Interview with Shanan Marineau

Shanan Martineau was interviewed November 13, 2018 in St. George, Washington County, Utah by Susannah Nilsson for the Washington County Historical Society. Participants are: Susannah Nilsson; Kathleen Broeder, Archivist at Dixie State 00:01:00[Utah Tech] University; and videographer Mike Gardner.

SN:We are recording an oral history of Shanandoah (Martineau) Anderson's father, "LaVan"' Martineau. LaVan Martineau was an important figure in the St. George and Southern Utah area. He was the [author] of two very important books, The Rocks Begin to Speak and The Southern Paiutes: Legend, Lore, Language and Lineage. We feel it would be great to record the history of his life today. I am 00:02:00going to ask Shanandoah a little about her memories of her father, starting with his youth, his parents, where he came from, and happenings of his young days.

SA:LaVan Martineau's real name is Douglas LaVan Martineau. His father was Amon Douglas Martineau and his mother was Mavis (Sorenson) [Martineau]. Amon was born in Chuhuichupa, Mexico. We did go down there when I was in my early teens and [was able] to visit a lot of the relatives. They still [have] a colony of 00:03:00Martineaus who live in Mexico. That is where his dad was from.

My mom, his second wife, was Evalina May McFee. She is from the Shivwits [Band of] Paiute [Indian] Tribe of Utah, which is located outside St. George, Utah.

My dad was born in Kanab, [Kane County] Utah. I am not sure how long he lived there. [The family] eventually moved to Cedar City, [Iron County] Utah. I do not 00:04:00know if they migrated here and there, working here and there. He did live with his dad and mom until he was ten years old. His mom had died [in 1942]. [I will look up] the history on that. When he was eighteen years old, his father passed away. He had come back from a Boy Scouts [of America] camp at 2:00 a.m. and the house was burned down. The scoutmaster did not know where to take him, so he got dropped off with some friends. After he found out his dad had passed away, none of his relatives came to take him in. It was a Paiute [man] who lived in a sheep 00:05:00wagon and had one arm. He said, "If your relatives do not want you, I will take you in." He had a Paiute family from then on and was raised [as a] Paiute. He always used to say, "I am like an apple inside out; I am white on the outside, but red on the inside." [Laughter]

He always believed [the Paiute] teachings. He learned the language and throughout his teens, he talked Paiute to all of his friends. He learned everything he could. He told me that from a young age and I have witnessed when he was older. He had a t-shirt with a pocket and always had one folded piece of paper and a pencil. Every time he would hear something, he would pull out his paper and start writing little notes. At the end of the day, he would go through his paper and write anything important in a notebook or scrapbook. I have a lot of those today. I have all of his books [after] he passed away. They are all smeared pencil writing, but he learned at a young age to start preserving things. I do not know how that came about, why he wanted to start preserving 00:06:00things. Throughout the years I have heard from my side of the family, the Paiute side, that if it was not for his preserving a lot of that, it would have died out. He did not do it for publicity or to get all the information to write a book. He started preserving things. I thought that was great because there would be so much [information] that would be lost if [he hadn't done] that. Throughout his life, [it did not] matter if it was on the Native side or the Anglo side, he would write things down. He preserved a lot of history that way.

SN:That is very interesting. He was a very prolific writer. Can you remember the 00:07:00name of the man who took him in when he was first orphaned?

SA:He was my relative. His name was Edrick Bushhead and he was my grandma's nephew. Edrick Bushhead was Shivwits Paiute, but he lived in Cedar City in the Cedar [Indian] village over there. He lived there in a sheep wagon and took in [my dad]. Edrick Bushhead's job was to go from town to town during the seasons and pick carrots [or other crops, assist in] the farming and irrigation -- anything that needed to be done when they gathered the foods. [That] was my dad's new life; they went to Richfield [Sevier County, Utah] to pick carrots or whatever else. I know they went to Salt Lake [City, Salt Lake County, Utah] or Ogden [Weber County, Utah to] pick cherries. They migrated wherever the farms were to pick [crops] from the farms. He had a lot of stories from Richfield, where they spent the majority of their gathering time. A lot of the other tribes were there. They had Navajos, and a lot of the bands were there, so they had 00:08:00gatherings and a lot of special events. Years later, he met my mom, Evelina, who was Edrick's relative. He met his first wife while living in Richfield.

SN:Tell some of the things that he learned in his youth, that you think were important, from the Native side.

SA:Number one would be the language, because today I cannot speak it. When my dad was alive I would ask him questions, words and he would tell me. From him, I 00:09:00could listen to elders and understand what they were saying. Today, we are trying to bring it back, but it is hard because you have nobody to converse with. You are on your own, telling yourself: I need to learn this word today. But you will not remember it if you have nobody to talk to. He learned the language and they spoke it fluently in the 1940s and 1950s.

Edrick taught him how to sing songs, taught him [how to make] bows [and] arrows. There were other bands up there of elders who were still making bows, arrows and 00:10:00arrowheads. So he learned how to do that. When they would travel up north to Fort Duchesne [Uintah County, Utah] to the Ute tribe, a lot of the tribal people up there spoke sign language because they were older people and were deaf or could not hear very well. He started to learn sign language because he would see them all talking with their hands and he thought that was fascinating. Every chance he got, he would ask questions, "How do you say this in sign?" I think the sign language was one of the main things that stuck to him because it was fascinating. It did not matter which tribe it was; they all knew how to sign. It was universal, so every tribe knew how to speak to each other.

SN:This type of sign language is not our American Sign Language. Is it a Native sign language? Only within the Native people? Do they have a certain signage for communicating that is not connected to our American Sign Language at all?

SA:Yes, it is not connected. Through his research on sign language, he found out 00:11:00that in the early 1900s, [Garrick] Mallery [of the Deaf-Mute Institute in Washington, D.C.] had done a study of Indian Sign Language. He brought some people back from the Old World. He brought seven Utes from Utah; they met and as they signed, they could understand each other. Only when it came to the animals they could not understand each other. Somehow, that sign language was universal. It was with the old people from the Old World and the Indians here. That is a study in a book. You could find it; I am not sure how you would get [a copy], 00:12:00but they understood the signs.

My dad said that the only trouble he had in learning signs was [when] he went to Canada and they would point. For example, an old man kept pointing at his elbow and he had to ask, "Why do you keep pointing at your elbow?" They said that there is a river up there called Elbow River and he was referring to [it]. It was little gestures like that that were different, but it was still all understandable.

[Besides] the sign language, arrowhead making, bow and arrow [making], he learned to bead. He was not very good at it, but he learned it. [Laughter] The sign language [inspired] him to learn the petroglyphs because an older man went to the Parowan Gap [Iron County, Utah] area and told him what some of those signs meant. It was fascinating to him and that is how he wanted to learn [about the] petroglyphs.

SN:You did not mention dancing. Did he take up actual learning of the Native dancing?

SA:Yes, that is why he was doing his own beadwork. He was in the Boy Scouts and the Boy Scout [leaders] wanted them to do Native American dancing. He got all of his [friends] who were at the Cedar Village; they all made their regalia and started to perform at the different church branches. Soon, they began to travel all over. He learned everything from tanning the hide, to making the bows and arrows [to create] the full regalia. For some of the dances, like the Mountain Sheep Dance, he made his own bustles and gathered all of the materials. He did learn how to dance. The Native dance group would go all over to pow-wows and special events. They would go to Flagstaff [Arizona] and [were] in the parade there. There were several of them who would tour, dancing.

SN:Is this when he was in his teenage years?

SA:Yes, teens and twenties.

SN:After that he joined the United States military. Do you have any memories of 00:14:00why he did that? Was he drafted, or did he join?

SA:He said he knew he was going to be drafted. He and his Indian [friends] said, "Let's go and enlist because they are going to draft us anyway." They took a train to Salt Lake. On their way, they were talking to each other about what they wanted to join. Is it going to be the Air Force or the Army? They were all talking about it. They [thought] that it seemed like the Air Force would be the simplest one of them all, so they all chose the Air Force. When they got up [to Salt Lake City], they were asked questions about what they did in their lives to 00:15:00want to be in the Air Force. My dad said that he herded cattle a lot of the time. They said, "If you can herd cattle, you can herd airplanes." [Laughter]

They put him as an air pilot control operator and he went back east to learn how to do that. That was in 1955. Before he left, he had met an Indian family in [Richfield] and had a liking for one of the younger girls; Doris Kanosh. He started writing to her while he was in training. When he came back, they 00:16:00married, and moved to California where he was stationed. That is where my older sister, Dorena [Martineau] was born on the base in 1955. [He went to Korea before he married.] While he was in Korea, he became fascinated by the crypto-analysis side of how they interpreted all of the codes. Every night when they were in their tents, he started to ask questions. He was fascinated with codes or cryptology and how that the repetition of deciphering did something inside his brain that maybe that was the same with the petroglyphs and the Indian writing at home. If you are going to do a symbol in picture writing, then it has to be based on crypto-analysis. He learned all he could while he was in Korea.

He did his four years in the [military] service and came home. He became fascinated with interpreting the picture writing. That is where it led him afterwards. They told him when he left the service, if he wanted to stay longer he would be making a lot of money and could have a good career, but he said his 00:17:00people were at home, his family was at home, and his loves were at home. He did not want to travel or be away from the Paiute country because of all the things that he learned being raised in Paiute country; he said he needed to come home. He came home and he did not have a good job. He never had a steady job. He did not care about being poor; he loved the country so much that he did not want to be apart from it.

That is when he started writing more things down [about] tribal information. He was going around to every petroglyph he could [find]. He would take pictures and go ask the elders, "What do you think this means? Or how do you do this in sign? 00:18:00Do you think this goes with this picture?" He started asking questions and soon he started writing down notes. I have all his library of penciled notes. It is in at least four different books. Back from the 1950s on, there are penciled notes of what he thought this interpretation was. He would go back, erase it and do it over. I have pages that are so erased over and rewritten that you could tell that his passion was in learning. He devoted his entire life. He spent more than forty years learning how to analyze what those writings meant.

SN:One of the things I noticed in the book during his military years, was that when he and his Native friends joined, they were put into a bunkhouse with a bunch of other people, [but] they could not sleep on the bunks. They took everything off [the bunks] and slept on the floor.

SA:Yes, they slept on the floor. They said it was cold the year that they went back and it was freezing. They were so used to sleeping on the ground. In Cedar City, where he was based most of his life, and in his teens in Richfield, they slept on the ground. In the sheep wagon, he slept on the ground. That was his life, having his sleeping bag and rolling it out wherever he was. When you were out picking carrots, you throw your sleeping bag wherever you were. Going into [military] service and having to sleep on a mattress, he said it was bad on his back. He and his Indian friends slept on the ground until they [were] caught and they had to end that. He lived a very simple life.

SN:I noticed by reading through his autobiography that he actually spent most of 00:20:00his life sleeping outside. He hardly ever slept in a house. He slept on a porch, or on the ground, or in a tepee.

SA:That is how I was raised. I started dancing, I think, when I learned to walk. I have a photo from when I was two years old, dancing at a pow-wow. We lived in a tepee all summer. We would go from pow-wow to pow-wow, all the way to Canada. He did not have a job, so the way he made money was to make arrowheads and would sell them for a couple of dollars. That would give him enough gas money to go to the next pow-wow. Every tribe that we visited was very generous; they always fed us, so we always had food. It was mainly the gas to get there. They always provided gifts and blankets, so we were well taken care of, but we lived in a 00:21:00tepee. They normally supplied the tepee poles, so we would only carry our canvas wherever we went in a station wagon piled high with blankets. My dad, my sisters and I would travel all over.

My mom left my dad when I was two [years old], so I was raised by my dad. We would visit our mom every year, so it was not like I did not have a mom in my life, but our dad raised us and he raised us traditionally to be Paiute. He said, "You may be half-white. Anytime you want to go visit your relatives on my side that is fine." But he felt that the Native way was the true way to be raised because it was simple, yet your survival skills were [learned]. I do not know if it was easier to get through life because I am dark-skinned. I may be half-white, but I could never pass as a white person. [Laughter] Knowing that, 00:22:00we were raised fully Indian. I do not care what tribe we went to, he would have us sit down with the elders and they would talk to us. I say we were raised by elders through life because he made a point to [tell us], "You go listen to what they have to say. I do not care if it is not your tribe; you learn anything you can from them." I have a multitude of knowledge from growing up all over. We call them family; they may not be by blood, but I have moms, dads, uncles, sisters all over the United States and Canada, and they are family. No matter where you go, you are never orphaned, you are never left alone. In Indian Country, if a child has no mom and dad, you never let them know they are orphaned. You take them in, you tell them, I am your mom, or that is your dad, or that is your uncle, or that is your grandpa. He was raised to never feel like 00:23:00he had no family and that is the way he taught us. I do not care where I go in the United States today, if I go all the way back east, I will have family there. They may not be by blood, but he taught us that no matter where you are in your life, you will always have somebody to support you and back you up. It is a good life. I loved growing up; traveled every year. The last eight years, being married, I have not traveled a lot, so I am getting a bug where [laughter] I need to get out and travel.

I think he raised us really well. We have good moral values. One thing that he always [taught], like his dad taught him, was to never lie and to always be on time. He said, "If you are not on time, you are lying because you did not show up when you said you would." Those were the two main things that he instilled in us.

SN:Let us go back to his first marriage and children. Can you tell us about your 00:24:00older sisters and that first marriage?

SA:Doris Kanosh was his first wife and she was from the [Paiute] Koosharem Band, which is in Richfield. That is where he met her when he was out in the fields picking carrots or whatever they [were] picking up there. She was young when he married her. I am not sure -- 1955 is when he enlisted. After he married her, they had their first child. She had another child which was Sophia. She was pregnant with her third child, who was going to be a boy, but during the labor, the doctor mistakenly thought the baby was breech and spent a couple of hours trying to turn the baby around. It killed the baby and the mother because the 00:25:00doctor did not -- it was the loss of blood and shock. She passed away and his son passed away. It took a couple of years, but he finally met my mom. He married her and they had my sister Carmen. She is the oldest. When my mom was pregnant with my sister Georgetta, she went into labor, and that is when Dorena's sister, Sophia, died. It was the day before "Jetta" [Georgetta Martineau] was born.

On the Shivwits Reservation the speed limit in the 1960s was 55 [miles per hour] through a residential area. [Sophia] was playing in the road and [was] hit by a car and my sister [Georgetta] was born the next day. Dorena lost her full sister there. I was born a year later. Through Evalina and my dad, there were three 00:26:00daughters born. There were four of us that were my dad's full daughters. Years later, he adopted an Apache girl. My oldest sister, Dorena fell in love with her because she used to babysit her. We call her Rachel. That is not her real name, but when we adopted her we changed it to Rachel. There were five of us girls that my dad raised and took around to pow-wows. He never married again after Evalina. When I was two years old, she left my dad. He never married again, but he had girlfriends. I remember going around everywhere and saying, "Are you my dad's girlfriend? Are you my dad's girlfriend?" He never wanted to marry again; 00:27:00it hurt him when my mom left. He has the four full daughters.

SN:You have talked about this a little bit already, that his livelihood and resources were basically doing odd jobs and making the arrowheads. Tell about how he did that. Did he sell the arrowheads to curio shops?

SA:He had a few rock shops [where] he would go and do trades. The rock shops would have big rocks that he could make a lot of arrowheads out of, so he would go and trade arrowheads. The majority of the time, we would be at a pow-wow. We had a truck and he would be sitting on the tailgate, whittling away at an arrowhead. People would come over and watch him make the arrowhead. They would 00:28:00say, "Are you going to sell that?" He would say, "Yes, you can have it for a couple of dollars." He got well-known for being an arrowhead maker. Anytime anybody needed an arrowhead, they would come and buy from him. He did have some places where he stopped, [like] the trading posts and he would sell some to them. The majority of the time, it was through that. A lot of the tribes would have give-a-ways. They would give you blankets or cash and we would get money [to use] for travel to the next pow-wow.

I am not sure if he sold beadwork. I know he did not bead, but when we got older, we did a lot of the beading. I do not think he made his living from any of the crafts other than the arrowheads. He did The Rocks Begin to Speak book in the 1970s so he did get royalty from that. I think what carried him through was 00:29:00getting the royalty money.

SN:Tell a little bit about how this book came about.

SA:He was collecting information and all of those loose leaf books that I have at home. He happened to be at Sundance up north by Fort Duchesne. A publisher, KC Publications, was there doing an interview for [a] southwest arts magazine that he was doing. Somebody introduced him. He said [after seeing] my dad's notes, that for the pages to be worn as much as they were there must be some truth in all that he was studying and [be] passionate about his work. He looked through the books and asked, "Would you be interested in doing an interpretation book on petroglyphs for [my] publication?" He thought about it and said, "Maybe 00:30:00I can write something up." He did have a magazine -- I cannot think of the name -- where he did have an article. KC Publications owned the magazines. He said, "Can you do one article on what you know, how you decipher these, and explain how they can be deciphered?" My dad did one article for the magazine. It was so popular that the publisher saw it was a moneymaker. He said, "If you can give me an entire book, I will advance you the money to travel where you need to take the photos of the pictures you want to put in the book and to do the artwork." My dad took a full year to get it organized enough to be in a book and then showed it to the publisher. It probably took two years to get that book written. My dad never intended --

SA:-- to do it. He was gathering information for himself. He wanted to learn it. 00:31:00He was so curious about the different tribes that he wanted to learn the writings so that he could go around and know the stories because they are all lost. He always said there were libraries of stories [in] every canyon you went up, every reservation you went to. Those were the libraries, but only the elders knew it. They would share the oral history with their family, or their tribe, so the tribal people knew it, but they never shared it with anybody. My dad always said, "If it is oral, nobody is ever going to know. Nobody is ever going to believe you. Unless it is actually written down, their history is going to die." 00:32:00So he was preserving it for himself to learn. Some of the tribes found out about it and they invited him to their reservation to talk. They tested him. There was a tribe in Arizona that invited him and said, "We want to see if you can read this writing." He read the writing. It was a map and he said it was telling them that if you go down here, you will come across this. It looked like it was a battle. He was [telling] the story and they said, "That is true." They took him down the path and showed him where the battle happened and where there was water. They believed my dad. They said, "How can you lie about something that is our history, never having been there before?" In the 1970s, they hired him every year. They took all of the school [children] out to learn about the petroglyphs, 00:33:00that [they] had meaning and that [they were] not only doodling or art like everybody now says it is. It was their history; it was their library.

He would do little books and reports for all the tribes because he was not trying to impress or prove a point that it was a writing system. They already knew it was a writing system. He learned it from the tribes that it was a writing system. He had done that with the tribes. When this book deal came along, he thought: I guess I could write a book and share what little I have. He was afraid to write it. He said, back when he wrote it, he was -- I am not sure of the percentage, but maybe 40% he could read. He did not want to publish a book until he was at least 90%, able to read every symbol. He did it because the publisher pushed him. He said he was not very happy with it because there was so much more that he could have explained in the 1990s after he had learned a lot more. However, he did the book and it became one of the best sellers. I do not know how many prints it has been in, but it has had quite a few reprints. It was popular.

He never went to college. He never [received] a degree in anything. He was hired 00:34:00to go present lectures at a lot of the colleges and different places. Because he was a white man talking about reading art -- as they called it, saying that it was art and could not be read -- he got a lot of criticism in the white world. Because he was a white man reading Indian writing. He was not a scholar, he had no degree. He was put down a lot, but he did not care because he knew the truth. He was raised knowing, he was raised reading it, and he was raised by the Indians knowing what the truth was. He did it regardless of what people said. He had a passion for it. If somebody is going to spend over forty years studying a writing system, there has to be a lot of truth to it.

SN:I agree.

MG:If he was more knowledgeable in the 1990s, did he want to do a revised version?

SA:Yes.

MG:Did he ever do that?

SA:I have it. It is The Rocks Begin to Speak II book. He has the introductions and a lot of the interpretations in there, but he is missing seven chapters and I cannot find them. He has doodling that says, "You need to look at" this book or that book. It is not complete, but yes, I have it. I am not sure if I want to 00:36:00publish it as a The Rocks Begin to Speak II book. Right now, I am working on a dictionary because he had four volumes of dictionaries. He would have, for example, a sun symbol and he would have a variety of meanings next to it. I am working on that right now to do a dictionary of symbols. I am thinking of putting the introduction of The Rocks Begin to Speak II into the dictionary and merge them together. It will be published and it is 90% readable now. Even though he has passed away, he will have more credibility. You know when you are alive everybody wants to put you down because they say it cannot be read. At 90% readable, I think people are going to look through a dictionary, see a symbol, maybe go out to a site and say, "Yes, that is true. It looks like the same symbol and it can be read."

MG:What would you call it?

SA:Right now, it is Symbol Dictionary. I am working with a professor [and] we are going to get it published. Right now, we are digitizing it, because everything is in pencil and can be smeared. We have everything scanned so everything is on a little disk right now. I am going through his typing. If you look through the notes he writes, everything is in capital. If it is not capital, it is in cursive and I cannot read a lot of his cursive. It is smeared so it has taken a long time. The symbols are on lined paper, in pencil and smeared. [Carol Patterson] is using photoshop to take the symbol off the smeared background. She is doing the symbols and I am doing the typing. Between the two of us, we are hoping to get a book out in 2020. It was [planned for] 2019, but I think in 2020 we will have the first volume out. I think it has to be done in volumes because he has over 200 chapters in there on different varieties of symbols, such as hands or walking, and everything that has to do with a symbol. 00:38:00It is going to have to be done in volumes. [Laughter]

SN:I believe that anybody [who] spends time in front of petroglyphs, anywhere, can see the similarity anywhere you go ─ in the Southwest at least.

MG:Did he say the petroglyphs were similar to the sign language?

SA:Yes. I have a PowerPoint that I give on the Paiute tribe. I do mention that sign language is what is written on the rocks. I give signs, for instance, "to go up" in sign is like this, and then I will show a picture of a spiral. If it is going the other way, it will show it going down. On the PowerPoint, I have a picture of a -- in picture writing it looks like a pueblo. I explain every 00:39:00symbol and then I will show the sign next to it. There is a dot with a circle around it and I will say, "If you go like this and hold your finger, there is a dot in the middle and that means to hold." In sign language, it means "to hold," and if you see that symbol on the rock, it means "to hold." Every symbol can be explained into a sign. It is fascinating. I do teach a lot of the Paiute sign language around the campfire and how a lot of the elders could not speak so everybody had to sign so they could understand. I saw that growing up; people would sign whether they were deaf or not. It was habit when they would talk, "I am going over here," their hands would just move. I thought that was fascinating, but now you do not see that.

SN:That is very interesting. Can you talk a little more about the dance groups? The travels that you did with your sisters and your father?

SA:My dad did it with the Boy Scouts and later on he did it with the Paiute tribe. He and some of his friends went around and did that. Growing up, my dad taught us values -- these days, you can go dance, compete and you win money. Back in those days, probably in the 1970s, they had competitions and events. They had different categories such as traditional fancy, women's fancy, women's traditional, and they would dance for money. My dad said, "I do not want you to dance for money, because you are going to get it in your head that it is all about competing. It is not about holding yourself up with pride." When you 00:41:00compete, you are in a hurry to make an outfit so you can go out there and be like your outfit. You want to be flashy and you want to win. He said, "I do not want you to be raised that way." During our junior and teen years, we did not compete; we merely went and danced. We traveled everywhere, dancing for the fun of it.

When we got in our late teens, there was competition. We would always walk out when the participants would stand up and have their number taken. People would say, "Why are you walking out? You dance so well that you would have won that." We were always told that. My dad said, "You all have danced so long without money, you can start competing. You have it instilled in you that it is not all about the money." We started dancing and we started making money. Between the 00:42:00five sisters, we were making our own cash [by going to] dance. These days, you can win $1,500 if you win first place. It has become a competition where you can make $1,000 a week dancing, depending on where you go and, I guess a lot of times, who you know. Now, it is into politics where this family is going to pick that family because they know them. You can make a living dancing year round. They have pow-wows in the winter and summer. We started going up to Canada. They really liked our regalia because we tried to do it traditionally.

Our dad taught us through the elders' teaching. They told us that you could not do things for money, because it would not turn out right. You could not sell 00:43:00things, even medicines. They said never gather medicines and go sell it because it is not going to heal the person [who] the medicine was meant for. We [were taught] that you had to learn things the hard way, the original way. It may not have been hard back in the day, but if you compare now, it was hard. We had to learn how to make our own thread to sew. We had to get the sinew off the deer, strip the sinew, rub it to soften it, wet it in our mouths and then sit there to twist it. We had to make our own thread and the threads were this long, depending, if you got a buffalo sinew, it would be a long piece. We had to make our own thread and how to not use a needle. We had to use a bone awl to make the holes to put the thread through. We had to learn everything the hard way. We had 00:44:00to learn to quill before we could do beadwork because quillwork was before beads ever came to be. Beads are glass and that was not introduced until the 1800s. We had to learn to quill, how to dye the quills different colors using natural berries, roots and leaves. We had to learn from scratch. We had to learn how to gather the wolf moss and to boil it to make yellow. The yellow would not turn out and so we would have to mix different ingredients. We learned everything from the original way that people knew hundreds and thousands of years ago.

After we learned that, we moved to beadwork, a needle and thread, so we knew the difference. We knew the time that it took to make something and so we valued what we made. My sisters and I put a lot of detail in all of the beadwork. When we started going to pow-wows to dance and compete, people would say that we 00:45:00stood out because our beadwork had meaning or feeling; it was different. It was not done with sequins or flashy things to catch your attention. It was done authentically to look like you just stepped out of the past. People started inviting us to different villages asking, "Can you come over and teach us? Can you do your dances and show us the different things that you know?" We started getting invited to some of the villages that you had to fly into, in Ontario [Canada], up north, and all the way back east. We would do shows and then a presentation of our dancing. The schools started inviting us and we would teach at the schools, mostly in the southwest during the winter times. We would do anything from quill work to beading to flute playing. I played flute when I was a teenager and my sister, Jetta, played flute. My dad said, because our first flute was given to us and we did not make it, "If you are going to learn how to play flute, you have got to learn how to make it the original way." We had to gather the wood and learn how to hollow it out without metal tools. We learned how to do that. After a while, we would teach the other [children] how to do it. 00:46:00We would go around to different Indian schools and teach them everything we knew. The five sisters got a reputation of going around doing arts, crafts, or cultural teachings. They would have cultural camps in the summer and we would skin a buffalo and teach them how to use every part of the buffalo from the bone to the sinew and to the bladder to make the water bags. We just learned. I try now to teach my [children], but it seems harder because I do not travel as much and they stay put in one spot. A lot of times I think it is going in one ear and out the other. It seems that times have changed. It seems harder to teach them than when I grew up.

SN:In the autobiography, it said that he spent quite a bit of time with the Apaches in San Carlos.

SA:Yes.

SN:Where is that located?

SA:It is 100 miles east of Phoenix on the San Carlos Apache Reservation. In the 1970s we moved to Las Vegas [Nevada] because my dad was doing the book and that is where the publisher was. We spent one year there and then we moved to San Carlos when I was, probably, in the second grade. He said he wanted to move us to a tribe that had -- San Carlos Apache tribe has over 10,000 tribal members and my tribe, the Shivwits tribe, there were only a few houses on the reservation. He said he wanted us girls to pick and choose our friends and not just pick who was there. Some of them may have [been a] bad influence ─ some may drink, and some may do drugs. He wanted us to choose between the more traditional people rather than only who was here. He moved us from the Shivwits 00:48:00Reservation in St. George to the Apache Reservation so that we could have a bigger variety of friends. I was raised Apache once we moved there. I think I knew more Apache words than Paiute words and it was the same with my sisters. We were raised Apache and they were traditional there. Some of the women could not speak English. We lived there my [entire] life until my dad got sick and then we moved home in 2000. That was the year he passed away. My sisters and I were raised in Arizona on the Apache Reservation. We learned everything from the way they cooked their acorns, how they gathered their roots and how they did their cradleboards. It did not matter which tribe you were from, like my dad told us, they are all family. We had the good values being raised [like that]. We never 00:49:00grew up drinking or doing drugs; not one of my sisters or I ever picked it up. Even in our twenties and thirties, it was something that -- because we were raised so traditionally. It was not [like] where a lot of people who live in small communities and there is nothing to do, no teaching, no elders to teach you anything, so they turn to drinking or drugs, or whatever they needed to do.

Because our life was so full of traveling and wanting to -- we spent the winter making outfits because the next year for summer and competing, we wanted to have the best outfits. My sisters and I would sit around the table talking. We would tan hides. We grew up a close family and we are still close today. There is not a day goes by that not one of us is not talking to each other. We were raised drug and alcohol free. My dad always told us, "If you want to drink, you drink 00:50:00in front of me. If you have a beer, that is fine," but we did not want to drink in front of our dad. [Laughter] It was something ─ why would we want to drink? It was not an interest to us; we were busy doing other things. By him moving us to a tribe where we had a variety of friends [who] also did not drink and do drugs, we were raised not wanting to experience any of that. They were out maybe picking roots or doing things that we had an interest in, so our life was raised more traditionally than the majority of the people now.

SN:One thing that I noticed in the autobiography is when you went to the Gallup Intertribal Ceremonials in Gallup [New Mexico] one time, evidently you represented the Shivwits and it was announced that it was the least known tribe in America.

SA:That was my dad. That was in the 1960s or possibly the 1950s and they did the 00:51:00Mountain Sheep Dance. They won that every year because it was unique. Nobody had ever seen dancers with mountain sheep horns on and doing their little dance. That was announced that they were the least known tribe in the United States. I am not sure back then how many tribal members the Shivwits alone had, but today there are only 312. In the 1800s, there was 800 to 1,000. Through disease, pioneers, invasions and killings, it dwindled down to hardly anybody. My dad always said that our tribe may be small and one of the poorest tribes in the 00:52:00United States, but we had simple values. A lot of the tribes had so many ceremonies and so many rituals that they have to go through every day that -- which is good and I have learned a lot of them -- but the Paiutes were a simple people who lived every day. I am not going to say to survive, but we lived every day a simple life. He thought that was the cleanest, most beautiful thing, to see a tribe that is simple, but yet beautiful in his eye.

SN:I have a question about the quill work because I think anybody listening to this will know about beadwork, but quill work is less known. Can you give us the description of how quill work is done from beginning to end?

SA:Quill work is from a porcupine. To this day, if we see a dead porcupine on 00:53:00the side of the road, we will pull over. If it is fresh enough, we will throw it in the truck, take it home, skin it and keep the quills [from] it. If you get the really long pieces, you can dye the quills a variety of colors. You flatten the quill and when it is flat, you wrap it around, for [example], rawhide and it looks like a flat stitch. I am not sure how to explain it, but you can make all kinds of designs. There are a variety of ways to quill. A stem of a flower is more of a curl stitch where it is bent around each other to look like a stem. There is another where you use two; it is a crisscross pattern. There is a 00:54:00variety of ways to do a stitch in quilling, but that is how they did the designs. They would quill the men's buckskins shirts. They have quillwork along their war bonnets, so that was how they did their designs. Now, you do the beadwork, but back then, after you quilled it and designed your outfit, it would last a long time.

After you flatten the quill and you use your fingernail to flatten it, if you soaked it -- a lot of times my sisters and I would put it in our mouths. We would cut the tip off so it did not poke us. To soften the quill, put it in your mouth for a minute so it would soften and then you [could] start stitching. You would have to bend the quill and once the quill dried, it turned hard and there was no way to unbend that without getting it wet. The quillwork lasted a long time; it was a tough stitch. You would not think that a porcupine would make 00:55:00such beautiful designs, but it does. Dyeing it, alone, was a challenge. We had to learn a variety of ways to keep the dye in. [For example], you would think you could throw some blueberries in with some quills, it would dye it blue, but that is not the case. It would dye it a brown color and so you had to learn how to mix your dyes. I still quill today. Quill work is now in demand and can be $100 per inch. It is very pricey and it is valuable. It is good to know. I notice a lot of the young [people] are learning quill work. In the 1990s, you hardly knew anybody who could quill, so it is being brought back.

MG:If you get caught in the rain, does it come undone?

SA:No. Once it dries in a certain shape, if you get it wet, it is not going to 00:56:00uncurl itself, unless the entire thing is soaked in water. Merely getting rain splashed on it is not going to uncurl it. It stays hard, almost like cement; it cements itself into that shape.

SN:[Tell about] petroglyphs in this area. We have such an enormous amount of petroglyphs in the St. George region. They are almost everywhere you look. If you look for them, you can see petroglyphs everywhere. By your tribal lands, there are so many on the way out there.

SA:My dad had said that in the 1960s, because that is when St. George started to grow, that Washington County was the worst county in all of the United States for the destruction of petroglyphs, historical sites, cultural sites and digging 00:57:00up bones. St. George went through a period when there was a lot of destruction. I even heard that there is a newspaper, and I am not sure which newspaper it was in the early 1900s, was advertising that the freeway that went in over there going towards Wal-Mart, that they had dug up so many bones that it was in the newspaper to come over and sort through and pick whatever you want because we are going to plow through that. They were going through human remains to get pottery, beads, or whatever they could. It was advertised -- come and get it before we move it away. There was destruction all over St. George. In this area, there was a lot of history, not only with my Shivwits Band, but a lot of the Paiute Bands. Archaeologists say that the Anasazi were here before the Paiutes, 00:58:00but our oral history says that we were always here. We were here when the volcanoes erupted; we have never left here, but archaeologists say, "No, that was a different people." When we would ask them where we come from, they would say, "I do not know; you just appeared here so-and-so many years, not too long ago." Our history tells us [differently]. There was an archaeologist at Mt. Trumbull [on the Arizona Strip who] had found a pottery that had melted into a volcanic rock that you can see at the BLM [Bureau of Land Management] office [in St. George.].

SN:Yes, you can see that today.

SA:[Laughter] Yes, and after doing the studies on that, they found out [that] maybe your [people] were here longer than we [have thought]. Because now, when you look at the pictures that show us in wikiups, they say, "Your [people] always migrated. Your [people] were always on the go. Your [people] were hunters 00:59:00and gatherers so you never had a permanent structure." But they do not know that. We had elders; how could they travel year-round? We had permanent structures that would stay here and the rest would travel to go with the seasons, go pick pine nuts, or to go to Fish Lake [Sevier County, Utah] to do the gatherings and get fish. Yes, we did travel a lot, but we did have permanent structures. They say we were not Anasazi, but that was our people. We fight, to this day, for structures that are being destroyed. They are saying, "That is not your people." We say, "Yes, it is." We are fighting to preserve and make sure that those bodies that you are digging up come back to our tribe because those were my ancestors, whether you believe it or not. There were [numerous] villages throughout this whole valley. We are probably sitting on one now, but [they were] everywhere.

My dad, in reading some of the history on the petroglyphs, found a story on our 01:00:00reservation of a young girl. There is a picture of a parrot and there are no parrots around here with a big long beak. He read that to us and [the story] said that -- because a lot of the Spaniards in the Spanish Trail days would take a lot of the young [children] as slaves and then sell them into Mexico -- one Paiute girl escaped and made her way all the way back home. She talked about that bird with the long tail and the colorful bird with the big beak. There is a picture of it to prove that she found her way back. There is a story there. The petroglyphs all over here are written about everything, from slavery to battles to land claims to everyday life. Every time I see that there is a new development --

SA:-- going up, it breaks my heart because I know that there had to have been 01:01:00something underneath that [ground] at one time. I hear stories that people -- because you have to stop construction if you come across a bone -- say, "If you see bones, keep going." I have heard many stories where there was a pile of bones that people just threw in the dump because they did not want to stop [the construction project]. When I see this valley and all the destruction, it is sad to see because they have destroyed our history.

SN:It is amazing that we still have hundreds of petroglyphs, and yet, thousands have been lost.

SA:I have a lot that were destroyed that my dad had recorded. He got the maps, he took the photos. I will go back and see a new site come up like on the other side of Airport Hill and I will say, "There are houses there." I will go back and look at my dad's maps and say, "Yes, there are petroglyphs that were there. I wonder what happened to them." Because it is private property, you do not know what they have done with the petroglyphs. I know if there are bones, you have to 01:02:00stop, but if there are petroglyphs, what are they doing with them? I have probably the only photos of the destroyed sites and that is all that remains.

SN:I know the preservation of the petroglyphs within the St. George city limits is, I think, something that may be high on their list of [priorities]. I know in the last year, they did hire someone to do a complete survey of everything that remains. At least they know what remains.

SA:I was on [the Shivwits Band] Council for eight years. I was a cultural resource manager. When I [came] on, the different agencies did not work with the tribes. My sister, Dorena, works for the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah as a cultural resource manager. From growing up [the traditional way we did], we ended up in cultural [groups and committees], because we knew a lot of the 01:03:00culture. She is the main manager for all of the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah. She said that a lot of the agencies were not working with the tribal people. I do not know if that is because the tribes were not aware that things were going on, or they were not being informed. When I [came] on, I made sure to read everything. I said, "Should we be signing this?" I would talk to my sister and she said, "No, you do not have to sign it, but they have to consult with you." Through being in there for eight years, we did a lot of changes. Now, we work with the BLM well. We work with [the United States] Forest [Service] well. Before that, I have no idea what happened to a lot of these [artifacts]. Now, the state works with us with repatriation. We [received] some land where we can repatriate now. There have been a lot of changes.

Now [there are] a lot of the kiosks where you go out to some of the sites that the BLM [has]. They would look through the books and pick what they wanted to 01:04:00put on there [as] history for us. Now, they will write it up, send it to Dorena and Dorena will send it to me. We will read it over and we will make changes. They do work with the tribes now and I am so grateful because before, there was no communication between the different agencies and now it has changed.

SN:The last thing on the list here is about your father's spiritual beliefs. I know his whole life, number one, was a spiritual quest. He went through several phases of different spiritual growth. I know that impacted you quite a bit.

SA:Yes, our dad told us, "I am not going to pick a religion for you. If one day you want to go to a church, you can go to a church. I am not going to stop you 01:05:00from doing what you believe in." Growing up, because of all the experiences he had with spirituality and different paths he took, he learned, and that is why he left it up to us. His dad was Mormon [The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints], and his uncles are all jack-Mormons. They were Mormon, but they did not go every Sunday. They just belonged to the religion. He was baptized and he had a sister a year younger than him who was also baptized. He grew up in the church and did genealogy in the church. He and his first wife were married in the temple. By his second wife he had backed off from the Mormon Church.

He said it was the little things in the church. He did studies for himself on religion. He learned all about religions through his travels and all the 01:06:00different bibles he read. He would hop trains, get off and get work wherever he could, to see what it was like to travel around. He would go into odd churches, [looking as] poor as he could [and] as dirty as he could. He would see who would accept him. He did that to see if they [acted] as they preached. The majority of churches would turn him away. He would do a study within himself to see how the different churches were and what they believed. He said that, out of all of them, he liked the Mormon Church the best because of the things that were taught.

He became discouraged by some of the branch presidents where he was, in 01:07:00Richfield or different places, and how they took advantage of the Indians. Indians were his number one priority and when they would take advantage of them, it became a hurt for him. How can this church do this to these people? He [became] discouraged with the church and so he stopped going. That is why he never let us go to church. My oldest sister was baptized and so was her sister who passed away. He was married in the temple with his first marriage, but when he married my mom, it was not in the temple. It was only a quick wedding.

He taught us growing up that the Native American beliefs -- we believe in a Creator. You pray every morning. You wake up before the sun and you say your prayers. Everything has life. There is no one place that you go to worship the 01:08:00Creator or God; it is everywhere. Every rock has life, every plant has life, the water has life and the trees have life. Through the Native American teachings of religion, he found that was the best church there could be. As long as you believed in the Creator, you did not idolize any one thing. You only believed in Him. He found that the religion of [only] believing in God was the best one. That is why he said, "One day, if you want to go to church, that is fine. I am not going to stop you." That was [his] experience, but he was discouraged. The spirituality was the Paiute belief that we all believe in a Creator and that everything has life.

SN:In his autobiography, he talks quite a bit about receiving signs about the future. He felt like he had a special gift to be able to interpret those kinds of things as well. That was quite interesting.

SA:I think being taught from [the time he was] a teenager about the Native American -- I do not like to use the term "Native American" because we were here before America was America. When I talk to people, they understand what Native American is. It is a conflict for me to say "Native American." I like the term "Indian" because I was raised knowing Indian. My dad was the same way. He said, "We were called Indian when I was growing up, so I will use that term 'Indian.'" Growing up Indian and praying every day. He went on a fast, like the Indians do. 01:10:00When they reach a certain age or when they are seeking a vision, they will go on a fast. He went on his vision [fast] and he [received] his vision the first day. He went to sun dances. It is four-day sun dances where you get a vision while you are there. You are not drinking water or eating, so you get a vision through that. That is for the people who are seeking a higher -- they are expecting something more in life. A lot of them are going because they want to become a medicine man and they are looking for teachings to become a medicine man. I do 01:11:00not know that he was lost, but he was seeking visions to see where his path was going. He was raised Paiute; he believed Paiute. He was Indian in his eyes. He had learned a variety of different spiritualities of seeking things. He became a healer for a short time. People would come to him and he would heal them. He never talked to us about that. It was not until years later when I looked through his book that I found out that he was a healer. He did tell us how we could heal. He told all my sisters and me that you can heal anybody from any sickness there ever is. He said, "You see and you hear medicine men doing that."

In my husband's tribe, the Moapa Band of Paiutes, there were a lot of healers who had come to [the] Shivwits and had healed [small children who] were dying. 01:12:00Healing was a big spiritual level from the average Indian. I do not know if he was seeking that when he went on his vision quest, but he could heal people. He healed somebody with cancer. I read some of [the] papers that somebody else had written on him that he healed a lot of people. He became discouraged because he did not know if he was healing them for the right reasons or if he was healing them -- [or] if they were good enough to be healed. You get that conflict of: should I be healing this person? Were they a bad person? You get all those conflicts. I do not know why, but he quit. He told us how to heal, but my sisters and I are not on that level to become a medicine woman or to be able to 01:13:00do that. He taught us to heal through the different medicines and to gather. He was very spiritual and I think that is why we were raised the way we were. As long as we believed in the Creator, that we were untouchable. There was not anything that could touch our family. We had a lot of -- I do not know if you would call it witchcraft or jealousy or bad medicine that was aimed at my family. It was like a barrier was around us and we always made it through. My dad seemed to always know and be one step ahead of [when] people were wishing badly on us. He knew something bad was going to happen. I think I [have] that 01:14:00inside [myself]. I will know when something bad is going to happen and I will not go. For instance, if I am supposed to go to Arizona tomorrow -- one time I did that and I had a bad feeling of: oh, I cannot go. Then that feeling washed away. Our dad taught us that you have to stop and look at your surroundings. Do not merely go through life. There is a spirituality in his teachings that he passed along to us. As long as you believe in the Creator and do not idolize anything else, you will live a good life.

SN:Is there anything else you want to say about some remembrances of your father, other than what we have talked about? Is there any memory you might have had just between you and him? A treasured remembrance that you have of him that 01:15:00you would like to share?

SA:I know when he was going all over the United States, especially in the summer and fall, he was going to petroglyphs sites that were impossible to get to. Being young, we had to pack along his notebook and his camera. Growing up, my sisters and I said we hated those trips; we had to go everywhere. We climbed every rock, every canyon, every hill and growing up we did not like that. Now that we look back, I [can] say, "I guess I did go there and those different places." I do not see it, now, as bad as I did then because you were walking in 113° weather. My dad always taught us that you do not take water with you. He taught us [about] the different plants. The elders taught us [about] the different plants. There are ways to get what you need [when] you are hiking. I remember growing up that I did not want to go on another hike. [Laughter] It was 01:16:00hard and it did not seem like I learned anything.

He would tell us things about the rocks. That rock means this or that, then he would say, "Go ask the elders and see what they say." There are things that I did not think I remembered until my dad passed away. The BLM in Las Vegas asked me to come and do a talk on my dad. It was about Sloan Canyon [near Henderson, Nevada where] they were going. I do not know if they were going to make it a park, but they needed information on it. They sent me a whole lot of pictures and said, "Can you do a lecture on this?" I thought: I do not know what I am going to say, but I will go and talk about my dad. When I [arrived] there they were showing the slides. It seemed like all of the things I did not know that I knew, I had retained. You think going through life, I should have listened to 01:17:00this or that, but I did learn a lot.

I remember my dad telling me, probably in the 1990s, that, "Out of all my daughters, you are the only one who is going to carry all this through." He did not feel bad [then]. He was getting sick in the late 1990s because he had cancer. That is what he died from. He said, "All this work that I am doing is not going to be in vain." I let it go eighteen years and had it in storage. I keep thinking back to my dad. He told me I [was] going to do this, but it was sitting there. So I got off [the] council. It was good for eight years, but it is very stressful and there is a lot of negativity from being on the council. I [can] say [that] I am stress-free now and I can do this because this is my new path. I retained more than I actually thought he had taught us. It is the same 01:18:00with the elders. A lot of times we would be sitting together and I will tell my sister, "Do you remember how to do a certain thing?" They will say no, but one will remember. We all, through life, pick up different [memories]. Between all of the sisters, we seem to carry each other through with what we learned through our life in our dad's teachings.

We were raised by our dad and it is funny how he was not Indian, but we were raised Indian. Our mom would tell us, "I have to ask you because you know more than I do." [Laughter] She went to boarding school and lived on the reservation. She did not travel and there were no elders to teach her. Her mom and dad died when she was young. That is the situation with a lot of the tribal people and we do not want our [children] to lose that. Any chance we get, I say my door is 01:19:00open and you can learn whatever you want, from tanning deer hides and [how] to skin them. Anything! My dad taught me how to do arrowheads. He was showing me a move one time and I sliced into my finger. It opened up to the bone. After that, I said, "I am not going to do it anymore." [Laughter] My fifteen year old son says, "Mom, I know you know how to make arrowheads. When are you going to teach me?" He never met his grandpa. He said, "My grandpa had all these rocks here. They are just sitting there, waiting for me to make something out of them." He is at that age now. I told him in our tribe, in most Indian tribes, that it is not a grade level. You cannot say, "You only learn things when you hit a certain grade." When you are growing up, you want to learn how to do something. I do not care what age you are, you teach them if they want to know it. He wanted to know it back when he was about seven [years old]. [Laughter] To this day, I have not 01:20:00taught him. I feel bad that I am not passing on the teachings that I had as I should be.

SN:How many descendants does your dad have as far as grandchildren?

SA:My oldest sister, Dorena, has two boys and her oldest [child] has two little girls. Carmen had a son, but he passed away. He had a muscle disease and they said he [would] not live very long. She adopted two [children] recently. She has a four year old and a one year old. My sister, Jetta, has a boy and a girl, and I have two boys. One thing that my dad taught me that I listened to [laughter] was that most people now-a-days will wait until they retire, then they will go see the world. He told us, "You see the world before you have [children] and 01:21:00then settle down." I did not have [children] until I was in my late thirties. My [children] now are teenagers.

SN:He does mention in his autobiography that you and your sisters have traveled around the [entire] world.

SA:My sister, Carmen, was the world traveler. She read every book throughout her life. She was reading books all the time. One day she said, "Save money. We are going to go travel around the world because it was in the summer. Think of all the countries you want to visit and I will add it to all the countries I want to visit. We will go to a travel agency and pick the countries." We [were gone] thirty-nine days. We picked all the countries we wanted to visit and it was around the world. China was the last one and then back home. That is what my dad said, "You see the world and do everything you want to do. When you retire, who is to say you will not get sick and you will not be able to do it. Do it while 01:22:00you are young." And so we did. We went all over as a family. We went to Yucatan [Mexico], Belize, and we performed in Mexico City [Mexico]. We hiked and we had a pack horse to go to Tarahumara [Chihuahua, Mexico] country and danced with them. We have been coast to coast, whether it was dancing with my family or traveling just to see the different cultures. My passion is to see the different cultures. I like to go and learn from them to teach my [children]. We have been in every state except Alaska, teaching them and learning. I have had it for life.

SN:I think we will stop for today.

MG:Why did your mom leave your dad?

SA:There was a turkey plant up here where she worked and she found another [man] 01:23:00there. She [became] pregnant and wrote a note to [my dad] saying, "When you read this, I will be gone." She moved to Tucson [Arizona] somewhere. It was not until a year later that she came back. She had her baby and said she was trying to take all of her [children]. My dad said no. She had to write a letter saying she was not going to take any of us, but she did take me to go [for a] visit. When I came back, I was being mean to my dad. She was trying to put my dad against me to take the kids. She wrote a letter saying she would never try to fight for custody of us. My dad got full custody of us. She just found somebody else. I have other half-siblings; I have two other sisters and a brother from my mom's side.

MG:What tribe is she from?

SA:Here, Shivwits Paiutes.

MG:Do you keep in touch with her?

SA:She passed away at a young age; she was forty-five, she had diabetes. Pretty much everybody on my tribal side is diabetic and they're all dying of diabetes. I don't have it. Our dad taught us, luckily, to avoid the wrong [foods] to eat and to be more traditional. Who is to say, I could still get it, but [laughter] I try to live a healthy life.

SN:Thank you so much for coming in today and bringing all this wonderful information about your tribe, and your father and his life. I think we will stop for today. Hopefully, maybe we could meet on Thursday? I do have one other shorter interview I would like to do with you about just the Paiute tribal history; not about your dad, but Paiute tribal history as you know it. I'll just 01:25:00ask you to start from where you think the beginning was of your tribe, down to now.

SA:[Laughter]

KB:She's like, that's not going to be a short interview.

SA:I don't know dates; I don't know --.

SN:It's just a generalized [history]. I've heard so many things about how the Shivwits got their land there, but their native, traditional land is on the edge of the Grand Canyon [Arizona]. They were moved there. I don't know that that's -- we ought to get something down about that.

SA:I know it's written somewhere. When I was on council, I had the paper that it was written on, but I never learned the dates. I never learned the acreage that was given or the little details like that. My PowerPoint that I do now for the public and the schools is on the tribe as a whole, how many bands there are, how 01:26:00many states they live in, what is the population [and] the foods they ate. It's like a culture-gram that the schools have for every culture in the world. It's based from marriage life, foods, health and commerce. It is based on the tribe as a whole. As for the Shivwits, I could do some research and get dates.

SN:Just an in-general history of how your tribe got the land there and what's happened over the years since you got moved onto that land. I know that you lost tribal designation and then you received it back. It is a very interesting type of history. Would you be able to come again on Thursday morning for an hour?

MG:Yes.

SN:We will do that, and then maybe you could see if you want any of this. I do 01:27:00have this to give you, if that's alright with you to put into the [library]. It's a copy of his actual autobiography. If it's okay with you.

SA:I don't have anything copyrighted, but you did mention about his books that he did. He has a book on how to make bows, arrows and arrowheads. He has a sign language book that he did. They're not copyrighted, but because this is my new business now, is to go through this, I'm going to publish the sign language. I'm not sure about the bow and arrow making 'cause there's a lot of secrets in there. I know when he asked the Indians the secrets, they said not to share it. I am having trouble on should I share that because it is lost now and nobody knows it?

MG:Why is it secret?

SA:Well, back in the day, Paiutes were well-known for their arrowhead making. 01:28:00They made mountain sheep horn bows. The mountain sheep horns are curled. To uncurl that horn and to make it flat is a secret in itself. To make it so that when you pull it, it is not going to break is a secret in itself. They would trade with the other tribes that were warring tribes and because we were a peaceful tribe, they were secrets that they never shared with any of the other tribes. They were skilled at it and all the tribes came to them because they wanted it.

SN:It is like protecting a trademark today.

SA:Because it was a secret that now is lost. We're not a warring tribe and none of the other tribes are warring tribes. Should I reveal that? Because you know it's the mountain men who are gonna want to learn it and they're the ones that are gonna learn it. Are they going to give credit to the Paiute tribe? Or are they going to say, "This is what I learned through hard work. I learned it all on my own." I don't like that idea of them not giving credit where it's due. So 01:29:00that's why I am not sure. I could digitize it and give it to the tribal kids to learn because I do teach a lot of arrowhead making. They cook some of the stones in the ground. He talks about that, the temperature that it needs to be, how far down in the ground, and all those little details. He did the complete book, but just maybe for tribal eyes. I'm not sure.

SN:Only the things that you think you'd like to have stored here that would be important to have archived professionally --.

SA:See, I'm not worried about that. I'm gonna get it published so I don't need it archived if I am going to publish it.

KB:Ideally, once you've got it published, the originals and his research notes 01:30:00would then still be available? Those are important primary documents that I would hate to see lost. We do have the benefit here that we're open to everybody. You can put restrictions as far as time, restricting to certain people however, is difficult for us to do because we're a public institution; we need to be open to the public, but we can kind of request that, and we do request that anything that's used from our collection is cited as to the source, to try and make sure that everybody knows that it's by the Band, instead of, "Oh, well I discovered this all on my own." That's a very legit concern and that we do deal with as well. But it's entirely up to you because I do realize there are some things that are sensitive and you maybe don't want shared outside the Band or maybe the whole tribe.

SA:And that's where I'm touchy at, too, because when my dad passed away, I had a lot of the colleges come after, or saying they were gonna come after me and take everything because my dad had willed it to them. And I knew that wasn't true; and so my sisters and I, we took everything that he ever had and we put it in storage. And we hid it there for five years thinking that people are gonna come and get all of his stuff. So I don't want to part with any of it. I don't want it archived, I don't want it out of my sight. It's in my family and it's gonna stay in my family.

KB:In that case, I might have suggestions on how to store so that it is preserved.

SA:We've been putting it in those acid sleeves. Now everything that is one of a kind, like all of his pencil stuff, we are filing 'em and putting them in the proper way. Once I digitize them, then I protect them.

KB:Then you store them. Good.

SA:So that's only the issue I have. And he did a "Book of Reality" he calls it 01:32:00and throughout his life studies he's written down poems, he's written down phrases of his experiences in life. He talks about love, he talks about war, it's like whole chapters of different varieties that he's done little sayings for. And that's like a really big book that I don't know if I'll ever get published, but it's just something to read once in a while. It's his beliefs, I may not believe all of it, especially when it comes to love and marriage, I don't believe a lot of the stuff he wrote in there. [Laughter] So I don't know if I'll ever publish that one. And it's more things like this. Like he's got original, especially on his side of the family, he got original marriage documents in here, and original writings, old newspaper articles, and letters, love letters, and so this is the only thing that, if anything's gonna be 01:33:00preserved, it's gonna be that, I haven't, because the book is so thick I, unless I'm looking for genealogy to here, I've just, I haven't read. We don't really touch it.

MG:Who put those books together?

SA:My dad did 'em. And he had my mom write her whole history, so she wrote a pencil, two pages of what she can remember, so he was good at telling 'em, you need to preserve whatever you've learned growing up.

MG:After their divorce?

SA:No, when they were married. Right from day one he says, "Can you write about your, what you remember about your dad, mom?" So he was in here writing it and so we like to look through this one 'cause my sons are always curious. We're related to Charlemagne, we're related to the Brewster-Scotts. Brewster-Scotts is my twenty-fourth grandpa and so we're related to the queens and kings and so, this one he says they can date back to Adam and Eve. So he knew how to keep his 01:34:00history on his side. And then when it comes to this side, we can only go back to three grandpas or grandmas and that's it. There's nothing before that. So this one is a little more, not as much.

MG:Yeah, I've always wondered that with petroglyphs, like it would be nice if you could get a name out of it somehow. And you know who that person is.

SA:And they do, they have names in there. Yeah. You know, back in the day, people are named for objects and the wind and lightning and animals, so, my son is named, his nickname is Bear, so I say if were to ever to write about you on the rocks, we would just show a bear and whatever you're good at, he would have the skill, so names would be easy to find out. Because back then their names were all kinds of names. [Laughter]

MG:So just like the long horn sheep or somethin', did that represent a person?

SA:It represents The People. And in Paiute, we don't call ourselves Paiute, we call ourselves "Nuwuvi" which means "The People". And so when you're talkin about The People you show mountain sheep. Mountain sheep is who we are. And so if you see a whole tribe of mountain sheep, it's talkin about us going on a trip, or a family goin' somewhere or, so it talks about The People. So you see a lot of mountain sheep petroglyphs around, especially over in that-- We went to go take pictures over at The Valley of Fire area, it talks a lot about mountain sheep and there's a lot of mountain sheep over there. I actually did a article on it, I actually got my first publication through one of the Italian magazines on my interpretations. 'Cause I always say I don't like to follow in my, I don't like to use my dad's name to make myself known. Like my dad did this or my dad did that, I want to become my own person and not follow in his shadow. So I use 01:36:00his name but, because I learned a lot of stuff from my elders about the writings and the sign language and he led me on the right path to these things. So when I did my first paper on the petroglyphs over at the Nevada area, my husband's area, I talked about how I believed or how I was raised and I say, I give my dad credit but I didn't say he wrote it and I didn't say this is his words. It's my own writing and my own words. And then when I see petroglyphs, I see things that my dad may not have seen, I see it more through an Indian eye than he did, because he was white. And so I hear people say that I think he would learn it quicker than your dad did. [It] took him forty somethin' years, he says if I'd really studied I probably could learn it quicker. So I see things now when I see 01:37:00petroglyphs, I go "Oh, I know what that means." I already know, I can read a lot of that. But I don't like to share it, 'cause I might be wrong. I'm still nervous and [laughter] I'm not 100% sure of certain things but it's getting interesting where I'm getting that passion where I want to learn. So I wrote my first paper and I got published, so I'm excited about that.

SN:That's good, that's very good.

MG:Where is your husband from?

SA:He's from Moapa, where the Valley of Fire is.

MG:Is he Indian?

SA:Mm-hmm [affirmative]. He's the chairman for the Moapa Band of Paiutes till December, they're doing elections. So he doesn't want to run again, he says he's done. Tribal politics is too much. [Laughter] So he's got one more month and he's countin' down the days. [Laughter]

MG:How did you meet him?

SA:He's a singer. He sings Salt Songs, which is songs that are only sung for the dead. And it's a salt song trail that when your spirit dies, it goes on its own 01:38:00journey and the songs help you as you're going on that journey. And you're being led by the Creator through a trail that takes all night to do. And so he sings those songs and there's over a hundred and something songs and so when somebody dies, starting at seven o'clock, they start singing songs and it's over about five in the morning. I met him because one year on our reservation we had death, after death, after death, so I kept seein' him comin' pretty much every two weeks, he would come to the reservation with a lot of the other singers, and my cousin he is the lead singer and he was tellin' my husband that, kept looking at me 'cause I was the cook and I'd help with the breakfast and stuff and he would say, "Nope she's out of your league. You're never gonna get her." [Laughter] So he came to me one day and asked me if I had buckskin and I said yeah 'cause I tanned hides and he said, "Do you think you can make me a gourd bag?" which was 01:39:00a, just a buckskin bag and I says yeah. And so that's how we started talking.

SN:Okay, awesome. Very interesting. Would it be alright with everybody if we met again Thursday morning, 10:00 again and just had a, just like less than one hour little interview?

KB:I think that would be great. I might also suggest, if you've got time Friday to get an interview with just your history. You've talked about your dad and talked about the tribe, but you also seem like you've been involved in pretty much all stages of the cultural aspects, that would also be good if you're willing.

SA:I was raised dancing mostly. I was just raised more traveling and dancing, Then of course I know a lot of the cultural stuff. I could find somethin' to 01:40:00say. [Laughter]

MG:Do you feel like now that you're getting back into it, that this kind of stuff is happening because you've made the decision to kind of pursue things, get your dad's books back out?

SA:I think so. I'm getting a lot of overseas 'cause you know in the United States there's these groups here that, these rock art groups that didn't like my dad, they didn't like the interpretation, they know it's art, how can you be reading something that, and yet they turn around and read it and say that, "Oh it's the solstice," and like, "If it's art, how do you know it's the solstice?" So lately I've been getting a lot of people from overseas contacting me, wanting me to do papers and to do articles and to talk about my dad's, because they believe it. They don't consider it to be art as much as they do over here. So I've had a lot of opportunities and doors have been opening 'cause I'm getting 01:41:00more into it now. And because of the dictionary book that I'm writing, or not writing but working on, I'm getting a lot of new opportunities. So that's why I'm starting my Martineau archive so that I can do videography. We did import a lot of stuff, travels, I want to do some publications. I want to do some of my own applications. Some people say I should do my own history like my dad did, the autobiography but that's a long way down the line.

SN:-- that's what you just said. [Inaudible]

SA:That's what my husband says. "You know a lot, you should write a book." And I don't know if I want to write about myself.

SN:It mentions in his autobiography that he made some videos very early, early, early videos that were shown. I don't know what, but do you have copies of all those?

SA:Yeah, you know how VHS was, wasn't so [inaudible].

SN:Yeah, you have VHS copies?

SA:Yeah, I was actually, I have masters but I actually made copies of some of 01:42:00them, so-- We did some on our groups, our dance trips down in Belize, Yucatan, up in Canada, so, he narrated every one of them. He liked to talk, which was good 'cause he would explain where we were, what we did; so even on videos, he was real detailed. Not like now, you just put a title over somethin', this is your location, he was talking --

SN:So you do have all those protected?

SA:I have all those, yeah, well I don't know about protected, they're just laying --

SN:You should put them in a fill box for sure.

SA:I need to digitize 'em, because a lot of them are still VHS 'cause, and then we moved to Beta. No, not Beta. We moved to High 8.

SN:You know on Sunset, there's a place there that you can take those and they'll digitize them over for you overnight, practically. And if it's the monetary, we 01:43:00do have the money from the grant for this project that if you need to, you know, have some money to digitize your videos, you know, you could take 'em down there and I could pay for it out of the grant, as much as I have left over.

MB:Also, could we do another grant to, like a second phase on the Martineau project?

SN:Well, yes, we could. This money I got was from the Washington County Historical Society, they give a $1,000 a year to somebody who has a project in mind, so I put forth this project and they funded it, and so I'm going to pay Shanan for her time and effort and then I'm going to pay, I need kind of some invoices from whatever else we are like from you.

[END OF RECORDING. END OF INTERVIEW.]