Yaqui Deer Dance

Yaqui religion holds that before the arrival of Christianity there was the huya ania, the wilderness world, and that it did not disappear when the Jesuits came in the seventeenth century. It continues alongside the church, and the deer belongs to it. The deer dancer, the maaso, represents the deer as an actual animal rather than as a symbol: the movements are those of an animal grazing, lifting its head, catching a scent and starting. The dancer wears a small deer head fixed above the forehead with a cloth, carries a gourd rattle in each hand, and wears strings of cocoons filled with pebbles wound around his lower legs and a belt of deer hooves that sound as he moves.

The songs are sung in the Yaqui language by singers who play a water drum, a half gourd floated in a bowl of water and struck, and rasping sticks over resonators. The song texts are short, image based, and set in the sea ania, the flower world, a place of enormous importance in Yaqui thought that lies behind the dawn and is associated with flowers, with the deer and with grace. They are among the oldest surviving Native American song traditions in continuous performance, and they are not written down. A deer singer carries his whole repertoire in memory and acquires it by sitting beside an older singer for years, which is why the loss of a single singer is treated in Yaqui communities as a serious loss.

The deer dance is performed within Waehma, the Yaqui Lent and Easter, a ceremonial season that runs the full forty days and takes over the entire community. It is not a Catholic observance with indigenous decoration, nor an indigenous one with Catholic decoration, but a single ceremonial system built in the mission period and held by Yaqui religious societies who inherit the obligation. The Fariseos or Chapayekas, masked figures who represent the pursuers of Christ, take control of the village during the season, move in silence, carry wooden swords and daggers, and are subject to rules of behaviour that are strict precisely because their role is transgressive. Their masks are burned at the end.

The deer dancer and the pascolas, the masked and joking dancers who hold the other side of the ceremony, perform through the nights of the season and at the culminating Gloria on the Saturday, when the Fariseos assault the church and are defeated by flowers thrown by the assembled community, an event in which the flower world is doing the work.

The Yaqui hold Waehma as their own. Parts are open to visitors and parts are closed, photography and recording are generally forbidden, and communities in both Sonora and Arizona state their own conditions for attendance. This article describes what those communities and the published record make public and goes no further.