------------------------ at Outrider
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Wings
in the Desert A Folk Ornithology of the Northern Pimans by Amadeo M. Rea University of Arizona Press, 2007 |
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is a bird book based on the ornithological knowledge of an
indigenous tribe of Uto-Aztecans who speak the Piman language and
reside in the tierra caliente (hot lowlands) between the Gila River and
the Rio Yaqui of Arizona and northwest Mexico. These people, who call
themselves O'odham, have a keen ornithology of the birds native to
their region. |
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Part One of the volume introduces the O'odham peoples (Northern Pimans) and their environment, discussing how they obtained their knowledge of the behaviors, mating habits, migratory patterns, and distribution of local bird species, and how that knowledge has been incorporated into their clegends, songs, art, religion, and ceremonies. Part Two is comprised of species accounts of each named Piman category of bird from the turkey vulture (fiui, fiuwi) to the house finch (bahidaj u'uhig), each illustrated with line sketches by the author and others. |
Great
Horned Owl feathers were used in a native "baptism" or infant-naming
ceremony performed somewhere between three days and a month of birth.
As Bahr and associates describe it, th shaman gave to each parent
to drink a gruel he made from white clay and crushed owl feathers.
"Then the shaman brushes their heads with an owl feather and finally he
blows, spits, and presses on the top of each head."
Russell gave a somehwat different version of this rite of purification for the River Pima child: "Putting a sacred pebble and an owl feather into a seashell containing water, the medicine-man waved an eagle feather about, while the parents and the child drank the water and atesome white ashes or a little mud. |
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Ethnobiologist Amadeo M. Rea bases his text on more than four decades of field and textual research along with hundreds of interviews with O'odham tribal members, He previously published Once a River: Bird Life and Habitat Changes on the Middle Gila, At the Desert’s Green Edge: An Ethnobotany of the Gila River Pima and Folk Mammalogy of the Northern Pimans. Once a River focused on scientifically documenting the breeding, wintering, and migrant fauna of the Gila River Indian Reservation with some folk taxonomy and anecdotes included. This work explores at much greater depth the enthnographic role of birds in Piman society. "I think I have almost exhausted what is to be learned from River Pima regarding their local avifauna," Rea points out, "but in no way is this book a definitive work on Tohono O'odham folk ornithology, although I have made some contacts and, I hope, captured the basic structure." |
kokoho Burrowing Owl In Tohono O'odham country, someone told Culver Casssa and me that the Burrowing Owl might be called go'ol hikkam "differently positioned navel." The word go'ol means "in the wrong place" or "not in the normal place," a hunorous reference to this bird's habit of turning its head around or even upside down while watching you. The synecdoche is even funnier because birds don't even have a hik, navel. |
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| Unlike most Piman communities, the O'odham culture survived as a functioning system into the 20th century, allowing this appreciative and humanistic documentation of their indigenous knowledge to be developed. One can only wonder at the volumes of information irretrievably lost. |
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