278* THE SERI INDIANS [ktm.ann.17 



While the lieutenant attached no significance to the painting, the 

 procedure would seem to ha\'e beeu a ceremonial adoption, such as 

 might, for example, be used in connection with a confederate clan. 

 The description of the painting is sufficiently explicit to identify the 

 totem with that of the Turtle clan, represented by the clanmother and 

 the daughter of the clan at Costa Eica in 1894 (plates xviii and xxiv); 

 but it is noteworthy that the salutation with which tlie ceremony termi- 

 nated, and which may be rendered "Captain-Brother of the Sharks", 

 would seem to identify the totem with the sharli I'ather than the turtle.' 



The second case of adoption (if so it may be styled) was that of 

 Senor Encinas, after his bloodiest battle, in which nearly all of the 

 Seri warriors were left on the field. In this case there was no cere- 

 mony, or at least none remembered by the beneficiary; he was merely 

 informed by a delegation of aged dames that thenceforth he would be 

 regarded as a stronger and more invuhierable chief (shaman) than any 

 member of the tribe, and hence as the tribal leader. 



The third instance is still less definite, though it seems to be trust- 

 worthy. There is a widesiwead tradition throughout Sonora that in 

 the course of a brush between a band of Papago hunters and a maraud- 

 ing bunch of Seri warriors iu the mountains southeast of Cieneguilla 

 twenty-five or thirty years ago, a Papago maiden was captured and 

 carried oft' to Tiburon; and that for some years thereafter — i. e., until 

 the Papago had taken ample blood-vengeance — the intertribal animos- 

 ity was exceptionally bitter. No wholly satisfactory basis for the tradi- 

 tions could be found among the Papago, though some of the silences 

 of the old men were suggestive; nor was the tradition fully credited 

 by Seilor Encinas, despite its deep lodgment in the minds of some of 

 his yoemanry. When Mashi'm was interrogated ou different occasions, 

 he merely shook his head in stolid silence; but when the device was 

 ado])ted of inquiring the number of Papago children brought into the 

 tribe through this woman he responded promptly with a snort of 

 scorn, and followed this with the explanation that she never had chil- 

 dren, and could not because she was an alien slave. The explanation 

 was corroborated by clanmother Juana Maria and other matrons, with 

 sundry expressions of contemptuous disapproval of the inquiry and 

 scorn of the very idea that aliens could fructify within the tribe. 

 Later, the ice being broken, Mashem intimated that the woman had 

 recently died of old age and its consequences— doubtless as an outcast. 

 On the whole, the direct testimony would seem to substantiate the tra- 

 dition, and to supplement it with the short and simple annals of a 

 spouseless and childless life (incredible of other tribes, but consistent 



'This ideutification may poasibly be correct; the collocation of the totem with the turtle was 

 shaped through unwilling and perhaps misleading responsea made by Mash6ni to inquiries in 1894— 

 these J espouses deiiotinji a si'u monster which in the beginning helped the Ancient nf Pelicans to make 

 the world by pushing Irom below, and which is now very good food — a (lesorijition apparently iittiug 

 the turtle more closely tlian the other animal. 



