Deer Singer
by Andrew Peterson


0FF A SMALL dirt road, on public land north of Marana, the remnants of an ancient Hohokam village lie concealed among the cactus and palo verde trees. Felipe Molina, a Yaqui writer, singer and educator from the Yoem Pueblo in Marana, wishes his community would be given responsibility for the site. The cattle ranchers who have the lease on the land are unwilling to relinquish it, but Molina keeps trying. He thinks the Yaquis could take care of it with a proper respect. He says it would be an ideal place to teach children about nature and history.

 He would be a good person to do the teaching. Walking among the low stone walls that were once homes, his eyes catch details of the desert. A tiny pocket of water captured in the crack of a boulder. An early desert wildflower hidden beneath the brush. Shards of pottery among the plants and stones.

 He says he's just trying to be what Yaquis call tu'u hiapsekame, or one with a good heart. This means going through life with your eyes open, he explains. Too many people, he says, are kiavea hiapsame--just alive. "The only thing these people care about is eating, drinking, sleeping and sex," he says. "They never stop to look around."

 Molina learned these values growing up in Marana with his grandparents, who played a crucial role in helping him to understand what it meant to be Yaqui. "'They were like storybooks to us;" he says. "We were really fortunate that we had our grandparents' stories of their grandparents and their great grandparents. It was like a classroom for us."

 In the '50s, he recalls, the entire Pueblo spoke the Yaqui language. Molina himself spoke no English at all until he started kindergarten. And in some ways it was his early experiences in the public schools which created in him a sense of responsibility about maintaining his own culture. He remembers being taught in third grade about the different countries and peoples of the world. "I wondered, why don't they have Yaquis in there?" he says. "And so the teacher had me do a presentation on the Yaqui language for the class."

 The need to promote and preserve his native tongue still drives much of the work Molina does today. He is working intensively on a Yaqui dictionary, which he hopes will be published soon, with a grammar to follow.

 But the work for which he is best known is singing, transcribing and writing about traditional Yaqui deer songs. He has written a book on the subject, in collaboration with University of Arizona English Professor Larry Evers, entitled Yaqui Deer Songs/Maso Bwikam.

 Deer songs play a continuing, vital role in Yaqui culture. But the singing is highly proscribed during Lent, when Yaquis observe their unique and beautiful Easter celebration, a complex interweaving of ancient Yaqui beliefs and the more recently-introduced teachings of Catholicism.

 Because it falls during Lent, Molina's presentation in the Poetic and Politics Series will differ somewhat from that of other readings. Instead of reading or singing, he will lead a panel discussion with members of various Southern Arizona Yaqui communities. The presentation will cover both deer songs and the Yaqui Easter ceremony, and will include a screening of a 1940 film by anthropologist Edward Spicer, which documents a Yaqui Easter celebration from that era.

 "What we're doing," Molina says about Yaqui ceremonies, "is praying for the whole world. Not just for our own family, or our own community, but for the whole world. We care for the world. We care for the earth. And when we see it being destroyed, we feel sorry for it. These ceremonies are not just something that we do for fun. We do them so that the world will be a safe place to live in, so that there will be peace on earth."