Interview with Shanan Marineau

Shanan Martineau was interviewed November 16, 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 University; and videographer, Mike Gardner.

SN:Today is November 16, 2019. We are here at the Dixie State University Library and through a grant from the Washington County Historical Society, we are recording some of the oral history and information of Shanandoah (Martineau) Anderson and her family. Here in the room today is myself, Susannah Nilsson, representing the Washington County Historical Society; and Shanandoah (Martineau) Anderson; and Kathleen Broeder, Special Collections Librarian at DSU [Dixie State University]; and Mike Gardner, videographer. Today's goal is to talk a little bit about the Actual Southern Paiutes. This is the book that "Shanan's" [Shanandoah's] father wrote, with the help of Shanan, wrote about the 00:01:00Southern Paiutes, about their legends, lore, language and lineage, and we want to talk particularly about the history of the Southern Paiutes and particularly about the one group of Southern Paiutes that live in the St. George area called the Shivwits. So we're gonna turn some time over to Shanan, just give us an outline of what she knows about that.

SA:I am from the Shivwits Band of Paiutes. The original word for our Shivwits Band in-- Shivwits is broken English, but the real term is See'veets eng. See'veets eng means "Whitish Earth People" or "The People" because we lived out on the Shivwits plateau and the dirt out there was more white colored than you 00:02:00see here in Santa Clara [Washington County, Utah] along the [Santa Clara] River which is a reddish-tone dirt. See'veets eng was our Band name. Our Paiute name that we called ourselves is Nungwu. It varies among the different bands; some say, "Nuwuvi" [California, Nevada Paiutes], some say, "Nungwu," but it all means "The People." So we're known as Nungwu or Nuwu, not Nuwuvi, which is "The People." And in Utah alone, we have five bands. We are the furthest band to the south. In Cedar City [Iron County] Utah there's the Cedar Band. There is also Indian Peaks Band, and Kanosh Band is up north of Cedar [City. In] Richfield [Sevier County, Utah] we have Koosharem. So those are the five bands of Utah; ours is the largest of the five bands in Utah. We range about 312 [just under 00:03:00400] and the Cedar Band is just below us. There are, well right behind us, they're just over 300. So in total in Utah, there's about 800 tribal members remaining in all the five bands.

SN:Well, tell us-- there are very closely related bands also in Nevada though.

SA:Yeah, in Nevada we have two that are federally recognized. That's the Moapa Band of Paiutes and the Las Vegas [Paiute] Tribe, which is a break off of the Southern Paiute Bands; and there is the tribe over at Pahrump [Nevada], which is still fighting for federal status. There's quite a few band members over there, but right now they have no recognition with the [United States] Government as a tribe. And there was a lot of tribal members that were in the Ash Springs area 00:04:00of the Pahranagat Valley [Nevada] area that never did get tribal status. Just the two bands right now in Nevada. And also in Arizona, there's two tribes there, two bands. There's the Kaibab Band of Paiutes and the San Juan [Southern Paiute] Tribe, which is surrounded by the Navajo tribe. In total we have just under 2,000, I think close to 1,800. I think that's what I wrote, yeah, 1,893 right now. That changes depending on how many tribal enrollments we get, but it's just under 2,000 total.

SN:Tell us a little bit about what you know about your origin stories or what, just kind of the history of the people as a whole.

SA:The Southern Paiutes have always been here, we have no other story of us 00:05:00migrating from anywhere. We've always been on this land. Our origin story is from Mt. Charleston, which is in Las Vegas, that is where we were when the big flood came. All of the world had stories about the flood. We also have legends about the flood where, when the water rose, back then, the animals were people. We call 'em legends because we say that animals at one time were the people that talked and walked and so Mt. Charleston is when the flood hit, is where the animals went that survived, which are the Southern Paiute people. So our stories go all the way back to there.

We also have a Southern Paiute band from California which is the Chemehuevi band and they're also Southern Paiute, I forgot to mention them. They speak the same 00:06:00language, everything, but because they're in California, they're just considered a whole new tribe on their own, which they are under federal recognition. We have all kinds of legends of volcanoes and historical facts throughout all of the three states, the four states. So we've always been here.

Our particular band, the Shivwits Band, currently, today we have just over 28,000 acres, which is just outside of St. George, just past Ivins [Washington County, Utah]. We have 28,000 acres and we lived right along the Santa Clara River there. We have, we're the first band in Utah to get federally recognized 00:07:00as a tribe. We were the Shivwits tribe in 1891; we had federal recognition. It wasn't until the 1920s that the other four bands [Indian Peaks Band earlier in 1915] got federally recognized through the government, but we were the first. Back then, I don't know the statistics, how many tribal members we had, but we were all placed on the reservation that we have now. We were all placed there because we lived way out in Shivwits, all over the plateau, everywhere. And the Mormon settlers didn't like us being scattered, and because cows would go missing or, we were always accused. Yeah, I'm sure they took some of the cattle that were there to feed on, because it was harder and harder in the 1800s to roam free because of all the settlements that came in. And so starvation had hit in certain times of the year. Even though we did live in the desert and we knew all of the foods and the medicines and where the waters were, it was still a tough time because of the settlers that had moved in.

So they had moved all of the remaining Shivwits people onto the reservation that 00:08:00we have now. And, to keep a close eye on us, they put a BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] Office out there and so we pretty much had to stay in one place. We couldn't live and wander out like we had done before, lived where we normally lived, out in the mountains and the deserts. So we were placed on the Shivwits Reservation there, which was owned by a farmer and he had leased the land out to us to live on. And in the 1950s, the government had taken, had stripped our recognition away for all of the bands. Our band, including the other four bands in Utah. And so, we weren't federally recognized anymore, and they say because of that recognition the government had stopped providing us with the necessities because we couldn't go out and hunt like we freely could before, so they say it was a hard time. It was hard, we did have the water because it was along the river, but they said it was a tough time because all of the medical help that they had received before was gone, and a lot of the rations they had received 00:09:00was gone. So if there was a tough time-- my people say it was a tough time, that's because the government had made us depend on them so much, that when they took away that right, then it was a struggle for a while. And so between the five bands, it took a lot of years, but in 1980 we finally got that recognition back in April, so we now have a restoration celebration for when that recognition was returned.

And personally, myself, I don't like being under the government. I say we're children of the government, like the ward of the government, and I don't like that status. I don't care to be under the ward of the government but I know it has helped our people. It has helped with a lot of the grants and I was in tribal council for eight years, so I've seen all of the rules that we have to 00:10:00follow and the regulations that we have to follow. They say we have 28,000 acres, and yet we don't have permission to do what we want with it. We still have to go to the BIA, which is the Bureau of Indian Affairs, to ask permission, can we build on this or can we do that. So we're always going to be under the government; we're always going to have to ask permission, so that land isn't ours, even though they slapped a title on it that says it's reservation land, we still have to get permission. So, I don't like being under the government because it's just, you're still being told what to do. And that's just my personal opinion. I know a lot of the other tribal people couldn't do without it, couldn't live without it. And I don't like getting grants myself, personally, because to me, it's just like asking the government for one more thing, to survive. And they've made it hard to survive. I married into the Moapa Band of Paiutes, and my husband says that every time that they try to succeed or 00:11:00get a money on their own, without grants, to start businesses, the state is always pulling them back down saying that, "Well, we don't want to give you this permit or we don't want to give you that 'cause--" Every time the tribe starts to make money, they find a way to bring you back down. It's like they don't want any of the tribal people to succeed. And so, it's always been a struggle, and always will be, as long as we're under federal recognition.

And I've heard of a few tribes across the United States that want to remove that government assistance so that they can claim that land as their own and do what they want. And I know when casinos came in, everybody says, "You're a casino tribe now, you're making all that money," but you know how long it was to get money to these tribal people without being under the government? So every time the tribe succeeds in making a business, they're put down for it. So it seems 00:12:00like we can never succeed as a government-owned people. But that's just my personal opinion, like I said that, I was on there [council] for eight years and I quit. Well, I had four-year terms so after the two four-year terms, I just said I was done, it was just time to move on. And we did quite a bit for our people. We helped, I say "we" because my sister was also on there [council]. She was our vice-chair the first four years and our chairman for the last four years. But I think we did a lot of changes and we did a lot of things to succeed and so--.

As far as our Shivwits Band goes, when the rancher [farmer] had given us that land on a lease, and I'm not sure the year, I know it could be found. We had a website up, but that was taken down. But, one of the ranchers came to us when we had lost recognition back in the 1950s, that they were taxing that land and they were gonna take all that leased land away if we didn't start payin' taxes on it. And so one of the ranchers, I can't think of the name, had paid the taxes for us 00:13:00and we fought to get that land under our own name. And so it was finally granted as Shivwits Reservation land and so that's how we got that. And then years later while I was on term, they had given more land, the government had given a few more acres to the Shivwits. So every chance we get, we try to buy what we can back. But right now it's 28,000 and it's the largest in Utah. So, we're proud of what little land we do have remaining, even though when I look out, no matter where I look, I see our tribal lands that's been developed and still our land even though we don't have permission to go on it anymore.

SN:That's so true, very interesting. So, out of the five bands in Utah, you have 00:14:00the largest acreage? The other ones have very much smaller --.

SM:Very little, and they even fought for that. And I know over in Joseph, [Sevier County] Utah, they fought for that little bit of land just right along the [I-70] Freeway. They give you undeveloped land hoping that you'll never prosper. They give you the barrenest dirt, the land that they think that you're never gonna achieve anything on, 'cause it's just land that nobody wants. So they got some land back that nobody wanted. And Indian Peaks had some land north of Cedar City and I think that's turned into a reserve now. I'm not sure how that happened, but all of the bands got a little piece of land back. Not much, but a little of whatever they can get is good, I know that.

SN:Okay, I have a question about the "Pai" in the Paiute. Is that because you are cousins to the Pai people that ring around the Grand Canyon [Arizona]? All those Pai Indians, the Hualapai and the Supai [Havasupai], and all the Pai's?

SA:You know, they actually have a gathering of the Pai's, they call it, and I'm not sure how every one of them got their names. There's been a lot of controversy on how the Paiutes got their name; they say it was the Spaniards that named it. They said the Utes named it, because in each language, and I don't have the breakdown of it. I know Dorena would, she works for the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah as the Cultural Resource [Director], and we looked into see how the word Paiute had come to be. I know, even the Hopi's have a word for it that sounds similar to Paiute, so we're not really quite sure who actually gave the word Paiute to us but, yeah, we're linguistically related to a lot of them. 00:16:00We had crossed the Colorado River there to the Havasupai Tribe [Arizona], which I have relatives down there. There was two twin ladies that got captured by the chief, Chief Manakaja of Havasupai and one of them escaped and the other one he married and they had a lotta children together. So we have relatives down there. We're not, we can't understand each other. I know the Hopis and even the Comanches, they have the Uto-Aztecan language link all the way down to the Aztecs in Mexico. So there's a lot of languages that do sound similar. Even in northern Paiute, they have a lot of similarities, but I can't understand them. The Northern Band that we have, the Koosharem, a lot of those were from the Ute Tribe that were just a family of Utes that had moved on. They were labeled as Paiutes. They speak the same language, they just talk faster than us, but you can still understand them.

SN:So, the Northern Paiute actually are up in the Oregon area and that somehow --

SA:Northern Nevada, too.

SN:-- yeah, northern Nevada and Oregon. I went to a museum there and saw a bunch of things about the Northern Paiute. They are linked just because of linguistically they are very similar, but though you really don't have cousins up there or anything really?

SA:No, they're more, more Shoshone. There is a few words that I can understand, but our ceremonies are a little different, other than the Round, or the Circle Dance songs. That's a similarity that we have, but ceremonially-wise there's a lot of differences. So, you can't just say, "I'm Paiute," because you've got to distinguish whether you're northern or southern.

SN:Okay, so tell us a little bit about the history of the Paiute. I know that when the Spanish came through, and the Spanish Trail times, there was quite a bit of slavery, capture and slavery going on, with taking young Indian children off to be slaves in California and that sort of thing. What does your history 00:18:00say about that?

SA:You know, other than oral history, because we didn't write a lot of things down other than the really old stuff that is written on the writings on the rocks, we haven't really written anything, too much on it. I know my dad wrote some stuff on it in that Southern Paiute book, but I don't know too much about it. I know they weren't willingly sold or given; they were captured and taken, and stolen, so I can't really, I don't really have a big history of that era or time. And my mom and my dad, they never talked to me about anything that concerned that, other than that petroglyph site I was mentioning about slaves, the young lady that had found her way back from Mexico.

SN:Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Interesting. So when the actual first European, not Spanish, but European people came down, like the Jacob Hamblin group, do you have any idea about how large a population of people were here at that time or --?

SA:They were saying they counted around 800 to 1,000. Because we were farmers. We had a lot of the watermelons, and the squash, and all of that. You know, there was a guy from Beaver Dam [Arizona] that had found some seeds in a cave up at Shivwits somewhere. I don't remember where, but he planted them and it was a watermelon seed, so he called it the Shivwits watermelon. He gave us a watermelon from that and said that he'd found that in a cave somewheres, so we were planters, farmers. I don't like using that word "hunter gather" 'cause everybody hunted and gathered. [Laughter] Seasonally, we would take off with the 00:20:00seasons, go all the way north, go all the way south. Then certain times of the year, we celebrated the seasons, it was like a festival to us. So a ceremony where we would welcome each season. So we did a lot of traveling.

SN:What kind of hunting are there legends about? Was it deer, elk? What other? Did they actually have bighorn sheep in a big population, or no?

SA:Yeah, bighorn sheep was the main staple of food. We have legends, a lot of legends about the mountain sheep. How we were starving and the mountain sheep came forward and said that they would sacrifice their life so that we could live. And so, in return we honor the mountain sheep through song and dance and also the mountain sheep is the most powerful and they are the ones that you see on the petroglyphs to represent The People, which is us the Nungwu people. And 00:21:00so, the mountain sheep is the most sacred animal and it, because it sustained us through hardship and it gave, the spirit of the mountain sheep gave the men the powers to heal, it brought rain. So we prayed a lot for help through the mountain sheep, but the mountain sheep wasn't our god or wasn't ever claimed to be anything more than, one of our most sacred animals is the mountain sheep. But of course, we used to have elk that came all the way down here to the Shivwits Plateau till the seasons and the climate changes. But mostly deer, a lot of lizards, there was the Gila monster, there was the Chuckwalla, squirrels, 00:22:00everything from grasshoppers to bugs, to --. I know there was a grasshopper gruel they said they used to make, but I've never had it [laughter]. I would say I wanted to try it, you can order a lot of those insects through the mail now, so I would tell my son, bring back some of those traditional foods that we used to eat. And of course, living in a desert, people look out there and say, "How can you survive there? There's nothing out there," but every plant is useful. So you can find water, moisture, everything in all of the plants. Even in the roots, and so wherever you went, there was somethin' to eat.

SN:Mm-hmm. So tell us that little story about how your dad and his Shivwits friends went to the intertribal ceremonials and did the Mountain Sheep Dance and started to get the Shivwits-- you know it was the most unknown tribe in the United States, but then after that it became quite a bit more known.

SA:Yeah, and it was with my relatives. I know there's, his name is Clarence John, he's still alive today, he actually does our singing for us when we do the 00:23:00Mountain Sheep Dance. He taught my boys and some of the youth in Shivwits how to do the Mountain Sheep Dance. Shivwits was the only one that ever did that dance. Of course, when they would go to Flagstaff [Arizona] in the 1960s and 1950s, there was a lot of the Shivwits dancers, but they also had some of the Koosharem and Cedar Bands. And so, they had all done that Mountain Sheep Dance. So when they would go to Flagstaff-- and I'm not sure what time of year it was, but they had all of the tribes come together-- and they had a parade and they would do all the different dances. And so, Shivwits had a postcard that said, "The Least known tribe in America," because we were so small. Well, actually it was the Southern Paiutes. They were known for that because they had won the Mountain Sheep Dance contest every year for I don't know how many years. That's how they got known, that people started to know who the Southern Paiute were. So when we were chair, well when my sister was chairman, and I was on council, we always say that we are at least one of the least known tribes in the United States. And 00:24:00so we thought of ways to bring awareness to it and to just get people out.

We do have a Shivwits Princess that goes to all of the celebrations that introduces herself from Shivwits and from St. George. And I know one year, well growing up here, when I was younger and then coming back every year, everybody knew we were Indians. Going into the store, "Oh, are you from, out from the reservation?" And then it was probably in the 1990s, all of a sudden, they would talk Mexican to you or Spanish and just say, "Oh," thinking that we weren't here. And then I got to thinking: "Do they even know there's a tribe that is from this, this is our land? Does anybody even know about us?" And in the 2000s 00:25:00when I had come back, there was a letter that went out with the phone book that had asked for suggestions on how to make their phone book better. And I looked at that whole book and there wasn't one mention of our tribe. And I said, :You know what, I think we are invisible." You know how many people I've talked to, and they've said, "Oh, are you Mexican?" And I said, "No, I'm Indian." "Oh, what tribe are you from? Where are you from?" And I would say from here. Nobody knew we were here. So I, just, we're like the invisible people. So I wrote to the city and I said that, "You need to acknowledge that we exist still, that we're not gone." Yeah we're only, well back then, just under 300. I says, "We're a small tribe, but we're still here and we do exist." But, we had a meeting back east with all of the city officials from Washington County and I told them that story. I said that we're the invisible people and that as leaders for your different departments, that we should put our heads together and see how we can bring awareness to that, we're not gone, we're still here. But without somebody 00:26:00really pushin' it since I got off council, I don't know who's takin' that responsibility. But I just think we should, we need to bring awareness that we aren't gone and it's a struggle to be who we are.

Being under the government, and it just seems like everybody sees us as people that are looking for handouts or that we can never achieve or strive to be anything better than just a dirty Indian. If you look at our history, everybody puts you down and yeah we did have, if you look at the internet, we aren't a 00:27:00beautiful people. We're livin' in the desert with barely any clothes, our hairs were all cut and you look at pictures before the 1800s, they had the long hair, that was before death hit us. And once death came into our community, our hairs had to be cut, we have to cut our hairs. My relative just died a couple days ago and I got to cut my hair and I cut it to the length that you'll see online, in all the old photos. When you're in mourning, you cut your hair and so, if you look at the photos, everybody has short hair. If you look at those baptism pictures that they had here, they all had short hair, every one of them had lost. And you cut when you have an immediate family member die. So, you look at those pictures and they're sad. They all just look like poor, dirty old Indians, is what we were made to look like and so it's hard to bring awareness to people 00:28:00now, of who we really are, because they look at those pictures and say you're just a small little tribe that didn't go anywhere or didn't achieve anything.

But I try to bring that awareness to my kids and to all the youth, that you be proud of who you are. You stand up for who you are and we actually did a -- all of the Bands got together, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, to do a curriculum for the Washington County School District, which was part of the sixth and seventh grade, or seventh and eighth, I'm not quite sure. But, we all gathered at one of the libraries and we talked about how to put that curriculum together for the kids. And the teachers there that were there to help us, we told them what needed to be added and they said, "Nope, you're not gonna add that." And we said, "Why? But you're hiding the truth." And they said. "Because if you add that, then all the parents are gonna get mad and say, 'What are you teaching my kids? That you're teaching them that we, the pioneers had murdered, killed the whole tribe.'" They says. You can't do that." And I says, "You guys are tellin' a lie then." And they says, "Yes, to keep the parents happy, we can't disclose what really happened in history to your people." And I was upset, but they were 00:29:00doin' their job. It's not their fault. So that curriculum is out on the Parashant National Monument website, if you click on teachers link, you'll find it. And that's what I teach around to the libraries and the schools is that. I take that culture-gram and I've added to it and added photos for an awareness of who we are. We're not a poor and desolate tribe, we may be small, but we still have pride in who we are.

SN:Very interesting. I think there's more and more coming out now that the truth about the history. I think the climate today is a little better than it was even five years ago, of recognizing that sort of thing. Um, let's see. What else?

KB:I've got a question. I know a lot of my students tend to be interested in that time period where Native Americans were put on reservations. A lot of the 00:30:00stories we have are from the white side. What was it like for your people when they were first put on the reservations in the 1890s?

SA:In the 1890s, um, you know they still hunted, they still snuck out and they did a lot of the things that they could get away with, but they had to make ends meet. I know they had gathered that yucca root and they would go into town and they would sell it for soap. And so they found ways to make a little bit of money, but back then, they didn't need a lot of money as long as they had the food. And my husband would tell stories that back when he was a child, that they fed at least ten families in one household and it just seemed like when you put everybody, when everybody as a community puts everything together, they seem to manage. And so, yeah, it was hardship, but they ate the rabbits and whatever 00:31:00means that they could, but they say it was hard because a lot of them hid out and didn't want to come to live on the reservation or even, didn't want to come to town to be known or seen because they tracked every single person. And you know, they did the census, and so they didn't want to be a part of that. So there was quite a bit that hid out. I don't think, other than if you lived on the reservation, I don't think it was that hard other than a lot of hiding. I know they said that they hid out a lot because they didn't want to be shot or accused of stealing something that they didn't steal. And so, it was just, it was a tougher time of how to be sneaky, I guess, and just arrive without being seen.

KB:Did the Paiutes have the same that a lot of the other tribes did, with kids 00:32:00being sent off to boarding school?

SA:Yeah, that was more in the 1900s. I'm not sure, I don't know, I know a lot of them went off to California and a lot went off to Kansas and Oregon, so they did go all over. And they went to a lot of the Mormon placement homes. And I know of a lot of my relatives that snuck away and didn't want to go back, and some of them that liked it. But they were, a lot of them were shipped off. And we had a project one time where we were going to go to all the boarding schools and do a ceremony because a lot of them had died and never come back. And so we did lose a lot of the children to boarding schools.

KB:So how did the tribe fare during The Great Depression? And from there, you said they lost the recognition, what caused that loss of recognition?

SA:I'm not sure and I don't really, it's written I think, in the Utah, 00:33:00UtahPaiutes.org might have a little more history on it, but I'm not sure who the president was at that time or if it was Congress. I couldn't give you details on that, but it's online; you can find that.

KB:How did it affect the tribe, when they lost recognition?

SA:They say it did, but like you said, the Depression where a lot of people depended on money back then, I don't think it was any harder than it was without the Depression, because we still knew how to live off the land, we still knew how to provide and get the food. And so that Depression just meant that you didn't have the money, but other than for fuel and for gas, I guess, if you were cooking, cooked on campfires. So I don't think it hit the Paiutes as hard as it would the pioneers, because it took them money to survive and it didn't take us 00:34:00money, just the knowledge to survive and the skills to survive. And of course, you had to have water, which a lot of it was getting polluted, but it was still drinkable back then. So I think that was really an issue, but they just said that financially during then, when they took away their recognition, that the government stopped help with the people that were sick. Like diabetes wasn't as [well] known back then, but there was other diseases. And of course, cancer came through; my dad passed away from cancer and they said when they did the bombings, that fallout that came over this way so a lot of them, there was sickness, but -- I think the majority would be the sickness, and they were so used to the rations, getting the rations that when they stopped that, you had to just go back to living off the land, to find their resources they needed to survive.

SN:So when the Gunlock Reservoir was put in and actually dammed up the Santa Clara River that ran through your reservation, that dam is right there at the end of your reservation land. Did that have an effect on the water? I mean, the water was more controlled, I guess, after that because of flood issues. I'm sure that was through the history, the bad floods that came through there but --.

SA:I've never heard anything about it being any different. One thing I do want to note is that when that dam went up, they destroyed a lot of petroglyphs that went through that site and along that road. So they did destroy a lot. But we did have water rights, worked with Ivins City and the City of St. George to have, retain, the water rights. And so it seems like we've always had the water and, of course, back then we had farms along the reservation water line there. 00:36:00And we had the fruit trees that are cut down now, but we did have means to survive and to plant things, so water wasn't really an issue. I know we have an economic development fund right now that is because of the water rights. When they put up the right-of-way on the reservation, they had put it, everything has to be pre-agreed on, and they had put a road in that was just off of that right-of-way. And so the tribe sued for, to get that corrected, and so because of that, we got a big settlement for that. So the money was put aside for economic development. So anything to do with water right now, we can use that money to develop anything, economic development. So, we're good financially when it comes to economic development, but it's just which companies, or who do you 00:37:00want to bring onto the reservation that's gonna benefit our tribe.

I know there's some things that we still have to follow under the Utah State laws. I know we had a lot of issues with tobacco, selling tobacco on our reservation, because we have a convenience store and so we still have to follow some Utah laws. But we can break away and do our own because they say we're sovereign, but yet we still have to get permission to do things, but we try to stay as sovereign as we can without falling under the Utah State laws, so that we can have more rights. I know that selling medical marijuana issue that's comin' up; we can legally plant and do that on our reservation, but is the state gonna fight us so hard that we're just not gonna wanna do it? So it's gonna benefit our tribe, but it's not gonna benefit them, so I think we'll have a big battle ahead of us. But I know financially it's really gonna help our tribe, so 00:38:00we'll see. And I always say I'm not afraid to fight and I've always told our lawyer that. I said that we got a lot of people that, from our res', that they just wanna sit back and they don't wanna go to court over anything. They're just so used to being behind the closed door that they don't wanna stand up and fight. And I don't blame them because it's a battle and you have to have a strong voice to want to stand up, fight. Economic development-wise, we're in a good spot where we can develop a lot of stuff. We just have to have good leaders in there to want to do it.

SN:So the people that live right out there by you on the reservation, what is their main, what do they do for income? Do they do the crafts? Do they have paying jobs in town? What's the general --?

SA:Mostly jobs in town. We do have a convenience store that opened a few years back that it's all Native employment, but we do hire out, so it's not. It's 00:39:00Native preference, tribal preference for our band mostly, but if they don't qualify, they go to the next in line. And so, it is managed by our own tribal people and so that's good. But for a while there, the Moapa Band of Paiutes they made it, when they opened up their solar sites, and they had a lot of jobs, and they put it in their compact that they had Indian preference, especially Paiutes, so a lot of our tribal members were driving every day to Moapa [Nevada], which is an hour away and the pay was so good. You couldn't get a job here for that pay. They were like $25.00 an hour. So they were purposely hiring Paiutes to help better their community. So, and since that job ended, a lot of them, just in town, and other than the store there. Not too many make a living off of crafts. I know pottery, nobody's done pottery. I know we, with other 00:40:00Paiutes, we wanted to bring that back and do some pottery, basket making, cradleboard making. There is a few that does sell for a living. Our store makes it so that if you have any beaded items or anything you can go to the store and sell it to them. And so there is an income for those that don't want to work. And that's how I lived a long time ago, was to sell bead work and make a living, and I could still do that today if I took the time out to make the crafts to do it, but I haven't done that lately. But my dad always taught us that you learn all the crafts that you-- the skills that you can because it will help you survive one day without having to go out and get a job.

SN:Yeah.

SA:And I believe that, and I've taught my kids that, that you can be on your own, you can be self-employed and be your own boss.

SN:So the future for your tribe is going to be more economic development. 00:41:00Possibly, I heard, one time, that you're considering doing a solar project out there? Did you ever?

SA:They did, they checked on the wind 'cause we have a lot of wind out there, you know the windmills. They tried that, but they said it wasn't enough wind to generate enough electricity, so that fell through. We did some concerts for a while out there. To do events out there, but got a lot of flak on that because people were drinking. You know they say the tribal people are known as, oh all we are is drunken Indians and so they seen the events and said, "Oh yeah, they're gonna support that because they are drunken Indians." But that didn't go too well, so we quit that after a while. So right now, we're looking at farming, anything to do with water, like growing or we do have a portion of the reservoir at Ivins there. And we have the selling rights, like if we want to put up a food 00:42:00booth or anything. So we had an economic committee that I was on, but they [council] closed that out and brought a new committee in, our new council in, so I'm not on that committee, so I have no idea. But we were gonna do a concession out at the reservoir. So I know that down the line it's gonna be in the works. Then maybe a RV Park, expand the store, the gas station. I know that we added some more fuel pumps, so. The store makes a lot of money, that convenience store, so we have a good income

SN:That's good.

SA:Good enough that every year they give tribal members a bonus off of that. So it does go back into economic and to support the store, but they give out when they can. So we're growing slow, but we're growing.

SN:So do you have tribal dancing grounds right there on your part of the reservation? I mean, do you post a pow-wow out there or do you go elsewhere for 00:43:00the pow-wow?

SA:Pow-wow isn't a Paiute tradition.

SN:Okay.

SA:Because they dance, borrow dances from other tribes. So pow-wows, we have held a couple through the years, but we go off to other reservations that hold them. And you can dance for competition in each of the categories, or you can just go to dance for fun. So when I tell the youth, 'cause they always say, "Oh, pow-wows is my tradition," and I say, "No, it's not. You have to know what your traditions really are and what your dances are." For the first year that I was on tribal council, which is the four years, I did four years of our traditional dances which is the Round Dance or the Circle Dance. So for every spring, we would hold the Round Dance for the four years. And we invited a lot of the elders out to come and see the songs that nobody had heard, or songs just to 00:44:00hear the variety of songs. And so, after the four years, I didn't do that. I haven't done it since. Everybody said they really enjoyed it because a lot of the elders that were singing are not alive today. A lot of it was recorded for me. I have recordings of a lot of the elders that did sing. But other than the Paiute Restoration gathering that is held in June annually, that is the only pow-wow that we have. I know the Las Vegas tribe has one in the spring also. Spring is the time of celebration because everything comes in bloom. New growth, new life, so that's when they usually have their celebrations to welcome in the summer or the spring.

SN:Very interesting. Is there any other questions from anybody?

KB:I do. So it sounds like, as a tribe, you have experienced some heritage lost. 00:45:00Like you mentioned in our last interview, that you can understand the language but you can't really speak it. And that you're very concerned about making sure your son knows some of your tradition and history. Do you feel like that's kind of been a general trend over time? Just like having to fight for it. And what influence has it had?

SA:Because there's not a lot of full-blooded now. There is a lot of inter-marriage and so if you're getting a child that is half-Mexican and half-Indian, the mother says she is Paiute, don't know a lot of the traditions; and the father, which is Mexican, does. He is gonna want to teach his child more of his heritage. So a lot of that mixed blood came into play when it was just a conflict of what parent is gonna teach what. And if that wasn't a conflict, a lot of them didn't have time, because of diabetes and a lot of the diseases, 00:46:00that our people didn't live past their fifties. So it is rare to have elders that live in their seventies and eighties now. Back then, back in the early 1900s, there were a lot of elders, and so there is just not a lot of teaching along with the language, other than two elders talkin' to each other. It just wasn't popular to just go out and speak. Of course, back then, you got a lot of slack, like you said it wrong and got teased a lot. So a lot of kids just didn't want to talk their language, because they didn't want to be teased or made fun of for sayin' the word wrong.

So a lot of the dances died out and they were just celebrations in the spring and summer, like I said. But they were just glad and celebratin' dance. And a lot of those just stopped. I know in the 1950s, my dad had recorded, he had some recording on reel-to-reel a lot of them [the Indians], just out of the blue, they would just hold a celebration and all of the tribes would be coming and dance and sing. And so, I think back then it was just more of a, just to get 00:47:00away, just to enjoy, and now the only time we get together is for a funeral, it seems like. We don't do a lot of that, that celebrating like we used to.

So I know the book my dad wrote, The Southern Paiutes [:Language, Lineage and Lore], he had written down everything that he knew. And he had it in pencil. It was a pretty thick book, just all written, handwritten notes. And he never intended to write that book. And my sister and I, back in the early 1990s, which we had the huge Macintosh computers [laughter], before the laptops, he was doing a project and we told him, "Why don't we just type all that up into book form?" I said, "I wouldn't mind reading it one day." 'Cause I couldn't read his notes. So he said, "If you girls want to do it, go ahead." So everyday my sister and I took turns and we just typed what we could. Because he was right there, he would 00:48:00tell us what the word was if we couldn't read it. So we got that book together.

And because of that book in book form, it was just for us. It was just for me. I said that book was meant for me, because I wanted it in book form. And so we had it to just look at whenever we wanted. If we wanted to learn something and my dad wasn't available to tell us, we would just pull out that book, which, of course, was just printed out on and thrown together in that little folder. So the publisher seen it and said he'd publish it just as a favor. And so it was published, and we gave it out to a lot of our friends and relatives. And they say that if it wasn't for my dad and all that he had preserved and shared with everybody, that it would have been lost. And so, he does mention in there that there are some things that he couldn't add because he didn't want, I guess it was meant for Paiute eyes only. Actually, I have his originals and I was going 00:49:00to go and compare and look through that and see what they were. And then to share it with my people if there was something of interest. So that is on my to-do list, just to go through what was left out, that we could share.

Now, I tell everybody from our tribe, or whoever wants to listen, that you have to write it down. If it's not written, nobody is going to believe you. We are so used to oral history, in that we tell our stories, legends, in the winter and history throughout the year, that it is gonna change from one person to another. It's not gonna be the same, so they need to write it down. Otherwise nobody is ever gonna believe it ever happened. Of course, if you get a book in the library, they're gonna believe that over what you say, or you've lived, and so you have to write it down. Otherwise, our history is gonna be different.

I know one time the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah had a whole segment on who we were as a people. And I would look through that and I thought, "Who wrote this?" 00:50:00Because they were talkin' about things that we didn't do. They said there was a stick sticking out of a basket in the back that the lady would lean on. And I thought, "I've never ever seen that. Who wrote this?" So, I guess it was one of the workers and employees had copied it off of a book and kinda changed it around, I think. So, see what you are getting off of the book, is it true? A lot of that, they were putting down the man in there. And I thought, "That is not us." Our own people need to write our history because then it is the truth. I stress that. You need to write it down, or record it, or film it. Don't just oral history it, because it's not gonna be the same.

SN:Very good. Any questions? Mike?

MG:So, LaVan [Douglas LaVan "LaVan" Martineau, Shanan's father], he was the first one to write down a history of the local Paiutes?

SA:There was a lot of other books written. And it was William Palmer that did the majority of them. And my dad knew William Palmer and he said he glamorized it. He glamorized all the legends. He made it look so that people would want to read it. So he fairy tells a lot of it. And so, because my dad would read through it and say, "Well, that's not how it really happened, William." "I had 00:51:00to glamorize it to sell." So there was other books written. And a lot of the photos you see that were staged, he dressed them up. I don't know where he got it, he called them costumes. And he would throw it on a Paiute and say it was Paiute, but it wasn't. So, he was probably the one that did the majority of the history of the Paiutes. But I have a collection of 'em. There are probably ten or more books out there on Paiutes. A lot of it is not accurate. Some of it is. I don't know on a lot of it. But it is when he broke it up into the legends and lores, the lineage and the language. He has a lot on the language, but he only put just some of the words in there that people would want to know, not the whole dictionary. So he just had to put it into a book that people wouldn't get bored with or want to read. But there has been a few books. Now there's a lot 00:52:00of, what do you call those, when archaeologists gather all the information and put them into volumes?

SN:Reports?

SA:Yeah. So there's a lot of those out there, and I have a collection of those too. And it is interesting because they actually hire tribal members to go out and talk and so they get the history from them. So those are really good. It's not for public view, but it does have a lot of history.

MG:Do you know when the first outsiders came in? Do you have a history of that?

SA:We don't. I've never read anything on that. My dad wrote everything he could on that history and I've never seen anything that said that's the first time they've ever seen a stranger walk into their land. I have no history of that. That'd be interesting to know, though, if it was written down. It could be written on a rock somewhere.

SN:Yes, it could.

MG:'Cause I don't think we even know where Santa Clara got its name. If your people were here when it was, when it got its name.

SA:Yeah.

SN:I've read that the Dominquez and Escalante and the early Spaniards that came on the Spanish Trail, named it Santa Clara. That's what I've read in the history somewhere. Pre- any type of LDS [Latter Day Saints] missionaries or anything, pre- that, that it was named that.

SA:And a lot of our tribal, the Indian names that went to each of the landscapes is all gone. I know my dad, in that book [Paiute book], had written a lot of them that says, "Place unknown," but the name's there, but the place is unknown. And so I've looked for a lot of 'em. Like that big mountain, just above Ivins there, the big, big one, they have a Paiute name for that and it has to do with 00:54:00protruding. 'Cause it looks like a pregnant woman. So it's got an Indian name. So I'm curious too, a lot of times, especially when I was culture resource manager, trying to name things. And I wanted to do my own map with just Paiute names in it. But when you are on council, you have so much other duties, it is hard to sit back and do one specific thing.

SN:I'm sure the Paiutes have a name for the river.

SA:[Yes.]

SN:The Santa Clara River. I'm sure they had a particular name for that and many other things.

SA:Yeah. One thing that we didn't like, was they would slap the Navajo name on a lot of things, the Navajo Lake [laughter], Navajo Trail [laughter]. Because they were a people that weren't originally from this land, and so for them to be naming them for everything. We tried to change the names once in a while, but it's hard. They say, "Oh, no. We can't change it. Been there too long." Or "It 00:55:00means more to have that name." So, yeah, there's, there's a lot of names we tried. I think there is a few sites we got to change. [Inaudible]

SN:Out on the Santa Clara River Reserve, trails, bike trails and hiking trails, they all have a Paiute name. So that was acceptable [inaudible].

SA:Then there's actually a project. There's a new dam going up by Toquerville [Washington County, Utah] that they had specifically asked the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah to help, and because the Shivwits lived in Washington County, they asked us to lead the way in assigning a name. So, because Toquerville, means, is the name of a Chief [Toquer] that means "black." Too'kwahd in Paiute that is how you say it. We wanted to make sure that Toquerville meant our chief, so we said Chief Toquerville, so that people will put two and two together and say, "Oh, 00:56:00Toquerville is the name of a Paiute." But there was a little inner-fighting within our bands, but the Kaibab didn't like the word chief. Because a lot of times they're called, like my husband gets called chief all the time. Well, right now, he is the chief, he is the chairman of the band, but they just say, "Hey, Chief." So it got to be like a derogatory term to a lot of people, because you were known as chief, "Hey, chief," because you were a man. And so Kaibab didn't like that word that we were calling the place "Chief Toquer Reservoir" and then, so, the Paiute Tribe stepped in and they removed that name. And so our Band was upset because we had a survey on it. We asked everybody, "Do you think we should call it 'Chief Toquer' to let people know that we had a leader over there that was friends with the pioneer?". He was well-known and we knew where he was buried and just to let people know. But it got removed, so the place is just "Toquer Dam" or something like that. [Laughter] So, we have a little bit of 00:57:00inner-fighting once in a while when it comes to names. But we, we, thought about naming it a complete Paiute name, but they get butchered and you can't pronounce it [laughter] and it changes, so we just thought, "Well, stick with Toquer."

SN:Interesting. Alright, anything else? Anything in closing you'd like to say about your people?

SA:I don't think so. I think I've said it, all I know. Like I said, we're a small tribe that, they don't like to be recognized. Like, they just want to be who they are, without that recognition, but I think I'm proud of our tribe. I'm proud of what we've accomplished, how we've survived, the things that we do, the skills that we have and so, I've just, I want everybody to know who we are. So I'm not ashamed and I teach my kids that. I know there's statistically a lot of 00:58:00suicides in Indian country, because they are not proud of who they are. The kids get, they get bullied, or the color of their skin, and so I just like to instill pride in who they are and that we do have a history and that we're still surviving. That no matter what's been thrown at us, we've managed to pull through. So I'm just proud of who we are and I'm not ashamed to say that we're a Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah. We're still here!

SN:Great! That's great to end on.

KB:Before we close, if possible, would you mind spelling out how both you say The People, spelling that phonetically, as well as the Native way of saying Shivwits, 'cause our transcribers will thank you. [Laughter]

SA:I need to have a pencil so I can spell it out. In Utah we use, Nungwu. I'm 00:59:00not sure, if there's a, no.... I think that's how it is [spelled]. That's The People. Whitish Earth People [is how we say our band name Shivwits, See'veets eng] or you could just say, "White Earth People."

SN:Very good. Now, would you like to do just a very short, maybe fifteen minutes, of just your own personal history? Where you would just tell about you, particularly. Your life and what you've done, accomplishments, the things you've 01:00:00done with your tribe, to help your tribe, and also did you bring your flute?

SA:Yeah, I brought it. My husband goes, "You're gonna really play flute?" 'Cause I never play it. I go, "I brought it, but I don't know if I'm gonna play it, 'cause--." I had a really good flute. This one goes out of tune a lot. And no matter how much I adjust that, it just.... there is a note that will just not stick. So I'll try.

SN:Well, we'd love to hear just a little bit of flute playing. That would be awesome, you playing the flute. That would be something that you've done quite well throughout your life. I think that maybe we should just re-do a very short segment of your life. If that's okay with you.

SA:This flute, I traded with my cousin on my dad's side. He wanted to learn how 01:01:00to make Indian flutes and I happened to have a pattern. My original flute, that I really liked, we traced and made a pattern out of it. So he started making flutes. And then he got so good he started selling them. So this flute, he said, is called purpleheart wood from South America. And it has a really nice tune to it, but it is not like the cedar flute where when you are playing the moisture absorbs into the flute and you can play longer. This one, as soon as that moisture touches it, you can only play a couple of songs and then you're done. [Laughter] But I traded a cradleboard for this one. I made a cradleboard for him and he gave me a flute, so this is one of my flutes. [Started playing.]

MG:Hold on. [Inaudible] my card out.

SN:Okay, let's just wait for a second, till he's ready.

SA:I don't know when I started playing.

SN:Did your dad play? Or did he just encourage you to learn?

SA:He learned a song. I'll play it on here.

SN:Okay.

SA:He learned it, he got it [the flute] from Ray Carlos Nakai [R. Carlos Nakai]?

SN:[Yes.]

SA:He played a song for us. We were at his house and he played a song for him. And my dad goes, "I really like his flute." And then you forget when you compliment people that, a lot of the traditional Indians, they have to give you what you compliment. So Ray gave my dad that flute. "So in my traditions, I have to give you what you like." So he gave him the flute. So my dad sat there and he played and played and he learned his own songs. And then one day I just said, "I wouldn't mind playing." So I started messing around with it. And the songs my dad taught me, that he had learned, I played. And he goes, "You out did me. I'm 01:03:00never picking up that again." [Laughter] He goes. "You out did me on that song." [Laughter]

SN:[Laughter]

KB:[Laughter]

SA:So he learned, he had composed one other song and so he said, "Can you learn this song and play it?" So I did. But my dad, he was our speaker for all my sisters and I. He always did our talking. So he would always say, "Shanan, go get the flute. Go play the flute." So I got so tired of playing the flute, I didn't want to do it no more. So my sister learned, Jetta, so her and I would do duets. Once in a while we would play here and there. But I just got tired of playing it. [Laughter] it was more for performances instead of just because I wanted to [play]. So, I just, I put it away for years. It wasn't until I got this one that I started playing it. And then my sister had married a guy from Oklahoma that had his own recording studio, Millard Clark. He has the Indian Sounds [label] and he said, "I wanna record you and put you on a CD. So I did, 01:04:00but I wasn't real happy about it. I did it, just because.

SN:I have a copy. I have a copy. [Laughter]

SA:[Laughter] Of course, I'm never happy with my voice or my songs or anything, so it's for the people, so. As long as I don't have to listen to it. [Laughter]

SN:Alright, Mike, should we start, are you going? Okay. We are now, again on November 16 at DSU up in the archives area and we are talking with Shanandoah (Martineau) Anderson today about her life as a native person living here in St. George, Utah. And she is going to tell us a little bit about her life and her works throughout her life with her tribe and also demonstrate some of her talent.

SA:Well, I was raised with four other sisters that I had, my oldest, she was the half-sister. I had two full-blooded sisters. Then we adopted a little girl. She was Apache. And then on my mom's side, she remarried and she had two daughters and a son. So I have a lot of sisters and one brother growing up.

So, we moved to San Carlos, Arizona when I was probably five, five or six, and went to school there. We lived in Globe, Arizona for a while and then down to San Carlos, and then to Safford [Arizona]. We kinda moved around in Arizona, but I grew up down there amongst the Apaches. But my dad said that, "You will always be Paiute." So he made sure that we came back as often as we could to Utah. So we would come and visit our mom, our aunts, our grandma, everybody. And then, of 01:06:00course, he took us to a lot of the celebrations in Colorado, Towaoc. We had some relatives over there in Fort Duchesne [Utah].

So we grew up dancing. My mom, when her and my dad were together, she had done a lot of beading and outfits. So we had this little buckskins dress that we all had as a hand-me-down and it was really nice. And so we all learned to dance at a young age. And our dad, he loved to travel so we would go around every summer to pow-wows. And it was to Canada, all the way back east to Washington [D. C.]. We had a little pow-wow circuit, we called it, that we would go around and just dance. So we grew up on the pow-wow trail, grew up in a teepee because we lived and put the teepee up every weekend. And wherever we traveled we were known as the family with all the animals because we would pick up an animal here or there. We found a little baby skunk that we took with us to pow-wows. We got a 01:07:00little hawk one year that we took with us to pow-wows. We would have snakes and we would keep it for about a week and let it go, but we had a porcupine one year, coyote, a fox, so we've had a variety of animals that we always traveled with. So we would just pow-wow all summer. It was just, I remember they were just so fun, just going around and we met a lot of people that became family. And so we just lived to pow-wow. I call it a pow-wow trail, a pow-wow life.

And of course, my dad wanted us to grow up Indian. He was white, but he, he made us visit. That seems like a harsh word, but it was more, it was our life that we would go sit with the elders. I remember sittin' at the feet of a lot of 'em and they would tell us stories. I don't care if it was about their; legends, about 01:08:00us as women, our do's and don'ts, what we could do, what we couldn't do, taught us how to bead. We learned a lot of their secrets when it came to tanning hide, doing quill work, even dying quills. So we grew up learning a lot of the traditions and our dad made sure that we could learn everything we could. He said it would help us throughout our life if we ever needed to sell arts and crafts to make some quick bucks, some quick money, because he did that. He made arrowheads every weekend. Seems like he was always sittin' there making arrowheads to sell. And he would sell them for a couple of dollars, but it was enough gas to get us to the next place.

And then when we got older, we would sell stuff. And to this day, we sell items, bead work goes for a lot of money nowadays. So you can make a lot of money. So we grew up just traveling; spent the winters in Arizona. And because he [Father] recorded a lot of the petroglyphs, he would take off every weekend and go 01:09:00somewhere and record, walk miles and miles and miles. Especially in summer I remember being in the summer heat, just traveling and recording sites. So we grew up on the ground, grew up sleeping on the ground, grew up in a teepee. Even in the winter we put our teepee up next to wherever we stayed and just lived inside the teepee. It was nice. We had a close-knit family, all my sisters and I. And through the years, they, we would leave, but we always seemed to come back. It just seemed like we wanted that family togetherness, so we never permanently just moved away and never came back, like a lot of people do when they move all the way across town or across the world somewhere and you don't see them very often. But we were always close growing up.

So we would teach at schools when we were old enough. The Hualapai Tribe [has] invited us since the early 1980s to teach anything from my flute here, to 01:10:00dancing, to showing arts and crafts, to tanning hides, everything. Anything new, we'd say, "Well, let's know what you want. We'll write it down and we'll come for a week and teach the kids." So we would teach at different schools. We taught in Havasupai [Arizona]. We taught a lot of the schools and the camps that they had in Canada. So, that was our skill, was just arts and crafts. I never really had a real job my whole life. It was either dancing, 'cause you could make a thousand dollars a week if you were good enough at dancing, to selling something for a thousand dollars. So it just depended on, you never did have to have a job. Our life was just traveling. And I miss that. I got married and, of course, when you are married you can't go off [laughter] as often as you can. [Laughter] So I miss traveling. But that is what we grew up doing.

When I moved back to Utah, it wasn't until the year 2000. My dad got sick and eventually passed away. So we buried him up there [Shivwits] in the cemetery on Highway 91, so I just stayed here. And then I got on the tribal council for eight years. And I got off in 2017. So it's been over-- is going to be two years coming up that I have been off tribal council. And so I want to get back into traveling and doing a few things. Now that I'm off tribal council, a lot of my dad's work that he had done and recorded, he did a lot of maps and he has a lot of notes in pencil that I'm starting to, I want to put into book form. So I talked with my sisters and we got the Martineau Archives up and running to where we can start publishing his books. And put on digital format a lot of this stuff 01:12:00that he has. And even do videography or just do some short films of things. And so whenever, well, they haven't, they, they all have jobs. We all kinda live in the same area. We are within distance of each other to visit or to do projects. But that's my new project, is to just work on the Martineau Archives that my dad left behind. And the work with the petroglyphs and to start traveling.

I actually just got a letter this morning that said that my first article I did was just published worldwide. And so she [friend] said, "You're published now," she said. "So just to keep it up." I'm kinda excited. I haven't read it yet. But, well, I've read it because I wrote it, but [laughter] I haven't actually seen it on paper, so. It was done in Italy, so she said, "You're, you will be world known instead of locally known." Which is fine with me because it seems 01:13:00like you have more issues and fight with the locals than you do with other people. [Laughter] Because they have lived here and take claim to this land and say, "Well, you don't know that." And so, I'm just venturing off, trying a variety of things, and see where it goes.

I'm getting back into dancing. I started being a little healthier because I am older now. And so I'm trying to eat better and lose the weight and get back into dancing, get my kids back into dancing. They were little and they danced and I made them some nice outfits. They outgrew it and so they don't have them, so I'll eventually just make them some outfits to go out to go dancing. Stress to them, show them a lot of the sites that we have been to. I have never taken them to San Carlos where I grew up and so I told them maybe by summer we will go hit the road and go see where I grew up and the things that I did. 'Cause my two boys, they are teenagers now, they think they know everything. So [laughter] I 01:14:00have to show them some of the stuff that I know and hopefully they'll retain it and want to do, take my path. I always stress to them that well, this is what I wanted to do when I was younger, but I never got to do it. So maybe you will want to do that. And just they say, "Nope. No, Mom, I've got my own things I want to do." [Laughter] I try to teach them as traditionally as I can, but in this modern world now, where everybody looks down at their phone or they have a game, it is kinda hard to instill in them how I was raised. Because we didn't have that. We didn't have TV, we did have, we had a little black and white TV. So back then it was so much easier to learn. There was a lot of elders. Now we have, maybe, a couple that I can take them to, and that's it., they still know the language. But my kids are so into their little modern things that they want to do that it is hard to say, "Let's go sit down and talk to somebody."

So times have changed and I heard somebody say, not too long ago at a meeting, 01:15:00that we're, we're a dying race. And that if we don't keep our blood and we don't continue to teach our kids that, we're goin' to melt into invisibility. Well, I feel that now, but it's just a struggle. And it is hard to stay in modern society and still be traditional. And my dad taught me that in order to play flute that I had to learn the hard way. So I had to learn how to make a traditional flute, which is one piece. This is two pieces glued together. And so he said, we had to go pick a branch and then we had to learn how to hollow it out without modern tools. It took a long time, but I did it! [Laughter] When I made it, I felt a lot of pride in my little flute I made. It doesn't play very well, but --.

MG:What kind of wood is that?

SA:This is purpleheart. It's from South America. And it's got the purplish, 01:16:00really deep red, red tone to it. But I don't know, I think he ordered it online somewhere. My cousin that did it. This is where the [ornament on flute], you have to get this just right or the air when you blow in it comes up over and back down. So if you don't have this just right, the air will blow everywhere. It's gotta be super tight. He's got a little roadrunner on here.

MG:Did you hollow it out?

SA:This one I didn't. My cousin made for me. [Plays flute] And so, I have taught flute playing and I've showed the kids that just learned, to get your hands used to these. I was self-taught. I never, I don't know how to read music, never did any type of instruments growing up. But my dad, when he first learned, he learned an old Paiute song. And this is how he taught and this is how he played 01:17:00it. Let me find the right song. [Plays flute]

He taught me that one and he says, "Well, let me see how you play it." I took off from him. I didn't want him to see me play it. So I came back and I learned it. He goes, "Well, you outplayed me. I'm never playing again." So I just learned to, well, because I was self-taught, I just played it from my heart.

[Plays flute] That was the same song, I just added feeling to it, is what I 01:18:00would say.

Then he taught me another one that I really like and he composed it. And so I play this song quite a bit that he composed. [Plays flute] [Clapping]

And I have composed a few of my own. I just enjoyed it for a while there. I would just sit there and just learn songs and then I learned that I used to get a lot of these songs in my dreams. And when I would wake up, I wouldn't do anything about it. I would say, "Oh, I'll remember when I wake up." And I wouldn't. And so that ability left me. And I talked to some people about it and 01:20:00they said that you're given a lot of opportunities in life from your ancestors that give you things. And if you don't take it when they give it to you, it will go away. So that ability to learn songs was given to me, but I didn't use it, so it went away. So I did learn one song, honestly, that I did wake up and I wrote it down. Not wrote it, but I just hummed it into my recorder and I learned it. So I do have one of those dream songs, but I used to be given a lot of dream songs. But to this day, I just regret not ever recording them, 'cause I've heard a lot of people that say that songs were given to them. They may be famous today because they continued what they did. But I've never looked or sought after fame or to be recognized. I just enjoy doing what I was doing. So I would just do it. Never wanted to make money off of what I've done, my past, I just do it to pass 01:21:00it on. And because I learned it, why not share it.

They say that if you learn something, it's your, you have the responsibility of sharing and passing it on. So that's what I've told all of my relatives and friends and family, that my door is always open. Anything you want to learn, I'm here. So around deer season time, they bring me their deer hides. And I'll say, "Well, I'm not tanning it for you. You gotta come here and I'll show you how to do it." So I get some offers where they want to come and learn. Any, whatever they want to learn, I'm willing to share.

SN:Well, thank you so much for all your knowledge, first of all, and all your willingness to share it with those that need to learn these things.

MG:What music forms did they have? The Paiutes? Was it just vocal songs? Or did they have instruments?

SA:They have the drum, but that went with music, which was Circle Dance songs. They had Quail Dance songs. They had the mountain sheep songs. But they were 01:22:00just songs that talked about the land. They talked, because they were so grateful for all that was given to them, that they were giving respect and honor back to what was given to them for survival. So it was just mostly songs about, as offering, or just good songs just to sing. They were all self-composed, some were prayer songs, they would play flute, and it wasn't nothing ceremonial, other than the rattle, which is the gourd, that was for ceremony. But the hand drum was for singing and social. And so, it was just hand drum and flute as far as I know. I know they had the violin with a lot of the tribes. I know in Mexico they had a lot of the people that had played violin and certain types of stringed instruments. But for us it was mostly the gourd. And they did have the 01:23:00hand game, which is, they would hit the stick on the log. [Hitting the table] And just the sound of that, the stick on the log, made that sound and they would sing hand game songs, so. It was just mostly vocal.

SN:Thank you so much for your time and coming in and sharing all of this information with us.

SA:Yes.

[END OF RECORDING. END OF INTERVIEW.]