The new Marana Health Center building will be constructed on blessed ground, thanks to a group of Pascua Yaqui deer dancers who performed a blessing ceremony Friday.
Because the ceremony is sacred, no photography was permitted. The new center will be located at 11642 W. Civic Center Drive, west of the Marana Municipal Complex.
About 100 people including town employees, their families and local and state dignitaries were on hand for the event, which lasted nearly two hours.
Around 5:45 p.m., with the sun setting behind the mountains to the west and the sky lit up with pink clouds, four barefoot, shirtless Yaqui men and five others dressed in jeans, button-down Western-style shirts and cowboy hats began clearing pebbles from the area where they would perform the ceremony.
Four of the men in hats sat on blankets on the ground, facing the audience. One of the men had a stick and sat behind a small tub of water in which floated a large gourd painted with roses. The other three each held two textured sticks.
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The fifth man took his place at the left end of the row in a chair turned sideways in front of the other men.
To the right, the four shirtless men shuffled around, wearing strings of cocoons wrapped around their calves, blankets around their waists and through their legs, bells attached to leather belts and painted masks with long wisps of hair they kept on the backs of their heads until it was each one's turn to dance.
The cocoons were to represent the insect world, while the bells represent eight villages of the Yaqui, said Xavier Flores, who played the textured sticks and sang during the ceremony.
The ceremony began when the man in the chair began to tap a tambourine-sized drum with one hand while playing a bamboo flute with the other.
One of the dancers crossed in front of the row of men and approached the drummer/flutist, where he donned his black mask and tapped a shaker against his hand as he moved his legs rhythmically.
He returned to where he started and a second dancer entered the scene in his place, this one blindfolded with a deer's head tied onto his head.
The row of men began rhythmically scraping their sticks together, and the one with the water drum began to tap it with a stick. The men began to sing.
The deer dancer moved his body in such a way as to give the impression that the tiny deer on his head was using the dancer's body to move about and look around.
After dancing this way for several minutes while shaking two gourds, the deer dancer moved to the side and was followed successively by the third and fourth dancers, who were similar to the first dancer.
The dancers repeated the routine four times. On the final round, a harp player and violinist had set up seats at the end of the area where the dancers were gathered.
The water drum represents the beating of the deer's heart, Flores said. The sound of the rubbing sticks represents the deer's breathing and footsteps.
The dancers' necklaces, made of abalone shells and beads, protect them from evil, Flores said.
At the end of the ceremony the performers presented a mask and framed rendering of a deer dancer to Mirza Baig, Clarence Vatne and Miley Clark from the Marana Health Center. Both items had been blessed by the dancers.
Construction on the new, 74,000-square-foot building will begin in the next few weeks and should be finished by the end of next year.
