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Transcript: Cindy Alvitre

The survival of sacred funeral songs among southern California tribes, despite the loss of so many

[Alvitre:]
When a person died and they had the cremation, the people would come together—and there’s particular death songs. There are secular and there are sacred songs. We know the difference. We’ve lost a lot of those songs, but luckily for a lot of Southern California Indian reservations they still have their funeral songs, and only particular people sing those songs. That’s their obligation. That’s their commitment to their community and to this particular sacred ceremony. They sing those songs. They say in the old days they could sing four days and never repeat a song, and now we’ve been reduced to a handful of songs if you will. So we had a way, a process of being able to deal with our death.