Southern Paiute: A Portrait

Will Rogers, Shivwits Band

93 Will surfaces through sheer grit and concentration to tell his stories. Glenn (standing in photo), his son and the Shivwits tribal chairman, hollers each question into his ear. Usually Will chases that detail down, that name, that song. Other times he’ll say: “Can’t get to it in my mind. Goes brrzzzt.” He tells a joke about a beautiful tourist woman who says she’s a foreigner. He replies that he is too. As they both struggle with English, she asks; “show me how you make your living.” He responds as if she asked “how do you make children?” For some stories English doesn’t work, only Paiute. For another he has to make sure where the sun rises. Throughout, he touches his forehead and his heart to consecrate his words. Are you listening to me? There’s a lot of things that got to be told. There’s things that shoulda been said that nobody said. When you bless, you gotta put your faith in it. You believe in it really hard, what you’re doing. Toby, he came to me: “My grampa’s really sick, dying down there.” I took my box, my feathers. I didn’t know what to do with him. But I told him I’m gonna fix you, give you Indian medicine. He looked at me slow, said all right. I got that singing done, got the waters put outside. You really gotta believe in this. I went on praying to that god Tivats: “You got to help me this time.” I called him his Indian name, I talked Indian. I said a lot of really good things, gave him some medicine really quick. Gave him some water. One old man, Jody Roe, taught me to do things like this: “Be good. Bless everything. Medicine should get to him in thirty minutes.” Didn’t take long. He was talking good then. I brought the Native American Church here; it was me. Peyuta. One day we had a little money. Dan Bulletts was with us. We went to White Rocks. Long ways then, funny roads. We got up there, went to this place where they played cards. One man come to us, just one man come. “Something wrong?” he said. I don’t know how he knew. Dan talked to them, could talk like them Utes. “We’re going to make a Native American Church. We’ll have a special meeting for you.” They prayed for me. One man had kind of a round collar, he prayed on it. “Eat it and you’ll get well,” he said, so I ate it. I got better with their singing. After that we took it all over. Like Sun Dances and sweats. We made that charter in 1945, November 8. It’s nothing to play with it like they do now. They get high with it. Will Rogers shivwits band, born 1925 94 My mother was sick, really sick for almost two weeks. I tried to pray, tried my best. Mother called my name, asked if two men been here. No. “I think they’re coming,” she says. I think to myself how she knows? Five minutes someone knocks on the door. There’s two guys. They didn’t look like Mormons, kinda like Indians. They looked different. They had a power. I didn’t look at them too much. “Where’s your mother?” They did that thing with the water that we do, put the water on top her head. He talked really nice, good. He meant what he was doing. She’ll get all right, he said; they went out. I followed them out to thank them. I went all around the house but I can’t find them. It was something for me to see. The way you have to pray, think. I don’t know what they were, but it was something good. After they left my mother was hungry. I got her a piece of bread. She was all right. Dad come from up in Wyoming, drifted down. The white guy he worked for was Rogers , so they gave him that name. He came down to Panguitch. Had an Indian school there. He found my mother there. Soon as he looked at her, he fell in love. He had his chaps on, gloves on, big hat on, handkerchief in his pocket. Good looking man. So they run this way, some other guys and their girlfriends. Got another job in Enterprise...