Where There is Water There is Growth: Yoeme Land and Water Rights

Abstract

Where There is Water There is Growth:Yoeme Land and Water Rights Thalia Gomez Quintana (bio) Who is over there in the enchanted water sounding?Who is over there in the enchanted water sounding?Who is enchanted over there in the enchanted water sounding?Over here from the flower-covered dam I am sounding.Here over the enchanted water I am floating, brown, in theenchanted water sounding. —Second stanza, Yo Vaa'amp Hiyame, Sounding the Enchanted Waters Through song, the water drum spirit presents its teachings. Within Yoeme (Yaqui1) cultural paradigms, the ceremonial water drum made from a gourd and a larger water-filled container has agency and exercises a voice. This voice communicates via the vibrations of water. Miki Maaso, a Yoeme ceremonial Deer singer, asserts, "All the animals and living things can talk, but only a few can listen."2 Within Yoeme culture, water is understood to originate from the Flower World––the realm of all beauty, home to the deer and flowers, all of which are precious and beloved components that sustain Yaqui life and tribal culture. Maso Bwikam,3 Yaqui Deer Songs, are our most ancient form of speech which frame epistemologies of Yoeme relationality to the Huye Ania, the wilderness world of the Sonoran Desert, most importantly, the Yaqui River. This article will demonstrate how the Hiaki Vatwe4 plays a critical role in ongoing settler-colonial politics of natural resource extraction and the continued deterioration of Yoeme communities in Sonora, Mexico. In particular, the use of neoliberalist frameworks authorizes the removal of water from the Yoeme pueblos, forming a necropolitical5 order in which Yoemem6 are marked for illness, death, and removal in ways that support settler agendas of Native erasure and land seizure. I will first discuss Yoeme epistemologies of place and ontological relationships to the Yaqui River through the story of the Talking Tree and Deer songs. Yoeme ontological relationships are expressed and consolidated through Maso Bwikam and our relationships to the Deer and all the beings in the Yoeme desert homeland are expressed within this rich transmission of knowledge. Maso Bwikam hold some of the [End Page 1004] most ancient epistemologies of place, relationality, prayer, gratitude, and express the centrality of the Hiaki Vatwe to Yoeme tribal life and culture. I will then discuss settler colonialism and its technologies of natural resource extraction that seek to dispossess Indigenous people of their lands for settlements and profits. I emphasize the ways in which neoliberal politics aid settler-colonial technologies in generating Yaqui dispossession. I will ground this discussion in the context of the Aqueduct of Independence which is a tactic of settler-colonial design by which the state of Sonora has gained further access to the waters of the Yaqui River. Yoeme Ontologies of Place: Hiaki Vatwe Yaqui communities have been in relation with the Yaqui River since time immemorial sharing our very name as a tribal nation with the River. The Yaqui River originates in the western Sierra Mountains and courses southwest through the Yaqui Pueblos in Sonora, Mexico culminating at the Gulf of California into the Sea of Cortez. The eight original pueblos of Velem, Huirivis, Rahum, Potam, Vicam, Bacum, Cocorit, and Torim are located on both the west and east banks of the Yaqui River, which sustains all life in our desert homeland. Yaqui resistance to settler colonialism is rooted in our original cultural instructions, which derive from our tribe's Luturia,7 or our truth. Water makes everything possible with in the Yaqui desert. Communities around the Hiaki Vatwe are grounded in Yoeme original instructions found within our Luturia, our daily lives, culture, and ceremonies that consolidate our responsibilities to each other as Yoemem and to our relationships to land and water. Yoeme frameworks conceptualize space and position land, its species, and its elements, as kin. Cajete writes, "Native cultures describe their place as a living presence in the context of its mythic and spiritual meaning. The storied and living homeland of Native cultures provides a holistic foundational context for Native life."8 Thus, the story of the Talking Tree exercises a genealogy descending from the landscape and waters of Hiaki Vatwe. For Yaqui people...