Two friends have Cahuilla names that translate into “Wild Rose,” and “Moon.” We’ve also met others with beautiful Indigenous names. We started wondering about names, and so, we’re exploring today how area Native American children traditionally were named.
California Wild Rose (Photo copyright © 2017 John Doyen courtesy of California Native Plant Society)
Before diseases and other hardships came with newcomers to the Southern California homelands starting in the 1700s, thousands of people lived in the First Nations. While we can walk into a mall today, call out, “Jacob, Emily, Olivia!” and maybe see a bunch of kids come running, Native American children in older times didn’t share the same name. Among the many Desert Cahuilla, every person had a unique name.
“No name already possessed by a living person might be used,” anthropologist William Duncan Strong was told in the 1920s.1
In older times, the naming of children took place during the weeklong events of the Teykeman (Serrano for the Mourning or Image Dance Ceremony), known in Cahuilla as Nukil, according to Elder Ernest Siva (Cahuilla-Serrano), president of Dorothy Ramon Learning Center. The local ceremonial week was co-hosted every other year by the Maarrenga'yam and Mohatniyam Maarrenga'yam Serrano clans from Morongo Reservation and the Kauwisiktam and Payniktam Cahuilla clans from Palm Springs, he says.2
Anthropologist Lucile Hooper described in 1920 what she’d learned about the ceremony from her Cahuilla consultants: 3
“A special ceremony for the naming of children used to be held during fiesta week. … One name was given a child while in infancy; another at the age of ten or twelve years4. The grandparents chose the name that was to be given first and told the Net (ceremonial chief) what it was to be. Then at the fiesta, just before the Effigy dance [for the dead], the child was named. All the friends and relatives had been invited from far and near. The Net took the child in his arms and pronounced its name and then he and the other old men sang and danced. If the child was a girl, a song about certain plants was sung; if it was a boy, the song was about animals. … The name given the child was usually that of some ancestor.”
William Duncan Strong reported:5 "The ceremony called hemteūlūwen was a clan affair and usually occurred when there were several children of approximately the same age to be named. It took place in the dance house to which were summoned all members of the children’s clans and the clans of the children’s mothers. The age at which children were christened depended on the abundance of food possessed by their families. If they had enough provisions for a feast when the children were four or five years old they would have it then, otherwise they would wait until the children were nine or ten years old.
“… The actual naming occurred about midnight in the course of an entire night’s singing and dancing. The names to be given were decided upon by the net of the children’s clan, and were those of dead ancestors in the clan. No name already possessed by a living person might be used. The knowledge of the clan names is a duty of the net. No one was told the names until the net, holding the child high in his arms, danced slowly in the center of the dance house, and suddenly shouted the name three times. All the people assembled repeated this name.
“It was very dangerous and ignominious to have an ‘enemy’ clan get possession of the names, hence it sometimes happened that a false name was given at this time, the real name being bestowed in secret when the child was fourteen or fifteen years of age. The boys were named for the male ancestors, the girls according to a series of female names customary in the clan.”
He gives as examples boys’ names Pīihutnuminma-ī, Centipede humps, and Takvic, Marksman with a bow. Girls: Pūtcikilauvaa, “Dried berry flour (eaten only by nets).”6
Secret names, or names that have stayed quiet, or special nicknames given to children by their Elders, are still held by some in modern times. For example, Dorothy Ramon shared in her cultural memoir her Serrano name given by her father, “'Erqarvim,” meaning, Sandy-Faced.7
Elder Ernest Siva (Cahuilla-Serrano), president of Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, shares his Serrano name and how he got it:
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Pronghorn antelope, Photo by James C. Leupold, Courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Strong, William Duncan, Aboriginal Society in Southern California, (reprint from Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press, 1929. Series: Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, v. 26.), 1972, Malki Museum Press, p. 78-80
The Marrenga'yam were of the Coyote moiety, while the Kauwisiktam were Wildcats, Ernest Siva says. Under traditional marriage rules, only a Wildcat could marry a Coyote, and only a Coyote could marry a Wildcat.
Hooper, Lucile, in Studies in Cahuilla Culture, A.L. Kroeber and Lucile Hooper, “The Cahuilla Indians” (reprint from Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif. University of California, 1920, Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, v. 16) 1978, Malki Museum Press, pp 349-50 (75-76).
See explanation by William Duncan Strong about false names given to protect them from acquisition by “enemy” clans. “So-called ‘enemy’ clans hearing any of these names would incorporate them into their songs, to the mortification and danger of the owner of the name. Even though the individual had already changed his name, songs were sung about any old or new name discovered.” p. 79
Strong, p. 78.
Strong, p. 79.
Ramon, Dorothy, and Eric Elliott, 2000, Wayta’ Yawa’: Always Believe. Malki Museum Press, Banning, California, p. 43, from “My Father Giving Me a Nickname,” Reading 30.