The Salt Songs belong to the fourteen bands of the Nuwuvi, whose country lies across what are now four states. There are a hundred and forty-two of them. They are sung at a funeral, from sunset to sunrise, with a gourd rattle, and they used to take four days and four nights.

Each song is a place. Sung in order they leave the Mojave for the Tehachapis and go out to the Pacific, turn south, come back through the desert and around the Chocolate Mountains, meet the Quechan trail and run with it up the Colorado, cross the river near Poston, and finish where they started. Mount Charleston. Pahrump Valley. Emigrant Pass. The Providence Mountains. The dead are carried along it by the singing.

There is no copy. Nothing was written, there is no sheet to consult and no edition to check a performance against, and the whole of it is held in the people who can still sing it in the right order.

Stewart Indian School ran at Carson City from 1890 to 1980. Children were brought there from four states and punished for speaking their own languages.

In October 2006 singers gathered at Stewart and sang the cycle.

The school is a museum. The songs are not.