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NATIVE BUT FOREIGN
Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands by Brenden W. Rensink, Texas A&M Press, 2018

Chapter 1, Note 36 (pages 34 and 229)

Mexican Yaqui presence in what would later become Arizona stretches back as far as 1732 (p. 34)

…for sources and discussion of debates regarding potential earlier Yaqui sojourns in Arizona with Jesuit father Eusubio Kino (p. 229)

During twentieth-century debates over the Yaqui tribal recognition, some claims were made that Yaquis accompanied Jesuit Father Eusubio Kino, a Spanish Missionary in Pimería Alta in the 1690s. Kino did begin a establish missions in the region and had been involved in Christianizing Yaquis in Sonora, but there is no evidence that Yaquis joined him in Lower California in the late 1600s. Edward Spicer cited Kino’s northern activities, and later Yaqui involvement in those who followed in Kino’s footsteps, but Yaqui involvement in the initial stages were apparently extrapolated from Spicer’s comments on those later 18th century Yaqui involvement.

See the following sources:

  • Edward Spicer to Senator Paul J. Fannin, January 9, 1976, and Edward Spicer to Senator James Abourezk, September 21, 197, Edward H. and Rosamond B. Spicer Papers (Spicer Papers), MS 5, Arizona State Museum (ASM), Subgroup 6, Box 1, Folder 8.
  • Ben Cole, “House panel favors bill giving Yaquis equal treatment,” Arizona Republic (Phoenix), February 17, 1978.
  • George Pierre Castile, “Yaquis, Edward H. Spicer, and Federal Indian Policy: From, Immigrant to Native Americans,” Journal of the Southwest 44 (Winter, 2002): 416.