Oppapago looks on Waban, and Waban on Coso and the Bitter Lake, and the
campoodie looks on these three; and more, it sees the beginning of winds
along the foot of Coso, the gathering of clouds behind the high ridges,
the spring flush, the soft spread of wild almond bloom on the mesa.
These first, you understand, are the Paiute's walls, the other his
furnishings. Not the wattled hut is his home, but the land, the winds,
the hill front, the stream.
These he cannot duplicate at any furbisher's shop as you who live within
doors, who, if your purse allows, may have the same home at Sitka and
Samarcand. So you see how it is that the homesickness of an Indian is
often unto death, since he gets no relief from it; neither wind nor weed
nor sky-line, nor any aspect of the hills of a strange land sufficiently
like his own. So it was when the government reached out for the Paiutes,
they gathered into the Northern Reservation only such poor tribes as
could devise no other end of their affairs. Here, all along the river,
and south to Shoshone Land, live the clans who owned the earth, fallen
into the deplorable condition of hangers-on. Yet you hear them laughing
at the hour when they draw in to the campoodie after labor, when there
is a smell of meat and the steam of the cooking pots goes up against the
sun. Then the children lie with their toes in the ashes to hear tales;
then they are merry, and have the joys of repletion and the nearness of
their kind. They have their hills, and though jostled are sufficiently
free to get some fortitude for what will come. For now you shall hear of
the end of the basket maker.
In her best days Seyavi was most like Deborah, deep bosomed, broad in
the hips, quick in counsel, slow of speech, esteemed of her people. This
was that Seyavi who reared a man by her own hand, her own wit, and none
other. When the townspeople began to take note of her--and it was some
years after the war before there began to be any towns--she was then in
the quick maturity of primitive women; but when I knew her she seemed
already old.
Indian women do not often live to great age, though they look incredibly
steeped in years. They have the wit to win sustenance from the raw
material of life without intervention, but they have not the sleek look
of the women whom the social organization conspires to nourish. Seyavi
had somehow squeezed out of her daily round a spiritual ichor that kept
the skill in her knotted fingers long after the accustomed time, but
that also failed. By all counts she would have been about sixty years
old when it came her turn to sit in the dust on the sunny side of the
wickiup, with little strength left for anything but looking. And in time
she paid the toll of the smoky huts and became blind. This is a thing so
long expected by the Paiutes that when it comes they find it neither
bitter nor sweet, but tolerable because common. There were three other
blind women in the campoodie, withered fruit on a bough, but they had
memory and speech. By noon of the sun there were never any left in the
campoodie but these or some mother of weanlings, and they sat to keep
the ashes warm upon the hearth. If it were cold, they burrowed in the
blankets of the hut; if it were warm, they followed the shadow of the
wickiup around. Stir much out of their places they hardly dared, since
one might not help another; but they called, in high, old cracked
voices, gossip and reminder across the ash heaps.
Then, if they have your speech or you theirs, and have an hour to spare,
there are things to be learned of life not set down in any books, folk
tales, famine tales, love and long-suffering and desire, but no
whimpering. Now and then one or another of the blind keepers of the camp
will come across to where you sit gossiping, tapping her way among the
kitchen middens, guided by your voice that carries far in the clearness
and stillness of mesa afternoons. But suppose you find Seyavi retired
into the privacy of her blanket, you will get nothing for that day.
There is no other privacy possible in a campoodie. All the processes of
life are carried on out of doors or behind the thin, twig-woven walls of
the wickiup, and laughter is the only corrective for behavior. Very
early the Indian learns to possess his countenance in impassivity, to
cover his head with his blanket. Something to wrap around him is as
necessary to the Paiute as to you your closet to pray in.
So in her blanket Seyavi, sometime basket maker, sits by the unlit
hearths of her tribe and digests her life, nourishing her spirit against
the time of the spirit's need, for she knows in fact quite as much of
these matters as you who have a larger hope, though she has none but the
certainty that having borne herself courageously to this end she will
not be reborn a coyote.