Sacred Texts Native American Southwest Index Previous Next
The idea of creating the earth from the perspiration and waste cuticle of the Creator is, I believe, original.
The local touch in making the greasewood bush the first vegetation is very strong.
In the tipping over of the earth three times, and its standing right the fourth time, we are introduced to the first of the mystic fours in which the whole scheme of the stories is cast. Almost everything is done four times before finished.
The peculiar Indian idea of type-animals, the immortal and supernatural representatives of their respective animal tribes, appears in Nooee and Toehahvs, and here again the local color is rich and strong in making the buzzard and the coyote, the most common and striking animals of the desert, the particular aides on the staff of the Creator.
Might not the creation of Nooee out of the shadow of the eyes of the Doctor of the Earth be a poetical allusion to the flying shadow of the buzzard on the sun-bright desert?
In the creation of sun and moon we find the mystic four referred to the four corners of the universe, North, South, East and West, and this, I am persuaded, is really the origin of its sacred significance, for most religions find root and source in astronomy.
In the dropping of the sky appears the old idea of its solid character.
In the "slope of the world to the Westward" there is something curiously significant when we remember that both the Gila and Salt Rivers flow generally westward.
Nooee cuts the valleys with his wings. It would almost appear that Nooee was Juhwertamahkai's agent in the air and sky, Toehahvs on earth.
The night-prowling coyote is appropriately and poetically mothered by the moon.
And here appears Eeeetoy, the most active and mysterious personality in Piman mythology. Out of the North, apparently self-existent, but little inferior in power to Juhwertamahkai, and claiming greater age, he appears, by pure "bluff" and persistent push and wheedling, to have induced the really more powerful, but good-natured and rather lazy Juhwertamahkai to give over most of the real work and government of the world to him. In conversing with Harry Azul, the head chief's son, at Sacaton, I found he regarded Eeeetoy and Juhwertamahki as but two names for the same. And indeed it is hard to fix Eeeetoy's place or power.