News From Native California - Spring 2015 Volume 28, Issue 3 | Page 21

GOING TO A CRY

Dolly Suehead (left) and Levina Suehead.

Dolly Suehead (United Indian Auburn Community) and
Levina Suehead (Colfax), sisters-in-law
Levina Suehead: I was starting out to ask Dolly about life on
the reservation and about the cry. You started out talking
about that and I think I’d like to know how that went about
and some of the—I’m not sure how to put it—the differences I guess between the white culture and the Indian culture. So, if you’d like to start on that one.
Dolly Suehead: Well, we’ll start with the cry first. It usually
happened to the folks who had lost someone in their family.
And it happened once a year. There was a year of mourning
when you lost someone. You had to live by yourself in a little
hut and someone else cooked for you and they would carry
the food to you. And you did nothing. You just stayed there

and, I guess, mourned. I don’t really know why we stayed in
there. Your hair was cut off and your head was covered with
pitch. I would say it was from the evergreen tree or the pine
tree or something that had that sticky pitch. So, you would
put that on your head and then you stayed there for a year.
LS: Okay.
DS: After the year was up, you and everybody who had lost
someone in that year would have a big cry, which involved
everybody—men, women, and children, maybe about from
eight to ten years old. And you’d have this huge, huge cry and
you’d get rid of your sorrow, I guess is what you would say.
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