We Will Dance Our Truth: Yaqui History in Yoeme Performances (review)

In the opening pages to We Will Dance Our Truth, David Delgado Shorter introduces us to Ignacio Sombra, who recounts the Yoeme ceremonial practices of animam miika, the feeding the souls of deceased ancestors. Ignacio, who is from Potam Pueblo, distills in his account key elements of Yoeme identity: religion as a form of "work," the convergence of place and notions of "the people," and the holiness of the relationship between place, people, and cultural identity. In one of his many eloquent and insightful sets of journal entries that intersperse the book's ethnographic analysis and individual interviews, Shorter reflects on the significance of Ignacio's gift: "Although I hadn't asked him for a 'formal' presentation, Ignacio clearly gave me a gift tonight, not just in his description of animam miika. His talk evidenced a distinctly Yoeme way of thinking about, historicizing, and continuing tribal religious identity" (3). In short, Ignacio had provided an "essential" set of concepts that embodied the integral facets of Yoeme identity, but he implicitly hinted at an alternative conceptualization of historical consciousness.

We Will Dance Our Truth is one of those rare books that is delightfully impervious to easy categorization. At first blush it strikes one as an ethnographic study of Mexican Yoeme (Yaqui) constructions of identity, religion, and history. Delgado lived among and conducted interviews with dozens of Yoemem for more than a decade and a half. He kept copious notes on their cultural practices, memories, stories, and perceptions of the world. And, like a good ethnographer, he demonstrates a keen eye for the cultural performances that evidenced the complex interplay between social change and religious continuity. However, the reader will quickly realize that this book is much more than a standard ethnographic study of an Indigenous community. It is an insightful and in many ways personal account of Yoeme views on religion as a state of being that is deeply imbricated throughout individual and collective life. Specifically, We Will Dance Our Truth seeks to "express the spatial, performative, and religious ways that many Yoemem sustain their collective identity" (4). Moreover, Shorter proposes to "remap the boundary between the ethnological categories oral and literate and expand Western notions of historical expression to include nonliterate representations of 'local' history through various oral and ritual practices" (4).

A key dimension of this study is Shorter's ethnocultural eye for the significance of place, place-making, and geography for group identity. He draws upon key Yoeme myths, stories, folktales, symbols, cultural practices, and prophecies to contribute to broader ethnographic and scholarly discussions on historical consciousness and its discursive relationship with specific landscapes and locations. The ties between history, narrative, and place-making have been central subjects of much scholarly inquiry, but few authors have approached these issues with such an intellectual breadth and vigor. Moreover, few have chosen Shorter's commendable inductive and deductive approach: rather than applying extant theories and concepts to "reveal" the secrets of Indigenous cultural practices, this study posits an interactive model that draws upon Yoeme intellectual and religious principles to contribute to ongoing global discussions about place and identity. Not only is this an important effort to decolonize ethnographic studies of Indigenous peoples, but it also repositions the politics of cross-cultural research by taking seriously the modes of consciousness that characterize "the subject of study." The "intellectual" articulations of Yoeme thinkers and cultural practitioners take center stage with the anthropological and ethnographic "canon" to help us understand more broadly the tropes of identity, religion, and geography.

David Delgado Shorter disrupts standard organizational and thematic frameworks by interspersing and interweaving oral interviews, personal stories, ethnographic journal entries, and standard scholarly analysis. The resulting layout refuses to privilege one form of knowledge—Western or Indigenous—over another. He begins with a brief overview of the main themes and turning points in Yoeme history to provide the reader with a "scholarly" basis for situating...