Uto-Aztecan Peoples

This grouping runs from Oregon to central Mexico and joins peoples whose lives had almost nothing in common. At the northern end are the Northern Paiute and the Shoshone of the Great Basin, foragers in one of the harshest environments in North America. In the middle are the Hopi, farming maize on the mesas of northern Arizona in permanent stone towns, and the Comanche, who from the eighteenth century built a mounted empire on the southern plains that constrained Spanish, Mexican and American expansion for a century.

At the southern end are the Wixarika and Raramuri of the Sierra Madre, and the Nahua, whose Aztec state ran the largest city in the pre-conquest Americas. Five ways of living, one language family. The grouping is nonetheless real: the relationship was demonstrated by the comparative method and is not in doubt. It records that the ancestors of all these peoples once spoke one language, and it records nothing whatsoever about what any of them believed, built or ate. Reading a family tree as a chart of cultural affinity is the commonest error made with entries of this kind, and this row is the clearest available demonstration of why it fails. It is worth adding what the relationship does license. Reconstructed vocabulary can indicate what the ancestral speech community had words for, and the presence or absence of maize terminology in that reconstruction is one of the arguments in the dispute about which way the family spread.

Two religious traditions in this grouping involve peyote and they are not the same thing. The Wixarika of the Sierra Madre Occidental undertake an annual pilgrimage east to Wirikuta in the state of San Luis Potosi, where the cactus grows, and the journey, the hunt for it and the ceremonies attached are part of a tradition with its own elders, its own ritual specialists and its own conditions.

The Raramuri further north have their own practice. Separately, from the late nineteenth century, peyote ceremonies spread among peoples of the southern plains and beyond and were formalised in the Native American Church, which is a distinct institution with its own history and its own legal standing in the United States, protected by federal statute for enrolled members of federally recognised tribes.

Some of its members are Uto-Aztecan speakers and most are not. The atlas keeps the two apart because collapsing them is common and wrong, and it describes both without instructing in either. Wirikuta is under pressure from mining concessions, and the Wixarika have pursued that in Mexican courts, which is a current matter rather than an ethnographic one. Hopi practice belongs in neither category and is subject to explicit restrictions set by the Hopi Tribe and by individual villages on recording, photographing and describing ceremony. Those restrictions are recorded in this atlas as a rights gate and are honoured in what it publishes.