In 2003, Eva Tulene Watt received the Arizona Indian Living Treasure Award for her mastery of basket weaving, moccasin making and beading, but her most notable accomplishment was telling the story of her upbringing on the Apache Indian Reservation during the early 20th century.
With the assistance of anthropologist Keith Basso, Eva recorded her family’s history in her book, "Don’t Let the Sun Step Over You," considered one of the most comprehensive accounts of White Mountain Apaches. Eva wanted her descriptions of life on and off the reservation to be recorded so the next generation of Apaches would know their history, and she hoped Anglos might better understand the ways of her people.
Eva Tulene was born in 1913 at Blue House Mountain on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation. She was one of 11 children born to Ann Beatty and John Langley Tulene, although not all of her siblings survived.
Eva and her family traveled wherever they could find work. They gathered acorns, dug potatoes, harvested cotton and traded roasted agave with their Mexican neighbors. They walked miles to find work around the mines, and helped build roads across Arizona.
“It seems like the family was always traveling,” Eva said. “That’s how it was in those days — people traveled all the time, looking for something to eat, looking for something to do.”
According to Eva, they had to travel to find work because they could not rely on the rations doled out by the government. “(T)hose rations don’t last very long,” she said.
She spent much of her time with her paternal grandmother, Rose Lupe, who taught the youngster how to find herbs and plants that were useful for healing as well as cooking.
Around 1918, the family was living in Miami, Arizona, while her father worked in one of the mines. They were there during the influenza epidemic that spread around the world but all of Eva’s family survived. She believed the medicine that her mother prepared, izee libaahi, protected them from the ravages of the disease.
Her father worked on Roosevelt Dam and helped build the Apache Trail. The family camped by the side of the road as they moved from job to job. Young Eva was tasked with cooking and finding wood. Her grandmother taught her how to make tempting dishes with acorns, pinon nuts and mushrooms, all staples during their time on the road.
In 1925, at the age of 12, Eva was sent to St. Johns Indian School and Mission near Laveen. As with most Indian schools, discipline was harsh. “If they catch you talking your own language,” she said, “they punish you.”
The children marched everywhere — to class, to their dormitories, to church. “We’re praying all the time!” Eva said. “We prayed to eat, we prayed after we eat. Going to school we prayed, after school we prayed. And at recess times, some of the kids went to church to pray.”
Eva was assigned to care for the younger girls at the school. Each morning, she helped them dress, make their beds and guided them to the dining room. In her spare time, she worked in the laundry.
At age 16, Eva left St. Johns and went home to Cibecue to help her mother who had contracted trachoma, a disease that can lead to blindness. As the only daughter in the family after her older sister died while at St. Johns and her two younger sisters died in infancy, she hung out with her brothers who taught her how to tame horses.
She went on cattle drives to Holbrook and believed she was the only woman who rode with the men along those long, dusty trails. Bored with the slow pace of the cattle, she devised a rattle out of a coffee can and a few rocks that kept the herd moving. Soon all the men were rattling coffee cans to step up the pace.
Little is known of Eva’s first marriage to Rivers Kessay except for the birth of their son, Reuben, in 1940. Four years, later, she left Reuben in the care of her grandmother and set off to find work, sending most of her hard-earned wages back to her family. For 20 years, she labored around the country although she returned as often as she could to check on her child.
She cleaned patients’ rooms at a Whiteriver hospital, worked in the laundry at a Fort Apache school, cooked at the Horse Shoe Café in Show Low and cleaned house for a family in Phoenix.
She went to Spokane, Washington, to care for a family’s children. Upon her return, she went to work at Williams Air Force Base.
During the time she was in Spokane, Eva met Air Force aviation fuel specialist William Watt, a Cherokee from Oklahoma, who showed up again at the Williams base. The couple renewed their acquaintance and in 1952, Eva and Bill Watt married. They settled in Chandler and Eva brought Reuben to live with them. She added to her brood with son John Langley in 1953 and daughter Ora Ann in 1955.
In 1959, the Air Force ordered Bill to Morocco. Eva and her children lived with Bill’s father in Stillwell, Oklahoma, during the three years Bill was gone. Upon his return, he was sent to Hamilton Air Force Base near San Francisco where Eva worked in the officer’s club.
Bill was discharged from the military in 1965 and the family returned to Cibecue. When Bill died in 1987, Eva moved to Hon-Dah and Whiteriver to live with her children and grandchildren.
She served as a cultural advisor for the White Mountain Apache’s Cultural Center at Fort Apache and started telling the stories of her family’s adventures to co-author Keith Basso. Basso recognized that Eva’s work gave readers “a view of the past that few have seen before, a wholly Apache view, unsettling yet uplifting, that weighs upon the mind and educates the heart.”
Eva died Jan. 19, 2009, at the age of 95.
