William Logan Hebner moved to southwest Utah in 1981, opening an award-winning restaurant and working as a river guide. He met his wife Angie on a peace walk from Leningrad to Moscow in 1987, and together they founded International Legislative Exchange, working with new parliaments emerging from ex-Soviet republics. With their sons, Jordan and Sean, they live on a mesa overlooking Zion canyon. Hebner has published in High Country News, Best of Writers at Work, and Northern Lights.

Michael L. Plyler has been photographing for over thirty years. In1993 he was awarded a Visual Artist Fellowship from the Utah Arts Council. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, has won awards, and is held in numerous collections. Plyler was the photographer for the books Pioneer Voices of Zion Canyon and Zion Canyon: A Storied Land. He presently is director of the Zion Canyon Field Institute.

SOUTHERN PAIUTE

A PORTRAITBy William Logan Hebner

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 William Logan Hebner and Michael Plyler
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-754-4

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………xiForeword Vivienne Caron-Jake…………………………………..1Introduction…………………………………………………21San Juan Paiute………………………………………………23MARY ANN AND JACK OWL…………………………………………30BESSIE OWL…………………………………………………..34MARGARET KING………………………………………………..38Kaibab Paiute Tribe…………………………………………..41GARY TOM…………………………………………………….46GEVENE SAVALA………………………………………………..51Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah……………………………………55PATRICK CHARLES, KANOSH AND SHIVWITS BANDS………………………60MADELAN REDFOOT, KANOSH BAND…………………………………..64MCKAY PIKYAVIT, KANOSH BAND……………………………………69CLIFFORD JAKE, INDIAN PEAKS BAND……………………………….75LORA E. AND ELEANOR TOM, CEDAR BAND…………………………….82BARBARA PETE CHAVEZ, CEDAR BAND………………………………..87ARTHUR RICHARDS, CEDAR BAND……………………………………93WILL ROGERS, SHIVWITS BAND…………………………………….97ELDENE SNOW CERVANTES, SHIVWITS BAND……………………………101ALVIN MARBLE, SHIVWITS BAND……………………………………107EUNICE TILLAHASH SURVEYOR, SHIVWITS BAND………………………..113Caliente Paiute………………………………………………114WILLIE PETE, MOAPA BAND AND CALIENTE……………………………119DARLENE PETE HARRINGTON, CEDAR BAND AND CALIENTE…………………124Moapa Band of Paiute Indians…………………………………..126IRENE BENN…………………………………………………..132EVELYN SAMALAR……………………………………………….138LALOVI MILLER………………………………………………..143ROGER BENN…………………………………………………..148Las Vegas Paiute Tribe………………………………………..150LILA CARTER………………………………………………….155Chemehuevi Indian Tribe……………………………………….158GERTRUDE HANKS LEIVAS WITH DAUGHTERS……………………………166MATHEW LEIVAS………………………………………………..172Pahrump Band of Paiutes……………………………………….174RICHARD ARNOLD……………………………………………….180CLARA BELLE JIM………………………………………………185Poem Vivienne Caron-Jake………………………………………186Appendix: Southern Paiute Populations & Maps…………………….193

Chapter One

San Juan Paiute

I shall dance tonight When the dusk comes crawling There will be dancing and feasting I shall dance with the others In circles In leaps In stomps Laughter and talk will weave Into the night Among the fires of my people Games will be played And I shall be a part of it

—LAVERNE OWL

How the San Juan Paiute lost their enormous reservation called the Paiute Strip, about nine thousand square miles, is an interwoven story of bureaucratic corruption and ignorance, Paiute insularity, and Navajo opportunism and growth. In 1905 the federal government began exploring reservation possibilities for the Kaibab and San Juan people. In 1908, a stunning labyrinth of canyons south of the San Juan River was set aside for the San Juan Paiute and “other Paiute who wished to live there.”

The ethnographic record is clear regarding Southern Paiute claims to these lands. The essentially first European map of the area, drawn by Bernardo Miera of the 1776 Domínguez-Escalante expedition, shows the “Yutas Payuchis” south of the San Juan River. In 1874, John Wesley Powell couldn’t justify travel expenses to visit them, as they were too remote, but he included them with the Southern Paiute, calling them Kwai-an-ti-kwok-its, or “the people living across the river.”

In 1908, Byron Cummings, archeologist and University of Utah dean, who co-led the expedition to “discover” Rainbow Bridge, summed up the situation: “That was known as the Piute Strip, extending between the San Juan River and the Utah-Arizona boundary line … and was a Piute reservation at that time. A good many Piutes were still living on the Strip and there was continual clashing between the Piutes and the Navajos because the Navajo were continually attempting to go in on Piute territory and crowd out the Piutes.” Anthropologists Allen Turner and Robert Euler conclude, “The consensus that can be derived from the data is that the San Juan Paiute occupation of the area southeast of the San Juan … far predates that of the Navajo and that the latter migrated to that territory after the 1867 Bosque Redondo incarceration.”

Enter Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, who will later be convicted in the Teapot Dome Scandal that embroiled Warren Harding’s presidency. Without consulting or informing the San Juan Paiute, Fall vacated their title to the reservation in 1922 and opened their lands for oil drilling. Fall would gain infamy for becoming the first presidential cabinet member to be jailed, convicted of taking bribes from oil companies in exchange for leases on federal lands.

The oil companies drilled empty holes and left. A young Navajo graduate from the Sherman Institute began petitioning the government to set aside the Paiute Strip lands again, and initial paperwork referring to “the Indians who have always lived here” was gradually replaced with “Navajo.” There was a series of meetings, from 1930 to 1932, with the Navajo Tribal Council, regional BIA officials, and other federal and state bureaucrats—everyone but the San Juan Paiute. In 1933 the vast Paiute Strip officially became a part of the Navajo Reservation.

In their definitive study of Navajo Mountain ethnography, Anthropologists Pamela Bunte and Robert Franklin bluntly state, “Walker, Cheschillige, Hagerman, and the four Navajo councilman succeeded in promulgating a new view of regional social history, one in which Navajo possession of former Paiute holdings was seen as rightful and of ancient standing.” This also included a revisionist approach to Hopi claims when in 1930 Western Navajo Agency superintendent Chester Walker offered “the clearest case of explicit pro-Navajo bias” when he called the Hopi on their ancestral farms in Moencopi “squatters” who were “encroaching” on Navajo lands.

Throughout all this, the San Juan Paiute’s centuries-old seasonal trek from Douglas Mesa to Allen Canyon and White Mesa and was ending due to population devastation from the 1918 influenza epidemic and Navajo incursion. Throughout, the Paiute were neither informed nor consulted about the legal juggling of their lands. Today the San Juan Paiute, though a recognized tribe, have no reservation lands, and, like all Southern Paiute, live in different pockets around their homelands, including at Willow Springs and Tuba City, where they had long lived near Hopi neighbors at Moencopi.

The three stories here from Navajo (Paiute) Mountain all speak to personal experience of this loss of ancestral lands. This is not an academic matter; their losses continue today. At this writing, Louise Owl continues to fight the Navajo and a moribund bureaucracy for rights to her family’s traditional corn fields.

Jack and Mary Ann Owl asked me to look into interviews they did for the National Park Service, which they believed would clarify their claims and protect the eighteen acres they had left. Jack didn’t blink when he saw himself and Bessie Owl thanked as “Navajo” in the acknowledgments to the National Park Service’s 2001 Rainbow Bridge administrative history. 7 He then listened as his daughter translated the pro-Navajo revisionism of 1920 and 1932, which ignored San Juan claims. Finally, upon learning that the NPS had employed a Navajo anthropologist for the 2001 job, Jack shrugged and grinned, as if to say, “See? This is how it always is.” Phone calls to various NPS personnel, the authors of the report, and the BIA Southern Paiute field agent have thus far proved fruitless.

The murder of the prominent San Juan elder Alfred Lehi, referred to by Jack, Mary Ann, and Bessie, occurred in 1969 and was never resolved.

Mary Ann Owl SAN JUAN PAIUTE, born April 2, 1928

Jack Owl SAN JUAN PAIUTE, born September 1934

After hours of red dirt roads, we’re not sure this is the right home. Three people, an older man and woman and a younger man, greet us with absolute silence, their eyes kind, wary, and curious. There’s no electricity, so there’s that desert silence too. They present a timeless scene, working their way through a harvest of fresh picked corn. She sits on the floor, legs splayed straight out, her stone metate beside her, sorting the piles. The two men make short work of the blue speckled corn, deftly slicing the husks around the base and sliding them off.

After eyeing us a while, they admit they are indeed the Owls. But they speak no English, and their affable son Lenny is a hesitant translator. Despite good will and effort on both sides, there’s little headway. However, they seem to like what’s going on, and we agree to bring Vivienne out next time to translate so we can get down to business.

This place is primal. My friend Stephen Feldman taught out here at the Navajo Mountain Boarding School; he guides us to a magnificent camp behind the Navajo Mountain dump. The San Juan River canyons unfold before us and the Henry Mountains, eighty miles away, sit clear in the pure desert air like jeweled miniatures. Marauding thunderstorms whip the massive Navajo Mountain laccolith. As night falls we see scattered, isolated wildfires, lit by lightning, in the distance across the river, looking like small volcanoes. Earlier, a massive flash flood crashed through Paiute Canyon, quaking the earth, at least four thousand cubic feet per second of water goading a wall of piñons, junipers, cottonwoods, an old truck, and at least one unfortunate sheep. You would die before you got wet. Three different Southern Paiutes translated for these two interviews; the Owls’ son Lenny Youngheart, daughter Louise Owl, and Vivienne Caron-Jake.

JACK: I was six the first time I saw white people, crossing Paiute Canyon. They had shorts, backpacks, and donkeys, going to see Rainbow Bridge. I hid on top of a hill, watching. We used to call them Merricats; my mother would talk about them. Merricats means someone who makes a lot of things with their hands, and does a lot of things too.

That year I was sent to boarding school in Tuba City by my mother. I spent one year there. I came back and she was waiting on top of Paiute Canyon. They were laughing at me because all I spoke was Navajo. There were a lot of Paiute families that lived here, and we would go to the farms down in the canyon, irrigated by springs. When the corn and the plants were ripe, we would move down to Paiute Canyon to harvest. We’d bake the corn and dry the peaches.

We used to dry the corn, put it in bags, bring it up on top of Paiute Canyon, and bury it in a big hole. Then for winter we would move underneath the mountain. We would go back and get the corn when we needed it. Since the corn was dry, it was still good. During that time, all we ate was corn. We would grind it with a stone and make it into a lot of different things, like bread, tortillas, or cereals. There was a trading post about six or seven miles south, by the Navajo chapter house. The Paiutes would move around that area, spend our winter there. We would sell our baskets there. At that time it would probably cost two or three dollars for a basket.

Back then there were no Navajo farms anywhere. Navajos would ask if they could have some corn or peaches. When I was growing up, there weren’t many Navajos except on Paiute Mesa. From where we are sitting, there was only one or two Navajo families living east of us down here close to Paiute Canyon. Maybe two or three south of Navajo Mountain. My grandfather and grandmother lived south of Navajo Mountain. They used to move around to places way out like Shonto Arizona. His name was Muuputs, or “Owl.”

Navajos asked if they could move here. My grandparents said yes. The Navajo would spend the winter, then move back to Shonto. They asked if they could move in again and my grandparents said yes. Then they moved in with their sheep. The land used to be really good, grasses, a lot of plants that sheep or cattle or horses would eat. So that spring, the Navajos didn’t move back to Shonto. They stayed. The Navajo families stayed and told the Paiutes to stay away from where they moved in. Underneath the mountain where my grandfather used to keep his horses, on the mountainside, the Navajo family told them not to keep their horses there, saying it was their land.

Because my grandparents told the Navajo it was okay, that’s why most of this land is taken over by Navajo now. We always called this Paiute Mountain. When Navajos started coming in, they called it Navajo Mountain.

MARY ANN: The Mormons from Henry Mountain used to call this Paiute Mountain. I don’t know what happened. It wasn’t long ago I found out that it was now called Navajo Mountain.

JACK: So we moved north of the mountain. After the Navajo took over the land, we moved north of the mountain a couple years, then to Paiute Canyon. When I turned twelve, I could tell there were more Navajo families moving in. Right after the Paiute told them it was okay to move here, the Navajo said it was theirs. They started moving in from places like Dinehotso, Mexican Water, Oljeto area, Kaibito, Tuba City, Kayenta. Their kids, grandkids, families all live here now.

Around 1923 there was a lot of Paiutes living here. Maybe sixty. At Willie Lehi’s there were lots of people. Before he was born, I’m sure there were a lot more people. They used to move back and forth between White Mesa, Douglas Mesa, and Allen Canyon. Moving like that was before my time. But during that time, the Navajo started moving in.

We even farmed in Kayenta, the Paiutes did, and Shonto Canyon. We farmed here and there, a lot of places. We even had some people living on top the mountain. They moved down into Paiute Canyon and on to Oljeto. There was some kind of illness they were moving from [Influenza epidemic?]. On their way up people were dying. Long before I was born. Across the canyon on Paiute Mesa some people died there too. Two or three people died in each family. Somewhere up in the Monument Valley area there was a death there. A young woman died and left her child behind; the Navajo heard him crying and picked him up. Some went to Towaoc.

My father was Navajo. He was from the Kaibito area. That’s far from here so I couldn’t spend time with him. Around that time a lot of Navajos would move around here, just traveling around. That’s when the Paiute women had kids from the Navajo men moving around. There was no violence; they weren’t assaulting them. But they did want to take over the area.

MARY ANN: I was born here in Paiute Canyon. My mother’s mother was Paiute, but I didn’t know my mother. She passed away when I was just barely able to sit as an infant. My father had a Navajo father, but he had a Paiute name, Singg. His English name was Curtis Lehi. My mother was Rose Lehi. When I was eight we’d move back and forth between the mountain and up and down the canyons, down to the river. There were lots of water pockets down in the canyons. We used to go to the farms on horseback. Then after we’d harvest we’d move back here.

We used to live higher up on the mountain, like Bessie’s family. There’s two springs up there. We lived by one of those springs in the summer. Way up there where it’s level. We moved down when the rains started. My grandmother used to have a lot of sheep and horses.

JACK: We moved like that for years. Back and forth, with the sheep. Then I remember that a Navajo man, Gamoo-nup, came by on horseback, and asked us how long we were going to stay on our own land.

MARY ANN: Jack and I grew up together right here. My two grandmothers who raised me went ahead and let him be with me. I didn’t like it, my grandmothers had to really, really talk to me. That’s the only way it would have happened.

Now it’s good. We’ve had nine children. One passed away, so there are eight now. We had most of them here.

JACK: I chose her because she knew a lot of things. Cooking, working with the animals, planting, knowing the plant medicines, making Paiute baskets. She can even weave Navajo rugs.

Do you remember when it became a Navajo Reservation, and what changed with that?

JACK: I remember the Navajo family that took over the mountain, his name was One Salt. He would move through here on horseback and get ashes from different sweat lodges that used to be Paiute. He got those ashes from north of the mountain down to the San Juan Canyon and across the river. He would bring these ashes up and say these are from the Navajo sweats. He was showing them to a Navajo Councilman from Navajo Mountain, Bert Tallsalt. Archeologists found a Paiute woman’s bones close to a cave and they said they were from prehistoric people, like Anasazi. They were Paiute bones.

I went on a boat with a Navajo translator to where they were planning to build a trading post, close to Bullfrog. Where we crossed the river, the Paiute had a rock cairn. That Navajo translator claimed they were ceremonial Navajo rocks. Way back, there were no Navajos. And Navajos never used to do that kind of medicine.

MARY ANN: The old Paiutes used to do ceremonies with those rocks; we marked our land with rocks. There are still two places like that. A long time ago my grandmother took us over there and told us this is what we did, we prayed. So we prayed over where the rocks were.

JACK: When we’d travel towards the south, to Tuba City or Kayenta, we’d always stop and pray there. There are still some rocks there, but the Navajos are tearing them down. The Navajos say they used to do ceremonies with those rocks, but they’re just making it up. They never used to do that.

I also went to a meeting in Page with some Navajos. They said the trail, around the back of the mountain, is their trail, and called it the Navajo Trail. They were really saying it used to be their road, nobody else’s road.

That’s when they won that area, that Utah area from up the river to Mexican Hat and Monument Valley, they won that area from when that guy was taking ashes from our different areas.

When that happened, there weren’t that many older Paiutes, maybe only four, Lester Willitsen, Dan Lehi, Willie Lehi, Toby Owl. There were so many Navajos. They won this area. Now this is Navajo land, all the way to Mexican Hat. There was nothing we could say. There was only a few of us.

So that was it. We became Navajo. It was the only way we could get any assistance. We were given Navajo census numbers in 1933. We were told that the census number would help us, so we accepted Navajo census numbers. But when we were recognized as the San Juan Paiute Tribe, I went to the agency and took my name off the Navajo roles.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from SOUTHERN PAIUTEby William Logan Hebner Copyright © 2010 by William Logan Hebner and Michael Plyler. Excerpted by permission of UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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