By Pat Murkland
In late afternoon in our Inland Southern California canyon, we watched a deer pick its way along a slope. We thought of all wild animals with hooves, powerfully embraced by the cultural and spiritual lives of Southern California’s First Nations: Deer. Bighorn sheep.
And Antelope.
We tried to imagine a winter day long ago, when antelope may have come sweeping through our canyon, a herd of up to 100, all running at top speeds. In an instant they would have been here — and then gone. They are one of North America’s fastest animals, built to outrun their predators with speeds clocked past 55 mph.
While we call them antelope, they actually are pronghorn (Antilocaapra americana), a deerlike animal more closely related to giraffes than deer. They’re a holdover from 10,000 years ago and far beyond, when their ancestors in the family tree roamed Southern California landscapes among giant camels and mammoths.
Many people in Southern California may not even be able to describe what a pronghorn looks like. Here’s a male:
Male Pronghorn in Wyoming, 2012 (Photo by Yathin S. Krishnappa, courtesy of Wikimedia)
Pronghorn look like they should be running on African plains instead of through Native American homelands.
But they used to be here, in a powerful relationship with Native American people and their homelands. Pronghorn is Ténill in Cahuilla, and Termernc in Serrano.
Before the United States westward expansion, pronghorn numbered in the millions across North America, including throughout Southern California. Like the bison of the Plains, they were decimated, and pushed out of their lands. By hunters with rifles. Barbed wire. Grazing cattle competing for food.
By the late 1800s some pronghorn still ranged in the San Gorgonio Pass area and low and high deserts (including what is now called Antelope Valley), eating grasses, sagebrush, chamise, and some cacti. In the early 1900s George Wharton James wrote in Wonders of the Colorado Desert:1
“Deer and antelope are both fairly plentiful on the mountainsides near to the desert, though there are fewer antelope than deer. How well I remember my first sight of a band of antelope! They were — where I have never seen one since — miles away from the mountains and in the very heart of the desert.”
But by the 1920s, pronghorns were very few and far between, and during World War II, the last of the Colorado Desert pronghorn were wiped out by military personnel, according to desert naturalist Edmund C. Jaeger.2
Pronghorn in Montana (Photo by Jack Dykinga, U.S. Agricultural Research Service, via Wikimedia)
Spiritual Relationships
Deer, bighorn, and pronghorn need water sources, and so at times, still venture close to where people live. Just like the deer, and the bighorn, in older times, every part of the pronghorn was valuable: meat for food, and hide, muscles, sinew, and bone for tools and clothing, according to Cahuilla anthropologist Lowell Bean.
“The meat of these animals constituted a major protein source for the Cahuilla because one animal could feed so many at a time. The meat was often communally used.”3
Native people managed the wild herds, encouraging the growth of forbs that they ate, not overhunting or killing pregnant animals, and more. Although the pronghorn is very fast and also has far-reaching vision, in early days Native hunters, who had not yet met horses and were hunting on foot, would use a relay to chase and frighten the animals into speeding along a predetermined route, such as into a side canyon where the animals could be boxed in and shot with arrows.
For the Cahuilla, Lowell Bean shared, “Deer, pronghorn, and bighorn sheep were all known by the general term, sugatem (literally, ‘deer.’)4 These hooved game animals were important to Cahuilla lifeways. They shared a single supernatural guardian, Pemtemwaha, and special ceremonies, such as thanksgiving ceremonies for Pemtemwaha in the local ceremonial house (kishumawat) were associated with their capture. … Ritual preparation often preceded a hunt, e.g., fasting and the ritual smoking of tobacco.
“According to Alejo Patencio, the culture hero Kauiskiauka named a hill southeast of San Jacinto Peak pulukla, which was ‘ …a hill to which hunters would sing in the dance house in order to have deer sent to them … They would then go to the spot and if their prayer was granted they would secure a deer. Such hunters were called pavul, and had the power of changing themselves into bears or mountain lions.’ (Strong 1929:115)”
The Cahuilla and Serrano tell how, during the time of the Creation, the wild animals with hooves were people who gave themselves up to benefit mankind, and transformed into animals. The Serrano Bighorn Songs, the Paa'chucham, for example, once sung during ceremonies and rituals before a hunt, respect and remind the animals of their sacrifice.
Elder Ernest Siva (Cahuilla-Serrano), president of Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, singing Serrano bighorn sheep songs with Kim Marcus (Serrano-Cahuilla), 2021 Dragonfly Award winner, at the 2022 Dragonfly Gala. (Carlos Puma Photo)
At Dorothy Ramon Learning Center’s Nov. 14, 2022, “An Evening with Kim Marcus,” come listen to a few of these beautiful and sacred Bighorn songs, which have been saved:
November 14, 2022: An Evening with Kim Marcus
Co-Sponsored by Idyllwild Arts!
Join Kim Marcus (Serrano-Cahuilla), winner of Dorothy Ramon Learning Center’s 2021 Dragonfly Award, in an evening of cultural presentation and sharing, singing, and storytelling.
DETAILS:
6 p.m. Monday, November 14, 2022. 127 N. San Gorgonio Ave., Banning.
Your $10 helps the nonprofit Dorothy Ramon Learning Center save and share Native American cultures, languages, history, and traditional arts.
Other Upcoming Events
November 27, 2022, Fourth Sunday concert
Flutes, flutes, and more flutes with the Silver Sounds Flute Chorus.
DETAILS: 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 27, 2022, 127 N. San Gorgonio Ave., Banning.
Proceeds from your $10 help the nonprofit Dorothy Ramon Learning Center save and share Native American cultures, languages, history, and traditional arts.
December 5, 2022: “A Light to Do Shellwork By”:
Dragonfly Lecture by Elder Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez (Chumash/O’odham (Tohono and Akimal)).
Co-Sponsored by Idyllwild Arts!
Join Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez as she reads from her new poetry book, A Light to Do Shellwork By, and shares cultural memories, stories and songs.
DETAILS: 6 p.m. Monday, Dec. 5, 2022. 127 N. San Gorgonio Ave., Banning.
Your $10 helps the nonprofit Dorothy Ramon Learning Center save and share Native American cultures, languages, history, and traditional arts.
Thank you for your support! News from Dorothy Ramon Learning Center welcomes your EMAIL. Thanks from Center leaders Ernest (“Termernc”) and June Siva, and Editor Pat Murkland, November 3, 2022. Subscribe to News from Dorothy Ramon Learning Center. It’s free.
George Wharton James, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert (southern California) Its Rivers and Its Mountains, Its Canyons and Its Springs, Its Life and Its History, Pictured and Described: Including an Account of a Recent Journey Made Down the Overflow of the Colorado River to the Mysterious Salton Sea, Volume 1, 1906, Boston, Little, Brown and Co, pp 150-151.
Edmund C. Jaeger, Desert Wildlife, © 1950, 1961 by the trustees of Stanford University, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, p. 56.
Lowell J. Bean, Sylvia Brakke Vane, Sue Myers, and James Toenjes, (Cultural Systems Research Inc.) Cahuilla Ethnozoology, 2007, for U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, Palm Springs, p. 59.
Ibid., pp 60-61.