Following the Man in the Maze
Image of a mural illustration of the Man in the Maze taken at Salinas Grandes. Golfo de Santa Clara, Sonora, Mexico. 2021. Image by Will Baynard. Copyright Will Baynard, 2021.
This past semester, after three years of coursework and preliminary research, I became a doctoral candidate in the UW-Madison Anthropology department. In my doctoral research, I explore concepts of sovereignty and governance expressed by members of the Tohono O’odham, an indigenous group with communities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. My proposed fieldwork will take place over the course of 12 months in Sonoyta, Sonora, Mexico—a small town in the middle of the Sonoran Desert bisected by the U.S.-Mexico border. I will work with community leaders and residents while also conducting legal anthropological research focused on recent litigation between the O’odham and the Mexican government. I conducted preliminary fieldwork in the Summer of 2021, some of which I describe below. LACIS, through the Tinker-Nave Fellowship Program, funded that pilot project. I followed up with another visit to Sonora in January 2022.
The Traditional O’odham Leaders (TOL) are the apparatus of government for the Tohono O’odham in Mexico. In the past few years alone, the TOL prepared mass vaccination programs for the O’odham community in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, organized a census for O’odham living in Mexico, assisted community members in obtaining permission to cross the border to access services on the U.S.-based reservation (the reservation is home to a distinct legal entity, the Tohono O’odham Nation (TON)). The TOL also helped secure United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage status for a historically sacred site in Sonora (Demby, Keeping the Salt in the Earth).
Despite the array of government-like functions performed by the TOL, the Mexican state offers no recognition to the body as an institution of a sovereign or semi-sovereign community. This dilemma is at the heart of my research. Through further work in the region, I expect to better tease out indigenous assertions of self-governance in Sonora. Non-Westphalian ideas of sovereignty are not novel to my project, and I will bring into discussion the relevant literature on the subject. For a starting point, I would suggest readers look at Jessica Cattelino and Audra Simpson’s work (“Rethinking Indigeneity: Scholarship at the Intersection of Native American Studies and Anthropology”).
Before writing this, I went back to review fieldnotes and some assorted items from my time in Sonora. I came across a Tohono O’odham bumper sticker. Emblazoned across the top of the bumper sticker are the words “Expresa Tu Voto.” The image in the middle of the bumper sticker is a depiction of the Man in the Maze, a visual representation of the Tohono O’odham belief system surrounding the cycle of creation, destruction, life, and death. Here, the image is tied to the heart of O’odham self-governance. I bring this up now, because I believe we can use it to understand the ongoing shifts in global political systems, but I’ll get back to that.
My research is interdisciplinary as it sits within the realms of anthropology, law, political science, and cultural studies. In this sense, the theoretical frameworks and methodologies mirror the fieldwork location itself. My research site lies in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Borderlands are, by their nature, a liminal space (Chávez 11). The O’odham understand life in the Borderlands more than anyone, but they approach the idea with a different lens. There is a theoretical understanding particular to the O’odham in Mexico that I seek to incorporate (with proper attribution) into the final product of my research. I can’t quite place my finger on it yet, but I believe it ties back to the circuitous nature of our existence.
The interdisciplinary nature of my work reflects not only the geography of my research, but my background as well. I came to the University of Wisconsin in 2019 after nearly a decade of practicing law. I began a PhD program in anthropology knowing little about what I wanted to study and even less about where I would go. Anthropology offers the promise of fieldwork in exciting locations. In this sense, my own journey in life has been circuitous.
Sonoyta may not be a typical site for anthropological work, though the field is changing some. The obsession with more geographically distant cultures is not as pervasive as in decades past. Sonoyta is also not the kind of place that people vacation. All that said, it holds a powerful history and character. Depending on who you are, Sonoyta is several different places. It sits across the border from Lukeville, Arizona. To college students at the University of Arizona, it is a refueling stop on the way to their annual spring break destinations on Mexico’s coastline. To U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents, it’s an access point to the U.S. for Mexican drug cartels. To the Sinaloa drug cartel, it is a small but important area where their longtime dominance is challenged. Before Sonoyta was any of the above, however, it was one of several Tohono O’odham villages scattered throughout the Sonoran Desert. The name itself is derived from the O’odham name for their village (Son ‘Odiak). As the modern era marched across the North American continent in the form of railroads, mining, and monocrop agriculture, the lives of the Tohono O’odham transformed. The U.S. government relocated the O’odham to a reservation in present-day Arizona. In Mexico, indigenous title was simply extinguished through the national creation myth of mestizaje. In (post)-colonial Mexico, everyone was legally declared part-indigenous and part-European, part-colonizer and part-colonized. No one group or person could therefore dispute land claims based on indigenous title (what is often referred to as “Indian Title”). The land allotted to the O’odham on either side of the border represents a fraction of their traditional territory.
I want to draw your attention back to the Man in the Maze and invite you to think about human development in grand terms. I ask you to think about the paths taken by nations and empires. Think about the culture and development of the O’odham government over the course of millennia. I want you to imagine that human civilization is crossing back over from one side of the maze to the other. Imagine that we live in a world defined less by nation-states and more by communities. Dare to dream what is possible if we cast off everything that we are told to take for granted in our lives. That is the reason I study indigenous governance among the O’odham. I see a group of people who value self-determination. Whether we call that sovereignty, autonomy, or something else entirely is outside the present argument. We are on the cusp of a sea change in indigenous structures of governance in the Americas and I for one, am here for it.
The path for all of us in life is different. For many, it’s winding. It meanders through different places and takes us through different experiences. When conducting my research, I often trudge through different disciplines as well. Using my research as the guide serves me far greater than mapping my trajectory based on disciplinary traditions alone.
[1] See: Bernard Fontana’s essays in the Handbook of North American Indians vol. 10: Southwest; Christina Leza’s Divided Peoples; and Ruth Underhill’s Social Organization of the Papago Indians.
About the Author
Will Baynard is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. He earned a B.A. in History with a Spanish minor from Virginia Wesleyan College in 2006. He received a M.A. from George Mason University in 2008. In 2011, he graduated from Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
Works Cited
Cattelino, Jessica R., and Audra Simpson. “Rethinking Indigeneity: Scholarship at the Intersection of Native American Studies and Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology.vol. 12, no. 6, 2022, pp. 365-381.
Chávez, Alex. Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño. Duke University Press, 2017.
Demby, Samantha. 2018. “Keeping the Salt in the Earth.” NACLA, 5 July 2018, https://nacla.org/blog/2018/07/05/keeping-salt-earth.
Fontana, Bernard. “History of the Papago,” Handbook of North American Indians vol. 10: Southwest, edited by A. Ortiz and W. Sturtevant, Smithsonian Institution, 1983, pp. 137–49.
—. “Pima and Papago: Introduction.” Handbook of North American Indians vol. 10: Southwest, edited by A. Ortiz and W. Sturtevant, Smithsonian Institution, 1983, pp. 125–37.
Leza, Christina. Divided Peoples. The University of Arizona Press, 2019.
Underhill, Ruth. Social Organization of the Papago Indians. AMS Press, 1939.