50. Isabel T. Kelley, “Southern Paiute Shamanism,” Anthropological Records 2, no. 4 (1939): 151. 51. The Northern Paiute are a different people than the Southern Paiute. They speak a related but distinct Numic language and their homelands are in northern Nevada, eastern Oregon, and eastern California. 52. In the narratives of Paiute elders, I have rendered certain Paiute words and names as pronounced by each elder instead of employing a consistent spelling. The brother deities Sinawava and Tobats are prime examples. Tivats, Shinaalv, and Sinawav are all different pronunciations of these deities. At the same time, for ease of reading, I steered away from orthographic symbols representing glottals or other inflections. 53. Fowler and Fowler, Anthropology of the Numa, 104. This counts the Pahvant, but only counts the Chemehuevi, which he called a “confederation” (p. 107), as one, so his band list probably included more bands. William R. Palmer, “Pahute Indian Lands,” Utah Historical Quarterly 6, no. 3 (1933): 96–97. Isabel Kelly, “Southern Paiute Bands,” American Anthropologist 36, no. 4 (1934): 548–60.
Admittedly, I pressed for healing stories. It seemed essential, to reflect an intact culture still connected with each other and their lands. These elders tell of healers with red hot coals in their mouths, heads lit like lanterns; of healers gone bad who had to be killed; of peyote; of canes sliding into the earth and of feathers dancing on end, fringes glowing like flames as they offered glimpses into the future; of curing songs given by the dead through dreams; of the mixed blessings of “the little people”; of powers given by Elk, Sun, Ocean, and others; of tiny bears held in the palm of your hand; of songs offered by rivers, winds, and canyons; of songs from caves too terrifying to stand. Isabel Kelly spent time with the Southern Paiute from 1932 to 1934, and observed that “Shamanism is still a vital institution among the Southern Paiute and consequently it is discussed by informants with some reluctance . . .”50 She wrote about weather shamans, rattlesnake shamans, and powers coming from animals, caves, jimson weed, and dreams, sometimes unbidden. “Sorcerers” practiced “witchcraft,” and when another shaman envisioned the guilty sorcerer, he or she often admitted their crime and was forced to withdraw their intrusion. Sometimes they were killed. The stories here speak for themselves. All I can attest to is that, in the telling, there was only hesitance to reveal these intimacies, not any bravado or even pride in laying claim to their powers. Far more was left unsaid than told. Approaching any American Indian tribe, you first have to sit with the idea of utter devastation and suffering, in some ways that nontribal people do not conceive. It goes beyond the comprehensible losses of life, of land, of language. One constantly encounters the idea that Indians and their lands are linked, are one, but most nontribal people can simply never feel the bedrock truth of it, and therefore never understand the layers of insanity, the generations of despair and hopelessness, the slow motion genocide, the alluring peace of suicide. How many generations severed from each other, from lives intertwined with their lands, can any indigenous, oral culture withstand? Not only were generations separated time and again, but they were taught to be ashamed of their elders, and in turn these elders felt that shame. They have no writings to fall back on, bringing them to the bizarre position of reading white historical accounts for lost information, like Vivienne Jake’s dilemma with the taped Salt Songs. The Northern Paiute, whose prophets Wodziwob and Wovoka envisioned the Ghost Dances, recently revived these dances, and there’s ongoing debate on how much to use the ethnographer James Mooney’s remarkable, if inappropriate, details of the dance.51 Entire Paiute bands disappeared, including the Parusitts and Tonaquint, two bands who had the best lands along the Virgin and Santa Clara rivers in southwest Utah. With them went stories reaching back thousands of years. There are several stories in this book about the Flood, from when Paiute watched the Hopi move through on their ancient migrations, from when Sinawava,52 today equated with Jesus by many Mormon Paiute, visited the People three times, right over there on that ridge. Healthy fluidity between bands vanished with forced, separate reservation enrollment. Today there are ten recognized Southern Paiute groups, perhaps more depending on how you view the Twenty-Nine Palms, Cahuilla, and Kawaiisu peoples along their culturally permeable western border. To a degree, the contemporary Southern Paiute tribes represent a condensed core of distinct groups, as defined of course by their lands. But they also represent a particular moment in the flow of their history that got set in concrete. Powell lists thirty-five bands, Palmer lists thirty-one, Kelly, sixteen.53 The band names change so much from map to map that it’s hard to find continuity. This of course reflects loss, the complete vanishing of bands from optimal lands with water, but it also points to Paiute mobility, how they once moved amongst each other and across their homelands as they chose, and to
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