Southern Paiute: A Portrait

Chemehuevi Indian Tribe

155 1. Carobeth Laird, The Chemehuevis (Banning, CA: Malki Museum Press, 1976), 48–50. 2. Ibid., 3. 3. Chemehuevi Indian Tribe website, www.chemehuevi. net/home.php. 4. Robert C. Euler, Southern Paiute Ethnohistory, University of Utah Anthropological Papers 78, Glen Canyon Series 28 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1966), 37. 5. Martha C. Knack, Boundaries Between: The Southern Paiutes, 1775–1995, (University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 32. 6. Carobeth Laird, Encounter with an Angry God (Banning , CA: Malki Museum Press, 1975). 7. Laird, The Chemehuevis, xxvi. 8. Ibid., 9. 9. Ibid., 29. Chemehuevi Indian Tribe The Runners were a group of young men who may have been the last remnant of an ancient cult or guild . . . In the last two decades of the nineteenth century they ran simply for the joy of running in each other’s company . . . Only one was a true Runner, a Runner indeed. He had his “secret way of travelling, which was the old way.” His name was Kaawi’a, Rat Penis . . . Early one morning , George Laird said, they were all in the vicinity of Muuviya, Cottonwood Island . . . The sun had not yet risen. Kaawi’a stood up and announced, “I am going to Yuma . . .” They watched him run away from the camp in a long, easy lop and disappear over a sand dune . . . They followed his tracks up to and over the crest of the dune to the point where they had lost sight of him. The tracks continued on, but now they were different. They looked as if he had been “just staggering along,” taking giant steps, his feet touching the ground at long, irregular intervals, leaving prints that became further and further apart and lighter and lighter on the sand . . . The other Runners continued on down-river. When at length they reached the village at the mouth of the Gila, they inquired, “Did Kaawi’a come here?” “Yes,” the people answered, “he arrived . . . (the day he had left them) just as the sun was rising.” Kaawi’a died of smallpox while still young, possibly under twenty, never having known woman nor communicating his secret . . . —carobeth laird1 C hemehuevi appears to be a Mojave term which has been translated as differently as “mixed with all,”2 or “plays with fishes.”3 Other Southern Paiute call them Tantawats, or “Southerners.” The Chemehuevi call themselves Tuumontcokowi, which probably means “Black Beards,” or Nuwu, the Southern Paiute name for themselves. In 1776, Spain dispatched two expeditions into Southern Paiute territories, both led by Franciscan priests. Fathers Domínguez and Escalante left from Santa Fe, and Father Francisco Garcés from Tucson. Traveling among the Chemehuevi, Garcés recorded that “through the different lands that they inhabit they take different names.”4 He remarked on their good looks and running skills, observing that they “conducted themselves . . . most beautifully” and had “much good sense.”5 They told Garcés they considered the Southern Paiute as “their nation.” Much of white scholarship on the Chemehuevi derives from Carobeth Laird’s work, including The Chemehuevis. Her book testifies to a love story that unfolded when Carobeth met the Chemehuvi George Laird. Carobeth was married to the renowned anthropologist John Peabody Harrington, who was evidently so overbearing she entitled her book of their life together Encounter with an Angry God.6 In 1919, on assignment from Harrington, Carobeth went searching for a Chemehuevi informant. She had heard about a man who spoke fluent Spanish, English, Mojave and Chemehuevi, and who always worked. She found him hammering away at the agency blacksmith shop: “I . . . saw his face illumined by the glow from the forge. We were not separated till death did us part.”7 Carobeth was “astonished” when George outlined a system of inherited songs, such as Deer and Mountain Sheep Songs, which she tied to a form of historical land ownership unknown to other Southern Paiute.8 Reflecting on her notes, she was struck by the recurrence of phrases such as “the People met and talked it over,” or “they got together and decided.”9 156 10. Ibid., 8. 11. Herbert W. Pencille, A Short History of the Reorganization of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe (Havasu Lake, CA: Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, n.d.), 1. 12. Personal conversation with Herb Pencille, November, 6, 2008. 13. Laird, The Chemehuevis, 8. In 1853 the federal government folded the Chemehuevi’s traditional Mojave Desert lands into the public domain. In the mid-1850s the Chemehuevi moved south along the Colorado River after the Mojave...