THE FORT MOJAVE INDIAN TRIBE

The Mojave Desert lies between the Great Basin Desert to the north, and the Sonoran Desert to the south, and includes part of southeastern California and southern Nevada. The Mojave spreads over 15,000 square miles and is called a high desert with altitudes ranging from below sea level in Death Valley, to 4,500 feet. Various areas are covered by sandy soil, gravel, and salt flats. Winter rainfall, in varying amounts, produces spring wildflowers on the desert floor. The physical features and the altitude determine the plants and animals of the various areas of the desert. The Mojave is home to the Joshua tree, creosote bush, bighorn sheep, coyotes, jackrabbits, and sidewinders.

At present, the Mojave area contains over 15 reservations of Native Americans. Among these is the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe, whose offices are in Needles, California. 

The pre-contact Mojave were known as the “Pipa Aha Macav,” “the people by the water.”  Evidence suggests that the ancestors of the Mojave came to the area of the Colorado River soon after the last ice age. For perhaps as long as 8,000 years, they depended on crops of the cyclical spring floodwaters of the river to irrigate their beans, corn, pumpkins and other plants native to the area. All members of the family worked at the planting, weeding, and harvesting. The people also fished, and trapped small animals along the riverbank; with the hides of rabbits, beavers, etc. providing the little clothing they required. The men made bows and arrows for hunting. Other tools included stone knives, scrapers, choppers, hammerstones, string and rope. Before dams and flood control, the riverbanks were lined with groves of cottonwood, willow, and stands of arrow weed.  The Mojave were expert basket weavers, as these examples illustrate.

A Mojave house was rectangular, with a sloping roof that extended to form a covered porch. The frame and horizontal beams were made from large cottonwood logs. Arrow weed was used for the thatch roof and the wall covering. Some houses were filled in with mud from the river. The door and smoke hole were the only openings, but most of the cooking was done outside. Winter houses may have been built on excavation of a few feet in the sand. Summerhouses may have been built nearer to the river. There is no evidence that they used sweathouses for bathing.

Men wore willow bark breech clothes and fiber sandals if they were traveling far. Women wore a front and back skirt made from the inner bark of the willow, cottonwood, or mesquite tree. Body and face painting were used as well as tattooing with a blue cactus ink. (Slaves as well as married women were identified by chin tattoos.) One author has stated that the Mojave believed that a person must be tattooed in order to enter the here—after. They might, instead, go down a “rat-hole.”(1)

Cremation was practiced by the Mojave to enter the spirit world. All property and belongings of the deceased were placed on the pyre with the body to accompany the spirit. The name of the deceased person was never again spoken.

1.	From: Smith, Gerald A. The Mojave Indians. San 
Bernardino County Museum Assoc., 1977, p. 16.

The Mojave lived in a system of clans that they believed had been given to them in the First Time. The clans were named for things above and below the earth. There were 22 patrilinear clans (today there are 18) with the children taking the name of their father’s clan. However, only the women used the clan name and were required to marry someone from another clan. Leadership was divided among the leaders of three villages with a hereditary chief, a manager for entertainment, war leaders and the shamans who had curative powers.

The Mojave people were relatively healthy before the contact with the Europeans. The shaman used singing, laying on of hands, blowing, and conversation to try to cure his patient. Life for the shaman could be dangerous because, if too many of his patients died, the tribe might execute him for malpractice.

They were a very spiritual people and placed great importance in their dreams. All aspects of their lives, war, politics, love, etc., were dictated by this source of knowledge. Through the dreams, “sumach a’hot” a person might be given a direction or an ability to do something better than other tribal members. To receive a special gift, a person needed to go through a time of fasting and other trials. These gifts were to be used to better the tribe, as well as the individual.

The Mojave could be a fierce people who were willing to defend their land, but they were also willing to venture away from it.	They became excellent traders, going as far as the Pacific Coast to trade surplus crops, baskets, and beautiful pottery for items they valued, such as shells.
The people were great talkers and singers. Often the telling of one of their myths could take up to five or six evenings. In addition to these tales in the long song cycles, the people tell other kinds of myths, including an origin myth, migration legends, sources of clan traditions, and coyote and miscellaneous tales. Other forms of entertainment included casting a pole at a rolling hoop, football races, dice games, guessing games, and a game of tossing pumpkin rings onto a wooden pin.

In 1604, a search for silver led Don Juan Onate through the Mojave area, but it wasn’t until 1775 that contact was made with them by Fray Francisco Garces. He found the tall, attractive people to be friendly, and several of them traveled with him for several months. During this time, his travels included a visit to the Havasupai Indians in the Grand Canyon in 1776.

After contact with Jedediah Smith and James Ohio Pattie, violence flared and there followed 20 years of warfare with the trappers from various companies. It reached its peak when 26 Mojave were killed by trappers from the Hudson Bay Company in 1847.

In 1850, the United States annexed the territory, and trouble with the United States Army commenced. However, in 1854, Lt. Amie Weeks Whipple claimed the Mojave people’s friendship as he and his men surveyed and mapped a railroad route from Ft. Smith, Arkansas to the Pacific Ocean. The Mojave hoped that this would give them new trade opportunities. A wagon route soon followed Whipple’s survey route and a fort was built near present-day Needles, California, to guard the river crossing. Troubles continued, and by 1859, the cry was “Wipe out the Mojave!” which resulted in 700 Indian fighters being sent south from San Francisco.

The Civil War closed Fort Mojave but, by 1865, the U.S. government created the Colorado Indian Reservation near Parker, in the southern range of the tribe. In addition to splitting the tribe into two parts, the 1890 transfer of the fort from the War Department to the Department of the Interior led to the site becoming one of the industrial boarding schools designed to eliminate native languages and culture. The adults were taught Anglo farming methods, but had no land on which to farm. Many went to work for the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad (later the Santa Fe), mines, and riverboats. The Mojave people were now urban Indians.

In 1911, by Presidential order, The Fort Mojave Indians were granted a reservation, made up of the old military land on the California and Nevada sides of the river, and checkerboard land on the Arizona side, totaling 31,300 acres. (The checkerboard layout came about because the government had given every other section of land to the railroad.)

After a devastating flood in 1936, the tribe bought more land
outside Needles to build a new town. The leadership of the tribe changed completely in 1957, when they approved the Fort Mojave Constitution, which had a seven member tribal council.

Since then, the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe has fought many battles in Congress and the courts to protect its land and assets. They took “the long route through the legal system to prevent dissolution of Reservation lands to secure rights to the water of the Colorado River.” (2) The tribe’s water rights were stated

2.	Fort Mojave Indian Tribe. Celebrating Change. Needles, CA, 2001. /p.141.

in “Arizona vs. California,” which divided the Colorado River water among the claimants. Because Western water law uses the principle of “first in use, first in right,” the Tribe has “first call.” The Tribe has a diversion right to 132,537 acre-feet of the river water that is not subject to any state’s control. Careful planning has allowed the Tribe to construct housing on a large scale, casinos, commercial centers, and to continue with a large scale agri—business on reservation land.

Other legal battles have included the threat to close a major regional highway to make the point that the state had never acquired a Tribal right of way, and a continuing battle against the building of a low level nuclear waste dump on the reservation property.

Three casinos, an RV park, the Mojave Resort Golf Course, leases to Calpine for two power sites, shopping centers, and other land uses are among their assets. The Tribe is the largest employer in the southern Mojave Valley, and has full tribal employment, new health care and recreational facilities, cultural heritage preservation sites, and educational scholarships for tribal members. With a goal of economic self-sufficiency, the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe is looking forward to expanding its cultural and economic opportunities.