Establishing Connections to Place: Identifying O’odham Place Names in Early Spanish Documents

The sound system of the O’odham language differs from that of the Spanish language with sounds and processes that a Spanish speaker cannot duplicate when trying to pronounce O’odham words. This became problematic for the Tohono O’odham team reviewing Spanish documents as part of the O’odham–Pee Posh Documentary History Project. Father Eusebio Francisco Kino and Captain Juan Mateo Manje both recorded the O’odham place names of communities they visited, but wrote them as a Spanish speaker would pronounce them, corrupting the O’odham pronunciation in the process. The change made the place names almost unrecognizable as O’odham words and presented us some difficulty in deciphering the original O’odham names for the communities. But by using information from O’odham elders, place names already recognized as being Spanish pronunciations of O’odham words, and descriptions of the places provided in the documents, as well as applying my own linguistic studies to the problem, we have been able to distinguish the original O’odham names for various communities in present-day Mexico, establishing further evidence that these communities were originally O’odham communities.

In the following discussion of this effort, I use the orthography developed by Alvarez and Hale (1970),¹ which is the official O’odham writing system chosen by the Tohono O’odham Nation to be used for all educational purposes.² The following list of approximate English sounds, taken from Ofelia Zepeda’s (1983) A Tohono O’odham Grammar, will assist in distinguishing the letter-to-sound correlation of the Alvarez/Hale writing system.

• /a/ like the a in father

• /b/ like the b in big

• /c/ like the ch in chip

• /d/ like the th in this

• /ḍ/ like the t in but

• /e/ like the u in hum

• /g/ like the g in go

• /h/ like the h in hat

• /i/ like the i in machine

• /j/ like the j in job

• /k/ like the k in kiss

• /l/ no similar sound in English—closest is the dd in ladder; also similar to the single r in Spanish

• /m/ like the m in miss

• /n/ like the n in no

• /ñ/ like the ny in canyon

• /ŋ/ like the ng in finger

• /o/ like the a in all

• /p/ like the p in pot

• /s/ like the s in see

• /ṣ/ like the sh in ship

• /t/ like the th in with

• /u/ like the u in brute

• /w/ like the w in win

• /y/ like the y in yes

It should be noted that in translations discussed below, parentheses around a letter indicate that the letter is an added sound, and a hyphen before a letter indicates that the sound was dropped in written form.

The Loss of O’odham Places

The Tohono O’odham Nation is located in the southwestern region of Arizona and is the second-largest reservation in the United States. This land base is comparable to the size of the state of Connecticut and consists of 2.7 million acres. The 75-mile southern boundary of the reservation also serves as the international boundary between the United States and Mexico.

Historically, the O’odham occupied a greater area than what is now considered O’odham land. The original boundaries of the O’odham were marked by the San Pedro River to the east, the Gila River to the north, the Gulf of California on the west, and the Río Magdalena–Río Asunción to the south. This original O’odham territory has been referred to in literature as the Pimería Alta, and includes a portion called the Papaguería. Numerous O’odham communities existed within these original boundaries, but today only a few can still be described as O’odham communities with O’odham inhabitants.

The O’odham occupied this area autonomously until the arrival of Spaniards and Jesuit missionaries in the late 1600s. The Jesuits established missions in some of the O’odham communities with the hope that they could persuade the O’odham living in the outer desert...