Remy the dog barked in the nighttime. In the first daylight, Ernest Siva went for a walk, and spied the footprint in the dirt. The night visitor was Hunat (Serrano), Húnwet (Cahuilla). A bear.
So, today we’re telling bear stories. As summer heats up, bears wander in from the hot, dry hills. Usually when we see a footprint, it is isolated, as though the bear marked the ground with that single footprint, and then merged into the sage again. Bears are magical. Bears are powerful.
An old Native American basket depicting bear footprints, probably by a Morongo Reservation basket weaver, was on display at the Gilman Historic Ranch and Wagon Museum in Banning, CA.
The black bear is our bear species in residence in this Inland Southern California canyon. Dangerous enough. Yet the even more dangerous grizzly bears, the roughest and toughest of the bears, once lived throughout the Native American homelands of California. Palm Springs Cahuilla people advised anthropologist William Duncan Strong in the 1920s: “One must never talk about the bear in the night time, for at night the bear travels, and by day he usually sleeps.
“If you talk about him at night, earth or rocks or mountains tell him what you say. He listens until he hears where you are going to hunt and goes there, so you will surely be killed.” 1
Bears eat some of the same foods that the people did in older days, such as the fruits and berries of wild shrubs and trees, and acorns, and pine nuts. Bears also ate the meat of deer and other game that hunters might leave behind, so rather than encounter a grizzly bear eating one’s meat, hunters brought their food home.
Extinction
S.E. Hollister was a famed early American hunter and trapper. Lithograph by Henry C. Eno, 1853, courtesy of University of California, Berkeley.
The grizzly bear was hunted by newcomers to California. The arrival of thousands of people — and their repeating rifles — into the First Nations killed off the grizzlies. By the early 1900s the grizzly bear was wiped out from California. One grizzly bear remains today in California — on the California state flag.
Bears of Power
Black bear, courtesy of California State Fish and Wildlife Department
In older times, certain Cahuilla shamans, or leaders with supernatural powers to change the world, were said to hold the power of the bear. This gave them the ability to change into animals.
“Chepé' pé' pé' tuháyimani'chi' chememtéteyamaxwe' púvulam písh hemqálive', húnwetum písh he'míyaxwenive',” the late Katherine Siva Saubel (Cahuilla) said in her 2004 Cahuilla memoir.2 “It is true that they always used to tell that there were shamans, that they could become bears.” The people told one another not to shoot or kill a bear, because they might kill a person, she said.
Her brother the late Alvino Siva (Cahuilla) in 1999 told the family story, as told by their father, Juan Capistrano Siva, about one of their ancestors who grew to become one of the most powerful shamans. “And they said that he could turn himself into a bear,” Alvino Siva said.3
“And they used to say that if you saw a bear going down one of these trails with a little boy on his back, that was my great-great-great grandfather, with his little son on his back.
“Because they’d be going somewhere and the boy would get tired and … the father would tell him, ‘Now, I’m going to go back in here, in this brush, and when I come out, I’m going to be something else, but don’t be scared.’
“So he’d go back in there, and he’d come back as a bear.
“And he’d put the little boy on his back and they would travel that way.”
That’s why, Alvino Siva explained, their father taught them never to kill or eat bears. “They’re our relatives.”
His sister Katherine Siva Saubel, also remembered their father’s story: 4
“Pé' pé' mán péqi taxvukméniqa'.
He converted himself.
Húnwet míyaxwe', 'áy míva' pá' híchika' 'ámuka' 'éxenuk.
He became a bear when he was going to hunt.
Pénháni' 'áy táxmunashpu'. Pénga' 'áy híchinashpu'.
He would sing. And then he would go.
Miva' pá' pé' 'áy táxvukméninqa'. 'Ay húnwet miyaxwe'.
Somewhere along the way he transformed himself. He would become a bear.”
Don’t Feed the Bears
“Long ago,” Alice Lopez said in Cahuilla in April 1964,5 “ when my stepfather Francisco Torro, who was a shaman — a great shaman— was still alive, he told us this true story. He told us how the Indians in the old days turned themselves into bears; (he told us) that shamans became bears.”
Alice Lopez recalled how he told about a “foolhardy boy” who was told not to go hunting because a bear was around. The boy didn’t listen to the advice. The boy boasted that he would kill the bear. Sure enough, as he was hunting, two bears appeared, jumped on him, and killed him. “This is a true story that my stepfather told a long time ago.
“And he said that the earth is the aunt of the bears. The earth tells the bear everything that happens. Thus when anything bad (for the bears) is about to happen, they (the bears) know it; that is what he said.”
Menroy Turns into A Bear
The Cahuilla text to the story told by Alice Lopez, as it appears in Hansjakob Seiler’s book, Cahuilla Texts With an Introduction. We thank Raymond Huaute for sharing the story in Cahuilla with everyone at Dorothy Ramon Learning Center’s Native Voices Poetry Festival.
In another story Alice Lopez remembered in 1964 from Francisco Torro (and shared by Raymond Huaute in Cahuilla at Dorothy Ramon Learning Center’s Native Voices Poetry Festival), “There once was a man called Menroy who could turn himself into a bear.
“I believe he was an old man. He lived east of here, and from there he left for Cahuilla (Reservation, near Anza). His relatives lived there in Cahuilla. On his way between his home and what is known as Indian Wells (Káviñiš) — somewhere over there on the other side — he sat down on a rock, just sat there. He had already turned himself into a bear and sat there and picked the — what do you call them? Prickly pears. He picked and ate them as he sat there on the rock. Then along came two cowboys on their horses; they came and saw him. And they knew that he was a man. They laughed at him, saying, ‘That’s Menroy. Quick, we’ll rope him and then tease him.’ They had a rope and jumped at him — they roped him as he sat there.
“But the man jumped up and tore the rope (apart). They tried to get it (the rope) but he got it away from them and ran away from the cowboys. Now they knew that he was a man. They left him and went on their way, and he who was left there started on his way, too. He went on, and changed himself into a person as he went, but the rope was still tied like a belt around him. He went on to Cahuilla. He reached his relatives, who lived there. He arrived there and told them, ‘As I was on my way some cowboys roped me to make fun of me, and I took this rope away from them.’ After he had stayed there a while, he said, ‘the sun is going down; I’m ready to go home.’ ‘It’s evening, yet you want to go home,’ they said. ‘I shall be there in no time. It isn’t far,’ he said. They gave him dried meat in a sack. He put it on his shoulder and left for home. He changed into a bear underway, and then ran so fast that he arrived at his house in the east as night fell.”
Little Bear
Elder Ernest Siva (Cahuilla-Serrano), president of Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, shares the second song he learned as a child more than 80 years ago, a song about a misbehaving young bear.
Honoring Bear
“The bear was honored by the people in the past,” Sean Milanovich (Cahuilla) says, “and the people continue to revere the bear as they share about healing, medicine, and stories of the bear.”
Wherever there are bears, Indigenous people have a relationship with them. (Pottery art from Siva Family Collection)
Dragonfly Gala
As we’re getting ready for our Aug. 14, 2021, Dragonfly Gala, we’re honored that the Morongo Band of Mission Indians has become a Gala sponsor. Thank you!
Here are the details so you don’t miss our celebration of Southern California Native American cultures, languages, history, and traditional arts.
Thank you!
Special thanks this week to Ernest Siva, Sean Milanovich, and Will Madrigal.
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Strong, William Duncan, Aboriginal Society in Southern California, University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, 1929, (reprint, Malki Museum Press, 1972), pp 115-116.
Sauvel (also spelled Saubel), Katherine Siva, and Eric Elliott, “Bears in Oldendays,” in 'Isill Heqwas Wáxish: A Dried Coyote’s Tail, Malki Museum Press, 2004, Book 2, p. 754., and p. 755, “Bears Disappearing.”
Murkland, Pat, “View to an Ancient Past,” The (Riverside, CA) Press-Enterprise newspaper, special section, “Family Album,” p. 3., Oct. 10, 1999.
Sauvel (also spelled Saubel), Katherine Siva, and Eric Elliott, “Shamans Turning into Bears,” in 'Isill Heqwas Wáxish: A Dried Coyote’s Tail, Malki Museum Press, 2004, Book 2, p. 719.
Seiler, Hansjakob, Cahuilla Texts with an Introduction, © 1970, Indiana University Publications, Language Series Monographs, v. 6, Editor, C.F. Voegelin, Alice Lopez, “The Foolhardy Boy and the Bears,” pp 138-141, and “Menroy Turns into a Bear,” 141-143. Note: Chona Dominguez, the mother of Alice Lopez, also contributed stories and songs to the language project represented in this book. She died in 1962 at age 102.