NEEDLES, Calif. – As the desert sun slides behind the mountains and the temperature dips below 90, members of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe Band assemble in a parking lot to rehearse. Mothers with clarinets to their lips. Young men lugging drums. Children carrying flags and streamers. A 76-year-old trumpeter in a wheelchair.
Two stray dogs take seats in the street, ready for the evening’s parade.
“Quickly, we’re losing daylight!” someone shouts. Soon they are parading through the bleak reservation village outside Needles to the cadence of American marching music – an improbable scene that has been a tradition on the California-Arizona border for 100 years.
A century ago, dozens of Indian tribes nationwide had bands that played John Philip Sousa music and other patriotic anthems. The bands were an outgrowth of government-run boarding schools that sought, brutally at times, to erase Indian cultures, religions and languages in the name of assimilation. Only a few bands survive. The Fort Mojave tribe’s is thought to be the oldest.
Through the decades, the band has weathered forces that killed others – poverty, an exodus of young people and opposition from Indians who saw marches as symbols of oppression, music to which their ancestors were slaughtered.
“A lot of tribes dropped their bands because they were symbols of the boarding-school experience,” said Melissa Nelson, an assistant professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University. “The Mojave made it their own music, and it helped them survive. … It’s an incredible story.”
The band has played many roles for the tribe, most of whose 1,200 members live along the Colorado River in California, Arizona and Nevada. It’s been a tool to fight bigotry. A source of pride in the face of unemployment and poverty. A way to keep young people from drinking and drugs.
As the noisy procession of two dozen musicians winds through the village past modest homes, people watch the show from lawn chairs and the beds of pickup trucks. Past an 81-year-old woman whose late husband kept the band going for decades through force of will, like his father before him.
“He lived for the band,” Betty Barrackman said of her husband, Llewellyn. “He didn’t ever want to let it die.”
In 1906, Mojave elders enlisted Albert Eller, a German-born music teacher at the Ft. Mojave Indian boarding school in Arizona, to help form a band to play patriotic marches. Their goal: to defuse racism by embracing the dominant culture’s popular music.
“They believed one of the best ways they could combat this violence was with a tuba and a saxophone,” Nelson said. “Music is the universal language. Instead of being spat at by people coming through Needles, now they were being applauded and cheered.”
The punchy marches were a sharp contrast to traditional Mojave music, which centered on epic poems that served as the tribe’s oral encyclopedia.
By the late 1950s, Needles had undergone an upheaval. The Santa Fe Railroad’s rail yard – and its jobs – were gone. Young Indians left the deep poverty of the reservation in search of work. As the older generation died, so too did widespread knowledge of the Mojave language and songs.
When Roger Barrackman, who had worked for the government off the reservation, returned and became band director in 1958, there was little left – a handful of old men who performed sporadically on thrift-store instruments. Barrackman concluded the band’s survival depended on recruiting a new generation of musicians.
“The band was dying,” Irene McCord said. “He had a love of music and wanted to pass it on. He went door to door, begging for pennies and dimes, and students.”
McCord was 8 when Barrackman got her to take up the trumpet. She remembers Barrackman as an exacting teacher unafraid to swat a lackadaisical student.
“His baton served many purposes,” said Steve Lopez, among the children Barrackman enticed into the band.
Lopez’s motivation for learning the trumpet and the tuba was simple: The reservation offered few other diversions, especially after dark. “We didn’t have much – no TVs and stuff. Our toys were sticks and rocks.”
Barrackman preached a philosophy that transcended race: Excelling at music could put one on the path to success.
“We were lucky to get out of high school,” Lopez said. “He was constantly telling us, ‘Music could take you out of here. You could go to college – they have university bands and you might be able to get a scholarship.’ And I said, ‘What’s that?’”
When Roger Barrackman died in 1968, his son, Llewellyn, a longtime tribal council member and trombonist, asked McCord to pick up the baton. She was 17, intensely shy, one of six children raised by her widowed mother.
She worked cleaning motels rooms by day. At night, she taught music to the children that now formed the band’s core.
“I baked cookies, cakes, made popcorn balls, whatever they liked to keep them there practicing. Somehow, it all worked, and the band stayed alive,” said McCord, who at 55 is still the director. “When they grew up, they sent their kids to me, and now their kids are sending their kids. It became my life.”
“It’s always been used as a way to keep kids from getting into trouble,” said Amanda McCord, Irene’s cousin and a clarinet player whose job is to distribute government surplus food to more than 10 percent of the tribe’s members.
Barrackman lobbied successfully in recent years to secure the band’s future with money from tribal business ventures, including casinos in Nevada and Arizona. This year, the band and its youth music program received $264,000 from the tribe for teacher salaries, instruments and uniforms.
Musicians get paid – adults, $35; children, $25 – when they perform at events such as the dedication of a hospital, the opening of a restored train depot or parades in Laughlin, Nev., and Gallup, N.M.
In March, the band celebrated its centennial with a concert and parade in Needles. More than 80 current and former members marched, as did Indian bands from the Navajo and Zuni tribes and a U.S. Army band.
At 87 and in poor health, Barrackman told people he intended to hang on to see the day – and to play his trombone one last time.
He did. Several weeks later, he died.
“When he passed away, the question on everyone’s mind was: Can we still do it without him?” said Amanda McCord, 33, who intends to take over from her cousin as band director and whose 12-year-old daughter is the ensemble’s youngest musician.
The answer, any Mojave band member will tell you, was never in doubt.
“He was always there to push it. Now, we need to keep it going,” McCord said. “We can’t disappoint him.”
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