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101 Alvin’s narrative begins with something he said about Grand Canyon that I arranged in verse form. Alvin has this way about him, whether telling stories or singing Bird Songs. As a singer, listening has always been a key virtue, especially now that he’s blind. He talks a lot about listening, how he should have listened more as a child, how this generation should listen more, how he listens to his dreams to remember old Bird Songs, a tape machine by his bedside to record them. Though his blindness is recent, his apartment is impeccably clean and organized. I sit there along the river listening, early one morning I got up, sitting by the river listening to the river roaring down. Pretty soon the river was singing to me. It was singing to me. They were singing those Indian songs to me. How that river roared. It sounded weird, just sitting there listening On that river going down. Grand Canyon still has that spiritual feeling. First trip I went down there was really spiritual; seems like everything came back to me. A lot of stuff my gramma said came back. I used to feel it on the rez, up on the cliffs. Not so much around here anymore. Too many people, too much noise. I used to walk around by myself, walk on the reservation, sit there on the ledge looking down on the riverbed, down where my grandmother was born, and listen. I’d think a little bit about how it was in the old days for my ancestors walking through there, how it was. I used to work with the BLM out on the Arizona Strip, the Shivwits Plateau, where all the Indians used to live on Black Rock Mountain. I’d walk around there, find lots of arrowheads , pieces of pottery, and I’d wonder what happened to them all. Alvin Marble shivwits band, born May 5, 1947 102 My grandmother, Bertha Cumeral, told me about living in St. George before it became St. George, before the Anglos came in. She didn’t see whites until this man rode up there on his horse. He had all these whiskers; it was the first time she saw that kind of face. It scared her. They came, they treated the Indians bad, pushed them out. They’re just like ants coming out, pushing us. Down by the college in the tamarisk and mesquite bushes along the river, that’s where all the Indians lived. Bloomington Hills, all along the river up Santa Clara Creek; that used to be all Indian villages. Where did they all go to? What happened to them all? They got pushed out. Put them up there on that little reservation they call it now. I always think about that a lot. Pretty soon we won’t be here either. Maybe just a handful of us now. Maybe they’ll wipe us out too. Another story I heard down here in Santa Clara; there’s a spring, Indians used to get water from there. The Dutchmen living there in Santa Clara, they went and poisoned that spring and it just wiped them all out, wiped the Indians out. That’s what I heard. Just below the black hills, Indian Hills they call it, by the Tonaquint Cemetery. They use our names, like Tonaquint, for cemeteries; that’s not nice. Anyway, Indians used to get their water there. Somebody went and poisoned that water. That’s what wiped some of them out. I was raised on the Shivwits Reservation with my grandparents and my mother, Dorothy , half Mojave, half Paiute. My grandmother was full-blooded Paiute. Didn’t have any electric when I was born; lived in a two-room house, dirt floor, three or four beds in the other room. We all slept there. We had kerosene lamps and a wood-burning cook stove. In the winter our outdoor taps would freeze, so I’d break the ice on the creek and haul water up. We’d drink that water from the creek there; we were above the cattle and everything. My grandmother was born just below the reservation, called the Five Mile. They’d plant down there. Summertime they’d walk down the creek there, three or four miles. I was small yet; we’d stay there all day with their garden, weeding. When they were ripe they’d pack the ripe vegetables up on their back in their gunny sack, all the...

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