Arrival on the Reservation

We parked our trailer house on the mission grounds in Owyhee, Nevada. Our Paiute friends lived on farms. They raised hay in the valley along the Owyhee River and ran cattle in the surrounding hills. Most of these ranchers lived in modest, one or two room, wood-frame houses as did two sisters we befriended. We visited in their homes and learned about tanning deer hides as we gathered bits and pieces of their language.

On our visits, we found it difficult at first to sit for five minutes without saying anything. This was their way. We learned to wait until they were ready to talk. Usually, they would begin by admiring our month old baby. It pleased them that we carried him in a Paiute cradleboard. We asked them about the deer hides they were tanning. We learned that the inside of the hides had to be scraped, the hides soaked, treated with a mixture of brains and fat, and then rinsed. The ladies had to keep working the hides while they dried or they would get hard. As they sat stretching, twisting, and pulling on the hides with their hands, we began learning Paiute words and phrases. They taught us expressions like “Egauki,” “Come in” and “Peshakama,” “Tastes good.” These two sisters taught us much of their language those early years.

In one of our first contacts with these ladies, I made a blunder. It’s not difficult to make blunders when you enter a different culture. We went to visit one of them, not knowing they were having a family picnic. They welcomed us graciously and invited us to share their picnic dinner. Wild onions thrived on the hillsides, and were included on the menu for the day. They looked similar to regular green onions. I enjoyed the food except for the wild onions. I forced myself to eat them even though they were very strong. When the hostess came to pick up my plate, she said, “You didn’t eat your wild onions.”

“I ate the white part.”

“Oh,” she said, “we don’t eat the white part. It’s too strong.”

A few years later, I had another encounter with wild onions. Our main language helpers by then were Jessie and Minnie, two widow ladies. They decided they should cook us an Indian dinner. We planned the menu together: fish, rice, and steamed wild onions. I enjoyed going with them to gather the onions on the hillside. We cooked the meal at our house and everything tasted good except the onions. I forced myself to eat them—and had diarrhea for two days!

By this time, a group of ladies worked with us. When we felt we knew enough about the language to begin translation, Ed chose a narrative portion from the Gospel of Mark and wrote it in as simple English as possible. The group discussed among themselves how it could best be said in Paiute. When they came to an agreement, one of the ladies repeated it in Paiute, and I recorded it with the phonetic symbols we had learned. It took several weeks to work through one short passage in this way. The day we finished, I read it aloud. They all listened attentively, and then one of them said, “I’ve heard that story all my life. Now I know what it means!”

That one comment made up for all the hard work and discouragement we had faced over the years to reach that goal.

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