“The Bird Songs are used at wakes invoking the spirits of our ancestors. We respect and honor the elders who gave us the songs. They have become a spiritual shield from our ancestors. Protecting us.”
-- Wally Antone (Quechan).
The small town of Needles, California, is located on the banks of the Colorado
River in the east Mojave desert. The once wild river now runs cold and tame on a prescribed course through tilting vistas of creosote and yucca. At the gymnasium near City Hall, the federal Bureau of Land Management is holding hearings on the proposal for a nuclear waste dump at a place referred to on maps as Ward Valley and called Silyaye Ahease (Land of Mesquite and Sand) by the
Mohave 1 Indians. Plans were to bury long-lived radioactive wastes from nuclear power plants in shallow, unlined trenches, above an aquifer, 18 miles from the
Colorado River, in critical habitat for the endangered desert tortoise and on land considered sacred by the five Colorado River Indian tribes.
Outside the gymnasium, Quechan Bird Song singer Wally Antone has assembled a group of singers and dancers. The women elders are dressed in traditional regalia of black and red shawls and dresses, diamonds dance on the hems of their skirts. They enter the building followed by a group of elders and
1 There are two spellings for "Mohave" Indians. In 1859, the Mohave people were forcibly divided by the United States military into two groups. A portion of the population were relocated to the Colorado River Indian Reservation at Parker, Arizona. The other portion refused to leave. The Mojaves who remained near Needles spelled their name with a "j" after the spelling of Fort Mojave, while the Parker group spelled their name with an "h." The two groups continue to use the difference in spelling to distinguish themselves from each other. In this article, we refer to the group historically and as a whole as the Mohave, a convention found in the anthropological literature. Mohave is also used when referring to the Parker group. Mojave is used when referring to the Needles group.

supporters and approach the microphone. Speakers are allow three minutes to express their views on a proposal that would impact the next 12,000 generations.
All morning, local residents, scientists, small town officials and tribal leaders testify against the dump with arguments that range from emotional pleas to technical analysis.
The group begins to sing, their voices accompanied by gourd rattles in a music that has endured the centuries. The songs tell of the ancient journeys of their spirit mentors through a landscape that is at the same time earthly and symbolic.
Ward Valley was a stopping point along the journey, a place where mesquite beans were collected along with medicinal herbs and where people lived and travelers rested, a landmark on in a sacred landscape described within the story of the songs.
Government bureaucrats sit and listen with a studied lack of interest as the songs are captured by a whirling recorder as they are entered into the administrative record. Wally ends the song with a signature twirl of the rattle and says,
“Can you understand what we are doing here? This is our land, our sacred lands, our ancestral lands. We have been placed here by our Creator to protect the river. If you poison the land, you poison us. We have been here since time immemorial.”
Years later the dump project was defeated by a combination of lawsuits, protests, scientific criticism and an occupation of the land by Native Americans and their allies. The songs assumed a central role of protecting Silyaye Ahease by calling forth the strength and unity of the tribes.
The Storyscape Project was founded in 1998 to assist the Mohave people in the preservation of their sacred Creation Songs. Before the last of the Creation Song singers died in 1972, Mojave elder Emmett Van Fleet was recorded by an amateur ethnographer. The precious songs lay dormant for nearly forty years as reel-to-reel tapes Mojave elders Llewellyn and Betty Barrackman asked the
Storyscape Project for help in preserving the aging recordings so that they may once again come to voice. Since then, the Storyscape Project has assisted other indigenous communities by recording culture bearers who are the storehouses of language, story and song with the goal of teaching the songs to a new generation and using them to protect their traditional lands.
Guy Tyler was a Texan who lived in Los Angeles, worked for ABC television as a sound engineer and traveled throughout the Southwest making recordings of
Indian stories, songs and languages. He interviewed Sitting Bull’s niece,

recorded native Hualapai speakers, visited the Zuni pueblo and made a series of visits to the Colorado River Indian Reservation to record Emmett Van Fleet’s songs. Their lasting friendship produced the recordings valued by the Mohave today. When Tyler passed on he left a library of 67 fragile reel-to-reel tapes from
22 different tribes. Tyler’s family asked the Storyscape Project to help archive the invaluable collection and we agreed provided that we would also return the recordings from where they came. With the expert assistance and state-of-the-art archival equipment of the University of California at Berkeley Language Center, we have been able to save the recordings from disintegration. A complete list of the Tyler collection can be found at the Storyscape web site.
Our protocols were developed through consultation with culture bearers, indigenous rights activists and native scholars. The culture bearers we record retain all intellectual property rights over the recordings and determine the conditions of archive should they choose to make the songs available to others.
The recordings from the Tyler collection have been archived at the request of the estate, but the conditions of the archive is determined by the culture bearers and their respective tribes. Following Native American Graves and Repatriation Act
(NAGPRA) guidelines, after transferring the recordings onto a digital format for long term storage and use, we return them to the Indian nations where the languages are still spoken and the culture bearers featured in the recordings their surviving relatives. We also engage in “catch and release” ethnography in which the culture bearers retain all the master recordings and our role is to provide technical assistance. We consider ourselves indigenous rights activists as well as researchers and field ethnographers.
We recently visited the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe to return a set of Bird Songs from the Tyler collection, sung by Charlie Evanston, one of the most famous
Mojave Bird Song singers. We met with the tribal council to answer any questions they may have regarding our protocols. Evanston’s songs are revered by the Mojaves who use the songs in ritual and have developed language and song cultural programs to teach their youth. We asked Mojave elder Llewellyn
Barrackman, vice-chairman of the Tribe, about the importance of the songs.
“The songs help to protect our lands. They are a map of our sacred territory. We sung the songs at our gatherings to educate people and to protect ourselves.
Each song tells a story. Our Creation Songs come from Spirit Mountain and tells about the Almighty. We will always be under attack by the federal government, we will always need to prove that this is our land. Just like the older days when they displaced us.”
Songs are the maps, libraries and spiritual hub for indigenous cultures around the world. The geographic aspect of the songs are multi-dimensional in purpose,

meaning and levels of reality. Mojave Bird Songs and Creation Songs are both real and metaphorical maps of ancestral territory that lead the ancient traveler to places of food, water, medicines and sacredness where teachings reside in the rocks. The Creation Songs travel from Avi Kwa Me (Spirit Mountain) located at
Mt. Newberry, Nevada to Avi Kwahath (Greasy Mountain) at South Mountain,
Arizona and follow the story of the spirit mentors of the Mojave people.
Travels along song routes were pilgrimages to places of power and adventures into different realms. Cahuilla Bird Songs tell of a legendary journey that happens in mythic time and in abstract space. Opinions about the true meaning of the songs differ among Cahuilla singers and range from a three time revolution around the earth to voyages that take place around aboriginal territory.
“These songs are very powerful. They are the songs that are going to unite our people again. It’s going to be a spiritual awakening of the Native American people, especially other Paiute people. It has to happen. It has been prophesized.
How do you stop prophecy? You can’t stop prophecy.”
Vivienne-Caron Jake (Kaibab Paiute)
After a short break of donuts and coffee the singers returned to the council chambers. In the center of the room a series of microphones stood between two rows of chairs. A small audience of people sat in the back of the room. A line of seated men faced a line of women, most of them elders, thirteen in all. The singers came from the far ranges of the thirteen bands of Nuwuvi or Southern
Paiutes and Chemehuevi people -- from the dry desert along the Colorado River in southwestern Arizona, southern California and southern Nevada, and the rich red rich canyon country of Utah with plateaus alive with deer and pine and winter snow.
In the middle of the group sat Willis Mayo, the 89 year old Salt Song singer from the Kaibab Paiute Tribe in northwestern Arizona. Willis made his living as a rancher and his hands have the leather to prove it. He is blind in one eye from an accident in his youth. He has dedicated his life to keeping the songs alive and is one of the only singers left who can recant the 142 Salt Song cycle from beginning to end.. Seated next to Willis was Ralph Pikyavit, a well-known singer from the
Kanosh Paiute Tribe in Millard County, Utah. Ralph leaned over to Willis and yelled into his ear asking him if he was ready to sing. The old man nodded and began to strike his blue gourd rattle against his left hand. I picked up the earphones and listened to the recording. Willis’ voice was clear through the

background of the other singers. The story of ancient travel by spirit mentors, the very song for the passage of the dead into the next realm inhabited the tribal chambers with a profound presence.
Last April, the Storyscape Project was invited to record the Salt Songs of the
Nuwuvi people by the Vivienne-Caron Jake (Kaibab Paiute) and Matthew Leivas
Sr. (Chemehuevi), founders of the Salt Song Project. We gathered at the Las
Vegas Paiute Tribal reservation in North Las Vegas. The gaudy hotels along the
Strip were a stark contrast to our assignment to help the Nuwuvi preserve their sacred storyscapes. After months of planning, the singers gathered for the historic sessions. Like the Creation and Bird songs, the Salt Songs describe the ancient landscapes of the Southern Paiute people since Ocean Woman and
Coyote set the world into motion at the beginning of time. And although they describe a world belonging to a dusky past, the Salt Songs are alive today guarding the lands that define the indigenous people of the Colorado Plateau and Mojave Desert regions.
In 1997, the 29 Palms Band of Mission Indians, one of the thirteen bands of
Southern Paiutes, founded the Native American Land Conservancy (NALC) to protect the endangered plants, animals, native homelands and cultural sites of
Southern California. In 2000, The Salt Song Project became part of the NALC’s cultural preservation efforts. Other tribes including the Chemehuevis, Serranos,
Cahuillas and Wyandots have joined the effort to purchase and protect 2,500 acres of wildlands including the Old Woman Mountains of the southeastern
Mojave Desert.
In summer storms, flash floods tumble down canyons surrounded by golden granitic peaks. Petroglyphs and pictographs dance on the varnished ceilings and walls of caves used by Chemehuevi holy men on sacred pilgrimages. These pristine lands are threatened by off-road vehicles, mining, grazing, pot hunters and vandals. The consortium of tribes plan to establish a culture and nature preserve with an interpretive center describing the unique natural and cultural treasures within a protected and respected area. The Salt Songs travel through the Old Woman Mountains and their continued practice will become an integral part of the nature preserve. The Native American Land Conservancy is leading the way toward a nexus of cultural preservation and environmental protection and the recognition of the intimacy of human relations with the landscape in a way that is designed to promote biological and cultural diversity.
After one night and a day of recording the Salt Songs, we chronicled the singers as they spoke about the importance of their songs to present and future generations of Southern Paiutes.

Matthew Leivas has been a leader of his people, serving as chairman of the
Chemehuevi Indian Tribe and currently as a councilmember. He has worked passionately to promote the Salt Songs and to record them so that future generations of Nuwuvi revive their customs and traditions. He introduces the songs at the beginning of our recording session.
“What you are going to hear in these songs is a variety of songs that begin customarily at sundown and are sung through the night-- evening songs, midnight songs, morning songs--and lastly, in the morning, before sunrise..
There’s approximately 140 songs that we sing. To me, the last four songs are the most important. Those last four songs sing about the inevitable death and also the excitement and desire to get to the other side and how these individuals on the other side are waiting. The spirit that will soon join them is drooling at the mouth in their excitement, just tasting what they were coming for, which is referred to as the happy hunting grounds, or heaven.
“These songs make the connection between the people and the spirit. It’s a healing ceremony in many ways that people who are grieving, surviving family members, are able to express themselves and cry when we go to these ceremonies. Most important is the spirit of the person who has passed on to help them on their journey into the spirit world.
“The Salt Songs tell about the different sacred sites on the thousand-mile journey beginning at the Bill Williams River, and visiting all the sacred sites within the circle from Chemehuevi Valley, Mojave Valley, Hualapai Valley, Utah, Nevada, and California, and different sacred sites that were visited on this journey and the things that they saw and experienced. It explains the whole history of our people and the connections we have with the elements.
Vivienne Jake’s dream has been to preserve these songs and to visit the sacred sites, historical places and the landmarks described in the journeys. Her delicate health has made the recording sessions even more immediate. Vivienne served in the United States Marine Corps and has been the chairwoman of the Kaibab
Paiute Indian Tribe. She is a mentor to many Southern Paiute women who value the guidance of the elders and who long to practice their traditions. Her gentle and soft-spoken ways are combined with a foundation of determination.
“We sing the songs to purify us. To put us in balance with ourselves and with all that which femininity means to us—what does it mean to be a woman? We forget those things. And you go back, you see the ceremony, you see the women dancing. You see the ceremony being conducted outside—it’s because we have to make that connection to the earth. We have to be in balance. Because we are the people of the earth. We came from here.

“The songs talk about the upper world, it talks about the other people, it talks about Pueblo people in the songs. You’re talking about houses, about the places where people lived, you’re talking about the land, you’re talking about the water. All of these things are in the song and you have to listen. You have to listen with your spiritual ears and see it with your spiritual eyes.
Vivienne’s next project is to travel the bitter trail of the Southern Paiute people’s encounter with the colonizers of North America, perform ceremony and sing the
Salt Songs to assist their ancestors to a final resting place.
“There’s a lot of work to be done. We have to visit all these places, the massacre site areas, the boarding schools where our children never went home, where they were buried and they were never given the rite of passage to go into the spirit world, because there was no ceremony for them. And so the spirits of the children are at unrest today. So we need to go and we need to help them. We are people who have the power to overcome. We are people with great strength. We are people who are survivors in today’s world. This is what the Salt Songs mean to me.”
The Salt Songs have been archived at the University of California Berkeley
Language Center and were distributed to the thirteen bands of Southern Paiutes so that they may continue to live through the breath of the singer. The songs inspire a grounding in a geography that traverses the borders and boundaries of life and death, the physical and spiritual, past and present, natural and supernatural.
The Old Woman Mountains rise above the long tilting valley and present monuments of rose-colored stone, valleys with hidden falls and ponds of water, and amphitheaters of piled rocks. In the rocks, in a small cave with a floor of stone worn smooth by many feet are the petroglyphs and pictographs Matthew
Leivas Sr. and others are trying to protect. On the ceiling of the cave, carved into the iron red varnish, were the signs for three mountains, a dancing figure, dark red paintings of hatch patterns. The cave opened onto a high perch in a canyon facing a wall of rock and then to a grand vista of valleys and mountains, Turtle
Mountains, Chemehuevi Mountains, all the way to the Colorado River. As we climbed the rocks at sunset and squeezed into the cave, Matthew explained the vision he had when he came to this place. He showed us on the rocks where the
Colorado, Gila and Bill Williams Rivers converge into a wandering band of water that pours down and around the stone all the way to the Gulf of California. With his sacred staff or poro in hand, Matthew spoke of the message brought to him by the Creator about the urgent need to protect the river from threats to its health to realize its essential place in our lives.

"In April, there were the planting songs, ceremonies to loosen the ground and to soften the ground to plant on it, dance on the earth to shake the ground and plant."
-- Corbin Harney
Outside the wind is still and the only sound, aside from the morning chatter of birds, is the constant flow of spring water emerging from heated depths.
The weather is excellent for recording and the sound of running water is a fitting background for the songs. We have been invited to Poo Ha Bah (Doctor Water), a traditional indigenous healing center outside of Death Valley, founded by
Western Shoshone activist and spiritual leader, Corbin Harney. Corbin has traveled the world calling for action against nuclear weapons, testing on indigenous lands and for a return to a spiritual relationship with the earth.
The United States government took over lands ceded to the Western Shoshone people through dominion and treaties and turned it into a domestic war zone.
The Department of Energy has been detonating nuclear weapons above and below the earth's surface on former Shoshone land for the last forty years. The
Shundahai Network has been working with other groups staging large demonstrations at the Test Site challenging the government's plans for a highlevel nuclear waste dump on the same lands. Ground zero for this country’s nuclear addition is the high desert region of snow-dusted mountains, Piñon Pine forests and riparian refuges in a charged landscape of wastelands, wildlands and traditional lands.
Corbin Harney has performed his songs at protest demonstrations from
Tahiti to the Russian Nuclear Test Site at Khazakstan to the Nevada Test site. At 82 years old, you can find him swinging a sledge hammer and directing the construction at the retreat center. He has led thousands of activists past the front gates of the Test Site in mass acts of non-violent resistance.
Many gatherings around the world have been grounded and blessed by Corbins songs, seven songs to the accompaniment of his drum, before the sun rises every morning. At the ceremonies, Corbin would welcome the people in the circle to make an offering to the fire. "Pray your way, not my way, your way," he would say, standing like a big bear in the light of the fire, an offer of tobacco filling the valleys of his palms.

We recorded Corbin Harney's seven songs called Newe Huvia, Mother Earth
Songs. The large hulking elder sat on a pow wow chair in the courtyard of the center with the spring water flowing behind him. He rubbed the skin of his drum in a circular motion and spoke about each song he was about to sing.
"This first song is about a bear who returns to this land. He's crying because there's nothing left to eat. His food is not there no more, he's looking for food and he's crying."
Corbin Harney then sings a slow, repetitive, hypnotic chant while staring beyond his surroundings and beating his drum. His voice is like raw silk, tough eloquent and deeply textured.
"This next song is about darkness, the importance of darkness to our people, important to the native people so they could escape their enemies. And all the animals need the darkness to hide from us. Today that darkness is used by a lot of creatures. Darkness rolls over the Mother from the east to the west, the day comes right after that. That's how important the darkness is.”
You can hear a question, a request, a warning in the slow cadence and color of his voice. Constant through the songs and the stories water emerges heated from the depths and flows down a series of baths and onto a wide salt marsh.
"Now I want to sing about water, how important water is. Water is flowing over this Mother. Water is something we have to appreciate, clean water, drinking water, soon we will have to buy all our water. All the living things need water. We need to sing to the water to keep it happy so it will flow. We have to sing to the life of the water, the spirit of the water so that it will flow."
Corbin caresses the skin of his drum and prepares for the next song. "Now I want to sing about all the living things, everything tied to gather in a circle. All the plant life, everything is in a circle. The native people say the circle can not be broken unless we break it. All over the land we all circle together."
"Now I want to sing about the Horned Toad, a creature that used to be here at one time and now has disappeared. They have been gone from here because we have not been singing about them. They came onto my shoulder and started singing songs asking why we had stopped singing about them. Now that we are

singing about them and they are coming back. This is a very important animal, he bleeds us, he helps us, he's a doctor and we have to appreciate him and he's happy if you sing about him. He disappeared and now he's coming back."
Corbin pauses to take a deep breath and in the quiet we hear only the hot springs.
"Now I want to sing about the water life here. The mineral hot springs here. It's flowing over the Mother Earth. The hot water comes from the hills, from under the land and flows over the land. The water is an really important part of the healing. He's a real doctor, a healer, Doctor Water, the mineral water. I'm singing about the Poo-Ha-Ba, the Doctor Water."
"Now I want to sing about arrowheads. Arrowheads are very important to the native people. We make the arrowheads and we use them to hunt, to take fish, birds, other animals. You have different arrowheads for different animals. The smaller the arrowheads the smaller the game, the bigger the arrowheads the bigger the game. Arrowheads kept us alive, they kept us in food, we have to appreciate them.”
"Now I want to sing about the sun, how important the sun is. Without the sun our Mother Earth would be an ice ball. All the living things depend on the sun. We depend on the sun. We have to appreciate the sun, we have to make sure the sun is shining upon the Mother Earth."
Corbin finished his songs with a deep sigh. I had heard these songs many times before, at conferences and protest actions, in small groups as the eastern sky began to, and in large circles with hundreds people as the new light crept across the land. We danced on the earth and prayed in our own way.
We returned to San Francisco to duplicate Corbin’s songs onto a long-lasing digital format. With permission, we will keep a copy for our archives, another copy will be placed in archival storage at the University of California and Corbin will keep the copyright, the master and distribute the recordings as he wants.
Conclusion
The intimate dance between land and culture is still practiced in the North
American Southwest, where patches of wildlands and pockets of native peoples survive. Federal land use policies and decisions have often failed to comprehend this connection, or have sought to subvert it. The loss of language is an intimate destroyer, vanishing story, meaning, perception and spiritual knowledge. For

people with oral traditions, the loss of language is like a fire in the library leaving pieces of an intricate puzzle. But somehow, language, stories and songs endure.
Culture bearers, teachers, artists and ethnographic recordings provide a map that new generations can sing giving new meanings to old traditions, new life to ancestral guides. The songs describe the personal, the natural and supernatural landscape in a multi-dimensional reality that Salt Song singers say enable them to fly from place to place. Like the hot spings at Poo Ha Bah flowing through desert rock, the songs nourish healing and transformation. The last four Salt
Songs aid the spirit into the next world -- a sacred ritual performed for one and as a service to the whole. Today the songs are providing the gift of unity, connecting the past with the present, uniting peoples, people with the land, and the land with our future.