Walking to Magdalena: Personhood and Place in Tohono O’odham Songs, Sticks, and Stories by Seth Schermerhorn (review)

THE MANY ACADEMIC CATEGORIES listed on the back cover of Walking to Magdalena—Native studies, religion, Christianity, American history, anthropology—hint at the complexities and nuances of this multifaceted and ultimately satisfying study of “what the O’odham made of Christianity.” Schermerhorn sets out explicitly to build upon religious studies scholarship and to critique the shortcomings of anthropology vis-à-vis theories about the relationship between Christianity and Indigenous peoples’ religious traditions. He focuses on how the O’odham live their “walking” tradition—widely discussed as pilgrimages—to the Church of St. Francis of Magdalena, Sonora, Mexico. Readers need to attentively hear and seriously consider the many voices within this text.

The book is based on Schermerhorn’s fieldwork from 2009 to 2012, when he joined a group of O’odham “walkers” led by the late and prestigious elder Felix Antone, who unexpectedly died in 2012; the book is dedicated in his honor. Schermerhorn “spent a total of only five weeks over a period of five years” when he accompanied the group, which walked “36 miles in 5 days, averaging about 7 miles per day” (22). Through conversations and recorded interviews with Antone and other seasoned walkers conducted outside and after the walk, Schermerhorn explores the O’odham walking tradition. O’odham walkers explain the meanings behind the three essential physical elements of the walk: the staffs used by walkers, the songs that accompany the walk, and the stories that accompany the walkers. Schermerhorn also uses the ontological categories of personhood, place, and historical production to understand the unique ways the O’odham have created, embraced, adapted, and interpreted the walking tradition as a key part of both Indigenous spiritual beliefs and O’odham Christianity; their relationship with the land; and the development of the highest form of the O’odham character itself. Schermerhorn thematically examines how the “O’odham understanding of walking to Magdalena [is] grounded within wider O’odham conceptions of movement.” He explains that “much about ‘walking’ and ‘being a good walker’ or a ‘good’ O’odham person is about maintaining proper kinship relations with one’s kin as well as with the entities in the O’odham landscapes” (98). For the O’odham, saints, staffs, and sacred caves make up this Indigenous landscape.

Schermerhorn tackles the central question throughout his book: “What have O’odham made of Christianity?” (128). It’s a complicated question to the academic, but as the book evolves it is clear that the question is important among O’odham walkers as well. O’odham walkers, both men and women, explain their personal views of the meaning of the pilgrimage, staffs, and stories. At the start of the text, Schermerhorm positions their role as consultants rather than informants. O’odham elder Felix Antone and walkers Louis Lopez, Simon Lopez, Mary Narcho, Mary Ann Ramirez, Royetta Thomas, and others are prominent voices who provide temperate and thoughtful discussions. Clearly, the author respects their voices. Ultimately, Schermer-horn accomplishes his stated goal to have O’odham voices “come through in this text but also cut against the interpretive grains toward which I may be inclined” (13). The reader should be prepared, however, to encounter significant anthropological, religious studies, and theoretical discussions about O’odham and Native American spiritual traditions. Still, these are not without merit and could provide further poignant discussion in graduate seminars.

Schermerhorn’s main argument is that the O’odham walkers have made their landscape and the landscape has formed them through time, geography, and memory, forming them not only as O’odham people but as the highest form, arguably, the best version they can be—a “good person.” The O’odham name this quality siakam, “something as real people . . . inextricably linked to what it means ‘to be a good walker’” (98). In one key example, this ideal is replicated and reciprocated in the care of the walking sticks...