Among the Seri, as among primitive folk generally, the habitation
reflects local conditions, especially climate and building materials.
Now, Seriland is a subtropical yet arid tract, where rain rarely
falls, frost seldom forms, and snow is known only as a fleeting mantle
on generally distant mountains, so that there is little need for
protection from cold and wet; at the same time the district is too
desert to yield serviceable building material other than rock, which
the lowly folk have not learned to manipulate. Moreover, the tribesmen
and their families are perpetual fugitives (their movements being too
erratic and aimless to put them in the class of nomads); they are
too accustomed to wandering and too unaccustomed to long resting at
particular spots to have a home-sense, save for their motherland as
a whole; and, just as they rely on their own physical hardihood for
preservation against the elements, so they depend on their combined
fleetness and prowess for preservation against enemies. Accordingly,
the Seri habitation is not a permanent abode, still less a domicile for
weaklings or a shrine for household lares and penates, not at all a
castle of proprietary sanctity, and least of all a home; it is rather a
time-serving lair than a house in ordinary meaning.
Despite the poverty of the material and the squalor of the
structure, certain features of the Seri jacal are notably uniform
and conventional. In size and form it recalls the passing “prairie
schooner”, or covered wagon; it is some 10 or 12 feet long, half as
wide measured on the ground, and about 4½ feet high, with one end (the
front) open to the full width and height, and the other nearly or quite
closed. The conventional structural features comprise the upright bows
and horizontal tie-sticks forming the framework. The bows are made
of okatilla stems (_Fouquiera splendens_) roughly denuded of their
thorns; each is formed by thrusting the butts of two such stems (or
more if they are slender) into the ground at the requisite distance
apart, bending the tops together into an overlap of a yard or two,
and securing them partly by intertwisting, partly by any convenient
lashing; and about five or six such bows suffice for a jacal (the
appearance of the bows is fairly represented by the ruin shown in
plate VII). Next come the tie-sticks, which consist of any convenient
material (okatilla stems, cane-stalks, paloblanco branches, mesquite
roots, saguaro ribs, etc.), and are lashed to the butts by means of
withes, splints, or fiber wisps, at a height of some 4 feet above the
ground, or about where the walls merge into the roof. With the placing
of these sticks the conventional part of the building process may be
said to end; for up to this point the process is a collective one and
the materials are essentially uniform, while thereafter the completion
of the work depends largely on individual or family caprice, and the
materials are selected at random. Moreover, the framework is fairly
permanent, usually surviving a number of occupancies extending over
months or years, and outlasting an equal number of outer coverings; so
that all habitable Seriland is dotted sparsely with jacal skeletons,
sometimes retaining fragments of walls or roof, but oftener entirely
denuded.
The conversion of the framework into a habitable jacal is effected by
piling around and over it any convenient shrubbery, by which it is made
a sort of bower; sometimes the conversion is aided by the attachment of
additional tie-sticks both above and below the main horizontal pieces,
as illustrated in the upper figure of plate IX; sometimes, too, the
material of walls and roof is carefully selected and interwoven with
such pains as to form a rude thatch, as in the chief jacal at Rada
Ballena (the upper figure in plate VI); but more commonly the covering
is collected at random and is laid so loosely that it is held in place
only by gravity and wind pressure, and may be dislodged by a change of
wind. Ordinarily the walls are thicker and denser than the roofs, which
are supplemented in time of occupancy by haunches of venison, remnantal
quarters of cattle and horses, half-eaten turtles, hides and pelts, as
well as bird-skin robes, thrown on the bows partly to keep them out of
reach of coyotes and partly to afford shade. Most of the jacales about
the old rancheria at Punta Tormenta (abandoned at “The Time of the Big
Fish”), which may be regarded as the center of the turtle industry, are
irregularly clapboarded with turtle-shells and with sheets of a local
sponge, as illustrated in plate VII. This sponge abounds in the bight
of Rada Ballena, where at high water it spreads over the silty bottom
in a slimy sheet, and at low water with off-shore gales is left by the
waters to dry into a light and fairly tenacious mat, which is gathered
in sheets for bedding as well as for house-making material (a specimen
of the sponge—probably Chalina—is shown on larger scale in plate
VIII). On the frontier the jacales may be modified by the introduction
of sawed or riven lumber, as illustrated by some of the-structures
at Costa Rica (shown in plate XI); but even here there is a strong
disposition to adhere to the customary form, and especially to the
conventional framework, as indicated by the example in plate X.
While the jacales are not consistently oriented, they reveal a primary
preference for facing away from the prevailing wind and toward the
nearest sea, with a secondary preference for southern and eastern
exposures—the former preference being easily explained, since a gale
from the front quickly strips walls and roof and scatters the materials
afar. No definite order is observed in the placement of the several
jacales in the larger rancherias; apparently the first is located at
the choice of the leading elderwoman, and the others are clustered
about it at the common convenience. Usually the several jacales
are entirely separate; but at Punta Tormenta, Punta Narragansett, and
still more notably at Rada Ballena, individual huts were found either
extended to double length or joined obliquely in such wise as to show
two fronts (as illustrated in plate VI). The conventional frameworks
appear to be common tribal property, at least to the extent that an
abandoned skeleton may be preempted by any comer; while the addition
of walls and roof appears to afford a prescriptive proprietary right
to the elderwoman and family by whom the work is done—though the right
seems to hold only during occupancy, or until the temporary covering is
dislodged.
[Illustration: BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY