This week we explore a little of Southern California’s Mojave and Colorado deserts, homelands of the Mojave, Chemehuevi, Serrano, and Cahuilla people. It’s a world vibrant with sacred places, and the Native Americans’ long cultural history is shared with many animals, birds, and plants — and with water.
(Deserts offer scenery, colors, and contrasts that no artist can duplicate. Photo © copyright Ruth Nolan)
Ruth Nolan also discusses her Sept. 28, 2020, online visual-poetic presentation on the desert’s beauty and powers of transformation and healing. And Ernest Siva tells a story from his father about the power of sacred places.
Water in the Desert
Oasis of Mara (Courtesy of National Park Service, photo by Brad Sutton)
By Pat Murkland
Some desert animals have an ability to save water that’s built right into their bodies. The desert tortoise, for example, can recycle its own water from day to day without needing to drink more water. People, though, need to live close to water. In older times Native Americans in the arid deserts lived near springs and other sources of fresh water. These are sacred places.
In the story shared by Dorothy Ramon, the Oasis of Mara near modern-day Twentynine Palms is the first place where the Serrano people believe they lived after coming to this world, the place of origin of the Maarrênga'yam Hiddith (“the Orthodox Serrano”). (1) The oasis also is cherished by the Chemehuevi people and is on the trail of the Salt Songs, ancient, sacred ceremonial songs of the Chemehuevi and all the Southern Paiute people of California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. (2)
Dorothy Ramon: Drinking Water
“… Paachim pa'. Pihaqa'tim pa'.
They would drink water. They would drink water from springs.
Wanu'tu'ow qaym 'amay pa' kwana'.
They would not drink water that was flowing in a stream.
Tervanu' waya'xqow 'amaym pa' Taaqtam 'uviht kwana'.
The Indians would drink water that gushed forth from the earth.
Mit hamin kesha'. 'Amaym qay' pa' 'amay wanu'tu'ow.
It (river water) was bad for some reason. They didn’t drink from rivers.
'Amatunganim piipchim qac pihaqa' peyika'. 'Amaym pa' Taaqtam.
For this reason they would live near springs. That’s what the Indians would drink.
… Pa'cu' paachi' wangatkow tervanu' kwana' hawayt.
They would always go drink water flowing from the earth.
Pana' kwenemu' nyihay 'uviht: taaqtaam 'atuchinim keym ki'. 'Ama' 'ayee'.
That’s what they used to do: That’s what the old-timers talked about. That’s all.” (3)
Water Underground
“An ancient Indian well,” Carl Eytel illustration, circa 1900-1906 in modern-day Indian Wells,
in The Wonders of the Colorado Desert, 1906, by George Wharton James, Vol. 1: 264.
In his Sept. 14, 2020, online presentation for Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, “Pal Tingaypish! Water is Medicine! (Sept. 9, 2020, News),” Sean Milanovich told about a famous walk-in desert well that once served as a major regional source of water in modern-day Indian Wells. Dorothy Ramon remembered that her family always referred to Indian Wells by its Cahuilla name, Kávinish, which literally means “dug out.” (4) Here is a little more on this engineering ingenuity.
Francisco Patencio: The Story of the Well (1939)
“At Indian Wells the water ran from the ground, a good spring. Very fine clumps of palm trees grew around it. This is where the first palm tree grew. But the water was drying slowly. The Indian people began digging to reach the water. As the water lowered, they dug deeper, until what had been a good spring came to be named the “Indian Well” by the first White People who came much time later. Then it was that they had to dig lower until they had made an Indian well. One side had steps going down to the water. Then often that one side was dug out slant-ways for the animals to go down to drink.
Honey mesquite, USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database / Britton, N.L., and A. Brown. 1913. An illustrated flora of the northern United States, Canada and the British Possessions. 3 vols. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. Vol. 2: 333.
“Thickets of mesquite grew at this place — many of them,” Francisco Patencio said. “The Indian tribes from many places claimed a thicket for themselves, and put their mark on it. When the harvest was ripe, all the tribes came and collected their beans. One tribe never took the beans of another tribe.” (5)
View from the 1890s
Generations of Cahuilla people engineered wells in the desert.
“The whole [Coachella] valley … is dotted with [Native American] wells,” ethnologist David Prescott Barrows observed in the 1890s, “… [and] many dug in the old way still remain, supporting life and giving refreshment miles and miles away from the rocky walls where the streams of the mountains disappear in the sands. These wells are usually great pits with terraced sides leading down to the narrow hole at the bottom where the water sparkles, built in such a way that a woman with an olla on her head can walk to the very water’s edge and dip her painted vessel full. The deeper it is down to the water, the larger, of course, is the excavation and the greater the diameter across its upper terrace.
Traditional clay olla by David Largo (Cahuilla), in Dorothy Ramon Learning Center’s Gathering Hall.
“The Coahuillas call these wells tema-ka-wo-ma-em, a pretty figure,” David Prescott Barrows wrote. “Ka-wo-mal is the word for a tinaja or water olla, and temal is the word for earth or the ground. There is no question but that the Coahuillas learned of themselves to dig these wells, and this practice cannot perhaps be paralleled elsewhere among American Indians.” (6)
Ernest Siva: Sacred Water
Elder Ernest Siva (Cahuilla/Serrano), president of Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, shares a memory from his father, Tom Siva, about the hot mineral-water spring that is a sacred place in Palm Springs at Agua Caliente Reservation.
“The Desert Is Our Mother”
Ruth Nolan’s grandchildren learning about the homelands of the First People at Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument Visitor Center, Palm Desert, California. Art sculpture: “Enduring Tradition,” by Gerald Clarke Jr. of Cahuilla Reservation. Learn more from Gerald Clarke about his artwork in our August 6, 2020 News from Dorothy Ramon Learning Center. (Ruth Nolan Photo)
Inspiration and healing
The desert soothes other thirsts. Learning Center leaders Ernest and June Siva invited Ruth Nolan to again share with us her inspiring visual-poetic presentation, “The Desert is our Mother.” This time, it’ll be online, via Zoom. Ruth Nolan tells more here about her September 28, 2020, online excursion. Explore how these landscapes can inspire, heal, and transform us.
(Photo © copyright Ruth Nolan)
Finding Beauty in Harsh Terrain in the 2020 Pandemic
By Ruth Nolan
My own lifelong pattern of turning to the Desert, our Mother, for beauty and hope, for sustenance and joyful celebrating, to this most rugged and also most gentle of places, my lifelong home, has taken on a new urgency this year, the result of the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic. Like never before, our desert’s power and portals that enable us to achieve an understanding of our world, particularly in confusing and erratic times such as this, have soothed and renewed me, as I hope it has, and will, for you.
(Photo © copyright Ruth Nolan)
Relief from Tension and Turmoil
(Photo © copyright Ruth Nolan)
Time spent in the perfect, ancient-wise ways of the desert world is time that allows us to filter out the noise and darkness spewed at us from socially fraught times. From the pain and suffering so many are going through with illness, fear, disconnection to one another and deep loss. The desert is our great teacher, and our great healer, and as shadows and lightens from one mood and rock-scape to the next; from deep waterholes in small but lush fan palm oases to utterly oceanic sand dunes; from the most profound silence at the exact moment of sunset to the joyful sound of children looking skyward to notice a full moon for the very first time — the desert is our mother, it is a cacophony of music, it is in, and of, our deepest souls.
(Photo © copyright Ruth Nolan)
Through severe heat in summer, to crashing waterfalls in spring; to fluorescent cactus blooms, to ravens high in a tree; to lonely shotgun shacks and wildfires flashing through our foothills and mountains. My presentation, “The Desert Is Our Mother,” is in honor of, and gratitude for, our centering life spirit.
DETAILS:
Sept. 28, 2020, 6 pm, California time online via zoom
Journey online into the desert’s beautiful places with poet Ruth Nolan and explore the desert’s powers for healing and transformation. Free. Donations to the 501(c)3 nonprofit Learning Center are welcome.
To join the conversation, please register for “The Desert is our Mother” via zoom:
As part of this presentation, you will all be invited to pen a few short verses of your own and share with others as you wish.
About Ruth Nolan
Ruth Nolan is a poet, writer, and book editor and publisher from the Mojave Desert in the Apple Valley area. She is Associate Professor of English at College of the Desert near Palm Springs, California. In the summers of 1986 and 1987, she worked for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management as a helicopter hotshot and engine crew firefighter in the California Desert District, and has extensively hiked, traveled, and embraced the essence of her desert homeland. Her extensive works on the desert include the anthology, No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California’s deserts, published by Heyday Books.
Notes
1., 3. and 4. Dorothy Ramon (and Eric Elliott), “Beginning of the World,” in Wayta' Yawa': Always Believe, Malki Museum Press, 2001, pp 6-9 and (3) “Drinking Water,” p 101, (4) “Travelling through the Desert,” p. 100.
2. Clifford E. Trafzer and Matthew Hanks Leivas, Where Puha Sits: Salt Songs, Power, and the Oasis of Mara, 2018, Rupert Costo Endowment, University of California, Riverside.
5. Francisco Patencio and Margaret Boynton. Stories And Legends of the Palm Springs Indians, 1943, Palm Springs Desert Museum, pp 58-59.
6. David Prescott Barrows, The Ethno-Botany of the Coahuilla Indians of Southern California, [2d printing 1977] © 1967 Malki Museum Inc., Malki Museum Press, pp 26-27.
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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.