The Maze of History

Komal Hok, O'odham Teachings, and an Earth-Based Sense of Time

David Martínez

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780826369147
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A major contribution to O’odham studies and Southwest history, Martínez offers a new perspective on the life and knowledge of Komal Hok, an important Akimel O'odham storyteller also known as “Thin Leather.”

The Maze of History refers to the man-in-the-maze symbol that has adorned O’odham baskets for generations. According to O’odham oral tradition, the maze is the home to I’itoi, “our elder brother,” the sacred being that taught ancestral O’odham their way of doing things, their himdag. Moreover, I’itoi’s home is in the mountains everywhere that O’odham dwell, be it South Mountain, Baboquivari, or Sierra Pinacate.

Komal Hok (born ca. 1825), also known as Thin Leather, was an Akimel O’odham elder and storyteller from Sacaton Village who shared his people’s origin narrative with anthropologist Frank Russell, archaeologist Jesse Walter Fewkes, and writer J. William Lloyd. With the help of translators Jose Lewis Brennan and Edward H. Wood (both O’odham), Komal Hok created an epic legacy that continues to inform the direction of O’odham studies to this day. However, his uniqueness in modern O’odham history has never been fully appreciated and honored until now.

The culmination of David Martínez’s twenty-five years of studying, writing, and teaching about O’odham culture and history, The Maze of History at last captures the significance of Komal Hok’s work as an O’odham intellectual. Komal Hok’s recounting of O’odham origins forms the basis of an O’odham sense of history, which is based on their relationship with their jeved—the earth, soil, land—that was given them at the time of creation. Here is where I’itoi, along with Jeved mahkai (Earth medicine maker), Bán (Coyote), and Nuwi (Buzzard), shaped the first people into O’odham.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Finding My Way to the Top of a Crooked Path
• One: Pulling Down the Clouds: Komal Hok, Jose Lewis Brennan, and the Origins of O’odham Literature
• Two: Casa Grande Is Not a Ruin: Huhugam Narratives as a Living Part of the Land
• Three: Earth Medicine Maker Shapes This Place: Kinship as the Origin of Ethics
• Four: Hahashañ: Brief Reflections on an Ancestral Plant
• Five: When Coyote Stole Rabbit’s Heart: An Environmental Ethic for the O’odham Himdag
• Six: Missionary of Sorrows: Charles H. Cook and a Time of Bihugig
• Seven: Elder Brother Still Dwells Here: I’itoi Kih as a Symbol of Renewal
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index