Page:The Pima Indians.pdf/176

176 some members of the Pima community during preceding generations before outside influences were brought to bear upon them. Indeed, soine measure of prudence was enforced by the fact that the Apaches were hovering upon the outskirts of the villages watching for an opportunity to attack when the warriors were incapacitated for resistance.

The "Name song" is a social device that accomplishes the ends of organized charity, together with those of the ordinary festival. If a village suffers from a scarcity of food, it visits one where the crops have been plentiful and shares in the bountiful harvest in the following manner: The visitors camp outside the village and come in during the evening to learn the names of the residents and to arrange these names in the song, which provides places for two names in each stanza. There are seventy stanzas in the song, and if there are more than twice that number of visitors it may be repeated and other names substituted. Each visitor assumes the name of a resident of the village as a seal of fellowship and for the purpose of contributing to the pleasure of the festivities of the morrow, when the strangers come into the village to sing. As the song is sung and a name is called the wife or daughter of the person of that name runs with some light object, and the wife or daughter of the person who has assumed the name for the day pursues the other woman to take it away from her. If she is unable to catch her, some of the other visiting women aid in capturing the runner, and she leads her captors to where "the value of her husband’s name," in the form of corn, wheat, beans, or other foodstuffs, is ready to be presented to the visitor.

When there are many participants in the ceremony nearly the entire day may be consumed in its performance. When some of the resident villagers are destitute, only the names of those who have plentiful crops are used. The visitors give nothing but their services as singers, and they receive very substantial rewards. Etiquette requires that the visit be returned within a reasonable time—late the same season or during the following year. However, when the nomadic Papagos come to give the Pimas entertainment the visit can so seldom be returned that the gifts are more of the nature of exchanges by barter, with the advantages in favor of the Papagos. The Pimas always received the Papagos cordially, though rarely returning their visits—so rarely that in the last fifty years the Pimas have sung the name song but twice in Papagueria, the two visits being to Suijotoa.



The men received thorough training in speed and endurance in running during their raids into the Apache country, but they had few sports that tended toward physical improvement except the foot races. Sometimes a woman ran in a contest against a man, she