Bird Songs Don't Lie: Writings from the Rez

By Gordon Lee Johnson

In this collection of essays and short stories, the Native American author explores reservation life through a range of genres and perspectives.

In this moving collection, Gordon Lee Johnson (Cupeño/Cahuilla) distinguishes himself not only as a wry commentator on American Indian reservation life but also as a master of fiction writing. In Johnson’s stories, all of which are set on the fictional San Ignacio reservation in Southern California, we meet unforgettable characters like Plato Pena, the Stanford-bound geek who reads Kahlil Gibran during intertribal softball games; hardboiled investigator Roddy Foo; and Etta, whose motto is “early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise,” as they face down circumstances by turns ordinary and devastating.

The nonfiction featured in Bird Songs Don’t Lie is equally revelatory in its exploration of complex connections between past and present. Whether examining his own conflicted feelings toward the missions as a source of both cultural damage and identity or sharing advice for cooking for eight dozen cowboys and -girls, Johnson plumbs the comedy, catastrophe, and beauty of his life on the Pala Reservation to thunderous effect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781597144568

Book preview

Columns and Essays

LOSS OF A FRIEND BRINGS MEMORIES

I’m dialing the way-back machine to circa 1975.

On Sundays Ed Arviso, Ronnie Powvall, and I would be hungover. We lived in a small house on Grape Street in Escondido. In the fridge there would be ice water in a brown ceramic jug with a cork stopper, the kind of jug a hillbilly might drink corn liquor from.

In the fridge, there would be a length of bologna, the kind encased in a red plastic wrapper, bought from Poor Ol’ Rube’s, a now defunct grocery store.

There would be a block of commodity cheese that Ronnie had gotten from his sister, Debbie.

And there might be some white bread or a pack of tortillas or, if nothing else, soda crackers. We’d slice the bologna and cheese to make breakfast sandwiches, pour a glass of ice water, maybe scarf some cold fries left over from a night-before stop at Jack in the Box, and watch football. For some reason, Ed was a Washington Redskins fan, and he’d whoop at touchdowns and scream at refs for bad calls.

It was a dark time in Ed’s life. His wife had left him, and because he still loved her, it kicked him in the heart. He did his best to keep his inner turmoil to himself, but every now and then, his loss would get the better of him, and his eyes would get rusty with tears.

Ed was a big guy, over 6 foot, probably 280 pounds, a standout football player in high school.

He’d been deputized by the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department but was conflicted about the job. Faced with the prospect of locking up friends, relatives, and fellow Indians, he walked away from the department.

He was enrolled in the Rincon Reservation but had blood ties to Pechanga, where his father’s people were from.

After his wife left, he invited Ronnie to set up camp in the spare bedroom. I was friends with Ronnie, and somehow I ended up surfing the couch. For years afterward, Ed would harp on me for borrowing his socks.

Eventually, Ronnie and I rented the house in front of Ed’s house. The three of us hung out together. We were young, we caroused the bars, we did our best to pick up women at nightspots, went to ball games, made road trips to other reservations.

Once we took off in Ronnie’s Ford LTD to attend a funeral on the Quechan Reservation near Yuma, Arizona. It was the kind of funeral where they built a pyre and burned the body. But at the same time as the funeral, there was a fiesta going on. We never made it to the funeral.

Once, the National Congress of American Indians convened at the Sheraton Hotel in Escondido, and we all got rooms. The Miss NCAI competition was part of the convention, so pretty contestants populated the lobby and roamed hallways. Ed hosted a lively after-hours party in his room. Suffice it to say no formal charges were levied. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

It wasn’t all wildness. We had our business side, too. Ronnie and I worked as proposal writers for the California Tribal Chairmen’s Association. Ed was launching what would become one of the biggest employment training programs for Indians in the county, the Indian Action Team. Eventually, I ended up working for Ed, first as a trainee carpenter, then as a proposal writer.

He was a good boss. When Ed belly-laughed, it was boisterous and joyful, his eyes squinting to the point of practically disappearing. He had the most colorful way of speaking of anyone I ever knew. He came up with the eyes getting rusted over from tears saying. He was a master of metaphor.

He put his social skills into play in the business world. Ed Arviso was very good at making his own way in the world.

But nothing lasts forever. Ronnie Powvall died of cancer years ago. Ed Arviso died Wednesday, leaving behind a wife and three daughters.

Once, we were three buddies cruising desert highways, radio blasting, at eighty-five miles per hour in a Ford LTD.

And now no más.

February 11, 2014

LUISEÑO INITIATION

There are times when I’ve sat at the patio bar of the Bank of Mexican Food, sipped a Negra Modelo, munched on tortilla chips and salsa, and wondered in silence where I went wrong.

I imagine we all feel adrift at times, like we’ve made a bad turn and are butting heads against a dead end in the labyrinth of life. When I feel the swirl of the world, the chaos of a million bits of information trying to infiltrate my brain, when I feel lost, I revert to simplicity. That’s been my lifelong pattern: start out in simplicity, let the complexities pile on until it gets crazy, then return to simplicity.

I know, it’s all pretty vague. Maybe I’ve been reading too much Henry James lately and his style is subverting my own. What I’m trying to say is we all need an anchor, something that tethers us, directs us to do what’s right.

I’m a reader, so it makes sense that one of my anchors was found in a book: The Culture of the Luiseño Indians by Philip Stedman Sparkman, University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, volume 8, 1908.

In the late 1890s, Sparkman, a quiet storekeeper near the Rincon Indian Reservation, learned the Luiseño language, to the point where he compiled a dictionary. He studied Luiseño culture, acquainting himself with many ceremonies. At one initiation ceremony, he wrote down word-for-word a lecture given by elders to young men as they were being initiated into manhood. It should be noted that initiation ceremonies were also conducted for girls transitioning into womanhood.

I was born too late for an initiation ceremony. Although I’ve heard of a couple attempts at revival, the last official initiation ceremony was held in the 1940s.

For both girls and boys, the initiation was a complex, multi-day ordeal that often involved imbibing toloache, a hallucinogenic drink made from a local plant. I won’t name the plant because too many youths try it on their own and end up in the hospital.

The ceremony also included a fire dance accompanied by trance-induced visions of animal spirits that might become personal power guides.

Initiates fasted and bathed each morning in cold water, then their bodies were painted. Ground paintings were used to explain the Luiseño cosmology.

Girls were often buried up to their necks in pits for three days, fasting except for sips of water and atole, a thin gruel made from acorns.

Sometimes the boys’ ceremony was capped with an ant ordeal: initiates placed in a pit with fire ants that repeatedly bit them. Attendants would stir up the ants to make them mad and bite some more.

There are accounts of boys being whipped with stinging nettles to toughen them for life’s hardships.

And there were also reports of a kind of branding with crumpled mugwort placed on the arm and then lit on fire to sear the skin. The burn was left untreated and would subsequently scar.

At the heart of the initiation ceremony was the lecture on how to conduct oneself in the right way. This was the lecture transcribed by Sparkman.

The lecture is too long to recount here, but its prescriptions and admonitions for a good life stay with me to this day.

Here’s a much abbreviated sampling of advice given to youngsters on how to live life:

Respect for others is key. Believe in people, and they will see this respect and feel this respect in you, and you will gain fame and be praised.

The earth, the sky, the mountains see you. If you maintain respect for them, you will grow old, and you will pass this respect on to your sons and daughters, and they in turn will pass it along. It’s up to the older to teach the younger.

The code teaches generosity. If you kill a rabbit or a deer, willingly share it with others. Don’t be angry when you give it. And you will be praised, and you will be able to shoot straight in the future.

Don’t steal food, don’t eat too fast, don’t eat too much, and don’t be lazy. Bathe in the early morning and be active during the day and you will win races.

Heed these words and you’ll grow old, and people will say you escaped death and went to the sky to become a star.

But ignore these words and you will die and your spirit (heart) will not rise to the north, nor your soul (towish) to the sky.

When I recall these words, I embrace the teachings of the old ones. I find comfort in these simple virtues. I take another sip of Negra Modelo, and I’m heartened.

April 15, 2014

AN UNKNOWN CONNECTION TO THE PAST

Funny how seemingly insignificant events can snowball.

The other day I got a LinkedIn message from Bryn (rhymes with Lynn) Potter, a woman I didn’t know. She had just read my book Rez Dogs Eat Beans and wanted to ask me some questions about my great-grandmother Esperanza Fidelio, who I talked about in the book.

My great-grandmother was a basketmaker, and Bryn is working on a book of Southern California Indian basketry and wondered if I could provide further information. I wanted to help if I could, so I called her.

During our conversation, I discovered she’s helping to assemble a Cahuilla basket exhibit for the Riverside Metropolitan Museum set to open in September. She’s also working to update and expand an older book called Rods, Bundles & Stitches: A Century of Southern California Indian Basketry.

This book is apparently the bible of local basketry. And my great-grandmother is in it. As an aside, it’s out of print, so if you spot it at a swap meet or thrift store or yard sale, snatch it up. It’s easily worth two hundred dollars now, and continues to rise in value.

As we talked, Bryn told me she used to work for the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, specializing in basketry. Curious, she looked up my great-grandmother’s name through the museum’s website and hit on more than twenty photos of Esperanza, shot between 1927 and 1936.

After our talk, I visited theautry.org. (The Autry Museum has taken over the Southwest Museum. It’s complicated.) I clicked over to online collections and entered Esperanza’s name into the search engine. The first picture I found was a shot of my great-grandmother next to a woodpile, kneeling over a metate. Standing next to her was my mother, Barbara (Magee) Johnson, at about age four.

It’s a picture I’d never seen before.

Esperanza died in the late forties. I wasn’t born until 1951, so I never met her. But growing up, I listened to countless stories from my grandmother and my mother about Esperanza, so I feel I almost knew her.

My mother lived in the small shack next door and spent much time with her. She often told of going with her grandmother to the San Luis Rey River, which runs through the Pala Indian Reservation, to collect grasses for basket making. My mother learned to pick grasses, how to soak them, and, while seated next to her grandmother, how to weave the tight coils that would grow into a basket.

My mother often stayed with her grandmother and would complain about being so cold in the thin-walled shack, the wind slipping through cracks, as she tried to sleep beneath threadbare blankets. And she’d sneak into her grandmother’s bed and warm her frozen feet against her grandmother’s back.

For a time, my great-grandmother and her husband, Pedro Trujillo, raised chilies, and my mother helped to string them and hang them to dry for use in winter stews.

Pedro died young, and Esperanza, husbandless, set up housekeeping with a man named (I think) Epiphano Fidelio. The reservation knew him as Jack Johnson, because he resembled the boxer. We knew him simply as Uncle Jack.

He was my great-grandmother’s common-law husband and lived with the family in their small house, even after she died in the late forties. He slept in a small back bedroom, a place of mystery for me, for Uncle Jack was a man of power, and there were things—like crystals under his pillow—that you weren’t to touch, or some of the power could bounce back on you and maybe make you sick, or loosen your teeth, or cause you to fall off a roof.

It was said he used his power mostly for good, for healing, but you never knew.

To us kids, Uncle Jack seemed a gruff man. My Uncle Copy tells the story of getting whipped by Uncle Jack with his belt for fighting with a younger cousin.

He was strict, my uncle said. Now he can laugh about it. I don’t think he thought it was funny back then.

After my great-grandmother died, my Aunt Clara and Uncle Jack used to drink wine in the shade of an old tree at the side of the house, and they could be heard laughing the afternoon away. When I was about ten years old, my cousin Randy discovered Uncle Jack dead in the outhouse, his heart refusing to take one more beat. Uncle Jack was one of those people in my life that I always wished I knew better.

My great-grandmother died a long, slow, painful death of stomach cancer. My mother often rubbed her stomach for her. Oh, girlie, your hands feel so good, she’d say.

My Uncle Copy sat at my computer, and we looked at the old photos. He’d comment: There’s the house where I was born, That’s me in that cradleboard, and I’m sure that’s my mother.

And the memories flooded in. All because of a LinkedIn message from Bryn Potter. Thanks, Bryn.

April 25, 2014

REFLECTING ON A LIFE

In his bedroom on the Pala Indian Reservation, his old marriage bed has been replaced by a hospital bed, where he now spends his hours in striped sheets, propped up on pillows, staring at a white ceiling fan.

There’s a new flat-screen TV mounted to the wall, but it’s turned off. He finds his memories provide better company.

On a table near his bed, there’s an abalone shell with a bundle of dried sage wrapped in red yarn. The tip of the sage has been burned to smudge the room. A set of antlers from a young buck sits nearby.

Richard Onnie Mojado (he spells it Onnie, but it’s pronounced Oonie) has pancreatic cancer. He’s in hospice care. Maybe the word hospice has a softer sound than hospital, but the meaning is less than comforting. It portends the end.

His bedroom window is open. Sounds of the outer world seep in: the whir of cars on Highway 76, the occasional yip from a passel of rez puppies tugging on one another’s ears, a crow scolding from a nearby tree.

In the next room, his daughter, Trina, watches TV and talks on the phone. Every now and then she checks on his comfort, brings him a plastic cup of grape juice with a flexible straw.

Onnie is seventy-two but looks older. Once a 280-pound man, strong, handsome in a black cowboy hat with a beaded hatband, he’s now a desiccated version of his former self. Cancer knows no mercy.

I’ve known Onnie for most of my life. Way back when I played fast-pitch softball for the Pala men’s team, Onnie was my coach. We’ve played on the same peon team off and on for more than thirty years. He’s godfather to my youngest son, Bear.

He’s a family man. His wife, Brenda, died several years ago, but he has Trina, and a son, Lawrence, and five grandchildren.

He worked twenty-seven years for the Fallbrook sanitation department, and after retiring from there he worked four years for tribal maintenance, and another five as security for Pala Casino.

He’s gonna die on the reservation where he was born. He wouldn’t have it otherwise. In quiet moments, the ceiling fan spins images from his life.

He sees the cup he drank coffee in as a kid. He drank it sweet but with no milk. Lactose intolerance is common with Indians.

Coffee for breakfast, coffee for dinner. It’s mostly what we drank, he says. And we had a lot of mush for breakfast. No steak and eggs in those days.

Sometimes the fan spins him a rabbit sitting in a clearing in between sage and chamise, his iron-sighted .22-caliber rifle trained on what was just a trigger squeeze away from becoming dinner. He’d carry them home by their hind legs so his mom, Dorothy, could fry them up in a cast-iron frying pan.

Dang they were good, he says.

Once his Uncle Porky bought him a fielder’s glove, a Spalding. You couldn’t give a kid who loved sports as much as Onnie anything better. He rubbed it down with neatsfoot oil until it was soft as an earlobe. He shoveled in many a ground ball at shortstop with that glove, snagged many a line drive in the outfield with it.

After high school, he joined the army, stationed at Fort Ord and Hunter Liggett. He’s proud of his military service and active in local veterans’ affairs.

Onnie grew up across the street from Brenda, the girl he would marry. They were high school sweethearts. She went to college in Utah, eventually got her master’s degree, and headed up the Pala Head Start program for thirty-eight years. All four of my kids went to Head Start; all four learned to read from Teacher Brenda.

Sometimes, this fan spins visions of his brother and sister, now dead, playing in the yard, or his children opening Christmas presents, or his wife singing Indian songs; she had a lovely voice.

He took his last drink about forty years ago. He simply quit when he found that drink was interfering with family.

Onnie liked to travel with his family. He usually bought a big van, large enough for them to be comfortable in. They made summer trips to Fort Duchesne powwows in Utah, where Brenda was originally from.

I loved going to those, he says.

They traveled as a family to peon games all around Southern California and Arizona reservations. They liked to eat at Denny’s while on the road.

When we played peon, an Indian bone game, Onnie usually anchored one end, while I had the other. King Freeman and John Chutnicutt would take the inside positions. Later his son played too, father and son singing in unison.

Onnie has a distinctive singing voice, clear and resonant. Of all our