Journal of the Southwest articles from September 2000

Journal of the Southwest archives from September 2000

Publishing the Southwest.(editorial)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2000... "Seriland," a forlorn but haltingly beautiful strip of Sonoran desert at water's edge on the Sea of Cortes, is home to the Comcaac people, or Seri Indians. It is where they have survived for centuries. Seri territoriality--whether defined in...

The Seri Indians Today.
September 22, 2000... The Seri Indians of Sonora, Mexico, live along a hundred-mile strip of desert by the Sea of Cortes. On the east coast across from Tiburon Island, seven hundred Seris survive as fishermen and artists. Seri families are constantly on the move...

Miguel's Last Santo.(Miguel Barnet, Seri artist)
September 22, 2000... Miguel was about to butcher a horse with a machete. His eyes glittered as he led the poor beast to a vacant lot behind Jose's tiny house. A small army of happy Seri men and boys followed. One of them carried a small-caliber rifle. Jose...

A Desemboque Childhood.
September 22, 2000... Occasionally when walking through the desert near a Seri Indian fishing camp, one comes upon an ocotillo or small mesquite tree, its branches tied with torn strips of brightly colored cloth. It's a good luck symbol or a desert graffiti of...

Trading with Armando in Seriland, 1973.
September 22, 2000... In 1961 Jose Astorga (ca. 1912-1994), a Seri Indian from Desemboque, Sonora, began carving ironwood into unique shapes and figures. His work marked the beginning of two important homegrown industries: Seri handmade ironwood crafts and, ten...

The Other Seris.
September 22, 2000... When Europeans first encountered the Seri Indians early in the seventeenth century, the Seris were not the single unified group they are today. Seri oral history distinguishes six or seven politically independent semi-territorial bands, some of...

Seri Hands and Their Archaeology.
September 22, 2000... For many years, beginning in the 1980s, I studied the archaeology of the central gulf coast of the Sonoran Desert. And it is there that I've been most exposed to the artifacts Seri hands have left as testimony of their presence in this...

Recollections of Seriland: A Personal Account.
September 22, 2000... My ties with the Seri and the land they live on are both scholarly and personal. I first visited the Seri in May 1966, at the age of sixteen, at the invitation of Edward and Mary Beck Moser. The invitation came because I am their nephew and...

Lost in the Desert: A Four-Year-Old Survivor.
September 22, 2000... The following story is a true account of the orphan Juan Topete, at the tender age of four. It was around 1918 when he wandered alone in the treacherously hot Sonoran desert during the month of June. This account was recorded in Juan's own...

Seriland From the Air: A Portfolio of Photographs.
September 22, 2000... Not so long ago, I didn't know there was such a place as Seriland. I'm inclined to apologize for this, especially among aficionados of Sonora whose home, like mine, is Tucson. It seems that the Seri Indians, living not so far over the horizon...

The Seris.
September 22, 2000... My first contact with the Seris was in the early 1960s, when my father worked for the Ministry of Hydraulic Resources. On trips to inspect wells along the Hermosillo coast he would gather firewood to sell in Barrio Cinco dc Mayo. Bahia Kino was...

The Seris.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2000... My first memories of the Seris are set in Bahia de Guaymas, where during my childhood (1950-1960) I saw them compete in panga boat races against the fisherman of Punta de Arena and other barrios. I remember looking for books about the Seris at...

The Seris and The Guy Who Cuts the Tops Off Plants.
September 22, 2000... When my alligators got to be over five feet long they went to the zoo and I went to college. I had been to the tropical deciduous forest around Alamos, with my high school biology teacher.(1) Palms, cycads, orchids, burseras, tree snakes and...

Cultural Dispersal of Plants and Reptiles to the Midriff Islands of the Sea of Cortes: Integrating Indigenous Human Dispersal Agents into Island Biogeography.
September 22, 2000... Long before the eclectic biologist E. O. Wilson (1997) sought consilience through his attempts to unify biological and social sciences into one corpus of knowledge, Wilson collaborated with mathematical ecologist Robert MacArthur on a theory of...

The Seri and Commercial Totoaba Fishing (1930-1965).
September 22, 2000... In February 1935 Laurence Huey,(1) then the curator of birds and mammals at the Natural History Museum in San Diego, California, visited the Seri Indians at Bahia Kino, where he observed them fishing commercially for totoaba or totuava (Totoaba...

Seri Maps.
September 22, 2000... The first time I saw Seriland was the fall of 1968. An old friend, David Yetman, and I had wanted to travel south to visit the Mayo Indians in southern Sonora, but a violent thunderstorm had washed out all the bridges between Guaymas and Ciudad...

Seri Concepts of Place.
September 22, 2000... INTRODUCTION AND PROJECT DESCRIPTION The Seri are a group of 600 Hokan speakers residing in two principal towns on the gulf coast of Sonora, Mexico. Although historically they ranged seventy miles north and south and thirty miles east and...

Five Seri Spirit Songs.
September 22, 2000... There are hundreds of Seri songs known to the Seri Indians of Sonora, Mexico. The words of these songs concern multiple and diverse matters that are resonant to the Seri. Many of the songs are in the person of animals or objects or localities,...

Why the Seri Language Is Important and Interesting.
September 22, 2000... All natural human languages ever described have revealed something about the amazing faculty known to us as "language."(1) All humans are born with this ability and they develop it (unless tragically hindered) with amazing speed. Plus all...

Locating the Seri on the Musical Map of Indian North America.
September 22, 2000... Not until the mid-twentieth century did scholars begin to describe Seri music in any detail. Given the tribe's isolation and reputation for antipathy to outsiders, chroniclers' visits to Seriland were few, brier, and sporadic. Early...