Southern Paiute: A Portrait

Lila Carter

150 With her natural grace and elegance and fluid storytelling, Lila transforms Las Vegas back into landscape, a reminder of how recently this city materialized out of the desert. She recalls flowing springs with huge cottonwoods over there, a dairy farm over here. Like Clara Belle Jim, she refers to mythic places that one can see from the Las Vegas tribal offices, one just a stone’s throw away from the front door, where Cottontail hid after declaring war on Sun. Well, I’ve gone away from here a lot. I went away when I was fourteen to the Stewart Indian School. They sent us all away when we were about six and eight—Paiute, Shoshone, and Washoe. Tried to make us forget the old Indian ways. If we got caught talking it, we’d get punished. They’d swat you. They were harder on the kids who went before, like Evelyn [Samalar]. I ran away from there. My parents didn’t tell me when my little sister died. I was very close to her. I got disgusted. There were four of us girls ran off. They were from Lone Pine, Paiutes, but a different kind. We planned it with one of their boyfriends. She was a little bit older than we were, sixteen. We had to walk across the desert to the California state line to where they could pick us up again. They’d watch all that. We walked way out in the desert. Then we went to Lone Pine, and we stayed with that girl’s cousin. I wasn’t in touch with my parents until I got about nineteen. We worked in the laundry. We had to lie about our age. They got caught in that canyon in Lone Pine drinking. They had a wreck and got sent back. I didn’t go; I was thinking about my job. An older lady, she told me that she knew some people in Fresno. We had enough money to get to L.A., then we hitchhiked up to Fresno. It was around the end of World War II, but that didn’t really enter into it. We got different little jobs in people’s homes. She had an uncle, this girl we met there. So we stayed out at the outskirts of Fresno. They were Monos [a Northern Paiute tribe]. Different language; we just spoke English together. The girl there, Mop, she had long hair that would get all stringy when she washed it, so we called her Mop. Then from there I went to Sacramento. I worked in a Libby’s cannery up there. I was sixteen. Lila Carter las vegas tribe, born September 14, 1929 152 I worked in a bar, too. Indians couldn’t be served in those days. I don’t know how I got that job, but they wanted me to work for them. I was working across the street, with a pool hall, and this guy says, “I’ll pay you more.” I worked in his restaurant first. The bar was a few doors up. They didn’t pay much, five, six bucks a day. In the restaurant we’d sneak whiskey. My boyfriend would get it for us. I started drinking too much. Too much. There was a bunch of us girls used to get together in my room, used to just drink and drink. That’s before I had my three girls. I kinda started seeing things from drinking. I got thrown in the can, and the policeman up there in Sacramento, McCormac, he was mixed with them Indians in Oregon, and he used to get onto me all the time. “Why don’t you be an actor?” I didn’t listen to him. He told me one day when I was drinking, he asked, “What are you looking at?” I said, “I’m looking at my friends.” And of course there was no one there, just my hallucinating. I told McCormac; he took me to the hospital there. I quit it just like that. I was born right here in Las Vegas, right up here in my aunt’s house. Mmm hmm. There was nothing here years ago. Not a thing. A river used to run down through here. All of that used to be marshland, on this side of where the water used to flow. There were springs here too, down this hill, at Las Vegas Boulevard and Washington Street. Used to be dikes right here. On the...