The Paiute People Remember Their Salt Songs

From the dawn of time when Ocean Woman and Coyote began the world for the Southern Paiute People, they were given many Sacred Songs to honor their ceremonies and protect their Sacred Land.

For untold generations, the Paiute People sang their songs and kept their world in balance. Then the white invaders came and with them came destruction. And as the People died, the songs were nearly lost.

The Spirits of those long ago men, women and children do not rest well along the Colorado Plateau and Mojave Desert regions. Many were butchered in the name of God and Greed. Little children were ripped away from their parents and put in boarding schools where many of them died alone and frightened, their tiny bodies interred in Mother Earth without the proper songs to take them into the Spirit World.

There are some of the Paiute People who remember many of their Sacred songs. But there was only one, an old man named Willis Mayo, who remembered all 142 of the Salt Songs, those Sacred Songs which tell the complete cycle of Paiute cosmology and especially the last 4 songs which help the Dead make the journey to the Upper World.

Now these songs have been recorded and all 13 bands of Southern Paiute have them and will use the Salt Songs to purify themselves and their land. And the Spirits of their Ancestors will finally be at Peace.

This is a fulfillment of their Prophesies.

But I wonder, what songs will the people of the United States sing.....those who belong to the great stew pot who do not know their own Creation Stories?

What will they sing to make the economy strong, the leaders less greedy, the wars end, and the insanity that leads people to throw their children off of bridges to stop?

I don't think there are any songs to cover this mess. But those of us who are a part of the People have our Songs. We have our Ceremonies and our own Stories which tell each tribe of us how to live. And we each need to be doing these things. If there is any hope at all for Mother Earth and Her Children, there isn't a moment to lose.
<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
The Salt Songs have been archived at the University of California Berkeley Language Center and were distributed to the thirteen bands of Southern Paiutes so that they may continue to live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.