Norton and Ethel Allen among the Paipai

Norton and Ethel Allen among the Paipai SUZANNE GRISET AND ALAN FERG Although Norton Allen is known primarily in connection with the archaeology of the Hohokam, he and his wife, Ethel, also took an interest in contemporary Native Americans (see Schwartzlose’s biography of Allen in this issue). This article examines the Allens’ collection of objects made by the Paipai of Baja California, particularly the pottery, donated by Ethel Allen to the Arizona State Museum (ASM) in Tucson. The Paipai are a Yuman-speaking people who today live in and around the village of Santa Catarina, which is about eighty miles southsouthwest of Calexico/Mexicali. The village is associated with the former Dominican mission of Santa Catarina (or Santa Catalina) de los Yumas, established in 1797 and destroyed in 1840 by a native revolt (Meigs 1935). The Paipai are linguistically related to the Kiliwa just to the south of them, the Ipai and Tipai (Kamia/Kumeyaay) in southern California and northwestern Baja, the Cocopa on the Colorado River delta, and the Arizona Pai groups (the Hualapai, Havasupai, and Yavapai) (see maps in Luomala 1978:fig. 1 and Owen 1969:fig. 1). The people referred to today as Paipai are actually an amalgam of what were formerly two separate groups, one of which spoke Paipai, the other Kuatl, another Yuman language (Wilken 1987:19). Anthropologist Roger Owen stated, “It seems likely that Santa Catarina was originally a Kuatl settlement to which Paipai were brought by the missionaries. All of the remembered Kuatl rancherías were around and to the north of the location of the mission; all of the former settlements of the Paipai were to the south and east of the present reserve. The Paipai were desert peoples, the Kuatl were highlanders” (cited in Wilken 1987:19). The traditional Paipai economy was based on a mixture of low- and high-elevation resources, including storable native plants, such as acorns, agave, piñon, chia and pamita seeds, tuna cactus fruit, and bisnaga SUZANNE GRISET received her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Davis, with a specialty in western North American prehistoric and historic ceramics. She is a principal investigator with SWCA Environmental Services , Tucson. ALAN FERG is the archivist at the Arizona State Museum. Journal of the Southwest 52, 2 and 3 (Summer-Autumn 2010) : 395–416 396 ✜ JOURNAL OF THE SOUTHWEST buds; as well as animals like deer, desert hares, and wood rats (Michelsen 1970b:42; 1974:44). Many of these resources continued to be important to the Paipai as late as the 1950s (Henderson 1951:10–11). Paipai ceramics are very similar to those made by the other Pai peoples. They are primarily an undecorated brown ware formed by coiling, thinned and shaped by paddle-and-anvil technique, and fired in small batches in open fires. Vessel forms include bowls and jars (ollas) of various sizes, as well as pipes, rattles, and anvils for making pottery. Anthropologist Michael Wilken (1987:20) noted that several lines of evidence indicate that the current Paipai pottery tradition originated with the Kuatlspeaking portion of the tribe, and that the neighboring Kiliwa referred to the Kuatl as los ceramiqueros (the pottery makers), in contrast to the Paipai, la gente antigua (the ancient people). The Paipai have been visited by several professional anthropologists, including William Hohenthal Jr. (2001:51–58) between 1948 and 1951, Roger Owen (1962, 1963) in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Norton Allen’s friend Anita Alvarez de Williams (1975), Michael Wilken (1987), and an intensive 1958–59 University of California, Los Angeles, anthropological research program under the direction of J. B. Birdsell. (Owen [1969] provides a review of all early work in the area.) The Paipai are, however, known to the public largely through a handful of popular articles. The editor of Desert Magazine, Randall Henderson, and his friends visited a small Paipai village on the east face of the Sierra Juárez in 1951, and visited Santa Catarina in 1952 (Henderson 1951, 1952a, 1952b). Juan Arvallo, the so-called chief of Santa Catarina, told Henderson that “the community included Cocopahs, Diegueños, Kaliwas and Pai-Pais—mostly the latter” (Henderson 1952a:9). Henderson’s party purchased ollas...