After the storms. (Pat Murkland Photo)
In that last series of storms taking us into 2022, we received too much mud. Ashes from our 2020 fire, mud, and unchecked water barreled from the burn-scarred hillsides. Tractor angels now are helping everyone dig out. In the mud, we also have seen updates from area wildlife. What a busy nightlife Tukut (Bobcat) has, judging from all the tracks he’s left under the crescent moon.
Traditionally, mud is so important to the First Nations. In the Cahuilla Creation Story,1 “Mo-Cot answered, ‘We have made the earth, two kinds: fam av sil (meaning moist earth) and pal lis ma wit (meaning damp earth). Also, the u le wit (meaning the clay earth), the ta vi wit (meaning the white clay and also the black clay, the yellow clay, and the red clay). Of this earth which we have made will we make the people.’”
“Háni' 'áy paam … méta' híkusqa'. Then he (Múkat) ummm … breathed on them,” the late Cahuilla Elder Katherine Siva Sauvel (also spelled Saubel) said.2 “Pé'pé' mán 'áy hemqwápiwe'. 'Et chepév wálangax múlu'uk pish miyaxwenive' yúlish témal pish he'miyaxwenive'. And so they (the first human beings) came to life. It is true that they (the people) were originally created from mud and earth.”
In older Native American times, mud was a supply tool for making essentials such as pots (the people knew where to find their special clay). It also served as a powerful medicine. For example, Katherine Saubel remembered how her mother doctored her scorpion sting: She mixed mud, “something else,” and mashed it together with cottonwood leaves into a healing plaster. “Pé'pé' péqi' pehúva'niqa' pé'iy písh. And so she cured herself of it.”3
Saved by Mud
By Pat Murkland
So by way of a long introduction to today’s tale, it probably was no insult to be named after mud — perhaps the opposite? The Mud story we share with you is about a Cahuilla woman who was renowned 100 years ago among area Native American people as a traditional healer. Her name was Yúlish, Mud.
In 1923 Yúlish saved the life of Katherine Saubel’s late brother, Bird Singer Alvino Siva. Here is the story that Katherine Siva Saubel and Alvino Siva told me in 1999:4
1923: The Accident
Katherine Siva Saubel said that when her brother Alvino was several months old, the family was traveling by horse-drawn wagon from the Santa Rosa Mountains to the place where they were staying for the father’s health in Palm Springs.
This, as you might imagine, was a difficult journey.
“Then one of the horses stepped in a gopher hole,” Katherine Siva Saubel said. “The other horse became afraid.” The horses panicked and ran. The wagon bounced wildly before it jolted to a halt. Katherine, who was about 3 or 4 years old, fell between the horses and the wagon. She remembered that her older brother Cruz pulled her up and saved her from becoming trampled or crushed.
But their mother and baby Alvino catapulted to the ground. “Somehow, she was still holding the baby in her arms,” Katherine Saubel said. Her mother’s arm was cut, bruised, and bleeding, her clothing torn. And the baby had an indentation in his head.
Alvino Siva in 1999. (Photo Courtesy of The Press-Enterprise newspaper.)
An Egg and Cigarette Papers
Alvino Siva said, “My mother was breast-feeding me and she saw that I couldn’t nurse very good. Every time I would start sucking, then I would start crying. And I just didn’t have, I guess, the right motion, in getting milk …
“This old lady, she was from T-M, Torres-Martinez, they called her Yúlish, which in Cahuilla means Mud. This was her name.
“And she sat there and was watching my mother breastfeed me, and she noticed I wasn’t getting the milk like I should. So, the old lady told my mother, ‘Let me have him.’
“So she took me, and looked at me, looked at my soft spot on my head. And she told my mother, ‘You know, his soft spot has collapsed, has caved in.’
“… So, my mother said, ‘Well what can we do for it?’
“She said, ‘Why, I’ll fix him.’”
Yúlish asked his father to get an egg, cigarette paper that people used to roll their cigarettes — “the dark-colored one” — and a pail of warm water. Their father ran to town and bought an egg; he was charged $1. When he came back, she used the egg white to make a glue. “She took me by the ankles and stuck my head in this pail of water,” Alvino Siva said. “And then she would lift up on it.”
After doing this three times, the suction pulled the fontanel back in place. “And then she used that white of the egg on the top of my head and put that cigarette paper on top of it, for to hold it up. So, that’s how I got over that and I could nurse again,” he said.
Alvino Siva and Katherine Saubel shared this story with others over the years. A version from Katherine Saubel in her 2004 cultural memoir5 tells how her father sought out Yúlish: “‘Pé' 'é' ñishka', pé' 'éxenuk hem'íyaxwenipa' kíkitam,’ yáqa'. ‘She knows what to do with babies like that,’ he said.”
“So now, when I sleep,” Alvino Siva said in 1999, when he was in his 70s, “my eyes are not completely closed. My eyes are partly open when I sleep, and that’s from that.
“So, if it hadn’t been for that, I don’t know what would have happened to me, but I’m thankful that Old Lady Mud showed up and saw what was wrong with me, and she corrected it.”
Thank you!
Bobcat tracks in the mud. (Pat Murkland Photo)
News from Dorothy Ramon Learning Center thanks you for exploring the wonder of Southern California Native American cultures with us. Please send your feedback and ideas: EMAIL. Subscribe; it’s free. Gmail users, please look in your “promotions” folder. Thank you from Editor Pat Murkland, January 5, 2022.
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Patencio, Francisco, and Margaret Boynton. Stories And Legends of the Palm Springs Indians, 1943, Palm Springs Desert Museum, pp 3-4.
Sauvel, Katherine Siva, and Eric Elliott, “Being Made of Mud,” in 'Isill Heqwas Wáxish: A Dried Coyote’s Tail, 2004, Malki Museum Press, Book 1, p. 307.
Ibid, “My Mother Stung by a Scorpion,” Book 1, pp 673-74.
Murkland, Pat, transcript of oral history recordings made with permission of Katherine Siva Saubel and Alvino Siva, 1999, part of research for a history series published in the Press-Enterprise (Riverside, CA) newspaper throughout October 1999: “Family Album, Legacies from Southern California.” (This story was not included in the published series.)
Sauvel, Katherine Siva, and Eric Elliott, “Alvino’s Fallen Fontanel,” in 'Isill Heqwas Wáxish: A Dried Coyote’s Tail, 2004, Malki Museum Press, Book 2, pp. 1298-1302.