Finding Resilience in Hiaki Ritual Knowledge: An Interpretation of Waehma

Abstract

The interpretive lens commonly employed in the study of the Hiaki that sees their religious expression as Roman Catholic, or as a native version of Roman Catholicism, is too ethnocentric to be useful. It assumes that before the coming of Europeans, the Hiaki had no intrinsic symbolic and ritual life of lasting value, and they found one only through the introduction of Christianity. Looking anew at the Hiaki celebration of Waehma, which is the conclusion of the Hiaki ritual calendar that coincides with the Roman Catholic celebration of Easter, I argue that Hiaki religious expression remains thoroughly Hiaki. I look at the use of sacred space during Waehma, and ground my reinterpretation of Hiaki practice in the examination of the unique and prominent place that many sacred Hiaki symbols and figures have throughout the ritual of Waehma that are clearly not part of the narratives of the Passion of Christ that the Jesuits introduced.

El enfoque interpretativo comúnmente empleado en el estudio de los Hiaki que examina la expresión religiosa como Católica Romano o como una versión nativa del catolicismo Romano es demasiado etnocéntricas para ser de beneficio. Se supone que antes de la llegada de los europeos, los Hiaki no tenían una vida simbólica intrínseca y ritual de valor permanente. Examinando de nuevo la celebración Hiaki de Waema que es la conclusión del calendario ritual Hiaki coincide con la celebración Católica Romano de la Pascua. Mantengo que la expresión religiosa Hiaki sigue siendo completamente Hiaki. Observo que el uso del espacio sagrado durante la celebración de Waema fortalece mi reinterpretación en la examinación del lugar único y prominente sobre la práctica de Hiaki, muchos símbolos y figuras sagradas de Hiaki que se honoran a lo largo del rito de Waema claramente no forman parte de las narraciones de La Pasión de Cristo que introdujeron los jesuitas.

KEYWORDS:

• Hiaki
• Yoeme
• Yaqui Lenten rituals
• Yaqui beliefs and practices

Acknowledgments

A version of this article was presented at the XL Convegnio Internazionale di Americanistica in Perugia, Italy, 2018. I would like to thank Deni Seymour for her encouragement of publishing this study, and the reviewers on an earlier draft for their insights and corrections.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/00231940.2019.1605106.

Notes

1 Eduardo Obregón Pagán is the Bob Stump Endowed Professor of History at Arizona State University.

2 My own Hiaki ancestry traces through my maternal grandfather, Valentin Obregón, whose personal story was one of the many strands in the history of the Hiaki diaspora. His parents (my great-grandparents) fled the war waged by the Mexican government in 1905 and lived with their children in Arizona’s Coconino National Forest for a number of years before resettling in the Hiaki community of Barrio Libre in Tucson. My grandfather eventually moved farther north near the Hiaki community of Penhamo in Scottsdale, Arizona. While I am not an enrolled tribal member, Hiaki history and culture has remained an area of study in my scholarly and personal life.

3 Lindenfeld found minimal differences between Sonora and Arizona Hiaki dialect and syntax, surmising that it “is probably attributable to the existence of very close family and ceremonial ties among the members of various Yaqui communities and to the continuous interaction among all their settlements on both sides of the border” (1972:5).

4 Also known as Waresma or Cuaema in other communities.

5 For an insightful discussion of the significance of the Deer Dance, see David Shorter’s “Hunting for History in Potam Pueblo.”

6 Others explain the meaning of the term as “long noses.”