Jewed Maakai

Jewed Maakai, the Earth Doctor, is the first being in O'odham cosmology. In the darkness before the world he rubs sweat and grime from his breast, kneads it into a small ball, and expands it into the flat, spinning disk of the earth, then covers it with plants and the first creatures. He is the elder of the creative powers, and in the Pima-Papago 'Hohokam Chronicles' his work is completed and partly contested by Elder Brother. Sources differ on the sequence of the earliest acts and on whether Earth Doctor or Elder Brother is responsible for particular features of the land. Displeased with the world he has made, Earth Doctor at last withdraws, in some tellings sinking down through the earth itself, leaving the ongoing shaping of human life to Elder Brother and Coyote.

Domains

• creation
• earth

Powers

• shape the world from his own substance
• make the first living things

Epithets

• Jeved Ma:kai

Relations

• ally: I'itoi
• ally: Ban

Sources

• Ruth M. Underhill, Papago Indian Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946)
• Donald Bahr et al., The Short Swift Time of Gods on Earth: The Hohokam Chronicles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)
• Frank Russell, The Pima Indians, 26th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1908)