From the Archive – Southwest Center Researchers / Joseph C. Wilder
I recall as a boy accompanying my mother as we went to Old Pascua, Tucson’s original Yaqui Village, at Easter-time. Across the great dirt plaza, late at night, out of the darkness, I could see the yellow-white light from a bare bulb hanging in a ramada, as we made our way quietly toward the small bunch of people gathered, the silence only interrupted by the irregular drum beat coming out of the darkness like an echo, the beat hanging in the air. And then the flute. Working our way to the front, I would behold the pascolas and musicians and the central figure, motionless, ready, standing in the center. My mother bends down and whispers in my ear: “Look, Joe, the deer dancer.”
A Yaqui pahko is a ceremonial event celebrating and expressing reli-gious meaning. It is especially associated with deer songs and the deer dancer. To me attending, observing, or just being in the vicinity and hearing a pahko underway captures the quintessential feeling of our desert Southwest. For me it is one of those apertures through which I am tied to place and tied to the layers of my own being experienced over time. A seeming lifetime after my childhood, I remember a night in otam when I was the guest of Felipe Molina and his Sonoran compadre. I was sleeping in a daub-and-wattle structure in the family compound. I had gone to sleep hearing, in the distance, a pahko underway, the sound of flute and drum. In the middle of the night I awoke and heard that solitary drum beat—a resonating “bong” that carried through the black Potam night—followed by an interval of silence before a brief trill of flute. Lying there I felt at once the exoticism the sounds conveyed to me, as well as the deep comfort of the familiar, the remembrance of the many deer dances I had seen, from childhood on. I drifted back to sleep easily; Yaquis—the Yoeme—were doing a pahko, and an almost chiropractic adjustment was being made in our corner of the world. […]
