The Society That Did Not Die

Abstract

In a 1963 article published in Ethnohistory, Henry F. Dobyns and others reported in Death of a Society that the Halchidhoma, a Yuman tribe formerly situated on the lower Colorado River, had disappeared as a cultural entity. Recent fieldwork indicates that these people are, in 1973, alive and well and living on the Salt River Reservation in southern Arizona. In 1963, Henry Dobyns, Paul Ezell and Greta Ezell published an article in Ethnohistory entitled Death of a Society (Dobyns and others 1963). The society whose death the authors were reporting was known as Halchidhoma. Today this word is pronounced xaltca6o'm, following the orthography used by Leslie Spier (1946) in his Comparative vocabularies and parallel texts in two Yuman languages of Arizona.2 The Halchidhoma, or as they are known to non-Indians, live in the Lehi area of the Salt River Indian Reservation about 10 miles east of Phoenix, Arizona. The people who identify themselves as Maricopas live on the Gila River Indian Reservation south and west of Phoenix about 5 miles. The area they inhabit is known as the Maricopa Colony and is located in the westernmost district of the reservation, District No. 7. The following discussion is intended to rescue the Halchidhoma from the ranks of dead societies in the ethnohistorical literature, reexamining the evidence presented by Dobyns and the Ezells in the light of more recent information. Dobyns and the Ezells trace the historical movements of the Halchidhoma from the Colorado River into northwest Mexico and finally to the area of the Gila and Salt rivers to which the other groups from the Colorado River had also fled. Among these groups were the Maricopas themselves and the Kohuana (Spier 1936). That much of the history is known and is dealt with in detail by Ezell (1963). It is common knowledge among Maricopas living in