Southern Paiute: A Portrait by William Logan Hebner (review)

Turn to page 109 in this glossy, coffee table-style book. There you’ll see a black-and-white portrait of Eunice Tillahash Surveyor of the Shivwits Band of Southern Paiutes. You’d like to know her. Photographer Michael L. Plyler caught her in a quizzical expression, perhaps just beginning to smile, her eyes squinting, her gray-streaked hair ruffled by the wind, the mountains of her desert homeland out of focus in the background. Every crease in her round, wrinkled face tells a story.

This book has many wrinkled faces, all in powerful black-and-white, and you will get to know at least some of the stories behind those faces in the lengthy interview excerpts that accompany each portrait. Ten of the thirty Southern Paiute elders interviewed for this book died before it was published, including Eunice Tillahash Surveyor. But at least some of their stories remain, thanks to what author William Logan Hebner acknowledges is the unlikely role of two white guys. Hebner initially got to know some Southern Paiutes, an all but invisible tribe comprising several distinct bands, as fellow opponents of a hazardous waste incinerator proposed for the Kaibab Paiute reservation, between the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park. Poor as it is, the tribe turned down the prospect of hundreds of millions of dollars and voted to reject the hazardous waste site, preferring to keep their air and land unsullied. Hebner’s friendship with some of the Kaibab Paiute incinerator opponents ultimately led to his proposal to the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah tribal council, first to produce a photo exhibit and ultimately a book. The author and photographer agreed to donate all of their royalties to the tribe and also agreed that each of the elders would have complete editorial control over the interviews. Hebner says in his introduction that an accident of timing made the book possible: Southern Paiute elders realized their numbers were dwindling—fewer than fifty fluently speak the language—and enough recognized the value in having someone listen to the stories they thought important.

Hebner makes no claims to being an oral historian, and, indeed, it is an unfortunate shortcoming of the book that nowhere do readers learn whether or where recordings of the interviews might be found. They almost surely contain even more information than could be included in the book, information that historians might find fascinating and revealing. Nor is there an explanation of the extent to which the long interview excerpts were edited or of the standards used for such editing. Sometimes, for example, the questions are included, other times not. Nonetheless, this book is a model for oral historians in several important ways.

First, thoroughly documented historical essays set the stage for the interviews. The Southern Paiutes share other tribes’ legacies of disease, displacement from their ancestral lands on the Colorado Plateau, Great Basin, and Mojave Desert, and attempts at forced assimilation. But their heritage also differs from some other tribes’ stories. The Southern Paiutes lived a nomadic life, wintering in the Grand Canyon and gradually moving to the alpine meadows and mesas, harvesting traditional plants as their main food sources. But that changed in the 1860s, when the Mormons who had made Utah their home diverted major water sources, in effect starving the tribe. The Southern Paiutes never adopted horses and suffered from raids by Mexicans and by Indians from the Ute and Navajo tribes, all of whom took Paiutes as slaves. They also became a source of cheap labor in the form of indentured servants to Mormon families, all of which contributed to a loss of their cultural heritage.

In addition to the historical background, Hebner provides important context in the interviews themselves. He includes the names of people who served as translators during the interviews, and, if more than one person were present, he explains why. He also puts readers in the room with him. Take Evelyn Samalar of the Moapa...