Walking to Magdalena: Personhood and Place in Tohono O'odham Songs, Sticks and Stories

In Walking to Magdalena, Seth Schermerhorn examines the annual pilgrimage of the Tohono O’odham to Magdalena in Sonora, Mexico, exploring how these indigenous people of southern Arizona have made Christianity their own.

With scholarly rigor and passionate empathy, Schermerhorn offers a deep understanding of Tohono O’odham Christian traditions as practiced in everyday life and in the words of the O’odham themselves. The author’s rich ethnographic description and analyses are also drawn from his experiences accompanying a group of O’odham walkers on their pilgrimage to Saint Francis in Magdalena.

Walking to Magdalena offers insight into religious life and expressive culture, relying on extensive field study, videotaped and transcribed oral histories of the O’odham and archival research. The book illuminates indigenous theories of personhood and place in the everyday life, narratives, songs and material culture of the Tohono O’odham.

About the speaker: 

Seth Schermerhorn is Associate Professor of American Studies at Hamilton College. He specializes in the interdisciplinary study of indigenous traditions, particularly in the southwestern United States. Although Schermerhorn has worked with several indigenous nations, he works most extensively with the Tohono O'odham Nation in southern Arizona. His first book, Walking to Magdalena: Personhood and Place in Tohono O'odham Songs, Sticks and Stories, was co-published by the University of Nebraska Press and the American Philosophical Society in 2019. Walking to Magdalena was selected for an "Author Meets Critics" panel at the American Academy of Religion and the book has received glowing reviews from a dozen academic journals across the fields of anthropology, history, religious studies and Native American and Indigenous studies. He is the Founding Editor of Indigenous Religious Traditions, a new interdisciplinary, international peer-reviewed academic journal. He has also published articles in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, Religious Studies and Theology: Interdisciplinary Studies in Religion, and Journal of the Southwest.

This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for Humanities Research’s Desert Humanities Initiative.