Southern Paiute: A Portrait

Margaret King

34 Aged 106, Margaret King sits on her cot like a stained-glass sculpture. If you parted the Bluebird Flour sack curtains from the window and held all sixty pounds of her to the sunlight, purples, reds, blues, yellows and browns would stream through her parchment skin. Her ferocious, white, marble eyes have retreated so deep into her skull you could balance pennies on her overhung lower lids. Her ears are huge and hairy, and somehow her teeth remain perfect . A fine, soft laugh. She lives in an isolated canyon with flowing springs that feed a tidy arrangement of gardens, orchards, and sheep. Behind her HUD cube house is a round, freshly mudded hogan, the horizontals of the cedar post roof stacked with Byzantine precision. A brace of abandoned cars, including a Studebaker, line up behind the outhouse and beyond that stretch the seemingly endless canyons of the San Juan River. Navajo Mountain, once called Paiute Mountain, dominates the western horizon while being pummeled by August thunderstorms . Her home, this canyon, is a perfection of the Colorado Plateau. It feels endless and ageless, beyond quiet, preternaturally still, save for the crystalline sound of water crossing slickrock. Mary King, Margaret’s daughter-in-law and a Navajo, translates; she is there with her husband, Leonard, Margaret’s son. They are waiting until after the interview to tell Margaret that her daughter, in her eighties, just had an unsuccessful operation and is now paralyzed. At first, Margaret doesn’t talk much, as Mary knows the answers to basic questions. margaret: My eyes are weak. My hearing is weak. When you get old things sort of wander away and you don’t remember them. This old age has taken over. You turn into a little kid when you get older. I can’t remember this or that. If you had come years ago, I would have told you many stories. mary: Her father was Joe Goodman, enrolled Navajo at Fort Sumner. Her mother, Rhett Shaw, or Lady Joe Goodman, was Paiute from Towaoc, not a Ute, and was a medicine woman. She taught Margaret all the plants, so she was a medicine woman too, and delivered babies. One time a baby was coming out breached and she just turned that baby around inside the mother’s belly. She saved Leonard’s life. He was about eighteen years old. He got so sick he was ready to die. She went out and got some roots and revived him. Just then, her brother, Paul Goodman from Douglas Mesa, came over and did a little ceremony. Paul was Paiute too, but enrolled as Navajo. When she could still walk around, she’d get roots, pound them into powder, and made drinks. That’s probably why she’s lived so long. Margaret King san juan paiute, born 1896 36 When she was growing up, she traveled between Kayenta, Paiute Farms, and Bullfrog before there was a dam. They had a field close to Mexican Water. She’d visit her relatives in Towaoc. Her grandmother’s name was Greyhair; they didn’t have English names then. Travel was far; she used to sing a song about that. It was a traveling song. She used to tell us stories about going back and forth; she used to speak and sing in Paiute. But it’s been too long and now she only speaks Navajo. When the San Juan became a tribe, she thought it was too late to switch things around. But her son, Ned King, enrolled Paiute. She thinks about those times she went from place to place. Now that’s she’s old, she likes to remember what she has done through all the years. She learned the plants, the ceremonies, the healings. Her parents taught her to live a good life. Now she is old, she can’t remember. She went to the Sherman Indian School; she was older than most of the kids. She liked it. They didn’t want them to speak Navajo or other languages. Only when they got together by themselves did they talk Navajo. She got baptized there. margaret: It helped me a lot too. Two missionaries came to my house and taught about Christianity. I believe it. It’s helped me to live life a better way. It teaches you a lot. I’m glad I went to see the white man’s world, but I came back to my people. mary: She sings in Christian Navajo. She went there...