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Quechan Old Lady Sanyu·xáv Introduction by Amy Miller The Quechan (also known as Kwtsaan or Yuma) people once lived along the floodplain of the lower Colorado River, between Blythe, California, and the Colorado Delta. Their population is estimated to have numbered between four and five thousand at the time of first contact with whites. Today the Quechan Indian Nation occupies the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation, located on a portion of their original territory on the west side of the Colorado near its confluence with the Gila River. The Quechan language, often referred to as Yuma, belongs to the Yuman family (which extends from western Arizona through much of San Diego County, California , and into Baja California). It is now spoken fluently by fewer than 150 people . Abraham M. Halpern began work on this language in the 1930s, and his grammar later appeared as a series of articles in the International Journal of American Linguistics. In the 1970s, after retiring from a career in international relations, he returned to the study of Quechan language, literature, and culture. He published bilingual versions of numerous stories, songs, and personal reminiscences, as well as detailed descriptions by Quechan elders of the mourning ceremony known as the Karúk. Halpern’s legacy also includes a large collection of oral literature , ethnographic information, and local history, recorded on cassette tape in the Quechan language. The story of Old Lady Sanyu·xáv that appears here was recorded by Halpern in 1979.1 The storyteller, born in 1923, is now an elder in the Quechan community . She asked that her name not be revealed.2 The story was translated by Millie Romero and Amy Miller in 1998. Millie Romero explained that stories like this are important in teaching young people about social and personal relationships and about the dangers of a world in which some people have more power than others. Supernatural power, manifested in curing, magic, and witchcraft, played a prominent part in traditional Quechan life.3 The story of Old Lady Sanyu·xáv, like many Quechan stories, is concerned with supernatural power and its consequences for the people touched by it. The version presented here tells of twin old lady sanyu·xáv 269 young men, born in magical circumstances, who decide to marry against the wishes of their mother. Being twins, the sons of Old Lady Sanyu·xáv are particularly powerful; they change shape at will and do as they please. The old lady’s powers are no match for theirs, and she tries with little success to persuade them to do her bidding. The twin young women who marry the sons are powerful enough to overcome the old lady on one occasion but cannot escape her wrath in the end. Three different versions of the story of Old Lady Sanyu·xáv are found in the Halpern collection, each told by a different storyteller. While the present version focuses on the old lady and her relationship with her sons and their wives, another is concerned with the family of the twin young women, and the third focuses on the great power of the younger twin and its effect on his relationship with his brother. Details differ across the three versions of the story, and their plots develop in different directions, but two versions end with the disappearance of the old lady into the ocean in the west. The name Sanyu·xáv is based on the verb axáv ‘to enter; to set (in the west, said of the sun)’ and is said to refer to her disappearance. The story is presented here in a broken-line format intended to capture aspects of the Quechan oral delivery in the physical layout of the text. Each line provides a coherent translation of a prosodically motivated unit of Quechan speech.4 Blank lines separate prosodic ‘‘paragraphs’’, or units of speech bounded by a long pause and often falling to a low pitch. This broken-line format forces the flow of information in the English translation to follow that of the Quechan original. It also highlights stylistic devices such as repetition and parallelism. notes This material is based on work supported by the Abraham Halpern Memorial Fund and by National Science Foundation Grants no. sbr-9728976 and no. bcs-9910654. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the...

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