W J McGee

“ The Sonorenses generally hold the Seri in indescribably deep dread as uncanny and savage monsters lying beyond the human pale; while the reciprocal feeling on the part of the Seri toward Caucasians, and still more toward Indian aliens, seems akin to that of the average man toward the rattlesnake, which he flees or slays without pause for thought—it seems nothing less than intuitive and involuntary loathing. The Seri antipathy is at once deepened into an obsession and crystallized into a cult ”

“ Commonly he singles out some special object as his personal, family, or tribal mystery-symbol or fetich, the object usually representing that which is most feared or worst hated among his surroundings. Vaguely realizing from the memory of accidents or unforeseen events that he is dependent on his surroundings, he invests every feature of his environment with a capricious humor reflecting his own disposition, and gives to each and all a subtlety and inscrutability corresponding to his exalted estimation of his own craft in the chase and war ”

“ He recognizes his responsibility for the welfare of the tribe—not only for success in battle and food-getting, but for stilling storms at sea, protecting the aguajes from the drought-demons, and securing all other benefits, both physical and magical; he must be aggressive yet cautious on the warpath, fleet and enduring in retreat, indomitable in the chase, bold but not reckless on the balsa, and above all panoplied and favored by the shadowy potencies of air and earth and waters ”

“ Perhaps the most significant fact connected with the Seri turtle-fishing is the excellent adaptation of means to ends. The graceful and effective balsa is in large measure an appurtenance of the industry; the harpoon is hardly heavier and is much simpler than a trout-fishing tackle, yet serves for the certain capture of a 200-pound turtle; and the art of fishing for a quarry so shy and elusive that Caucasians may spend weeks on the shores without seeing a specimen is reduced to a perfection even transcending that of such artifacts as the light harpoon and fragile olla. ”

“ In smooth water a lightly laden balsa may appear heavy and logy, but with a heavier load and stronger sea each tapering end rises strongly and then recurves slightly in a Hogarthian line graceful as the neck of a swan, while the whole craft skims the waves or glides sinuously over their crests in a lightsome way, recalling the easy movement of gull or petrel. ”

“ Briefly, the Seri balsa is remarkable for perfect adaptation to those needs of its makers shaped by their distinctive environment. It seems to approach the ideal of industrial economy—the acme of practicality—in the adjustment of materials and forces to the ends of a lowly culture; and, like the olla and harpoon and arrow, it affords an impressive example of the adjustment of artifacts to environment through the intervention of budding intelligence. ”

“ The dread inspired by the personal presence of the alien is stronger still; when the Seri rancheria at Costa Rica was visited in 1894 it was found needful to keep the Papago interpreter and others of the tribe at a distance, since the mere sight of the inimical tribesmen threw even the women and children into watchful irritation, like that of range-bred horses at scent of bear or timber-wolf, or that of oft-harried cats and swine at sight of passing dog—they instinctively huddled into circles facing outward, and ceased to think connectedly under the stress of nervous tension. ”

“ A turtle is a very lethargic animal, and may frequently be surprised in its watery slumbers. The balsa is placed nearly perpendicularly over one of these unsuspecting sleepers, when the fisherman, softly sliding the pole through the water in the direction of the animal till within a foot or two of it, he suddenly plunges the iron into its back. No sooner does the creature feel itself transfixed than it swims hastily forward and endeavors to liberate itself. ”

“ I was assured by the acting governor of Sonora and by the prefect of Hermosillo that it would be little short of suicide for even a Mexican official to visit these Indians or land on their island without an armed guard. Through conference with the Indians, also, I learned that any white man, Mexican, or Indian of another tribe coming in contact with them is killed without the slightest compunction, unless they are restrained by fear. Accordingly I am satisfied that the character of the Seri Indians is quite as bad as the unsavory reputation they have acquired throughout the Southwest. ”

“ The brief preliminary courtship and the long probationary mating mark an era of intensification in two lives at their most impressionable stage; and if there be 284* aught in the simple yet puissant law of conjugal conation—that law whose motive underlies the world’s song and story and all the pulsing progress of mankind as the inspiration of most men’s work and most women’s hopes—the vital intensity of this era passes down the line of blood-descent to the betterment of later generations. ”

“ It is not too much to say that the interracial mistrust and hatred of the Western Hemisphere culminates on the borders of Seriland; though the antipathy is commonly regarded by the alien tribesmen and the Mexicans as other than racial, since the Seri are felt to be hardly human—a feeling fully shared by the Seri, who undoubtedly deem themselves more closely akin to their deified bestial tutelaries than to the hated humans haunting their borders. ”

“ The industrial materials are local—but not more local than the thoughts in which they are reflected; the technical methods are unmistakably the offspring of the environment—but they are equally the offspring of minds reflecting that environment and no other; the few and simple devices stand for integrations of experiences, instinctive rather than ratiocinative, the germ of invention rather than even its opening bud—but the experiences bear the marks of that environment and no other. ”

“ A collateral feature of the customs is the necessary reaction of the requirements on individual character of both groom and bride; for the would-be warrior-spouse is compelled to display high qualities of physical and moral manhood on pain of ostracism and outlawry, so that his passions of ambition and affection are at once stimulated to the highest degree, while the maiden’s pride of blood and possession and her sense of regnant responsibility are fostered to the utmost. ”

“ The dead are clothed in their finest raiment, folded and fastened in small compass like Peruvian mummies, placed in shallow graves, and covered with turtle-shells, when the graves are filled with earth and heaped with stones or thorny brambles for protection against beasts of prey. Fetishes, weapons, and other personal belongings are buried with the body, as well as a dish of food and an olla of water, and there are curious customs connected with the place of 12 sepulture. There is a weird, formal mourning for dead matrons, and suggestions of fear of or veneration for the manes. ”

“ Desierto Encinas is an impossible human habitat in any proper sense; it is merely a broad and hardly passable boundary between habitats. The hardy stock of the frontier ranchos, pasturing partly on the thorny fruit of the cholla, push far out on the plains, and are sometimes watered for short periods, under strong guards of heavily armed vaqueros, at Barranca Salina; yet the greater part of the expanse is trodden only by the Seri. Two or three ruined frames of Seri jacales and a few graves crown the low knoll near Pozo Escalante, and there are one or two house remnants near Barranca Salina ”

“ The neighboring Papago tribe met the invaders frankly as man to man, displaying a notable combination of receptivity and self-containment which enabled them to assimilate just so much of the Caucasian culture as they deemed desirable, yet to maintain their purity of blood and distinctiveness of culture for centuries; the Seri, on the other hand, met the invaders as enemies, to be first feared, then blinded, balked, and bled by surreptitious and sinister devices, and finally to be assassinated through ambuscade or remorseless treachery ”

“ The Seri archery habit is in every way consistent with the general habits of the tribe, alike in the chase and in warfare, in which the tribesmen, actuated by the fierce blood-craze common to carnivores, either leap on their prey with purpling eyes and gnashing teeth, or beat quick and stealthy retreat; and it is especially significant in the light thrown on the bow as a device for swift and vigorous rather than accurate offense, an apparatus for lengthening the arm still more than does the harpoon, and at the same time strengthening and intensifying its stroke. ”

“ During the height of the season the clans withdraw from the coast and give undivided attention to the collection and consumption of the fruits, gorging them in such quantities that, according to the testimony of the vaqueros, they are fattened beyond recognition. Commonly the tunas are eaten just as they are gathered, and the families and larger bands move about from pitahaya to pitahaya and from valley to valley in a slovenly chase of this natural harvest, until waning supply and cloying appetite drive them back to the severer chase of turtle and pelican. ”

“ If the attachés of the rancho are indisposed to tolerate the first envoy, yet feel kindly rather than rancorous, she is merely dogged and stoned away like a depredating domestic animal from another hacienda; if the rancor of past encounters remains, the mercy accorded her is precisely that shown the predatory coyote or other feral animal from the fastnesses of the sierras—and the tribe take warning and doubtless rejoice that their loss is no greater. ”

“ Concordantly with this habitual sentiment, they glory in their strength and swiftness, and are inordinately proud of their fine figures and excessively vain of their luxuriant locks—indeed, they seem to exalt their own bodies and their own kind well toward, if not beyond, the verge of inchoate deification. The obverse of the same sentiment appears in the hereditary hate and horror of aliens attested by their history, by their persistent blood-thirst, and by the rigorous marriage regulations adapted to the maintenance of tribal purity ”

“ In weighing the linguistic relations, it is to be remembered that the Seri are distinctive in practically every somatic and demotic character, that they are bitterly antipathetic to aliens, and that their race-sense is perhaps the strongest known. It is also to be remembered that they are zoosematic in esthetic, largely zoomimic in their primitive industries, putatively zoocratic in government, and overweeningly zootheistic in belief; that nearly all observers and recorders of their characteristics have been impressed by both the distinctiveness and the primitiveness of their speech ”

“ While human independence of environment culminates in socialry, the interdependence of activital lines so well revealed in lowest savagery demonstrates that institutions and all government necessarily reflect environment; and, at the same time, that the progressive emancipation from environment signalized in the higher culture-grades measures the conquest of Nature through industrial activity—for both the productive work and the attendant exercise cumulatively elevate sapient Man above mindless Nature. ”

“ Yet the subclass is of great significance as a mile-mark of progress in nature-conquest, and as the germ of that industrial revolution consummated as tribesmen grew into reliance on their own acumen and strength and skill rather than on the capricious favor of beast-gods. ”

“ An adjunct of progress in every stage of development, as indicated with especial clearness in the earliest stages, is the annulment or curtailment of both physical and formal law, and the substitution of cumulatively growing volition: the development of the esthetic passes from the intuitive toward the ratiocinative, that of the industrial from the instinctive toward the inventive, and that of the social from the merely reflective to the vigorously constructive ”

“ During this period the always dignified position occupied by the daughter of the family culminates; she is the observed of all observers, the subject of gossip among matrons and warriors alike, the recipient of frequent tokens from designing sisters with an eye to shares of her spouse’s spoils, and the receiver of material supplies measuring the competence of the would-be husband; through his energy she is enabled to dispense largess with lavish hand, and thus to dignify her clan and honor her spouse in the most effective way known to primitive life ”

“ The Caucasian huntsman does not have to think of his knife when game is to be bled or skinned or dissected; his habit-trained hand knows where to find the implement, how to seize it, and in most cases how to wield it advantageously; but the Seri hand possesses no such cunning, and uses the knife only clumsily and at second thought, if at all. The Seri huntsman, on the other hand, does not have to think of nails and teeth, for they are trained and coordinated by hereditary habit to spontaneously act in unison and with the utmost possible or needful vigor ”

“ The Indians on the island of Tiburon are very stout, tall, and well-built fellows, exceedingly like the Twelchii tribe of Indians in Patagonia, and with a language so like theirs that I imagined I was transported back into those wild regions. They by no means look so ferocious as they are represented, and there is something peculiarly mild in the countenances of the females. Their dress is a sort of blanket, extending from the hips to the knees. But most of the old women have this part of the body covered with the skins of the eagle, having the feathers turned towards the flesh. ”

“ Experienced observers of the native tribes may form an impression of the Seri color from the explanation that they are as much darker than the neighboring Papago as the Papago are darker than the average tribesmen about the Great lakes; the Papago themselves being as much darker than the southern plains or Pueblo folk as these are darker than those of the Lake region. The range in color seems to be slight; the variation among the 60 individuals of both sexes and all ages seen at Costa Rica was hardly perceptible, being less than that usually observed in a single family of any neighboring tribe ”

“ The ordinary shield is a pelican pelt, or a robe or kilt comprising several skins; it is employed either for confusing the enemy by swift brandishing, something after the fashion of the capa of the banderillero in the bull ring, or for actual protection of the body against arrows and other missiles or weapons. So far as known it is not backed or otherwise strengthened, the user relying solely on the stout integument and thick feathers—or rather on the mystical properties imputed to the pelt as the mystery-tinged investiture of their chief creative tutelary. ”

“ The Seri robustness of body and slenderness of limb are brought out by the absence (in appearance at least) of adipose; the skin is strikingly firm and hard and evidently thick, yet the play of muscle and tendon beneath indicate a dearth of connective tissue and convey that impression of physical vigor which their familiars so miss in the photographs; and in no case, save perhaps in the young babe, could the slightest trace of obesity be discerned. Thus the Seri, male and female, young and old, may be described as notably deep-chested and clean-limbed quick-steppers, or as human thoroughbreds. ”

“ Still more suggestive to the observer than the well-molded structures and the intense functioning with which they are conjoined are those elusive yet persistent characteristics of the Seri comprised in their distinctive race sense—characteristics ranging from overweening intratribal pride to overpowering extratribal hatred. Even at first blush it would seem obvious that the tribal isolation, itself the reflection of environment, would necessarily tend toward a segregative habit with concomitant hostility toward aliens ”

“ Seriland is the most rugged portion of piedmont Sonora, and is bounded by its most forbidding desert; the territory is nearly if not quite, the most arid and inhospitable of the Sonoran province; the diurnal and sporadic temperature-ranges are apparently the widest, and the gales and other storms apparently the severest of the entire province; the flora is among the most meager and least fruitful, and the mountains are among the craggiest of the continent; the tides are among the strongest and the tidal currents among the swiftest of the world ”

“ Although a material condition attends the union, it is essentially a test of character, and is applied in such wise as to dignify the feminine element rather than to degrade it like barbaric wife-purchase; while any semblance of purchase would be incongruous with the economic condition of a tribe practically destitute of accumulated property or even of thrift-sense. ”

“ Thus the savage on the warpath is a different being from the same man in times of peace; viewed from his own standpoint, he is possessed of an alien and violent demon, usually that of a fantastic and furious beast-god whose rage he must symbolize and enact; viewed from the standpoint of higher culture, he is a raving and ruthless maniac whose craze is none the less complete by reason of its voluntary origin. ”

“ A striking correspondence between workfare and warfare is found in the fierce blood-lust displayed alike in chase and battle, a feature manifestly borrowed from beasts and intensified by besetting beast-faith; and more striking still is the correspondence in motive, as revealed by the overlapping functions of the protective kilt, by the borrowing of animal symbols alike in peace and war, and by the imitation of animal movements on the warpath as in the chase. ”

“ When it is read in history fifty years hence that a handful of murderous Ceris, certainly not more than 80 of the tribe able to bear arms, was able to domineer in the midst of their crimes with unexampled audacity on account of the debility of the government and the inhabitants, it will be regarded as a romance or a fable; for it seems impossible that in the nineteenth century such a condition of things could exist to degrade the reason, the morality, and the dignity of civilized man. ”