Identifying Bird Species in River Yuman Oral Traditions

Abstract

Nearly 400 bird species occur along the lower Colorado River (Rosenberg et al. 1991), and Yuman communities that have historically lived along the lower Colorado surely knew and named many of them. However, judging from modern sources, this knowledge has been fading over time. For example, the ~6,700-entry Mojave dictionary (Munro et al. 1992; also spelled “Mohave”) lists 105 unique bird names, and past speakers likely knew specific species referents for many of these, yet 53 are glossed as a “type of” something while many others are given generic definitions that preclude identifying an exact species referent (e.g., ‘big bird’, ‘chickenhawk’, ‘eagle’). Studying such knowledge today is complicated by at least three factors: (1) changes to traditional ecological knowledge that have accompanied man-made changes to the lower Colorado River ecosystem, which has caused many species to decline while allowing other formerly-rare or new species to expand their use of the lower Colorado (Rosenberg et al. 1991: 14–28); (2) historical migrations away from the lower Colorado River and toward the Gila and Salt Rivers in central Arizona by the Piipaash (also spelled “Pee Posh”, a.k.a. “Maricopa”; see Rea 1983, 2007 for changes to the Gila River ecosystem); and (3) the general decline in the intergenerational transmission of linguistic and cultural knowledge that Yuman communities have experienced. However, we can turn to the information that past speakers of these languages shared with early linguists and anthropologists about these birds, especially through their oral traditions, to identify exact referents for many such names, and thus reconstruct a small part of the rich ecological knowledge that they possessed.