Songs of the Seri - Seri Indian ecotourism on the Sea of Cortez

Sierra, Nov, 1998 by Gary Paul Nabhan

This cryptic organism was among the few on the island that Alfredo could not name and tell a story about. When Craig caught one of the giant chuckwallas by hand, Alfredo showed us how to sex it. Then he proceeded to tell how male chuckwallas "won" in a gambling game their buttonlike femoral pores, a peculiar marking that various iguanids have on their back legs. He explained to Laurie how the historic residents of San Esteban "sold" the rights to come and roast mescal to other Seri bands from Tiburon Island. And he told Katrina and me about aquatic games of "chicken" that the men here once played: driving their kayak-like balsa boats made from agave stalks straight toward the mouths of whales to see who could get closest, or swimming with sharks to see who could stay with them the longest.

Later that day, and the next as well, we turned our attention back toward the subtidal zone. We did not swim with sharks or enter the mouths of whales, but we did snorkel with sea lions, angelfish, and puffers. That's when I pumped up the kayak and paddled along the rocky coast of San Esteban, counting the sea lions sunning and swimming around me, and watching for whales farther offshore. Blue-footed boobies dropped off the cliffs, dive-bombing schools of fish in the shallows. Ospreys and turkey vultures circled in the thermals high above us, reeling in the updrafts of warm air rising off the island's hot volcanic rocks.

The Seri, with their encyclopedic knowledge of the islands' natural history, were the ideal guides. And the opportunity to make more frequent trips out to San Esteban and the other islands, I learned, meant more to them than a short-term job. Shark fishermen from southern Mexico had come into Seri waters, set out nets, and slaughtered dozens of San Esteban's sea lions to use as shark bait. The Seri were incensed, but lacked the resources to patrol all the islands within their territorial waters to prevent such massacres. Ecotourists, however, supply the money that enables the Seri to frequently monitor the plants and animals that they have a legal right to protect, to prudently use, or to spontaneously sing about.

The sea lions of San Esteban are still trusting; one surfaced beside me as I paddled along in the kayak humming the canticle Alfredo had sung to us earlier that day:

   Wind, don't come/H, and don't come/ Keep the male hill in sight/Keep the
   female hill in sight/The ones (that could be) shrouded in clouds./You who
   are going asleep: wake up!/You who are going asleep: wake up!/Don't sleep
   anymore, for the sea is making its foaming sound/Hear the sound of the sea
   foam.

I closed my eyes and imagined the words of this song pouring from Alfredo's mouth. Its tune fused with the sea foam effervescing as it reached the shore.

GARY PAUL NABHAN is director of science outreach for the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, and advises its Ethnobiology and Conservation Team in work with the Seri. His latest book is Cultures of Habitat (Counterpoint Press, 1997).