Supplement to "History of the Sif Oidak District, Tohono 'O'odham Nation"

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• Supplement to "History of the Sif Oidak District, Tohono 'O'odham Nation"
• Harry J. Winters Jr. (bio)

Published in Journal of the Southwest, Volume 62, Number 3, Autumn2020, pages 679– 708

In the "History of the Sif Oidak District" referred to in this paper's title, translations of two 'O'odham men's names, both from the 'O'odham Paḍ 'Aangam tradition, were not given because I had not figured them out. These names are Suhañ Maakai, first mentioned on page 686, and Kokoñip, first mentioned on page 689. Since then, after checking some Uto-Aztecan vocabularies and consultation with friends, 'O'odham and non-'O'odham, the translations have become clear.

The name Suhañ Maakai is correctly pronounced S-'Uuvañ Maakai. A maakai is a man with certain natural knowledge and supernatural powers that, for example, enable him to cure 'O'odham sicknesses. S-'Uuvañ comes from the verb 'uuva that means to give off an odor (not a particular odor; just an odor). The name means Maakai Who Gives Off An Odor or Maakai Who Smells (of something).

The name of S-'Uuvañ Maakai's adopted son was Kokoñip. It is pronounced the way it is written. Kokoñip was a Yavapai boy who got lost in the desert and was found by S-'Uuvañ Maakai. Kokoñ is an old 'O'odham word that means raven (common raven, Corvus corax). Pennington (1979, 27) has it as "Cuervo coconi" for the seventeenth-century Pima Bajo in Sonora. Kokoñ is still used by the Pima Bajo of Ónavas, Sonora (Amadeo Rea, personal communication, September 2021), and by the Mountain Pimas (Luis Barragan, personal [End Page 179]communication, September 2021). It is still used by the Tepehuán of Baborigame, Chihuahua, as "kokóóñi (ave) s el Cuervo" (Bascom and Molina 1998, 99), and by the Tepehuán of Santa María Ocotán, Durango, as kakoon (sing) and kokkon (plural), cuervo and cuervos, respectively (Willett and Willett 2016, 110). Kokoñ is no longer heard in Arizona. The 'O'odham word for raven today is havañ, a word recorded as early as the mid eighteenth century (Winters 2020, 688–689). Kokoñip, the boy's name, is a contraction of kokoñ(i) and 'oob, affected by vowel harmony, and means Raven 'Oob.

The 'O'odham word 'oob means enemy, not a personal enemy, but a member of an enemy nation. At the time of the events in the Paḍ 'Aangam tradition, the 'O'odham applied the word 'oob to the Yavapai. Since the beginning of Apache raiding in 'O'odham country it has been applied to both the Yavapai and the Apaches. Until recently the Yavapai still referred to the 'Akimeli 'O'odham (Pimas) as the jahwá kahána, "the main (original) enemy," even though hostilities between the two ended in the 1870s. The failure of authors of books on 'O'odham history, ethnology, and linguistics to determine which 'oob, the Yavapai or Apaches, an 'O'odham narrator was talking about has led to serious errors in many well-known books.

Why did S-'Uuvañ Maakai name the Yavapai boy Kokoñip? Thinking about this leads us down some interesting paths. In the 'O'odham language when we say "T hahavañmad," we mean we are homesick or we miss someone who has died. The ravens are upon us. Maybe as a maakai himself, S-'Uuvañ Maakai had an ominous feeling about this boy who would eventually be killed and his body mutilated by Yavapais. In an 'O'odham purification ceremony described in Underhill (1979, 44), after the killing and scalping of an Apache or Yavapai enemy, the scalp would be hung from a pole, and for days the people sang, "Poor raven. There it hangs. Poor raven." The word raven, havañ, referred to the black hair of the scalp. Underhill calls the bird "crow" but I've never seen a crow in the desert. Such a ceremony may have given the Tohono 'O'odham village Havañ Naggiak, Hanging Raven, its name. See Winters (2020, 76–80) and Underhill (1979, 44). Edgar Allen Poe would have been right at home with all this. [End Page 180]

Harry J...