Yaqui

Well, um, like so many mixed women out here, I grew up in a home that wasn't connected to our indigenous lineage.

Um, I am mixed with many different lineages, but my main is Chumash from California, and Yaqui from Mexico, and also some Spanish and German in there, and African American.

And so really being mixed, um, the majority of my family didn't grow up with the culture, and so y- you know, in, in the Mexican side, because Yaqui is technically native, but also in my opinion, in my studies, all Mexican are indigenous individuals if you're from those bloodlines.

Um, and Along the way, we were always connected to the land.

We were always like...

We have had the same sort of traveling today.

We came to the Yaqui River, a muddy stream at this season, about two hundred yards wide, and so deep that we had to employ canoes to carry over our cargoes.

The canoes are paddled by Mexicans, no great boatmen by the way.

The mules and horses we swam over, having passed to Mochi.

Only once have I seen pulque at a small distillery of mezcal.

August 15th, Soyopa.

Leaving the Rio Yaqui for its little tributaries, which are sometimes above ground and sometimes below, running over the sands or disappearing underneath them, we encamped in a quiet, cool spot to rest after the great heat of the sunny sides of the hills we had left and the arroyos made by mountain torrents where we were nearly suffocated, and we looked forward to the plains of the Gulf of California and the sea breeze that sweeps them with anticipations of delight.

Alas, an occasional thunderstorm is all that gives coolness to the atmosphere here, for the puffs of land breeze only tantalize and do not cool.

Dad de Sonora, Mexico.

My mom, we just found out she's half Yaqui, Pascua Yaqui, so-

Okay

... yeah.

That's amazing.

[upbeat music] You're talking about growing up in Tucson.

Your mom is Yaqui Indian.

Your family is Mexicanos, but also there's kind of this southwest style food, right?

Part 6 Human Connection and Conservation The relationship between human beings and the Gila monster has been, for most of its recorded history, one of mutual misunderstanding.

The indigenous peoples of the Sonoran Desert, the Tohono O'odham, the Akimel O'odham, the various groups of Apache, the Yaqui, lived alongside the Gila monster for thousands of years and developed rich cultural relationships with it.

relationships that in many cases recognised its power and its danger, while also according it a place within the natural and spiritual order.

Some traditions viewed the Gila monster with a combination of respect and wariness, understanding that it was venomous and not to be provoked, but also that it was not inherently malevolent, simply what it was.

Or who was he, I should say.

It purported to tell of this young anthropologist's studies induction with a Yaqui shaman.

The Yaqui live in northern Mexico, southern Arizona, who using peyote, datura, and mushrooms reveals to him this entire kind of way of knowledge and understanding of the universe that supposedly has never before been shared with a quote-unquote Westerner.

For about Four and a half, five years, at least publicly, these books went unchallenged as legit works of anthropology.

It's not until 1972, somebody named Joyce Carol Oates writes a letter to the editor of the New York Times, which has been raving about Castaneda, saying, oh, am I the only person who thinks that these are novels? Right? And the interesting thing about Castaneda, there's never a definitive moment of unmasking.

And our party.

Did any one of them survive to carry back a report? Wiped out by the Yaquis, and poor young Bjornsson too.

I can see the dear old graybeards who sent me out shaking their heads and sighing for another young promise lost, and sighing too for the work that had not been done.

And I, who had originally been chosen, could have later taken them news whose confirmation would have made the university world-famous.

Sure.

Carlos Castaneda began his rise to fame in 1968 when the University of California published a book titled The Teachings of Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, which purported to tell of this young anthropologist's initiation with a Yaqui shaman in using datura and peyote and mushrooms into an entire kind of way of knowledge that supposedly had never before been revealed to a Westerner.

And the book was at first kind of an underground bestseller.

It soon became an international bestseller.

I'm not saying it's me.

It's just a guy named Carlos.

Who could it be? But Don Juan is the one who's ultimately going to serve as the teacher, right? He's going to be the one who leads him in this way, but he's not doing it in like the most traditional way, right? He's also, as he's defined by Yaqui culture and Carlos in the book, he's defined as a trickster, right? Can you talk a little bit about what the trickster figure is and the impact it's supposed to have on Carlos's sort of, you know, new perception of the world?

Yeah, I don't think that, I don't know that in the book that he actually uses the word trickster.