Donald M. Bahr, who conceived this presentation, spent twenty-four months during the 1960s in the Tohono O’odham village of Santa Rosa, Arizona. Bahr received his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology from Harvard University, and in 1967 became Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University. His published writings focus on Piman myth and ritual oratory as well as the Piman theory of sickness.
Juan Gregorio was the shaman personally interviewed by Don Bahr and whose theory of sickness comprises this corpus of texts. One of the first men from his Tohono O’odham village to be educated in Ango-American schools, he was an interpreter for Catholic priests and for many years a farm laborer, meanwhile planting his own crops at Santa Rosa and becoming a shaman and ritual curer for sicknesses concerned with war. Gregorio was keenly interested in the work leading to publication of this study, but died in 1971 before typesetting was completed—with the book in press.
David I. Lopez, interpreter of Gregorio’s discourse, as a child often stayed with his Tohono O’odham shaman grandfather in Santa Rosa. He attended school through the tenth grade. Lopez has worked as a farm laborer and, at home, as cowboy, farmer, and custodian at the Santa Rosa school.
Albert Alvarez, editor of Gregorio’s texts in this book, also is the grandson of a Tohono O’odham shaman. He was the first student in a linguistic training program for American Indians at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to that, he attended school on the Tohono O’odham reservation, dividing his boyhood between his grandparents’ home and the farm labor camps of southern Arizona where his parents worked. From M.I.T., Alvarez returned to the reservation at Sells, Arizona, to work as a linguist and day laborer. His writings on the sound system of Tohono O’odham and Tohono O’odham puns have been published in linguistic journals
