Elizabeth Peratrovich: An Early Civil Rights Activist from Alaska

By Mikaela Hamilton and Nathan Sowry

On February 16th, 1945, nearly 20 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the first anti-discrimination law in the United States was signed into effect. The Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945 was created to address discrimination against Indigenous populations within the Alaskan territory by banning segregationist policies based on race. The successful passing of this act has often been credited to the dedicated work of Elizabeth Wanamaker Peratrovich (Tlingit), a prominent figure in the fight for equality and civil rights in the early twentieth century.

As of this month, the Peratrovich family papers are now available online, and will soon be available for research and reference in the National Museum of the American Indian Archives Center. This collection includes photographs, audio recordings, correspondence, and newspaper clippings documenting the life and important civil rights work of Elizabeth and her husband Roy. 

Elizabeth Wanamaker Peratrovich, 1911-1958.
Peratrovich family papers (NMAI.AC.078), NMAI.AC.078_001_01_021.

Elizabeth (Ḵaax̲gal.aat) was born on July 4, 1911, in Petersburg, Alaska, as a member of the Lukaax̱.ádi clan, in the Raven moiety of the Tlingit nation. Elizabeth spent the first decade of her life in Sitka, a coastal city in southeast Alaska, until her family moved further southeast to the Native village Klawock, where Elizabeth met her future husband, Roy Peratrovich (Tlingit). Although Elizabeth and Roy spent their early years at segregated boarding schools, they were able to graduate from Ketichikan High School, which was integrated following a lawsuit won by attorney William Paul (Tlingit). In 1931, Elizabeth married Roy Peratrovich. They had three children: Roy Jr., Loretta Marie, and Frank Allen. 

In 1941, the Peratroviches moved to Juneau, the capital of the Alaska Territory, in search of more opportunities for themselves and their children. Although they encountered hostile white homeowners who refused to rent to Native Americans, they persevered to become one of the first Indigenous families to live in a non-Native neighborhood. They soon took on leadership roles within the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Sisterhood. Throughout Juneau, discrimination was ubiquitous; local businesses commonly displayed signage reading "No Natives Allowed," "No Dogs, No Natives," and “We cater to white trade only." After encountering a “No Natives Allowed Sign” on a local inn just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Elizabeth and Roy were driven to write a letter to Governor Ernest Gruening in protest, marking the beginnings of their political activism to establish legal protections for Indigenous people in Juneau and beyond. The letter read, in part:

“The proprietor of ‘Douglas Inn’ does not seem to realize that our Native boys are just as willing as the White boys to lay down their lives to protect the freedom that he enjoys. …We as Indians consider this an outrage because we are the real Natives of Alaska by reason of our ancestors who have guarded these shores and woods for years past."

Letter from the Elizabeth and Roy Peratrovich to Ernest Gruening, Governor of Alaska, December 30, 1941.
Peratrovich family papers (NMAI.AC.078), NMAI.AC.078_001_02_001.

Successfully gaining Governor Gruening’s support, Elizabeth and Roy began a campaign to pass an anti-discrimination bill in 1943. With a vote of 8-8 in the House of Alaska’s two-branch Territorial Legislature, it failed to pass. Undeterred, Elizabeth continued to tirelessly campaign across the Alaskan territory. After garnering public support, Elizabeth and Roy, representing the Alaska Native Brotherhood/Sisterhood, brought a new anti-discrimination bill before the Alaska Senate in 1945. In an eloquent two-hour long testimony, Elizabeth stood before a white male majority and eloquently argued for an end to racial discrimination within Alaska. 

During the hearing, Allen Shattuck, a Juneau territorial senator, asked Elizabeth “Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites, with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind us?” Elizabeth famously responded, “I would not have expected that I, who am ‘barely out of savagery,’ would have to remind gentlemen with five thousand years of recorded civilization behind them, of our Bill of Rights.” A local newspaper printed that she “shamed the opposition into a ‘defensive whisper.’” The Alaska Equal Rights Act of 1945 was signed into law by Governor Gruening on February 16, 1945. The Act provided that all Alaskans be entitled to “full and equal enjoyment” of public areas and businesses and banned signs that discriminated based on race. This marked the end of “Jim Crow” laws within Alaska.

Transcript of Alaska Territorial Senate Hearing regarding proposed Equal Rights Bill, February 6, 1945.
Peratrovich family papers (NMAI.AC.078), NMAI.AC.078_001_02_082 and NMAI.AC.078_001_02_083.

In recognition of her antiracist advocacy to provide equal accommodation privileges to all citizens regardless of race, in 1988 the state of Alaska posthumously established February 16th as Elizabeth Wanamaker Peratrovich Day. More recently, celebrating the 75th anniversary of Alaska’s Anti-Discrimination Law, Elizabeth Peratrovich appeared on the 2020 Native American $1 coin design. That same year, a Google doodle featuring the work of Tlingit and Haida artist Michaela Goade (Sheit.een) commemorated Elizabeth’s life and activism. Elizabeth and Roy’s efforts helped to pave the way for continued Indigenous activism within the United States. 

Mikaela (Mik) Hamilton, Intern, National Museum of the American Indian Archives Center

Nathan Sowry, Reference Archivist, National Museum of the American Indian Archives Center

Cultures in Motion: The Huichol Film Project 1973-1975 Part II

For Part I of this blog post please click here.

 

Image from copy at University of California Libraries.
Accessed via Internet Archive

Kalman Müller was not to the first outsider to experience the Hikuri Neixa (a ceremony which marks the end of the Huichol year and the time prepare the soil for planting and to call upon the rain), but he was likely the first to film it. Other foreign researchers, mostly ethnographers, had visited San Andres Cohamiata during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The eminent Norwegian explorer and ethnographer Carl Lumholtz (1851 – 1922) had been the most prolific researcher to visit the place to date. On a grant from the American Museum of Natural History, Lumholtz visited most of the indigenous communities in Sierra Madre from 1895 to 1898. Following this experience, in 1900 and in 1902, Lumholtz would author Symbolism of the Huichol Indians and Unknown Mexico, which remain important works on the Huichol. 

Like Lumholtz, Müller also extensively documented Huichol lifeways, but he stuck to the camera. After filming the Hikuri Neixa ceremony in 1973, Müller produced and helped produce four more film projects totaling 43,590 feet of film (approximately 20 hours).[i] The Huichol ceremonies of Las Pachitas, the Peyote Pilgrimage, and the

Cambio de Varas are among other important ceremonies that Müller documented. Aspects of daily life of Huichols, with a particular emphasis on child rearing and development also figure prominently in the films.

Notes for camera roll 28, 

helping to identify film after processing and printing.

HSFA 1989.3.3 (ephemera)

This interest did not come from Müller himself, but came from of a group of researchers at the National Institute of Health, the patrons who had financed Müller’s expedition into the Sierra Madre.[ii]

Indeed, one key difference between the film project Müller led in Mexico and the film projects he had led in Europe or the South Pacific, was that the former was conceived and produced as a scientific project. The project was itself part of a broader research agenda to use film as a research method.



According to E. Richard Sorenson, Müller’s supervisor for this project and one of the proponents of the film research agenda:

because the light sensitive emulsion of film produces an objective chemical facsimile of the pattern of light falling on it, it preserves a phenomenological record of the pattern of light received. The data does not have to be screened by the cognitive organization of a human observer before it can be preserved. Because of this, film preserves information not just of what has been “seen” and “selected” by the culturally programmed mind of the filmer but also what he has not.[iii]

Film, in other words, would be inevitably more objective a method of describing reality than the pen of even the most experienced researcher. Unlike humans, the argument went, cameras could capture a fuller representation of the present, which would enable future researchers to see aspects which would have otherwise escaped the eye of the field researcher. Sorenson’s perspective was heavily influenced by his mentor Margaret Mead, who also believed in the objectivity and emancipatory nature of film. It was this faith in film that motivated Mead to help found the National Anthropological Film Center in 1975, the predecessor to today’s Human Studies Film Archives.

Huichol social interaction at the Fiesta de las Pachitas, Summer 1974 [iv]
Frame grab from HSFA 1989.3.1-3A

Applied to the Huichol people of San Andres, the research film method would generate increased understanding on questions such as: How do children in isolated societies become “enculturated”? How do psychedelic plants influence indigenous social organization? And, perhaps more importantly, what can the U.S. learn from people like the Huichol to address their own sociocultural ailments?[v]  

In practice, however, the research film method as Müller applied translated into long and mostly static takes without an explicit narrative arc or angle, and indeed most of the 46 film rolls that make up this collection were made this way. The other, and perhaps more important component of the Huichol project as a scientific enterprise, was the annotations to the films themselves. Dozens of synchronized and non-synchronized, Spanish and English annotations accompany the films Müller made. These annotations, drafted in collaboration with Eliseo Castro Villa (Müller’s main indigenous informant/collaborator in San Andres) and Rocio Echaverría (a government nurse who had worked in San Andres for many years prior to Müller’s arrival and who would marry him in 1973), added a rich layer of detail on the specific names and processes for the people, ceremonies, plants and other things filmed. 

Kalman Müller narrating the first time a child in San Andres Cohamiata consumes peyote during the Hikuri Neixa ceremony, Winter 1975. HSFA 1989.3.3-9A 16mm workprint (Workprint is a temporary copy of film footage used for editing. It can have unstable color dyes causing the film to fade to a reddish hue.)

This added layer greatly amplifies the amount of contextual information about the moving images that appear on the films. But it would be after longs hours of conversation—while annotating these films behind a flat bed editing table—when Müller, Castro, and Echaverría would reveal even more telling pieces of information regarding Huichol culture and behavior. For it was at these times, when the commentators would reveal in jest, irritation, or silence, how their visions and concerns about the Huichol people differed. 

It is through Echaverría’s silence, punctuated with occasional outbursts of detailed information during one of these sessions, that one learns about the ways the Huichol people were coping with the debt and poverty the U.S.-backed Green Revolution was bringing to Huichol communities in the early ‘70s. [vi] It is through Müller’s repetitive dismissal of her comments that we may infer why she keeps mostly silent through the annotation process. It is also through Castro’s mocking of Müller as a friend of the Huichols who does not know their names that we learn about his possible irritation with the project.[vii]  A frustration which other Huichols may or may not have shared with Castro but that nonetheless makes one wonder: what was the story on the other side of the lens?

Photo by Kalman Müller, 1975

As master storytellers who were historically weary of the power of narratives in shaping their cultures, landscapes, and societies, who knows how the Huichol of San Andres Cohamiata may have bent their own reality for Müller’s camera?  We may never know, but what is certain is that to understand how cultures negotiate power in film, we must look at what lay behind the camera as well as in front of it.  

Enabling viewers to do so—to see through both sides of the lens—is indeed what makes the Huichol Film Project most remarkable. Influenced by the scientific film method, the extensive annotations and structured approach to filmmaking of this collection offer not only a more nuanced image of the Huichol people as film subjects, but also a more detailed glimpse into the culture and perspective of its filmmakers. As a clear and multifaceted window into the past, this collection represents a valuable resource for scholars interested in the history of film and of the Huichol people. For its incredible detail on the social and cultural practices of their ancestors, the Huichol Film Project should be of most interest and value to the Huichol people of San Andres Cohamiata. 

José Carlos Pons Ballesteros

Graduate Fellow

NMNH-Department of Anthropology

Original film footage of the Huichol Film Project, along with sound recordings and associated documentation, form part of the collections of the Human Studies Film Archives.  You can find more information about this film collection here.

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[i] According to catalogue records the Huichol Film Project is made of 50 camera rolls, according to the Processing Proposal for the collection, the Huichol Film Project is made of 46 rolls.  Muller’s footage was used to produce the edited film Huichols: People of the Peyote around 1976. Thomas Perry produced this film in collaboration with Steven Dreben, who edited and directed it.

[ii] There is dark back story to the main proponents of this research film method, visual anthropologist E. Richard Sorenson (1939 – 2015) and his mentor medical researcher Carleton Gajdusek (1923 – 2008), interest in childhood development, which I will not address here as it is complex and not the focus of this essay.  Suffice it to say that Gajdusek was charged with child molestation in April 1996. For more information about this watch the excellent documentary The Genius and the Boys by Bosse Lindquist (2009) or read: Spark, Ceridwen. 2009. “Carleton’s Kids: The Papua New Guinean Children of D. Carleton Gajdusek.” The Journal of Pacific History 44 (1): 1–19. 

[iii] Quote drawn from The Huichol Film Project, Unfinished Draft of the Huichol Enculturation: a Preliminary Report. Human Studies Film Archives, Smithsonian NMNH.

 [iv] The Huichols celebrate the Fiesta de las Pachitas around the time of Ash Wednesday. This ceremony mixes Mesoamerican, Mexican, and Catholic symbolism and rituals to commemorate the early attempts by Catholic missionaries to convert the Huichol people into Christianity. For this festival the Huichol participants are divided into two main bands, the Jews and the Toros, while the rest of the community watches, as the film roll 89.3.1-3A suggests, often in jest. The Jews represent the Huichol ancestors. The Huichol represent the Jews by painting their faces black, some men dressing as women, all of whom try to escape the Toros. Huichols representing the Toros carry red flags and bull horns with which they run after the Jews. One interesting historical relationship this festival, and in particular the depiction of Christian missionaries as Toros, may speak to is the connection between the arrival of Christianity and the development of cattle agriculture in northwest Mexico. For more information on this complex ceremony read:  Jáuregui, Jesús. "Las Pachitas en la Mesa del Nayar (Yaujque’e)." Dimensión antropológica 34 (2009). 

[v] The Huichol Film Project, Grant Application. Human Studies Film Archives, Smithsonian NMNH. The question as to what Western society can learn from indigenous peoples is not unique to the Huichol film project, in fact it has served as the inspiration for much of the ethnographical research that has been conducted for the last half-century. For a short but interesting comment on this matter see the Introduction by Kathleen Berrin in her edited book Art of the Huichol Indians, 1979.

[vi] Huichol FIlm Project, 1975, sound roll 1989.3.3-1, annotation track in Spanish. This tape describes the First Use of  a Corn Thresher

[vii] Huichol FIlm Project, 1975, round roll 1989.3.1-14, annotation track in Spanish. This tape describes the yearly Huichol Tree Planting Ceremony

Silver Horn’s Winter Count: An Archival Record of Indigenous Time Featured in a Smithsonian Exhibition

Elena Myers, Diana Marsh, and Candace Greene

Documenting Diversity: How Anthropologists Record Human Life is an exhibit showcasing the history of anthropological fieldwork through rare archival and print materials from the National Anthropological Archives and the Smithsonian Libraries. The exhibit, two cases in the Evans Gallery (ground floor) of the National Museum of Natural History, opened on March 12 and will be on view for 16 months when the museum reopens.

Specifically, the show traces the progress of technologies used to record human life, from paper to film to today’s digital media. The exhibit also grapples with the limits of such documents. Some ethnographic “data” resist documentation. It may be hard to record, or Indigenous community members may not choose to share it (especially with white anthropologists collecting it). But this is not always the case.

Figure 1: Page from Silver Horn's winter count depicting the years 1832-1835. As anthropologist Candace Greene describes in her book on Silver Horn, the wolf drawn in the first summer indicates that the Medicine Lodge Ceremony was held at Wolf Creek that year. The following summer (represented by a tree in leaf, because no Medicine Lodge Ceremony was held) marks the massacre of a Kiowa village in which the Osage attackers carried off the sacred Taime, the figure shown shrouded in feathers. After that was the winter the stars fell, when a meteor shower was visible across the Plains. MS 2531, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

The exhibit features an exquisite piece in the hand of master illustrator Silver Horn, or Haungooah. Silver Horn (Figure 1) was a Kiowa artist distinguished for his prolific career and intricate drawing style.

The “Silver Horn pictorial calendar,” as it is listed in the Smithsonian Collections catalog, is called a “winter count” (sai-guat) by the Kiowa. Smithsonian anthropologist James Mooney commissioned the calendar in 1904, and today it stands as an exceptional record of Native historical knowledge preserved in document form.

In Silver Horn’s rendering, time passes left to right across the page, marking winters with bare trees and summers with the forked pole that was erected in the annual Kado, Medicine Lodge Ceremony. The drawings associated with each season marker depict noteworthy events of communal memory. For example, the winter of 1833-34 is remembered as “The Year the Stars Fell,” after the striking Leonid meteor shower (Figure 1).

As a collective history standardized for use by all Kiowas, the events chosen to “name” specific seasons were not necessarily the most important, but rather the most memorable—the death of a well-known warrior, the outbreak of a deadly disease, or the location of the Kado that brought the entire tribe together.

Figure 2: As Greene writes in One Hundred Summers: A Kiowa Calendar Record, in this “Pawnee killed winter,” Silver Horn’s detailed rendering of the dress and decoration of a noted brave Pawnee warrior demonstrates his respect for the figure. MS 2531, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

Knowledge of history was held in communal memory and passed down through the oral tradition. The responsibility for recording year names their chronological order was assigned to calendar-keepers (a role Silver Horn inherited from his great-uncle Tohausan, a principal chief of the Kiowas, by way of his father also called Tohausan).

Figure 3: Summer of 1849: Entry for the summer of the Cramp Kado. The crouched figure represents the cholera epidemic that swept the Plains that year. Silver Horn also notes the death of On the Arrow from the disease with a unique pictorial convention, the death owl. The cradles in the bottom right corner denote two significant births. MS 2531, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

All members of the community could then refer to the calendar when placing their own life’s events, when the calendar made appearances at social gatherings. Silver Horn told Mooney that he was born in the summer that Bird Appearing was killed, 1860 (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Summer 1860: Entry for “Bird Appearing killed summer,” shown with a bullet streaking toward his name glyph. MS 2531, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

Most winter counts were intended as utilitarian mnemonic devices (Figure 5). Detailed narrative illustration conventions were reserved to tell stories of war. Silver Horn appears to have merged these two traditions, creating a novel form of historical storytelling.

Figure 5: James Quitone (Wolf Tail), winter count page representing the years 1847-1849. MS 2002-27, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

The calendar commissioned by Mooney in 1904 is actually a copy, reproduced from Silver Horn’s less-elaborate original. Silver Horn maintained the original for several decades after the copy ends, and passed many of the stories on to his family. The calendars thus stand not only as a record of the past, but as an investment in the future: the endurance of Kiowa history.

Documenting Diversity was curated by postdoctoral fellow Diana E. Marsh and Curator of  Globalization and Acting Director of the NAA Joshua A. Bell, and collaboratively produced by the National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives, the Smithsonian Libraries, and Smithsonian Exhibits. When it reopens, it will be on view in the Evans Gallery on the ground floor of the National Museum of Natural History for 16 months.

Elena Myers is a senior and student archivist at Bryn Mawr College where she is majoring in History. In summer 2019 she was an intern at the National Anthropological Archives. Diana Marsh is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Anthropological Archives.

Diana E. Marsh is a postdoctoral fellow at the National Anthropological Archives where she researches access to Indigenous archival collections.

Candace Greene is an anthropologist of the Plains Indians who was based at NMNH until her retirement, and worked closely with the Silver Horn family and other Kiowa people to combine Indigenous perspectives with archival research on Mooney and other turn-of-the-century anthropologists. Greene has published extensive “translations” of these calendars, and this post relies heavily on her research and publications.

Bibliography

Greene, Candace S. Silver Horn: Master Illustrator of the Kiowas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001.

———One Hundred Summers: A Kiowa Calendar Record. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009

Mooney, James. Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians. In The Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1895-96. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1898.

Cultures in Motion: The Huichol Film Project, 1973-1975 - Part I

 

Young Huichol man sitting on a cliff overlooking the Western Sierra Madre, Summer 1974

Frame grab from HSFA 1989.3.1-8

Before arriving in the Western Sierra Madre of Mexico in April 1973 to produce one of the richest visual ethnographic collections of the Huichol community of San Andres Cohamiata to date, Hungarian-American filmmaker Kalman Antal Müller (1939 – ) had already had a wealth of experiences. By his mid-thirties, Müller had traveled extensively across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and the South Pacific, making films and writing articles for popular and academic outlets such as Atlas, National Geographic, and the Journal de la Société des Océanistes along the way. Müller had also worked as an administrator for the United Nations in Zaire (now D.R.C.) and as a translator for the Department of State in the U.S.— all while moonlighting as a doctoral student in French Literature at the University of Arizona.[i]

Like most of the places where Müller had spent time through the 1960s and early 1970s, San Andres Cohamiata was not a town one could easily get to. This village or rancho (in Huichol lore) sat (and still sits) in a high plateau, some 6,000 feet above sea level, amid deep, treacherous barrancas—in what is perhaps one of the roughest landscapes in Mexico and the Americas. That the Huichol ancestors settled in this difficult terrain some four hundred years before Müller arrived on the scene was not an accident. Around 1530, following a series of military conflicts known today as the Mixtón Wars, through which the Spanish state and their Nahuatl indigenous allies sought to subjugate northern Mesoamerican peoples, the Huichol ancestors fled west from the lower and drier valleys of what is now the Mexican State of San Luis Potosi to the Sierra Madre highlands.[ii]  One could imagine that the smallpox, measles and other epidemics which decimated Mesoamerican populations to about five percent of its pre-contact numbers would have also provided a strong incentive for the Huichol ancestors to seek geographical isolation.

By the early seventeenth century, the Huichol environment was so uninviting to the eyes of the Spanish government and their indigenous allies that they referred to it as Colotlán--Nahuatl for “the place of scorpions.”

 Carrying a French-made,16-mm Eclair movie camera, a Swiss-made Nagra sound recording system, and a Japanese-made Pentax 120 still camera, along with enough batteries and film rolls to make these gadgets work, what Müller found and recorded upon his arrival in San Andres was one of the most culturally (and geographically) isolated communities in Mexico in the 1970s. At the same time, the residents’ way of life had been increasingly changing over the last few centuries. While Huichols had been relatively successful in evading colonial governments by taking refuge amid the Sierra Madre, they had been less successful escaping other influences such as the Catholic Church and, increasingly, Mexican bureaucrats. Thus, what Müller found on his first visit to San Andres, and what his film footage would most clearly depict, was a Mesoamerican culture in motion: a community with so well preserved a heritage that the traces of its cultural transformation were still fresh.

Huichol man and children, 1975.  Photo by Kalman Müller.

The Hikuri Neixa ceremony is a case in point, as it was the first ceremony Müller documented in the Sierra Madre (HSFA 1989.3.4).   He recorded this ceremony, which formally marks the end of the Huichol year, on his first visit to San Andres in April 1973 and 1974. 

Huichol peyote seeker painting his face during the Hikuri Neixa ceremony, Winter 1974
Frame grab from HSFA 1989.3.2-4

The film of this ceremony shows a group of indigenous people under a midday sun painting bright yellow figures (such as suns, snakes, rain drops, and maize plants) over each other’s faces, while other people drink, dance, and make more yellow paint by grinding up in a molcajete[iii] a root named urra (Mahonia trifofiolata)[iv], Huichol for spark. The painted images represented (and that participants sought to elicit) the blessings and protection of Tatewari, or the god Fire, one of the main deities for the polytheistic Huichol and the most important one for assuring a good harvest for the upcoming year.  Tortillas and beans as well as tepe (a kind of beer made of maize) flow in abundance during the celebration.

Peyote pilgrims on their way to Wirikuta, the sacred land. Summer 1974

Frame grab from HSFA 1989.3.1-4

 Beyond drink and food, during this ceremony Huichols share and consume their sacred peyote plant (Lophophora williamsii).  The Hikuri Neixa (the name of which comes from hikuri, Huichol for peyote, and neixa, Huichol for dance), is as much a celebration marking the end of the Huichol year as a celebration of the end of the peyote pilgrimage to the Huichol sacred land Wirikuta.[v] This is no coincidence, as the peyote pilgrimage is one of the most important rituals for pleasing Tatewari and other Huichol deities. During the pilgrimage to Wirikuta, Huichols gather many of the sacred plants they will use for rituals throughout the year, such as the yellow urra itself. For the Huichol, returning to one’s community with ample quantities of peyote, urra, and other goods to share with the community indicated a successful pilgrimage.  Judging by the liberal amounts of tepe the peyote seekers or kawiteros[vi] drank during the Hikuri Neixa ceremony of 1973, one could assume the peyote hunt for that year was a fruitful one.[vii]

To learn more about the Huichol Film Project check back soon for part 2!

José Carlos Pons Ballesteros

Graduate Fellow
NMNH-Department of Anthropology

Original film footage of the Huichol Film Project, along with sound recordings and associated documentation, form part of the collections of the Human Studies Film Archives.  You can find more information about this film collection here.

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[i] Information about Müller for this paragraph drawn from The Huichol Film Project, Kalman Müller’s 1975 C.V.  Human Studies Film Archives, Smithsonian NMNH.. 

[ii] According to Peter Furst’s Rock Crystals and Peyote Dreams (2006) and to Stacey Shaefer’s Huchol Women, Weavers, and Shamans (2015) linguistic proximity suggests the people today identified as Guachichils as the most likely ancestors of the Huichol.

[iii] The stone-made traditional Mesoamerican equivalent to the mortar and pestle. 

[iv] Ethnobotanist James A. Bauml et al. were the first scholars to uncover the scientific classification for the urra plant. Their findings were published in the Journal of Ethnobiology in 1990. Bauml, James, Gilbert Voss, and Peter Collings. 1990. “Uxa Identified.” Journal of Ethnobiology 10: 99–101. 

[v] Indeed, according to Schaefer and Furst (1996), the main purpose of the Hikuri Neixa (The Dance of the Peyote) Ceremony would be to prepare the soil for planting and to call upon the rain. The successful “hunt” of peyote would thus be an activity important as a means to both supply the community with this sacred plant as well as invoke the blessings of the Gods for the growing season. As a ceremony linking hunting and agriculture, the Hikuri Neixa represents the hybrid ecological and productive heritage of the Huichol people.  Schaefer, Stacy B., and Peter T. Furst. 1996. People of the Peyote: Huichol Indian History, Religion & Survival. UNM Press. Other scholars such as french anthropologist Michel Perrin (1994), and Kalman Muller himself referred to this same ceremony as “Hikurineira.”  Perrin, Michel. 1994. “Notes D’Ethnographie Huichol: La Notion de  ‘ma’ive’ et  la  nosologie.” Journal de La Société Des Américanistes 80: 195–206.

[vi] The peyote seekers or kawiteros are identifiable by their large squirrel-adorned sombreros. 

[vii]Information about the Hikuri Neixa for this paragraph drawn from: The Huichol Film Project, Document #3, p. 9.  Human Studies Film Archives, Smithsonian NMNH. August 2019. Schaefer and Furst (1996) also provide important information about this ceremony in their book People of the Peyote.