By Sandra Lynch
Back around 1600, an English jurist shed some light on the relationship between humans and their houses. "The house of everyone is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defense against injury and violence as for his repose," commented Sir Edward Coke.
Home is an American image. We seek safety and solitude from a home-our destination from the world every night. For Yavapai County's earlier citizens, the Yavapai Indians, home held the same meaning except it was expressed in shrubbery rather than sawn wood and brick.
Giovanni de Verrazano sailed into Narragansett Bay in 1524, and became the first European to record American Indian architecture. He described "circular" housing, "ten to twelve paces in diameter, and thoroughly covered with mats of straw ingeniously worked, which protect them from rain and wind." Verrazano's sample was small. Housing in the Americas varied a great deal in shape, size and substance. His observations were based on houses uniquely adapted to the northeastern woodlands -trees, bark, and a Home Depot-like variety of matting material. The Algonquian homeowners called these structures "wigwams," a name that soon stuck to many aboriginal abodes.
Anthropologist Julian Steward spent his career describing human adaptation to available resources. Housing fit Steward's model of ecology driving human economy. The first pioneers to see a Yavapai home probably weren't impressed. These European immigrants who left splintered wooden skeletons across a desert land wouldn't have inspired Steward.
Yavapais lived in houses non-Indians called "wikiups"-strangely, an Algonquian, not Yavapai or Apache word. Prescott area Yavapais called their homes "wahmbunias," a word dialectically different from other Yavapai regions. When E. W. Gifford studied Yavapai culture late in the 1920s, his Yavapai consultants called the brush house an "u-wa," pronounced "oo-ah" by struggling English speaking tongues. Local Yavapai keep this word for the smaller, temporary camp house. Both Yavapais and Western Apaches built easy-up brush shelters raised in only an hour. Quick housing was a necessity in a sparse environment frequently under threat from raiding competitors-both Indian and white. Old huts that had the luck to stay a while on the land were never reused.
Where water was reliable, Yavapais preferred to build larger houses than did Western Apaches. Frames from juniper, mesquite, willow or anything available that was long and bendable, were lashed together over an ovular space. On average, the oblong dome was ten by twenty-one feet. The roof apex reached six to seven feet. Holes were dug for the frame supports, and stones rolled to brace them as the branches were bent towards the roof dome. Horizontal stringers of cottonwood, oak, sumac or willow were tied into the structure. Thatching, three layers thick, came from stripped juniper bark. Thinner grasses such as bear grass were used towards the top of structure to allow smoke to filter out. Tanned hides covered east-facing doors.
Inside the home, there were designated spaces for storage, for sleeping, and for cooking when it was too miserable to cook outside. Near the Wahmbunia, ramadas provided work areas as well as sleeping quarters for hot summer nights. Quite late into this century, poor families still built wahmbunias covering them with canvas or ragged blankets.
Yavapais had a strong affection for the wahmbunia, a place where they raised families in comfort and safety. A Kickapoo living in a lashed sapling frame house far removed from the Southwest said: "By our houses you will know us." Homes show how ecology and technology are suited to the needs of family and society. They are standing examples of limitations at work on family size, and they tell us much about resource wealth. Homes are cherished pieces of history encoding meaning through the use of building and space.
Much has changed since wahmbunias dotted this land. There are still some Yavapais whose memories recall the wahmbunia, and even fewer now, with the knowledge and skills to build one. For most of today's young native people, the brush home has been displaced by a new signature. The Plains Indian tipi has become that new identity. Like the wahmbunia, the tipi was a home for a mobile people. Pine lodgepoles were quickly interlocked over a circular base. Today canvas has replaced the buffalo hides women once sewed with split sinew. Procurement has changed though; today's tipis can be ordered through retail catalogs.
The tipi stands as a symbol for pan-Indian togetherness. All Pow-Wows have them, sometimes in the hundreds at places like Montana's Crow Gathering. When you see a tipi, think of it as a flag. Under its shadow is a celebration of Native American presence and persistence. This Sunday, there is a tipi at Sharlot Hall Museum's Prescott Indian Art Market . It is a beacon for you to come join the celebration. Native Americans from all parts of the country have gathered under this home to share their dance, food and fine art.
Sandra Lynch is Curator of Anthropology at Sharlot Hall Museum.
Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number: (iny2111pd). Reuse only by permission.
Yavapai wahmbunias once graced the creek beds and hillsides surrounding Prescott. They were comfortable housing for a people in tune with the environment.
Photo #2 Cut line:
The tipi has become a symbol of American Indian survival. This Sunday, it is honorably placed beside Sharlot Hall Museum's landmark Governor's Mansion.