One of the more important factors in demotic development among
primitive peoples (probably second only to interclan marriage in
extending sympathy and unifying law) is adoption; and special efforts
were made to obtain data relating to the subject. Direct inquiries were
futile, the responses indicating that the entire subject is foreign to
the thought of the tribe; but three sporadic and measurably incongruous
examples of quasi adoption are worthy of record.
The most specific case is that of Lieutenant Hardy, who visited Isla
Tiburon in 1826, and was fortunate in gaining the confidence of the
tribe through successful medical treatment of the wife of the chief. On
his second landing he was greeted with many expressions of gratitude,
which were especially exuberant on the part of the daughter of the
family (always a personage in Seri custom), who insisted on painting
his face. He specifies:
Not wishing to deny her the indulgence of this innocent frolic,
I quietly suffered her to proceed. She mixed up part of a cake
of blue color, which resembles ultramarine (and of which I
have a specimen), in a small shell; in another, a white color,
obtained by ground talc, and in a third was mixed a color
obtained from the red flint-stone of the class which I before
stated was to be found on Seal Island, and resembled cinnabar.
With the assistance of a pointed stick the tender artist
formed perpendicular narrow stripes down my cheeks and nose,
at such distances apart as to admit of an equally narrow white
line between them. With equal delicacy and skill the tops and
bottoms of the white lines were finished off with a white spot.
If the cartilage of my nose at the nostrils had been perforated
so as to admit a small, round, white bone, five inches in
length, tapering off at both ends and rigged something like a
cross-jack yard, I might have been mistaken for a native of
the island. As soon as the operation was finished, the whole
party set up a roar of merry laughter, and called me “Hermano,
Capitan Tiburow,” being the very limited extent of their
knowledge of Spanish.[317]
[317] Travels, p. 286.
While the lieutenant attached no significance to the painting, the
procedure would seem to have been a ceremonial adoption, such as
might, for example, be used in connection with a confederate clan.
The description of the painting is sufficiently explicit to identify
the totem with that of the Turtle clan, represented by the clanmother
and the daughter of the clan at Costa Rica in 1894 (plates XVIII and
XXIV); but it is noteworthy that the salutation with which the ceremony
terminated, and which may be rendered “Captain-Brother of the Sharks”,
would seem to identify the totem with the shark rather than the
turtle.[318]
[318] This identification may possibly be correct; the collocation of
the totem with the turtle was shaped through unwilling and perhaps
misleading responses made by Mashém to inquiries in 1894—these
responses denoting a sea monster which in the beginning helped the
Ancient of Pelicans to make the world by pushing from below, and which
is now very good food—a description apparently fitting the turtle more
closely than the other animal.
The second case of adoption (if so it may be styled) was that of Señor
Encinas, after his bloodiest battle, in which nearly all of the Seri
warriors were left on the field. In this case there was no ceremony,
or at least none remembered by the beneficiary; he was merely informed
by a delegation of aged dames that thenceforth he would be regarded as
a stronger and more invulnerable chief (shaman) than any member of the
tribe, and hence as the tribal leader.
The third instance is still less definite, though it seems to be
trustworthy. There is a widespread tradition throughout Sonora that in
the course of a brush between a band of Papago hunters and a marauding
bunch of Seri warriors in the mountains southeast of Cieneguilla
twenty-five or thirty years ago, a Papago maiden was captured and
carried off to Tiburon; and that for some years thereafter—i. e.,
until the Papago had taken ample blood-vengeance—the intertribal
animosity was exceptionally bitter. No wholly satisfactory basis for
the traditions could be found among the Papago, though some of the
silences of the old men were suggestive; nor was the tradition fully
credited by Señor Encinas, despite its deep lodgment in the minds
of some of his yeomanry. When Mashém was interrogated on different
occasions, he merely shook his head in stolid silence; but when the
device was adopted of inquiring the number of Papago children brought
into the tribe through this woman, he responded promptly with a snort
of scorn, and followed this with the explanation that she never had
children, and could not because she was an alien slave. The explanation
was corroborated by clanmother Juana Maria and other matrons, with
sundry expressions of contemptuous disapproval of the inquiry and scorn
of the very idea that aliens could fructify within the tribe. Later,
the ice being broken, Mashém intimated that the woman had recently
died of old age and its consequences—doubtless as an outcast. On the
whole, the direct testimony would seem to substantiate the tradition,
and to supplement it with the short and simple annals of a spouseless
and childless life (incredible of other tribes, but consistent with
the customs of the Seri), endured for many years and ending at last in
unpitied death.
Collectively the cases seem to define a germ, rather than a mature
custom, of adoption. In the first case a benefactor (by means regarded
as magical) was formally inducted into the reigning family; in the
second case the conquering hero (through what were again regarded
as magical means) was less formally recognized and venerated, even
worshiped, as an all-powerful shaman; while in the third case a
representative of the doughtiest alien tribe was enslaved, probably
with motives akin to those expressed in the carrying of chargeless
guns, the making of imitation machetes, and other fetishistic devices.
Except in the first instance there is no indication of consistent
custom; but since the entire history of the tribe clearly contradicts
regulated adoption of aliens (and indeed affords no other example),
it must be inferred that any such custom is intratribal rather than
intertribal.