The River People – Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Environmental Education

The next day David called me at the motel. He had set up an opportunity for me to meet with six elders. They were all women who met on a weekly basis to recover and record their nation’s language. It was part of a project with university linguists to preserve and teach the original language to youth and interested adults. Without a written language, their memories and songs held this precious heritage. Their language, David explained, was the only surviving language from the original Yuman language groups, and thus was of immense value to them, as well as historians and linguists of American Indian culture.

“This is a great honor for you. I did not expect them to agree to meet with you, but for some reason they concurred. Perhaps they may somehow see it as part of the language project. I am not sure. However, they meet today at noon for a meal and then an afternoon work session. Can you meet me at 1 p.m. today? Plan for about a 30-minute meeting.”

I agreed.

~~~

The elders were six in number. I guessed most of them to be in their fifties or sixties, which was elderly for the tribe. Disease took members early. But nothing about these women looked tenuous: they were lively, tall, women of substance with unknowable expressions on their faces. It was awe-inspiring. None of them looked directly at me except for a glance here and there. What they might be thinking or feeling I could not tell.

I introduced myself and the idea for the project but followed with the statement that it might be something very different if the people wanted it to be. That produced soft chuckles. I wasn’t sure why. David had left me alone with the elders so I was on my own in this matter.

No one spoke. We sat in silence for a few moments, which made me uncomfortable. Then, I asked them about their language project. One elder spoke for the others.

“We are remembering the old language to teach it to the youth so it will not die out with us. But we do not all remember the same.” That produced laughter and eased the tension in the room.

There was some private communication among them, and then they shared how part of what they had to do was to try to retrieve from memory the names their grandparents or parents might have used for an object or an action. They were in disagreement about how to make an old-style of tribal pottery. Without the works to describe the process it had been forgotten. So they had spent a whole day with water, clay, mesquite, fire, and their conundrum.

“Are there words for the environment?” I asked.

After a long silence and many glances back and forth among the women, one cleared her throat and said, “We have no word for the environment. We ARE the environment.”

Silence and then laughter. They read my facial expression as I processed the statement.

No separation. There in a simple statement was the cultural divide between the River People and modern American culture.

“I see,” I said. Thinking as quickly as I could, I asked them about words for plants and animals on their reservation and suggested that might be a project for youth. There was no reaction at all. Silence reigned again. Even I was now staring at the floor.

The spokesperson came to my aide. “We’ll think more about this.”

That was my indication the meeting had ended. I stood and thanked them and left, not knowing if any good had come of the interaction. I felt completely unprepared for this kind of communication. I did not realize at the time that much of what I did and said was disrespectful of their ways. But because they expected it, they did not interrupt me. I hoped that what transpired was an important step in building good relations. This also was my first indication of a different pace among the River People as compared with my university’s frenzied project development. 

When I returned to David’s office, he seemed to know exactly what happened and simply explained, “Things move slowly here but not because the River People are slow. It is how things move among us. If you stay long enough, you’ll observe that people gather without any meeting notice. They just show up.”

He invited me to join him later to tour the reservation and the surrounding area. I returned to the motel to record some notes and make a few phone calls. Later I changed into slacks. David warned me the areas we would visit were thick with needle bearing trees and shrubs.

~~~

We drove first to the Laguna Dam, north of Yuma. Built in 1909, it was the first dam on the Lower Colorado River to help stem the floodwaters that threatened new towns and settlements each spring. Later dams would divert river water into canals that fed the farmlands surrounding the city. Standing on its bulwark, David pointed to the agricultural fields spanning to the horizon, and indicated by landmarks where the three reservations of the River People were located. One of them was on the edge of Yuma where the nation had just completed building a casino and hotel. It was the newest deed of land from the U.S. government allowing them to engage in commercial activity to support their community.

“How many people are in the tribe today?” I asked.

“There are about 2,000 in the U.S. but many more thousands below the border.” David stated this matter-of-factly. Right after the Gadsden Purchase ceded 30,000 square miles of additional land to the U.S. from Mexico, the River People had been separated by an international border. Life went on as usual during the first 100 years after the purchase, because no enforcement had taken place. But, in the 1930s, when border regulations were enforced, families were separated due to lack of official identification to cross over.

“The river used to flow all the way to the Sea of Cortez, or the Gulf of California, as most people know it,” David reflected. “When the Hoover Dam and later the Imperial Dam were filled, the delta region below the border—the traditional lands of the River People—dried up.”

We both stood in silence, looking out across the ragged landscape, its rubble of cement and iron left from the dam’s construction, and the accumulated trash scattered around the area.

Downriver I noticed a lone fisherman pull a large flopping fish from the narrow river. “So, people still fish from the river?” I asked, pointing to the figure below us.

“Oh, yes. We stock the river with tilapia and trout for the tourists. That’s Albert Pope, one of our tribal members. He is a regular here. He is one of our traditional members, holding to old ways…as much as he can, that is.” David’s voice trailed off as we lingered there in silence, watching the fisherman cast his line again.

Clearly, there was a sad reality I felt in the air itself.  David broke the spell, turning toward the car.

After my short tour, David and I went to lunch to try to figure out the next steps I could take before returning to Phoenix. We went to one of his favorite Mexican cafés and ordered a generous platter of local dishes. He was great company, easily navigating the cultural landscapes in the region: his people’s traditional members who resisted the outside forces that induced change in their cultural practices; the young people returning to the reservation from college with new ideas and dreams of modernizing the River People; the military culture that dominated much of Yuma life within the marine and army bases, and the vets he treated in his tribal community. He was fluent in many languages and dialects of the region. It made me curious about how he had accomplished such adaptability without losing a sense of himself. But I did not ask him about that because we barely knew each other and I thought it intrusive. I was impressed by him.

Before I left Yuma, I noticed a thrift shop and used bookstore in Winterhaven—a little hamlet opposite the reservation on the other side of the American Canal. Being a treasure hunter for old books, I enjoyed an hour crawling through the shop’s stacks of dusty books, antique photos, and an odd assortment of knickknacks.

After observing me for some time, the shopkeeper asked, “Are you looking for anything in particular?”

“I wondered if you might have any histories or even diaries about this region,” I replied, grateful for some guidance.

The shopkeeper was about 5’6”, round as a barrel, and sported a huge white mustache and beard. The hair around his red lips was yellowed with age. He looked like a western version of Santa Claus.

“Follow me,” he said.

In a back room where rickety tables struggled to hold stacks of dusty books, he plucked one off the top and handed it to me. His fingers were thick, and brown hair grew in misguided tufts on each digit. “I think you’ll find this one matches your requirements.”

It was a diary by an Army Lieutenant at Fort Yuma, dated 1851. It had been published by a small press in Yuma in 1950,  titled, “Navigating the Delta.”

“Steamboats used to travel up and down the river back when it ran free,” the shopkeeper said. He turned away to leave me to explore.

I ended up buying that diary, tucked it in my briefcase, and left town for home.