Native American Scholar Cahuilla Historian Katherine Siva Saubel Dies at 91

By
Guy
McCarthy

November 2, 2011
Katherine Siva Saubel, a Native American scholar, Cahuilla historian, co-founder of the
Malki Museum, and one California’s most respected tribal elders, died Tuesday at
her home on the Morongo Indian Reservation, her nephew and caregiver said
Wednesday.

“It is windy today, because the wind is looking for her,” Kevin Siva, a lifelong
resident of the Morongo Reservation, said in a phone interview.  ”She always told
me stories about the wind when I was younger.”

Saubel  died Tuesday at home in bed, “very peacefully,” said Siva, who has been his
aunt’s caregiver for the past 15 years.

Saubel was born in March 1920 in her village Pachaval in northern San DiegoCounty, Siva
said.

She came to the Morongo Reservation when she was 18 years old, and she had lived
there 73 years, Siva said.

Saubel was a widow, and her husband was Mariano Saubel, Siva
said.

She is survived by one son, Allen Saubel, of Florida, three grandsons, Aaron, Allen
and Steven, a granddaughter, Maria, and numerous nieces and nephews, Siva
said.

Saubel earned a PhD during her studies and she was a doctor of philosophy, Siva
said.

Tribal Council Chairman Robert Martin of the Morongo Band of Mission Indians expressed
his tribe’s condolences and grief.

“Dr. Saubel was truly remarkable, both as a leader and as a fierce defender of Native
American culture, from the preservation of the traditional Cahuilla language to
the protection of sacred sites,” Martin said in a statement released Wednesday
evening.

“As an author, a leader, an academic and an activist, she displayed astonishing
skill, courage and compassion as she worked tirelessly to preserve Native
American culture and reignite interest in our rich heritage among the public and
our tribal youth,” Martin said.

“We will miss her wit and her wisdom, her ability to inspire others through hard
work and laughter, and her enduring commitment to our cultural and spiritual
beliefs,” Martin said.

According to a biography on the Malki Museum web site, Saubel was born Katherine Siva to
Cahuilla-speaking parents at Pachawal Pa, the upper village of the Los Coyotes
Indian Reservation.

She spent the first years of her life in the mountains above WarnerSprings, where
only Cahuilla was spoken, according to the MalkiMuseum.

She had 11 siblings in her immediate family – six boys and five girls – and she was
the eighth.

At the time, the Los Coyotes Reservation was more isolated than it is today, and
its isolation was a factor in Saubel’s “superb command of her native tongue and
for her profound understanding of Cahuilla culture,” according to the
MalkiMuseum.

Although she lived more than 90 years in an English-dominated world, she was “a dominant
native speaker of her dialect of Cahuilla known as ‘Mountain Cahuilla,’” and the
Cahuilla culture was very much alive in her heart, according to the
MalkiMuseum.

Back in the 1920s, Saubel’s father took advice from a Cahuilla shaman and moved his
family out of Los Coyotes to a warmer part of the Cahuilla territory, settling
on the land of her mother’s uncle, Pedro Chino, at the Agua Caliente Reservation
in Palm Springs, according to the MalkiMuseum.

There she learned to speak the “Pass Cahuilla” dialect, even though it is the dialect
of Cahuilla most divergent from Mountain Cahuilla.

Around this time in the mid-1920s, she entered the segregated elementary school in Palm
Springs, where “she acquired English by the time honored sink-or-swim
pedagogical method,” according to the MalkiMuseum.

“She initially spoke not one word of English, but she learned by observing and
figuring out what was being said. No one taught her; she was just put in the
back of the classroom and ignored, but she still learned.”

She was a tomboy, often playing and rough-housing with her brothers – running,
climbing trees, and making mischief. Her grandmother once made her some dolls to
play with, and sat to play with her. But she did not like it, and upset her
grandmother by throwing the dolls up in a tree so she could climb up into the
tree, according to the MalkiMuseum.

After she finished primary school, she wanted to go to high school, but at the time
there was not one in Palm Springs.

So she had to take a bus with white students to Banning. She was athletic and
enjoyed sports like softball and archery, according to the MalkiMuseum. She was
the best archer in the otherwise all-male class.

Halfway through high school, the Palm Springs high school was finished, so she
transferred and was the first Native American woman to graduate from there,
according to the MalkiMuseum.

As a very young woman, she began to realize the imminent loss of Native American
culture and knowledge, which had been passed down through
generations.

During her high school years, she kept a notebook describing all of the familiar native
plants and their uses as foods, tools, and medicines, according to the
MalkiMuseum.

Her family was able to survive well during the Great Depression of the 1930s by
going back to their traditional ways of hunting and gathering. They never went
hungry, and she learned from her mother, who was a great cook, gatherer, and
medicine woman, according to the MalkiMuseum.

“Her mother instilled in her the idea that you must take care of the earth because it
takes care of you, and if you destroy it you are destroying yourself,” according
to the Malki Museum.

She was never afraid to stand up for her people and their rights. During high school
she had to wait at a bus stop on the reservation in front of a small restaurant
that had a sign in the window saying “Whites Only.”

When she noticed the sign, she went into the restaurant and told the owner to take it
down because his restaurant was on reservation land and he had no right to keep
Indians out of a restaurant on their own land, according to the
MalkiMuseum.

The owner didn’t say a word when she told him this – she thought he was shocked to
have an Indian teenage girl confront him – but later when she walked by the
restaurant the sign had been taken down.

When she was 18, she met Wanikik Cahuilla Mariano Saubel at a Cahuilla ceremonial
gathering, on the Palm Springs Reservation.

In 1940, at the age of 20, she married Mariano Saubel, who lived at the Morongo
Reservation near Banning, where both Mountain and Pass Cahuilla were spoken, as
well as the distantly related Serrano language, according to the
MalkiMuseum.

Mariano and Katherine Saubel were married for forty-five years, until Mariano Saubel
passed away in 1985. Allen was their only son, but they also helped raise his
four children, as well as nieces and nephews. Mariano was supportive of
Katherine’s work to preserve Cahuilla and other Native cultures, and worked with
her to found and build the MalkiMuseum.

In 1958, Saubel was introduced to Lowell Bean, who was then a student of ethnology
and anthropology at UCLA.

This began a 40-year collaboration on Cahuilla culture. Bean introduced her to Dr.
William Bright, Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at UCLA. Her life
began to change – her formal education had begun, according to the
MalkiMuseum.

The Kennedy Scholarship for Native Americans in 1962 allowed her to travel to the
University of Chicago and the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she
studied the fundamentals of ethnology, anthropology, and
linguistics.

She then began giving seminars and study groups at UCLA, under the direction of
Bright.

Together, Bean and Saubel in 1972 authored Temalpakh, a work
detailing the ethnobotanical knowledge of the Cahuilla, with much of the
information coming from Saubel’s mother, who was a Cahuilla medicine
woman.

Katherine Siva Saubel has since become known internationally as a Native American scholar,
and appears in the biographical Reference Encyclopedia of the American Indian,
1967, and many other biographical reference works, according to the
MalkiMuseum.

She has worked with other anthropologists and linguists, including German linguist
Hansjakob Seiler, who with her assistance published two studies of the Cahuilla
language. She also worked with Japanese linguist Dr. Kojiro Hioki, from the
HachinoheUniversity. Drs. Seiler and Hioki worked together with her to publish
an updated book on the Cahuilla language in 2006.

She also worked with linguist Eric Elliott for several years, and together they
published a two-volume work with cultural memories and stories in Mountain
Cahuilla and English, I’sill He’qwas Wa’xish: A Dried Coyote’s Tail.

Saubel’s life accomplishments include co-founding the MalkiMuseum in 1964, according to
the museum. The MalkiMuseum opened in February 1965.

For more on her achievements, click here.

*                 *                    *

I had been at the California Indian Conference at Chico State screening We Are Still Here at the end of October. It had been quite awhile since I viewed the film, and when Katherine’s beautiful face filled the screen, I was filled with such over-powering emotion and nostalgia. Through the years, I had kept in touch with Katherine and with Kevin, but I had not seen her in awhile. I missed her.

Later, a woman who appears in the film — she was at the Agave Roast Festival — spoke to me. She told me that Katherine was not doing well. My heart sank.

She died only days later.

Ironically, I was in the hospital undergoing spinal fusion when Katherine passed, and so was unable to bid this great spirit a final farewell.

I first met Katherine Siva Saubel in an attempt to include a Native American voice in a play festival I was both writing and producing. She became my friend for over a decade.

The play that was developed from the oral history I took on that day in September in 1999 performed all through the Southland on college and university campuses, at cultural centers and institutes for six years. Then, with the help of f and the Soboba Indians as well as the California Council for the Humanitites, the California Stories Project we were able to adapt the play into the documentary friendsWe Are Still Here.

Now, though both Katherine and her brother Alvino Siva are gone, their voices, their songs, their cultury, and their history and the history of their people, the Cahuilla Indians of Southern California are archived in this documentary.

I remain forever in Katherine’s debt for granting me the very great privilege of telling her story.