We thank all participants in our first 2021 online workshop, “Story Medicine in the Time of the Pandemic.” We plan to share more from this inspiring workshop with everyone. During the session, Michael Madrigal offered a healing prayer, sung in Cahuilla, that had come to him. This reminded us of a story from the late Guy Mount (1) on his first meeting with then-70-year-old Serrano Elder Magdalina Nombre (2) at Morongo Indian Reservation in 1968.
Ernest Siva (Cahuilla-Serrano), president of Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, discusses “catching a song” and the healing powers of songs.
Catching A Song (3)
View of San Jacinto Peak (Ayaqaych) from Morongo Indian Reservation (Detail) circa 1915 photCL 39 (272), William H. Weinland Collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Magdalina Nombre and the Quail
By Guy Mount
The first time I met Magdalina [Nombre], she was setting on an old couch under a mesquite tree near her little clapboard house [on Morongo Reservation]. I parked my car at the end of a dirt driveway beside an electric power pole, noticing that two wires which delivered power ran down its side to a meter, but stopped there. The electric had never been connected to the house. I didn’t think much about it at the time. I was more interested in the plump, elderly brown-skinned woman who was singing a song to a covey of quail scratching in the sand around the beat-up couch.
California Quail (Photo by Becky Matsubara courtesy of Wikimedia)
The birds flew away quickly as I approached. Magdalina shielded her eyes from the morning sunlight and looked up to me suspiciously. I knew she had been told a student from the university was coming to visit and that she had agreed beforehand to share her knowledge regarding Serrano traditions. However she only grunted as I introduced myself by saying that I had come by to record any information that she might have about the “old ways.”
“Oh. I don’t know anything,” she said modestly. “I don’t know why they told you to visit me.”
“They said you were one of the few people left who knows the old songs and stories.”
“I don’t know anything,” she repeated.
“What song were you singing to the quail?” I asked, taking a seat beside her on the couch. “Was that a traditional song?”
“Oh no,” she answered. “That’s just a song I caught.”
I was baffled by her answer because I was taking an elective class in music appreciation at the university, and the creative process of musical composition seemed so difficult and unattainable to me, I had been taught to believe that music was composed by people who knew how to read and write musical notation, yet I doubted that Magdalina knew how to read and write English — much less music. It suddenly occurred to me that aboriginal Indians didn’t … write language or music at all, yet they seemed to have plenty of songs and stories! This puzzled me and led to the first important question of my ethnographic career.
“What do you mean when you say you caught a song?” I asked.
“Well, you know … I caught that song out in the desert by listening to the earth.”
Now I was really baffled. “How do you listen to the earth?” I inquired.
“Oh, that’s easy: You just walk around in the desert until you find a quiet, beautiful place and then you sit down on the earth and listen.”
“I see,” I said, more confused than ever.
Magdalina seemed to notice my confusion. [They smoke together, Magdalina using a well-worn corncob pipe, and she explains to the shocked Guy Mount that she doesn’t want electrical power because the buzzing interferes with her ability to communicate with the world around her.]
… “If you want to catch a song,” she continued, “you have to open your mind and listen. You can’t hear the music of the earth when there’s electricity around. You have to stop thinking and listen to the sounds of the earth. You know, I caught that song for the quail by listening for it. When you hear the songs of the earth, it’s like the wind going through the leaves of a tree. It sounds like a bird flying. I like to have a smoke and listen for those songs.” …
I promised not to use my battery operated recording device and listened to Magdalina sing several songs. It was the first time I heard native music. The songs seemed strange to me, but beautiful. They were unlike any melodies that I had ever heard. (Later, after a formal analysis of southern California music, I realized they were using all the notes of the natural overtone series, including quarter-tones not found in the tempered western scale.) While she sat on the couch, smoking and singing, the quail returned. They hopped out of the creosote bushes and ran around her feet, pecking here and there. She fed them her songs the way some people feed pigeons in a park. Her little feathered audience was about all she had in the way of material possessions, and I felt poor by comparison. I wanted to try out her technique of composition, intrigued with the idea of catching my own songs. Thanks to Magdalina, I learned more about creating music and the mind of a Native American than was ever taught in a college classroom.
Notes
Art after prehistoric rock art of quail found in the Coso Range
1. Guy Mount (1938-October 2020) studied at University of California, Riverside, in the late 1960s-1970s, pursuing a masters degree in anthropology. As part of his studies he documented Cahuilla life with Ruby Modesto, published by his own Sweetlight Press of Cottonwood, CA, in 1980 as “Not for Innocent Ears: Spiritual Traditions of a Desert Cahuilla Medicine Woman.”
2. After the deaths of male Serrano traditional leaders at Morongo, Magdalina Nombre, together with Sarah Martin and Merinciana Lyons, held some traditional Serrano ceremonies together until Mrs. Martin’s death in 1976. The ceremonial house was then burned. This was the end of an era. (Read more in Martin, Sarah, with Kenneth C. Hill, 2005, The Road to Maarrenga': Serrano Memories of a Long-Ago Ceremony at Mission Creek, Ushkana Press, Banning, CA.)
3. Story excerpt from Serrano Songs and Stories, 1993, compiled and edited by Guy Mount, Sweetlight Books, Cottonwood, CA, pp 42-44. Author note: “The following narration was transcribed from tape recordings during the spring and fall of 1968 at Morongo Indian Reservation in southern California. I have omitted all of my questions and rearranged the dialog to present the material as a continuous story.”
Editor’s note: Explore more about connecting with the world in Listening to the Ground, published Nov. 18, 2020.
Upcoming Event: Native Women Leaders
Banning Library District, Friends of the Banning Library District, and Dorothy Ramon Learning Center will co-host an online Zoom session at 4 pm Saturday, January 30, 2021, featuring Native American women leaders and their nurturing of cultural community and strength: Mary Ann Andreas, a longtime Morongo Reservation tribal leader and a Dorothy Ramon Learning Center Dragonfly Award winner for her leadership, and teen leaders, the sisters Sophia and Isabella Madrigal (Cahuilla-Chippewa).
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Dorothy Ramon Learning Center is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that saves and shares Southern California Native American cultures, languages, history, and traditional arts. Join us at dorothyramon.org and Dorothy Ramon Learning Center on Facebook.