Southern Paiute: A Portrait

Richard Arnold

174 I stalked Richard. On the one hand, there is virtually nothing written about the Pahrump. On the other, you have Richard, who lives large and is famous for his big white cowboy hat, red convertible, and hard work, both as director of the Las Vegas Indian Center and as chairman of the Pahrump Band. I caught him at the Indian Center just after an eye operation for Graves disease. Turns out that the Indian medicine he had taken for his eyes was so effective that the doctor begged him for information about the medicinal plants, which Richard refused to divulge. They find some jewelry or maybe a cat buried next to a Neanderthal, and they attribute all these notions of culture to them that they refuse to attribute to us. That’s a pretty heavy racism, when you compare badly to Neanderthal. It’s amazing to me; in all the historical accounts, we have always been the lowest of the low. We didn’t have any culture, religion, anything. All we were doing in the history books was eating and sleeping. I get very resentful. Anthropologists talk about the Numic spread and how we were supposed to have come from out west, following the pine nuts. As I’ve told other people, that Numic spread sure goes good with white bread. Because it’s not our belief. They’re trying to say we’re newcomers to this area, and they base stuff on artifacts and say we couldn’t do that. But imagine if someone came here in a thousand years and found all this stuff made in China; there must have been Chinese all over here. Like we don’t have the capacity to adapt other technologies, or trade, or steal. We’re not given that credit to think that way; all we were doing was trying to survive. But we have in our language, in our words, in our descriptions, everything that is so complete. Most people use four directions. We have ten. We have to look at everything around. So not only the four nautical directions, but the past from a long time ago, the present where we’re at, the future, up, down, and you have also yourself, where you’re at, here, in this dimension. If you do that when you pray, you’ll consider everything. Richard Arnold pahrump band, born March 27 1953 176 When we do our doctoring, everything has a reason, everything has to be done a certain way, and it has to be backed out the same way you came in. It’s part of a sequence. My gramma, Annie Beck, did a lot of doctoring. Her and everyone else doing the doctoring, that’s how I grew up, seeing all that stuff being prepared, hearing the songs sung and the stories told. That’s how I was brought up. There are three different kinds of healers or doctors. There are the people who see in their dreams. Another doctor, you don’t have to talk to them, they know; you just walk into the room, they see you and they know. Then there are the ones tied into the elements of nature; they can read the wind, call the weather. That’s what Annie was. She could call all that. Her power was tied to the wind and the rain, and they were tied to the mountain sheep. Those three things were key to her powers, her doctoring. But you also have these people recognized for their tasks, who have those powers: rabbit drives, antelope drives, who knew those songs, could talk to those animals. They would just come to you. Then you wouldn’t have to go out and hunt them. That was a real power. That’s one of the common threads that we had throughout Paiute country; we have those people tied to those things. We always will respect that, no matter what. It gives us such a close relationship to the environment, to all the resources out there. I remember when I was young, elders would say, “Listen to the wind. Listen to the water; it will talk to you. Listen to that land. Listen to those rocks.” I remember being with some of these old folks and they’d say hurry up, pack your stuff. There’s no clouds, nothing. You’d hear the wind, listen to it, and sure enough, you’d hear it, know the rain is coming here. I felt stuck...