SIL-Mexico Branch Electronic Working Papers #017: Seri Origin Myth Roberto Herrera Marcos and Edward W. Moser Edited and annotated by Stephen A. Marlett Herrera Marcos, Roberto and Edward W. Moser; Stephen A. Marlett (editor and annotator). 2015. Seri Origin Myth.(SIL-Mexico Branch Electronic Working Papers #17. [http://mexico.sil.org/resources/archives/60997](©) SIL International. These working papers may be periodically updated, expanded, or corrected. Comments may be sent to the editor at: [email protected]. 2 SIL-Mexico Branch Electronic Working Papers #017:Seri Origin Myth Introduction by the editor The text presented here is a previously unpublished summary of one “typical version” (as it is labeled in the manuscript) of the Seri origin myth as compiled by Edward W. Moser (1924-1976) through interviews with Roberto Herrera Marcos (1916-1988) and perhaps other Seri individuals. Reference to this summary is made in Felger & M. Moser (1985:100), where other notes and other versions are brought to bear on the topic of Seri origin myths. The summary is presented here in its totality for the sake of the historical record. With his wife Mary B. (“Becky”), Edward Moser took up residence in the Seri community of El Desemboque (known as Haxöl Iihom in the Seri language, ISO 639-3 code [sei]) in 1952 and lived there until 1976, the year in which he died.1 The material presented here was acquired firsthand, and much of it in the Seri language itself, which Moser had learned while working under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Roberto Herrera Marcos, known locally as Cmiique Roberto, and sometimes referred to by the names Roberto Thomson and Roberto Herrera T., was a primary consultant with whom he collaborated for many years.2 A handwritten note on the undated manuscript suggests that the summary was written to pro- vide background information that would be used in Felger & M. Moser (1985). An audio record- ing of some part of an interview with Roberto Herrera, in Spanish, was made (E. Moser & M. Moser 1961); it was consulted in the preparation of the present version of the summary. (While the archived metadata of the interview has the date 1961, that date may not be correct for this particular recording.) The text has been lightly edited for this presentation. One change has been to use the spelling of the Seri words as they appear in the 2010 dictionary (M. Moser & Marlett 2010), replacing the (Americanist) phonetic symbols that appear in the original manuscript. More explanation of these words is provided in the footnotes, however, including both phonemic and allophonic transcriptions in the alphabet of the International Phonetic Association (IPA 1999), with phonemic long vowels represented as geminates while allophonic length is indicated with a raised dot. The glossing of morphemes in the footnotes generally follows the conventions of the Leipzig Glossing Rules.3 Abbreviations used in the footnotes for glossing morphemes are: 3 = third person def = definite fl = flexible, out of sight, or default nmlz = nominalizer pass = passive pl = plural pon = proposition/oblique nominalizer poss = possessive rlt = realis “t” form sbj = subject tr = transitive 1See http://www.sil.org/mexico/bio/iMoserEd.htm. 2See http://www.sil.org/mexico/bio/iHerreraRoberto.htm. 3See http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php. Seri origin myth 3 Seri origin myth The earth is flat and circular. It consists of the sea and the land, which are seated on a flat earth base. Around all of this rotates the sky, which is a globe in which the sun, moon, and stars are embedded. Night occurs when the section with the sun goes under the land. In the beginning there was no land and there was no life. Then Hant Caai ‘the one who made the land’4 created a number of land and sea animals and placed them on a huge cane raft on the sea. Needing some soil to use in creating the land, he challenged the animals to dive into the sea and bring up some soil from the bottom. The land tortoise was the first to try. It stayed under water for one year but returned to the surface without having reached the bottom. The male green sea turtle was the next to try. It stayed down for five years. Upon surfacing, the sea turtle said that it had reached bottom but had had time only to scratch the soil before starting back up. Hant Caai found just a bit of soil stuck between the upper sections of one of the turtle’s front flippers. Mixing it with a bit of sea water, he formed it into a tiny ball. Then as he worked with it, he caused it to grow. It grew and expanded until it was very large. Then he placed it on the sea where it continued to expand until it had formed the land. Then Hant Caai stuck some sticks into the soft land and said that they would form the first house for the people. But he saw that the land was very soft. To determine just how soft it was, he made the most lightweight insect he could imagine, a daddy longlegs,5 and placed it on the land. But the land was too soft, and the insect became mired in the mud. So Hant Caai caused the personage Hant Quizin ‘the one who hardens the land’6 to appear and told him to make the ground firm. This he did by walking back and forth across the land. As he walked, great flashes of light and heat came from him and hardened the land, which by this time had extended itself to cover a great area. As yet there were neither people nor vegetation on the land. Then Hant Caai caused a tree to grow. The first tree was xopinl (Bursera hindsiana).7 Next he created a man, a woman, and a horse and placed them under the tree.8 These first people were giants called xiica coosyatoj ‘the ones who sing’.9 (They are not thought to have been Seris, although their language as occurring in the giants’ songs is partially understood today.) 4/ʔant kaai/ [ˌʔant ˈkaai] land sbj.nmlz:[tr:]make. 5This insect, identified as a member of the Phalangiidae family (harvestmen, also known as daddy longlegs), is actually still called hant cmaa tpaxi iti hacaatax /ʔant kmaa tpaχi iti ʔakaataχ/ [ˌʔant ˌkw̃ãã ˌtpaχi ˌiti ʔaˈkaatˑaˑχ] land now rlt:pass:finish 3.poss:on sbj.nmlz:[pass:]make_go ‘the one who was caused to go on the recently made land’ (Felger & M. Moser 1985:38-39, M. Moser & Marlett 2010:325). Unfortunately, since there are so many species of similar insects, to the best of my knowledge no specimen has been collected to use for positive and public identification by an entymologist. The general identification of the insect in this creation account (as something like a daddy longlegs) was again confirmed to me (the editor) by René Montaño Herrera in January 2015. It may be that, like with other aspects of this account, there is a lack of unanimity in the Seri community as to the identification of this insect. See V. Romero & Hernández Santana (2012:10) in which it is claimed that the insect is something quite different (also depicted as such in Flores Farfán 2011:15). Comparison with that work shows that there are various points of convergence and divergence with the account presented here. 6/ʔant kiʃin/ [ˌʔant ˈkiʃˑiˑn] land sbj.nmlz:[tr:]toast_with_heat. Some notes by Moser have the word ending with /m/ or [ŋ], but this appears to be an error. The name clearly ends with /n/ in the recording in which Roberto Herrera explains this. The name of this personage appears in a seriously altered form in the Creation Song, as [ʔamatikaʃɛnɛ] or [ʔamatikasɛnɛ] or [ʔamatikaʃini], depending on the source; note that it has an [n] in the song. 7/χopinɬ/ [χoˈpinɬ]. This plant (whose name was previously written more like its etymological source, xoop inl) is described in considerable detail in Felger & M. Moser (1985:235-240). 8It is worth noting there that this account includes a post-Conquest element (the horse). Moreover, the Seri people are not and were not known as being horsemen. 9/χiika koosjatox/ [ˌχiika ˈkoosjatox] thing\pl sbj.nmlz:sing\pl. This plural form of the verb for coos ‘sing’ is not the one that is used in modern Seri (the modern plural form being coosi). 4 SIL-Mexico Branch Electronic Working Papers #017:Seri Origin Myth Then Hant Caai tested the man and the woman. He told the man to mount the horse and ride it. The man tried, but he got on backwards and fell off when the horse moved. So Hant Caai told the man to paddle a reed boat that was there. This he was able to do. He paddled out to sea and speared a sea turtle. Upon returning to land, the man found that he had no knife. So he split a stalk of cane and used one of the sharp edges for butchering the turtle. These two tests showed that the man, while useless for working on the land, was a capable fisherman. The woman’s test was to prepare food and do other household tasks. She attempted to do the work, but did a poor job. (Some of the Seris suggest that these failures indicated that the future people, the Seris, would be unsuccessful in developing a technology of their own. The man’s success as a turtle hunter, however, showed that the Seris would adapt well to the sea.) The first man and woman had children and eventually a number of giants inhabited the land.