John R. Preckwinkle III, an Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians Tribal Council member, grew up in Northern California, away from his tribe’s reservation and culture in the Palm Springs area — until a Christmastime visit at age 14 changed everything.
Tribal members gave him and other young people iPods with recordings of the songs of his great-grandfather, John Joseph Patencio, considered the last ceremonial bird singer, or hawanik, of his people. Preckwinkle was intrigued by the family connection as well as the music.
Then, like many music-infatuated teens, he became obsessed with memorizing the songs, repeatedly listening on an iPod, even though he couldn’t understand the Cahuilla words. He listened before bed, often falling asleep to his great-grandfather’s serenade.
“I fell in love with [the songs] and wanted to learn the meanings,” Preckwinkle says.
As a young adult, he moved to the Agua Caliente Indian Reservation, enrolled in Cahuilla language classes, and learned bird singing. He credits the practice with reconnecting him to his culture.
John R. Preckwinkle III, a prominent bird singer and member of the Agua Caliente Tribal Council. Traditional bird singer attire and gourd rattles.
Preckwinkle, now a prominent bird singer, makes cultural preservation his highest priority as a member of the Tribal Council, the governing body that both shapes the tribe’s future and safeguards its sovereignty. “Even though these songs are social, they still hold power to our ancestors,” he says. “The songs are to be treated with respect.”
“Our bird songs share the story of our people’s migration thousands of years ago across this land,” says Agua Caliente Tribal Chairman Reid D. Milanovich. “When our tribal members sing these songs and dance to these songs, we are honoring our ancestors and keeping our traditions alive.”
An Indigenous art form that reaches back tens of thousands of years in Southern California, Nevada, Arizona, and Mexico, bird singing nearly died out in the mid-1900s but was revived in the 1980s.
The practice has nothing to do with birdsong or imitating the calls and coos of feathered creatures. It is, says artist and bird singer Gerald Clarke, an enrolled member of the Cahuilla Band of Indians, “the sounds of the people.”
Bird songs, performed by men and boys, with women and girls often accompanying as dancers, tell the long story of the Cahuilla people: their creation; the migratory journey they took after the death of their creator, Múkat; and the many lessons, traditions, and beliefs developed along the way.
Traditionally, the Cahuilla sang bird songs in three cycles over consecutive nights from dusk to dawn. Today, bird singers perform at educational and cultural gatherings, such as the annual Singing the Birds festival hosted in January by the Agua Caliente tribe in Palm Springs.
While the songs sometimes include stories about birds, from owls to hummingbirds, and other animals, including deer, pack rats, badgers, and raccoons, “bird song” is metaphorical. Interpretations differ, but Clarke believes the term refers to the flight pattern of birds — how they often circle as a flock in one place in the sky, or migrate yearly from north to south, then back again. According to Cahuilla cosmology and history, the earliest people traveled in similar patterns: three times around the continent, and from California to Mexico, then north again to settle in the Palm Springs area.
Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians bird dancers in customary dress.
Scholar Paul Apodaca, author of Tradition, Myth, and Performance of Cahuilla Bird Songs, says the songs “are an example of one of the most important statements in Native American mythology: that at some point there was a great transformation wherein people took on different forms in order to accomplish different works or fulfill different responsibilities. So, deer and men and coyotes and birds are all related to each other … It is a basic approach toward all living things that is different from the European view, which resists the idea that all things have the same value as human beings.”
Clarke consciously keeps bird songs — and the voices of his community — in the present through his art and as a bird singer himself.
In one of his paintings, a row of seven colorful gourd rattles — musical instruments used by bird singers — stretches across an azure expanse, crowned by alternating depictions of acorns and threaded abalone shells. The objects hover over a single word that’s also the title of the artwork: “Survivance.”
Scholar Gerald Vizenor coined the term in his 1994 book Manifest Manners to describe how Indigenous people engage with the world rather than merely survive in it. “Any cultural act is an act of resistance to assimilation,” Clarke says. “Speaking our language, singing our songs, eating our foods, telling our stories — it’s about participation in one’s culture as an act of survival.”
Bird singing, then, is an act of survivance.
He and other bird singers, conveyors of culture, learned the songs from their elders and pass them on to the next generation.
Cahuilla elders credited with reviving bird singing include Robert Levi of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, Anthony Andreas of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, and Alvino Siva of the Los Coyotes Band of Cahuilla and Cupeño Indians.
Apodaca interviewed Siva for his dissertation. Siva told him he learned the songs as a young boy and was a student of Patencio, Preckwinkle’s great-grandfather. After Patencio died in 1974, Siva said, “I wish I had learned more of the songs. If I only knew that Joe was going to pass away so soon, I could have sat up with him more and asked about the old words in the old language.”
Bird singing almost disappeared by the 1980s, during a time when, as Clarke says, “it wasn’t cool to be Indian.” Native Americans tried to blend in. However, Siva and others began recruiting family members to learn the songs they remembered and perform them at both tribal and community events. A small group of elders won a California Arts Council grant to mentor younger singers, leading to a “rebirth,” Clarke says. “As those older guys passed away, these younger guys started their own groups, and it pyramided from there.”
Clarke, 58, a UC Riverside professor of ethnic studies and special adviser to the chancellor on Native American relations, grew up on a Cahuilla reservation in Anza listening to his grandfather sing. After his grandfather died, his parents divorced, and his mom moved them away from the reservation. Meanwhile, Clarke says, “My dad and my aunts, their generation, their whole life, they were told being Indian was bad, so they didn’t do a lot of traditional stuff.”
When his father died in 2003, Clarke, who had been teaching studio art at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, moved back home to the reservation to take over the family cattle ranch. That’s when, encouraged by a tribal elder, he started bird singing.
The songs are meant to be experienced as part of a community. The men, in a single horizontal line, sing and shake their gourd rattles in unison. The women dance, swaying together as one.
At one recent performance, a few audience members closed their eyes and appeared lost in the moment. Clarke suggests they might be missing the point: “It’s obvious they’re having this individual experience — and that’s such a non-Indigenous thing,” he says. “It’s about a collective experience and connection.”
An entire song might consist of a single word, such as the Cahuilla term for “cold,” to describe a wintry segment of the migration journey; or a few lines, repeated according to the preference of the head singer, lasting from a few minutes to more than 10. Wind is a frequent subject. Bird singer Anthony W. Purnel, Agua Caliente Tribal Council vice chairman, describes a verse that says, “On the wind, we came.” A song about swallows describes the birds as “wind welcomers.”
Bird singers perform at formal events like weddings and funerals as well as casual family and community gatherings.
The songs pass through generations orally, but recordings — from early-1900s wax cylinders to cassette tapes that elders played to learn songs — can still be found. While younger generations learn through MP3s and YouTube videos, elders who hold the songs and stories deep in their minds and souls remain the most important teachers.
Today’s performances seldom last longer than an hour; audiences hear individual songs versus a complete narrative. “You end up singing certain songs and [not] the deep cuts,” says Clarke, who prefers “all-nighters” that take place periodically on reservations and feature the full cycle of more than 300 songs.
Purnel, Preckwinkle’s cousin, started bird singing about 10 years ago. Although their great-grandfather, John Joseph Patencio, “was told not to carry these songs on,” Purnel offers a different perspective, emphasizing the urgency to teach and share the songs to preserve the culture.
While some bird singers don’t know the meanings of all the Cahuilla words, they remain faithful to the original lyrics.
Clarke says learning bird songs is a serious pursuit: “It’s valuable knowledge. You can’t learn the songs without also learning the culture.”
Agua Caliente bird singer Eli Andreas says in a video produced by the tribe that the songs also educate non-Native people about Native American culture. Instead of stereotypically ornate costumes, Cahuilla bird singers typically wear ceremonial black pants and shirts with colorful ribbons. They play rattles made from natural materials like gourds and cottonwood, with seeds from the native California fan palm.
“The rattle is very important to us,” Preckwinkle says. “In our language, rattle is a term that attributes it [as] a living thing.”
Clarke captures that sense of life and continuity in his “Survivance” painting. Along the bottom is the jagged red line of a heartbeat, pulsing through a row of icons shaped like the state of California — a visual echo of the songs themselves and an enduring expression of Cahuilla culture.
The songs, the rattles, the heartbeat, the people: They are alive, carrying ancient traditions forward.
