260* THE SERI INDIANS [eth.akx.H 



included a heavy Springfield " remodeled" rifle, lacking not only ammu- 

 nition but breechblock and firing pin; while Don Andrt^s Noriega, of 

 Costa Rica, and L. K. Thompson, of Hermosillo, described a rifle of 

 modern make captured similarly two years before, which was in good 

 working order and charged with a counterfeit cartridge ingeniously 

 fashioned from raw buckskin iu imitation of a center-fire brass shell 

 and lojided with a polished stone bullet.' The finders opined that the 

 rifles were carried to blufl' the eueniy, and even that the counterfeit 

 cartridge was designed to do deadly execution; but it would better 

 accord with Seri customs, and with the law of piratical acculturation 

 which they typify,- to infer that the weapons were regarded rather as 

 symbols of mystical potencies than as simple scarecrows. Of related 

 import were two or three pseudomachetes made from rust-pitted cask 

 hoops, reported by the majordomo and several vaqueios at Costa Kica; 

 and of still greater significance was a machete picked up in a just- 

 abandoned jacal by Don Ygnacio Lozaniii — veteran of the Andrade 

 expedition and the Encinas conquest — which was laboriously rasped 

 and scraped out of paloblanco wood, colored iu imitation of iron blade 

 and mahogany handle by means of face-paints, and even furnished with 

 "eyes" replacing the handle-rivets, iu the form of embedded iron scales. 

 Some of the Seri are familiar with the normal use of firearms, as was 

 demonstrated by the Robinson and other episodes, and mauy of them 

 uiodernly make some use of machetes or other knives, as shown by vari- 

 ous rudely whittled wooden artifacts; yet the burden of proof indicates 

 that the chief use of the Caucasian's weapons in the heat of actual war- 

 fare is shamanistic and symbolic. This interpretation is, iu fact, prac- 

 tically established by the experience of the frontier; for the vaqueros 

 and local soldiery have little fear of the ill-understood firearms and 

 clumsily handled machetes occasionally seen ift Seri hands, though 

 they dread unspeakably the uecromantic arrows and flesh-rending 

 teeth with which the agile foes are credited. 



The mystical potency ascribed to Caucasian firearms and cutlery by 

 the zoomimic tribesmen is of interest as a reflection of motives and 

 methods pervading the entire range of their activities; at the same 

 time it suggests the genesis of the aberrant technolithic craft displayed 

 in arrow-chipping. Tlie information obtained from Mashem and his 

 mates concerning chipped arrowpoints implied that the process was 

 hieratic and little understood by the body of the tribe, its place in the 

 tribal knowledge, indeed, being similar to that of the brewing of the 

 arrow "poison", which is the special work of shamans; and this infor- 

 mation, comporting as it does with the rarity of the chipped points and 



' The imitative skill itf the Seri was illustrated at Costa Kica some years ago, -when the petty 

 accouDts for labor, etc, were kept by means of tokeus stamped from sheet brass. While a Seri rau- 

 cheria was maintained near the rauclio. the storekeeper detected a number of counterfeits of his 

 tokeus. so well executed as to pass readily over the counter in ordinary exchange — and after extended 

 detective work the counterfeiting was traced to tlie rancheria. 



* American Anthropologist, vol. xi. August, 1898, pp. 243-249. 



