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Reviewed by:
  • We Will Dance Our Truth: Yaqui History in Yoeme Performances by David Delgado Shorter
  • Anthony K. Webster
We Will Dance Our Truth: Yaqui History in Yoeme Performances. By David Delgado Shorter. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Pp. xviii + 373, acknowledgments, introduction, references, index, 14 photographs, 2 tables.)

David Delgado Shorter’s We Will Dance Our Truth: Yaqui History in Yoeme Performances is an engagingly written and important book. Where Edward Spicer’s shadow still lingers over Yaqui ethnography and Larry Evers’s and [End Page 338] Felipe Molina’s work has added an important collaborative component to concerns with contemporary Yaqui verbal art and performance, Shorter wishes to engage Yaqui (Yoeme) performances and rituals as expressions of history but also, and more importantly, as the embodiment of their history and historical consciousness. Taking an orthogonal approach from Spicer, Shorter takes “Yoeme oral traditions, dances, and processions as ways of understanding historic events and manifestations of Yoeme historical consciousness” (p. 13). In doing so, Shorter wants to engage the relationship between what Western epistemological traditions might term “religion” and “history.” Shorter argues that “indigenous religious systems” are “epistemologically actualizing,” that is, “they make knowledge and set the standards for what counts as truth” (p. 18). To make this argument, he rethinks a number of venerable topics in Yaqui ethnography, including the “Talking Tree,” deer dancing, and the very notion of conversion.

Shorter’s book is composed of an introduction, six ethnographic and ethnohistorical chapters, one “theory” chapter, six ethno-graphic dialogues, and a conclusion. The ethnographic dialogues are very useful devices in the book and add a sense of the kinds of conversations that Shorter was engaged in with Yoeme consultants. Essentially, the ethno-graphic dialogues are excerpts from Shorter’s field recordings. However, as useful as the device is, it also raises two questions for me. First, it is unclear from the discussion in the book whether the respondents are the same or different across the dialogues. Thus, while Shorter uses the dialogues (quite usefully, I might add) to add “voices” (p. 57) to his ethnography, it is unclear how many voices were added. Second, it is also unclear what languages these dialogues were in. For example, at the beginning of chapter 1, Shorter includes a story told in Yaqui to Felipe Molina and then translated into English. However, in the ethnographic dialogues, it is unclear if the conversations were in English with the occasional Yaqui word inserted, in Spanish with the occasional Yaqui word inserted and then translated into English (which seems most likely), or in Yaqui and then translated into English with the occasional Yaqui lexical item retained in the transcript. This issue becomes particularly vexing with an exchange that ends with one of Shorter’s consultants asking: “How am I going to teach myself to speak English?” (p. 296). As Shorter notes at the beginning of the ethnographic dialogues, “the process of learning and translating another’s culture is complex” (p. 57); as such, a more explicit discussion of the process of translation would have been of use.

I have opened with this critique of Shorter’s book so that I can move on to all that is valuable and important in the book. One of the central issues of Yaqui ethnography and ethnohistory has been the relationship between “traditional” epistemology and “Christian” epistemology. It is this concern that undergirds much of Shorter’s book. Whether it be Shorter’s account of searching for Jesus’s handprints or footprints in the Yaqui homeland or the Talking Tree, the prophecy and the split between the Surem (the ancestors who decide not to become Christians but who persist in the huya ania “wilderness world”) and the Yoemem (chapter 3), or in the role of Testamento and “writing” as a performative inscriptive practice, dichotomies and binaries should be eschewed. Shorter’s interrogation of the Testamento in chapter 2 is a particularly insightful example of this perspective. Much has been made concerning the putative transformative powers of literacy (note that “literacy” is an ideological position). The Testamento, also known by an older generation of scholars as the “Rahum land myths,” is a set of narratives that depict “Yoeme...

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