In November, 1905, my friend and interpreter Jack Jones came to San Francisco and the University, bringing with him an informant called Aspa-sakam, which means Eagle-sell. Aspa-sakam was a youngish middle-aged man, heavy-set and inclined to be fat, who worked pretty steadily for the Santa Fe railroad at Needles. He was, however, a good Mohave inwardly, and had dreamt and could sing two cycles, Yellaka or Goose, and Nyohaiva (Nyô'haiva), which is a story of war but named after an insect. He narrated both of these, proving himself an excellent informant as regards precision, orderliness of mind, and willingness to explain. His Goose story has been outlined on pages 766-768 of the Handbook of California Indians. It is a very long tale with a minimum of action. The Nyohaiva story, which follows here, is much shorter. The songs, as their scheme was outlined and as they were recorded on the phonograph in part, aggregate only about a hundred, as against four hundred or more in the Goose series. Aspa-sakam said that it took only one night to sing the Nyohaiva series through.
Nyohaiva, the narrator said, was known also to an old man called Mehulye, who was his mother's brother and who now lived with him. This was a paralyzed man who knew the Great Tale, the story of migrations and battles of Mohave clan groups.
As regards Goose, Aspa-sakam said that this was known also to his brother and to an old man, Hakwe, who was his father-in-law and therefore not a blood relation. The narrator added that perhaps sometime he would teach the singing to his son. The old man, Hakwe, was subsequently interviewed at Needles. I shrank from obtaining from him the whole of the story, having already gone through the ordeal of securing it from Aspa-sakam, but did record some of the songs and a place-name synopsis of the story, which is given on pages 768-769 of the Handbook. This outline shows Hakwe's version of Goose to be quite different in detail from Aspa-sakam's. The songs also have a different melodic theme. It does not seem, therefore, that either of these two informants, son-in-law and father-in-law, could have learned from, or been very much influenced by, the other.
As for Nyohaiva, Aspa-sakam subsequently said that his kin on the father's side knew Nyohaiva. As a boy he heard them sing it and learned it. "They did not teach me, for such things cannot be taught. They can only be dreamed. But my relatives knew Nyohaiva, and I dreamed it." These are his own words, and, semi-contradictory as they may seem to us, they perhaps come as close as is possible to expressing a characteristic Mohave nondifferentiation of spontaneous development from within and acquisition from without. Aspa-sakam added that the way he came to know Goose was different: none of his kinsfolk knew this. In our words, he really dreamed this; Nyohaiva he both learned and dreamed. When he was a boy, sometimes he would sing parts of Goose. An old man, hearing him sing, would say: "Yes, that is right. Yes, that is Goose." So he acquired more of it, dreaming it, and came to sing more and more of it.
It is doubtful whether he had ever sung either Goose or Nyohaiva through consecutively at any one time or occasion. I had seen him about two years earlier at a death and cremation, where he was singing, probably Nyohaiva. He had sung Goose for amusement at night at his home, he said. Neither he nor the interpreter seemingly could be made to understand clearly my questions whether he had ever sung Goose a whole night through, or whether he had ever sung it or Nyohaiva continuously from beginning to end. Such a statement of factual events seems to have little meaning to the Mohave.
Nyohaiva is sung standing, at any rate when women dance in a ring around the singer. He leans on a stick, which he sometimes thrusts forward and waves to the rhythm of his song, sometimes drops through his hand to strike the ground. There is no rattle or musical instrument.
Nyohaiva is classed by the Mohave as one of their song-myths dealing with war, and its plot is simple. Nyohaiva is an insect. She comes into existence as a woman in the north end of Mohave valley, at Miakwa'orve, above Fort Mohave, at the time of the beginnings: "The world was still wet." There is however no reference in the tale to Matavilya's death, Ha'avulypo, Avikwame, or the actually originating events. Nyohaiva travels south along the river, naming places and encountering named personages, but without notable happenings, as far as Aqwāqa-have, in Halchidhoma territory, below Parker. Here four brothers, including Otšôuta, believe that she comes for war and plan to kill her first. She on her part finds bones which she recognizes as her relatives'—a characteristic Mohave motivation and inconsistency—and bets her body against her freedom in a game to be played with one of the same bones. She wins, threatens them with war, and runs off southward, announcing impending war to those whom she meets, as far as Ava-tšohai, somewhere between Parker and Yuma. There she incites the people, under the leadership of men whose names denote blackbirds, to join her in returning and attacking Otšôuta's people. There is no reason given, why they should do so; rather, war is treated as something which, now given its roots, grows and will be—a sort of gathering fate, though a stirring and pleasurable one. The prolix Mohave narrative manner of adding incident to incident makes for an effect of slow accumulation of feeling on this theme. However, the war itself resolves into the killing by magic of a single leader: Homeric battles are not a usual part of the story pattern of the Mohave, in spite of their preoccupation with war. With a magic ball Nyohaiva puts the enemy settlement to sleep, enters Otšôuta's house, cuts off his head. This she carries upriver to Samo'okusa or Amaṭ-ya'ama near Parker, where people are living under the leadership of four transvestites! She institutes the scalp dance for them; throws Otšôuta's skull far south to become a rock at Picacho in Yuma land; then turns herself to stone as Hawk-rock, east of Parker.
The objective towards which the events of the tale trend seems to be the institution of the victory scalp dance; at which, in actual Mohave practice, Nyohaiva was one of several singings that were sung and danced to. In this dance, too, transvestites—the word means coward as well—participated along with women; and there was the expectable heterosexual indulgence. Hence probably the astounding berdache chiefs of the tale: they are imagined in order to provide the fitting dance setting. The scalp celebration seems to have been the principal Mohave occasion for dancing.
Nyohaiva, as a woman, herself reflects this peculiar relation between women and war: her hair, her skirt, her bashfulness are specified. But there is also the opposite attitude: she incites, she wants revenge, she kills. Here she is almost the embodiment of the hwami, the occasional female active homosexual whom the Yuman river tribes recognize as the counterpart of the more frequent male passive invert or alyha. But she is never explicitly designated as a hwami, nor does the tale itself allow us to interpret her as having had defined hwami status in the Mohave mind. Normal sex impulse or relation, what we should call love interest, does not enter into this story at all. It is normally treated meagerly in Mohave mythology, in spite of the endless sex talk and obscene humor of Mohave daily life. When it does appear in narrative, it is episodically. The plots as a whole show the love incidents to be subsidiary. Thus the Cane hero wishes a storm to rid himself of his wives, who are delaying the revenge for which he is traveling; and when his conscience makes him relent, it is because his wish strikes him as inhumane and bad in general, not because of tender sentiments toward the wives as love-objects. And there is rarely much sex feeling, and never a touch of ribaldry. For instance, the Tumanpa story is based on an incest motive, but the theme is treated with such restraint as scarcely to obtrude beyond the skeleton of the plot, and never with a trace of passion. The brother and sister are old people at the beginning of the tale! The fact that such sex element as enters into Nyohaiva is tinged with the quality of inversion, suggests a definite functional relation between inversion and war in Mohave culture. I say inversion because its sanctioned institutionalization largely removes it from the realm of the perverse, at least socially and in part psychologically.
Besides fighting and love-making, a third element active in Mohave life is left out of Nyohaiva as out of certain other stories in Mohave mythology. This is their tribal consciousness and keen ethnographic or international interest. All the people encountered in the story are treated as if they were Mohaves, or at least members of a still undifferentiated human race leading a specifically Mohave-type life; even though they dwell as far away as the Yuma habitat. (There is a partial exception in the incident when Nyohaiva detours east into the mountains, finds a man whose name refers to buckskin shirts, and gives him hunting arrows to live by: thus she institutes the Walapai more than she encounters them.) The attitude of clannish rather than of tribal differentiation recurs in the unpublished "Great Tale" and, in the present monograph, in Cane (I), and explicitly in Vinimūlye-pātše (II), where the victorious attackers of the Mohave, coming from the desert Providence mountains, are not the Chemehuevi who historically inhabited this range, but a separatist band of Mohave who are represented as having settled there, contrary to economic possibility for a farming people.