This study is based on a thirty-month residence in Yaqui communities in both Arizona and Sonora and consists of integrating information from documented historical writing, of some primary source documents, of three centuries of contemporary descriptions of Yaqui customs and individuals, and of anthropological studies based on direct observation.

Winner of the American Folklore Society’s Chicago Folklore Prize Yaqui regard song as a kind of lingua franca of the intelligent universe. It is through song that experience with other living things is made intelligible and accessible to the human community. Deer songs often take the form of dialogues in which the deer and others in the wilderness world speak with one another or with the deer singers themselves. It is in this way, according to one deer singer, that “the wilderness world listens to itself even today.” In this book authentic ceremonial songs, transcribed in both Yaqui and English, are the center of a fascinating discussion of the Deer Song tradition in Yaqui culture. Yaqui Deer Songs/Maso Bwikam thus enables non-Yaquis to hear these dialogues with the wilderness world for the first time.

In this innovative, performative approach to the expressive culture of the Yaqui (Yoeme) peoples of the Sonora and Arizona borderlands, David Delgado Shorter provides an altogether fresh understanding of Yoeme worldviews. Based on extensive field study, Shorter's interpretation of the community's ceremonies and oral traditions as forms of "historical inscription" reveals new meanings of their legends of the Talking Tree, their narrative of myth-and-history known as the Testamento, their fabled deer dances, funerary rites, and church processions.

The San Ignacio's Day fiesta is one of Old Pascua's four most important ceremonies of the year. The saint's day of St. Ignatius falls on July 31, and, in order to avoid taking time from their jobs, the people in Pascua celebrate it on a weekend near that date. The fiesta begins on Saturday afternoon, continuing through the night into Sunday morning. The actual fiesta is the culmination of weeks of preparation, including calling on various people and groups in the village for help, collecting food, gathering firewood, putting up the fiesta decorations and making ready the place where the dancers will perform.

This is the major literary achievement of a sensitive, gifted man. The author is a Yaqui Indian, a railroad gandy dancer who sees beauty in iron spikes and rail clamps as well as in twilight-purple mountains and glossy-leafed cottonwood trees. In the seventy years following his flight from the Yaqui-Mexican wars in Sonora, Savala became a talented poet and loving recorder of his people's cultural heritage. A large sampling of his original works appears in the interpretations section of this book. Together with the beautifully written autobiography, they offer a unique view of Arizona Yaqui culture and history, railroading in the American West, and the personal and artistic growth of a Native American man of letters.