Wohpekumeu Culture

The final characteristic of Wohpekumeu is his transformative power. You see this most clearly when he talks to tree bark and convinces it to transform into acorns and acorn bread (Kroeber 106-108). Transformation is embedded in Yurok culture and is at the heart of medicine making. Plants were once thought to be wo’gey, but they transformed themselves into plants when humans came. The Yurok believe that if a skilled medicine person treats a plant the right way, and say a certain set of words called a formula, that they can make a plant have medicinal qualities. No plants are inherently medicinal, the process of reciting a formula and going through a ritual gives them healing powers (Keeling 55-56). The concept of transformation is also something
that the Yaqui people recognize.
The Yaqui people originally lived on a territory of land that spread across modern day northern Mexico and southern Arizona (Handbook of Native North America, Spicer, 250).
Before the European and Spanish invasion, Yaquis lived in small groups of about 250 people that were dispersed throughout their land. They lived in a subsistence culture and had a simple irrigation system living off corns, beans, squash, wild plants game, and shellfish (Gale Encyclopedia of North American Tribes 372). Yaqui is the name that the settlers gave them because of the Rio Yaqui River that ran through their original land, but the Yaqui call themselves the Yoemem (Evers and Molina
7).
Yaqui religious traditions have been heavily influenced by Catholic missionaries. The Yaqui religion as we know it is an intricate mixture of Catholic beliefs and traditional Yaqui rituals. Jesuit missionaries forced the Yaqui people to combine all their small settlements and form eight communities around the eight new churches that they built. These eight churches and the number eight became deeply sacred and symbolic figures for the new Yaqui religion (Handbook of Native North America, Spicer 251).
Jesus and the Virgin Mary are honored through various Yaqui rituals. In fact, some Yaqui myths give Jesus a trickster-like quality and depict Mary as a benevolent earth mother (Shorter 29). Holy Week is filled with passion plays, clowning, and fiestas (The Yaquis a Cultural History, Spicer 70-80). The Yaqui have also adopted the Christian idea of heaven and changed it into a living space of the ancestors. The Yaquis acknowledge the existence of Hell, but they don’t view it as a place of punishment. Heaven and Hell don’t occupy a physical place in the Yaqui cosmology, they are just places that float above and below the earth (Shorter 46).
The Yaqui understanding of the world also includes spirit worlds that exist in tandem with the physical world. Spirit worlds are as tangible to the Yaqui as the physical world and each world is connected to a physical location. Lary Evers and Felipe Molina emphasize the three spirit worlds that directly impact the Deer Songs. These worlds are the huya ania, or wilderness world, the sea ania, or flower world, and the yo ania, or enchanted world. Each of these worlds has unique characteristics. The best way to describe these worlds to Western thinkers is that they are like parallel universes or dimensions. Each of these spirit worlds is intricately interwoven with each other and the natural world.
The huya ania, or wilderness world is the largest of the spirit worlds. Everything that exists in the Yaqui world, came from the huya ania. The wilderness world is the original dimension that existed before our world. The Surem lived in the huya ania and when they departed, the wilderness world became closed off (Evers and Molina 44-45). Anyone who wants to come into the huya ania must perform certain rituals. One of these rituals is the Deer Dance. It is believed that during the deer song, the deer dancer is communicating to the animals and the Surem that live in huya ania (45). Now this world exists all around Yaqui villages as a hidden, but equally tangible place (Shorter 310)
The flower world, sea ania is another world directly connected to the Deer Dances. This world is believed to be “the mirror image of the beauty of the natural world” (Evers and Molina 47). The significance of flowers is twofold for the Yaquis. In their original mythology, flowers represent beauty (51). Since contact with Jesuit missionaries, it is believed that flowers poured out of Jesus’ side when the Roman soldier pierced him to check if he was alive. Even though flowers have a dual symbology, the meanings stay separated for most Yaquis and the flowers that are associated with the Deer Dance aren’t connected to Jesus (54). The sea ania is associated with the east (Shorter 47).
Yaquis believe that the salia maaso, or little brother deer came from the flower world (Evers and Molina 47). The salia maaso is vital to the deer dance since he connects the natural world to the flower world. The Yaqui people used to hunt deer and the Deer Dance would be performed before a deer hunt. In order to kill a deer, hunters had to get extremely close to the deer. It is believed that that deer could communicate with the hunters. Since the deer used the older form of the Yaqui language that singers use, the hunters would take what they heard to the deer singers to translate (48).
The final world that has a direct impact on Yaqui music is the enchanted world or yo ania. Yo ania can also mean “ancient world” (Evers and Molina 62). This translation illustrates the age of this world. This world doesn’t seem to have many physical characteristics, but it is where the Yaqui believe that the Surem, their pre-human ancestors received the deer songs (Evers and Molina 62-63). This world is physically associated with the mountainous caves that open up to the western part of Yaqui land. One specific mountain that is mentioned in Yaqui myth is the Sikili Kawi. In some ways, this world is the most sacred of all the sacred spirit worlds. People who enter the yo ania often gain special abilities, such as the ability to dance or sing (Shorter 37-42). These worlds are populated by a group of people called the Surem.
The Surem are the original Yaqui people but when they heard the prophecy from the talking tree about the European invasion of their land, their tribe split in two (Shorter 34). The Surem decided to go into the wilderness to live, some in caves, some underground. The other group, the Yoemem, became the modern Yaqui people and blended their traditional beliefs and practices with Spanish Catholicism and Jesuit political organization. Yoemem means “baptized ones” (Evers and Molina 38-42).
The Surem are described as “people of small stature and great knowledge” they were also “attuned to the ways of the Sonoran Desert and all that lived there” (Evers and Molina 42). Before Spanish/European contact, the sacred huya ania, or wilderness world was accessible to everyone all of the time. However, after contact with outsiders and the split that separated the Surem and the Yoemem, the spirit world is hidden in different realms and can only be accessed at certain places and through certain rituals.
The Surem could be related to other cultures that accept the existence of “little people”. The most famous of these are the Irish idea of leprechauns and the Norse idea of hidden folk. Other Native American tribes have mythologies that include “little people”. The Crow tribe believes that Little People care for the earth and the animals that populate it. When they hunt, they must be respectful of the Little People because they are in the home of the Litle People (Rose 2015). Similar to the Crow Little People, the Surem mostly keep to themselves and will help fellow Yaqui if they are lost. The reason that the Surem are so small is because all Yaqui were that small, but the ones who became the Yoeme, or the baptized ones, grew to full human height (Giddings 1959). Some people believe that Surem can be dangerous because of their strong magical powers, but overall Surem are believed to be benevolent creatures (Evers and Molina 41).
In addition to the ones directly related to music, there are many types of spirit worlds or realms and the Surem are associated with all of them.
It is believed that in these worlds, the religions of the Surem are still practiced. There is a debate on whether the Surem people still exist as human-like creatures of if they transformed into animals (Evers and Molina 41-45). Understanding the Yurok and Yaqui cosmogony and cosmology provides the framework, with which we can intelligently observe and evaluate Yurok and Yaqui music.
There are some important similarities between the musical expression of the Yurok and the Yaqui people. The most fundamental commonality between the music of these two tribes is that their music is sacred in nature. For the Yurok and the Yaqui, there is no separate category for secular and sacred music, all music is sacred. No kinds of secular music exist in the traditional Yurok and Yaqui religion. Another major similarity is that both tribe’s music follows a prescribed set of actions that were dictated by the people that existed before them. For the Yurok, Wohpekumeu is the model for musical expression. When Wohpekumeu wanted something, he cried for it and because he was so powerful, he got what he wanted (Keeling 2). For the Yurok, crying is the same as wishing and by mimicking the actions of Wohpekumeu they hope that they can receive the same reward
(2-3).