By Philip M. Klasky and Melissa K. Nelson
The great Creator told us, I’m going to teach you these songs,
but before I teach you these songs, I’m going to break your heart.
-- Larry Eddy (Chemehuevi)
The caravan of cars, trucks and tribal vans with Southern Paiute tribal members arrived at the Sherman Indian School Museum in Riverside, California. Salt Song singers, elders and their families walked through exhibits with photographs of rows and rows of students in military uniforms, and glass cases with band instruments, baskets, and trophies.
Matt Leivas, Sr. (Chemehuevi) picked up the yearbook from when his mother attended the school. “She used to sneak out back of the gym where the matrons could not see them and sing the Salt Songs,” he said. People scoured photographs, yearbooks and lists of students to find their names, and the names of their relatives and friends.
As the afternoon heat mellowed, everyone climbed back into their vehicles and drove about a mile to the Sherman Indian School Children’s Cemetery located on the edge of town in the middle of a dry vacant field. Inside a metal fence were hundreds of small anonymous headstones marking the graves of the Indian children who never came home. A few fading plastic flowers climb the bars of the fence. Our small film crew was at the cemetery ready for the singers as they arrived.
The Cultural Conservancy is a twenty year-old non-profit indigenous rights organization dedicated to the preservation and revitalization of native cultures and their ancestral lands. We conduct original recordings of endangered story, song and language and provide workshops on audio and video ethnographic recording equipment and skills. We work with tribes and indigenous communities in California, the Southwest, the Americas and Hawai’i on the protection of ancestral lands and sacred sites and the connection between cultural preservation and environmental protection. We have just completed our first film, a collaborative effort with the Salt Song Project, and our first Native American music compilation compact disc, Songscapes of Native America, a celebration of the richness and power of song.
The Cultural Conservancy has been working with Vivienne Jake (Kaibab Paiute) and Matthew Leivas, Sr. (Chemehuevi), the founders of the Salt Song Trail Project, since 2001 when we conducted an historic recording of the Salt Songs at the Las Vegas Paiute Tribal Colony. Vivienne and Matt arranged for singers from the all the bands of Southern Paiute to come together for the recording. Each of the singers took home copies of the digital audio recordings to use to teach the songs to others. Our collaboration with the Salt Song Trail Project has continued over the last four years to document oral histories and produce a short film about the sacred geographies described by the songs.
The Salt Songs are the sacred songs of the Southern Paiute people who live in thirteen bands in California, Utah, Arizona and Nevada. The Salt Song Trail is the sacred path of the songs as they travel from the vermillion cliffs of the Colorado Plateau, through the high desert to the spectacular California coast and then through the mountains, sandy deserts, palm oases and the Colorado River back to the high Plateau.
The Salt Songs are sung at funerals and memorials to assist the deceased on their journey. Whenever there is a death among the people, Southern Paiutes travel long distances to sing together all night. Their steady voices accompanied by a gourd rattle describe the sacred journey of the Salt Song Trail.
Along the Trail are historical and sacred sites, ancient villages, hunting grounds, burial grounds and gathering places for salt and other medicinal herbs. Many Southern Paiutes attending the boarding school never came home. The school’s cemetery is the setting for the film as the songs are sung to release the children who died there.
Sherman Indian School was one of over a hundred and fifty on and off-reservation boarding schools built by the government from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries. Described by a survivor as a “soul wound,” Native America experienced the systematic, forced removal of Indian children from their families and reservations to institutions far from home. Long black hair fell on the cutting room floor as traditional clothing was replaced by prison-style uniforms. The children were required to march in formation for hours on end and taught vocational skills limited to manual and domestic labor. They were forbidden to speak their languages, sing their songs or engage in religious ceremony, and physical and sexual abuse was common.
Some of the boarding schools, such as Sherman, evolved over the years to become a truly Indian school. Students demanded changes in curricula and with progress within the academic establishment, Indian schools began to address the needs of their students. The boarding schools also became meeting places for Indians from across the country and many long lasting inter-tribal friendships were forged.
The singers and dancers gathered at the large stone memorial with the names and dates of the deceased at the entrance to the cemetery. The dancers were young boys and girls dressed in reds, blacks and blues, ribbon shirts and full-length calico dresses with aprons. The boys played gourds and the dancers sang and danced in a slow and deliberate round.
There were about fifty people attending, including people from area tribes who heard about the Sing. As soon as the singers entered the cemetery, we could tell that they were going to start. Our team scrambled to put the cameras in place and I walked up behind Matt and whispered to him that if he wanted us to be able to record the songs, he needed to wait for me to put a mic on him. As I reached up Matt’s shirt with the microphone cord, one of the women elders made a suggestive joke that started a rolling round of laughter.
Matt explained that many of the Indian children who came to Sherman died there from illness, neglect and loneliness and did not have anyone to sing the Salt Songs for them. He had tears in his eyes as he held his head high. Lead singer Larry Eddy (Chemehuevi) began to shake his gourd and then began to sing, followed by the others. They sang only the last four songs of the cycle before the cameras. The children danced around the memorial stone and some of the people attending were rocking and crying.
After the sing, we conducted interviews for the film. Larry Eddy (Chemehuevi) spoke of the spiritual bonding and unifying force of the songs for the Southern Paiute Nation. Lalovi Miller (Moapa Paiute) told how the spirits of the children were waiting to go back to their families. Vivienne Jake (Kaibab Paiute) reiterated that the Sing was a necessary right of passage for the children and their families, and talked about the balance between land, people, song and language.
For the Salt Song Trail Project founders and directors, Matthew Leivas, Sr. (Chemehuevi) and Vivienne Jake (Kaibab Paiute), the film was a dream in the making – a document that could be used by future generations to learn about and revitalize Southern Paiute culture and spiritual protocols, to participate in a pilgrimage to the sacred and historical sites along the Salt Song Trail, and to engender understanding and healing about the Indian boarding school experience.
The film, entitled “The Salt Song Trail: Bringing Creation Back Together” is a short documentary introduction to the Salt Song Trail Project that will evolve in time as part of a larger, long-term effort to produce a full-length documentary and other cultural media. This summer, we will provide training and equipment for Southern Paiute tribal members interested in learning and expanding their ethnographic and media skills to add to the film as the singers gather at different sites along the Trail in the continuing production of a living documentary.
The lead Salt Song singer in our original recordings of the Salt Songs in Las Vegas was Willis Mayo (Kaibab Paiute), an elder with the experienced hands of a rancher and a deep and steady voice. Willis was honored last year at his memorial in a forest of juniper on the Kaibab Paiute Indian Reservation in Utah. Chocolate-colored buttes stand tall in the north, and to the south is the deep winding canyon country and the Colorado River. Hundreds of people from Paiute Country gathered to remember one of the most respected singers.
Under a ramada of juniper and pine branches, a group of twelve Salt Song singers were seated in a row. In another corner, a group of four Bird Singers sang near an altar draped with photographs, clothing and other personal memorabilia. At the feet of the Salt Song singers was a small compact disc player with the recording from our session four years ago. Willis’ voice was still leading the way.
Philip M. Klasky is a writer and environmental justice activist living in San Francisco. He is the director of The Storyscape Project of The Cultural Conservancy, and lectures in the American Indian Studies Department at San Francisco State University. pklasky@igc.org.
Melissa K. Nelson (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) has served as the executive director of The Cultural Conservancy for the past twelve years. She is an assistant professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University. mknelson@igc.org.
We acknowledge the generous support of The Christensen Fund and The Grousbeck Family Foundation for the production of the film, and the valuable assistance from Lori Sisquoc (Tongva, Cahuilla, Apache) director of the Sherman Indian Museum.
You can order “The Salt Song Trail: Bringing Creation Back Together” (20 minutes, Video or DVD) from The Cultural Conservancy web site (www.nativeland.org) or contact us at (415) 561-6594. The film is produced by The Cultural Conservancy and The Salt Song Project, directed/edited by Esther Figueroa (Juniroa Productions) and sound and music by Colin Farish (Stillwater Sound).
The Bay Area premier showing of “The Salt Song Trail,” and release party for our compilation compact disk, “Songscapes of the Americas” will take place at our 20th Anniversary Celebration of The Cultural Conservancy, September 22, 2005, 4pm to 10pm at the San Francisco Presidio Chapel. For more information contact (415) 561-6594 or visit our web site at www.nativeland.org.