Southern Paiute: A Portrait

Introduction

1 HOW THIS BOOK HAPPENED I n 1989 the hazardous waste incinerator corporation Waste Tech courted tribes across America, hoping to dodge federal regulation behind the veil of tribal sovereignty. They entered negotiations with the Kaibab Paiute on the Arizona Strip, and stress from the impending tonnage of toxic waste and money turned the area into a hornet’s nest. The hitherto invisible and poverty-stricken Kaibab suddenly found themselves under klieg lights, staring at hundreds of millions of dollars. They flexed their sovereign muscles, perhaps for the first time, blowing off entreaties from the federal government and the states of Arizona and Utah, all of whom were concerned about what the largest hazardous waste incinerator in the West, on their tiny reservation wedged right between Grand Canyon and Zion National Park, would do to the cleanest air in the continental U.S. All tribal council votes over a year unanimously favored Waste Tech, and the tribe had just pocketed the $100,000 good faith money. A final vote was imminent. Kaibab Paiute Vivienne Jake, her mother, Lucille, and nephew Verdell worked with white people like me to oppose the deal, no small thing. The divide between whites and Indians continues to be imbued with differences of the deepest kind. Native Americans’ anger and pain can best be approached by considering the meaning of genocide. In that slow way that people become friends, Vivienne and I connected, perhaps because I was often the only one catching her subtle, scathing puns. When a spokesman extolled incinerators’ virtues (“your car is a hazardous waste incinerator!”), Vivienne said it would all be “Honky Dory.” She still uses this term whenever honkies think everything is fine, even though everyone and everything around them suffer. When asked about fundamentalist religion, she responded, “Just look at the word; they fund a mental ism.” Driving to yet another rally or meeting, crammed into Vivienne’s old, brown Honda, was all giggles and elbows. Once, Lucille burst out laughing and got everyone going. When it was over, Vivienne asked Lucille what was that all about and she answered, “What?” Yet at the meetings, which Vivienne usually chaired, the Jakes became still and silent. One could see them glaze over in the white world. They found elder Bill Tom’s cancer too late, and he died within weeks. He was Lucille’s brother and a previous tribal chairman. It was his dying wish that the tribe reject the incinerator to preserve the sliver of ancestral lands they still possessed. The Kaibab Tribal Council had already scheduled a special session; it fell on the morning after his death. They unanimously dismissed the project. For almost a month, Waste Tech still thought they had a done deal. Introduction 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. —will rogers, Shivwits 2 1. Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, “The Pai Ute” Buffalo (New York) Courier, January 13, 1877. 2. William Chandless, A Visit to Salt Lake; Being a Journey Across the Plains and a Residence in the Mormon Settlements at Utah (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1857), 291. 3. Thomas J. Farnham, Travels in the Great Western Prairies, the Anahuac and Rocky Mountains, and in the Oregon Territory, 2 vols. (London: R. Bentley, 1843), 2: 9–10. I was politely invited to Bill’s Cry Ceremony, but even after a year I still wasn’t sure what anything really meant and felt that I had intruded enough. Then, at midnight, in the linoleum brilliance of the Smith’s Food King in St. George, Utah, I spotted Verdell in line, in silent mode, with a stack of coffee cakes. I asked if the Cry was over and he shot me a look of pity; how could I not know they go all night? Again I was invited, so I went. It was a classic American West tableau, driving desolate roads for an hour through glorious landscapes, in this case beneath the moonlit Vermillion Cliffs, with the snow-covered Kaibab Plateau on Grand Canyon’s North Rim rising to the south, to arrive at an electric burst of life in the middle of nowhere, ringed by old pickups with gun racks. Attending a ceremony is always a step up in intruding on people, more so of course for a funeral. I sat inside my unheated Toyota pickup until it just got too cold. I slipped inside, headed right up...