The Chemehuevis. By Carobeth Laird.
Banning: Malki Museum Press, 1976. Index. Maps. xxviii plus 349 pages. Cloth,
$15.00. Paper, $8.95.
Reviewed by Pamela Munro, assistant Professor of
Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles, author of Mojave Syntax
(1976) and articles on Mojave, Luiseño, Chemehuevi, and other American
Indian languages of Southern California and Arizona.
The Chemehuevis are a relatively small tribe most of whose
members live today in the desert areas around Palm Springs and Twentynine Palms
or along both sides of the Colorado River, primarily between the cities of
Needles and Blythe. (Much of the area they earlier occupied in Chemehuevi Valley
is now covered by Lake Havasu.) They have been almost completely ignored in both
scientific and popular literature, and Carobeth Laird's warm and sensitive study
fills an important need.
It might be best not to categorize this book simply as an
ethnography, because its scope is broader than even that broad term implies.
Mrs. Laird certainly provides detailed information on the life style, customs, and beliefs
of the Chemehuevi people, concentrating on the way things were along the River
long ago, before the arrival of the first white men. There are chapters on
tribal organization, shamanism, kinship, and the relationship of the people with
objects and places in the natural world. In addition, however (and this is her
unique contribution), Mrs. Laird gives a feeling for how these people felt and
thought about what happened to them and how it fitted in with the rest of their
history. Almost forty per cent of the text is devoted to Chemehuevi mythology.
The stories Mrs. Laird retells can be read just for entertainment, but
she also provides a "Master Key" for their
interpretation, to show how the body of literature they represent reveals the
essential Chemehuevi spirit.
What helps tie together this wide-ranging study of a complex
people is Mrs. Laird's conscientious attempt to show not just what the
Chemehuevis did and thought, but what words they used to talk about all this.
Chemehuevi words—in the old form in which they were used by earlier generations
of speakers—are everywhere throughout the book, and its second appendix (the
first is devoted to the excellent maps) is "A Brief Note on the Chemehuevi
Language," a succinct description of grammar and pronunciation, followed by a
detailed glossary of the words and phrases which appear in the text. As a
linguist whose work on modern Chemehuevi over the past few years has been
somewhat hampered by the lack of any descriptions of earlier forms of the
language, I can only applaud Mrs. Laird's careful presentation of this much of
the old ways of speaking: the "Brief Note" alone, in my opinion, assures the
scientific value of The Chemehuevis. (I should note here, perhaps,
however, that Mrs. Laird is really a little too gloomy about the competence of present-day
speakers of Chemehuevi, rather like Edwin Newman on the subject of American
English. The language has unquestionably changed over the past decades, like all
languages, but there are still people whose pronunciation of many words is the
same as that which she claims to be now totally lost!)
Carobeth Laird's credentials for producing a study of the
scope of The Chemehuevis cannot be faulted. She divorced the ethnologist
and linguist J.P. Harrington to marry a Chemehuevi, George Laird (now deceased),
who had learned from his grandparents how to speak the language and tell the
myths in the almost-forgotten style which Mrs. Laird preserves here. Carobeth
Laird burst upon the national literary scene in 1975 at the age of 80, with the
publication of Encounter with an Angry God, an account of her
relationship with Harrington. She has published several technical papers on
Chemehuevi culture and mythology in the Journal of California Anthropology,
and The Chemehuevis reveals this side of her not-inconsiderable
talent to the general public.
