Tribal Parallels

The following is a story from the North County Times in California. It still amazes me to this day how many stories in Tribes are eerily similar....

REGION: San Pasqual tribe could expel about 80 members

Questions of who belongs, who benefits from casino raised

By EDWARD SIFUENTES - Staff Writer | Saturday, July 19, 2008 5:09 PM PDT ∞

About 80 members of the San Pasqual Band of Mission Indians, which owns Valley View Casino, will be expelled from the Valley Center tribe if an internal effort to "disenroll" them is successful.

It is the latest in a long-standing, bitter feud among factions of the 300-member tribe that calls into question what it means to be American Indian and who gets to benefit from the spoils of casino wealth.

A week ago, members of the tribe held separate meetings on the disenrollment matter. One was held at the reservation and another at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Escondido.

The group that met at San Pasqual voted to accept a consultant's report that concluded the 80 people whose tribal affiliations are in question do not belong and should not be listed as members of San Pasqual.

The other group contends that some of the information in the report is "unsubstantiated."

Ron Mast, a member of the San Pasqual tribe, filed a challenge in August saying the group does not belong in the tribe. He says the group is made up of descendants of Marcus R. Alto Sr., whom he contends was adopted by his aunt and uncle, Maria Duro Alto and Jose Alto, as a child, but was not their biological son.

"They are not my family," Mast said in a recent interview. "They have no blood of the band."

Ray Alto, one of the descendants of Marcus R. Alto Sr., declined to comment.

The term "blood of the band" refers to kinship among tribal members. It was a method of describing an individual's Indian heritage by U.S. census takers, beginning in the mid-1800s.

San Pasqual's constitution requires that people have at least one-eighth blood of the band to belong.

Mast says that because Marcus R. Alto Sr. was adopted, he does not meet the requirement and neither do his descendants. In his challenge, he submitted Alto's baptismal certificate as evidence. In it, Alto's mother is listed as Benedita Barrios, a non-tribal member.

Blood feuds

In recent years, questions of who legitimately belongs have plagued tribes across the country, including several local tribes.

In 2006, the Pechanga Band of Mission Indians, which owns a large hotel and casino complex near Temecula, voted to disenroll 130 members of the tribe.

Factions within the Rincon Band of Mission Indians, which also own a casino in Valley Center, led a failed attempted to oust its former chairman, John Currier, and about 70 members of his extended family.

There are no precise statistics, but there are similar disputes across the state and the country involving thousands of tribal members whose heritage has come in to question, especially among tribes that own some of the largest and most profitable casinos.

There are about 50,000 people officially enrolled in California's 108 federally recognized tribes. But before tribes began building their casinos, most reservations were desolate, isolated places, with high unemployment, poverty and other social ills.

Many members began returning to their reservations when casinos began producing jobs, rekindling old bloodline feuds.

In 2007, the Indian gambling industry took in about $26 billion, up from $24.9 billion in 2006, according to the National Indian Gaming Commission, which oversees the tribal casinos. California's tribal gambling industry has grown into one of the largest in the world, generating an estimated $7.7 billion a year.

Payments suspended

The hundreds of people across the state who have lost their memberships in the tribes also have lost their share of the casino pie.

In Pechanga, those who were removed from tribal rolls are ineligible for monthly payments reported to be about $20,000.

In San Pasqual, about 50 of the people whose membership is in question also lost their jobs at the tribe's casino. Their casino payments were suspended, according to a letter dated July 7 from the tribe's enrollment committee to the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The amount of the payments are not officially disclosed, but are said to be about $4,000 a month.

"The suspended payments are being held in escrow accounts until these matters have been finally resolved," according to the letter signed by three members of the tribe's five-member enrollment committee.

The two members of the enrollment committee who did not sign the letter, Joe Navarro and Robert Phelps, wrote a separate letter to the bureau questioning the authenticity of Alto's baptismal certificate because the names don't match.

The child's name on the certificate is listed as Roberto Marco Alto, according to the letter signed by the two members of the enrollment committee.

"There is no record that Marcus Alto Sr. ever used the name Roberto Marco, and we therefore cannot determine if Marcus Alto Sr. and the child listed in the baptismal record is the same individual," according to the letter.

Under the San Pasqual tribe's constitution, the bureau must review the evidence and make a final ruling on membership matters, said Jim Fletcher, superintendent of the agency's Southern California office.

Fletcher said he reported the tribe's actions to the National Indian Gaming Commission because it may have violated federal rules by suspending the payments before the members were officially removed.

"They are considered members until the bureau completes the review process," Fletcher said in a phone interview Wednesday.

Many other tribes, such as Pechanga, decide such matters themselves.

Members of San Pasqual's enrollment committee appear to disagree with Fletcher over who has authority to expel people from the tribe.

"Under federal law, the tribe has inherent sovereign authority to govern membership in accordance with the enrollment criteria and procedures provided for in its constitution and by laws," according to the letter.

San Pasqual Chairman Allen Lawson declined to comment.

Pushed to the rocks

At San Pasqual, the question of who belongs is nearly as old as the tribe.

The tribe's members are descendents of the original inhabitants of the San Pasqual Valley, east of Escondido. The ancestors of the San Pasqual were removed from the valley in the 1870s, when non-Indians staked claims on the land.

The San Pasqual tribe remained landless until the federal government established the current reservation, a rocky patchwork of parcels north of Lake Wohlford. The land was considered so inhospitable that only one family moved there. The rest remained scattered in the area until the 1950s.

In 1958, tribal members formed an enrollment committee and hired anthropologist Florence Shipek to help them research and document tribal membership. The work was completed in 1966, establishing a base count of 229 tribal members who were alive as of 1959.

The tribe's enrollment committee repeatedly declined to let Marcus Alto Sr., who died in 1988, and his family into the band, according to a report by a consultant hired by the tribe to investigate Mast's challenge. Alto's son, Marcus Alto Jr., carried an appeal after his father's death.

The report, written by anthropologist Christine Grabowski, concluded that the bureau relied on documentation that "contained grievous discrepancies" when the bureau finally admitted Marcus Alto Sr. and his descendants into the tribe in 1994.

"The totality of the available information and how the facts fit together corroborate the long-standing position of San Pasqual tribal elders that Marcus Alto Sr. had been adopted by Jose Alto and Maria Duro and raised by them but was not a San Pasqual Band member by descent," according to the report.

Fletcher, the bureau's superintendent, said the tribe has given members of the Alto family time to respond to the challenge. Once the case is forwarded to the bureau, it will be reviewed and the federal government will make the final decision on the enrollment of the family members.

Contact staff writer Edward Sifuentes at (760) 740-3511 or esifuentes@nctimes.com.

West Valley Summer

For years I have been saying that I would be sure to take pictures of the wheat and other grains during the summer. The West Willamette Valley turns into fields of gold everywhere, and then sadly, at least for aesthetics, it is all harvested. But for a few weeks every year, the place is truly golden.

Political evolution, again

I got the first actual campaign letter today of the season. At least, it was the first for me. Even then, it wasn't really addressed to me, but to the person whose mail I am charged with taking care of. You get the picture.
Anyway, it wasn't really a letter, but a postcard. The card didn't really get into much depth, or issues, or really anything of substance, preferring to focus on the gold and purple logo and three-word slogan that have become nearly ubiquitous the last three years. I suspect that is mostly because the senders of the postcard, since the point was to ask you to vote for all three of the candidates whose names are listed, must be very confident that by now they have solid name-brand recognition, which isn't beyond reason as the Wisdom, Integrity, Family party have really dominated the last two Council elections. Indeed, by the end of the summer, I may end up being the only non-Wisdom, Integrity, Family party Tribal Council member left. I'm not going to lie, that is not a prospect which makes me optimistic, even giving the benefit of the doubt to some of this party's members alongside whom I work.
In looking on Grand Ronde On-Line I could see last night that my brother finally posted an introduction of his political action committee, the Grand Ronde for Open and Honest Leadership. Obviously, that was not news to me, having known about it for months, but for some reason the idea of a formal party I find on some levels encouraging, and even exciting. I really have no interest in being a political Last of the Mohicans, so seeing that help might be on the way, uncertain though it might be this year, is kind of a relief. But even more importantly, as the Tribe continues to grow financially, meaning the stakes in Council elections are higher, I am happy to see the first vestiges of a watchdog organization growing, because the more that we can make our electoral process based on issues and in the case of incumbents voting records, the better off our Tribe will be. I am genuinely hoping that others will agree.
I anticipate that there will probably be an attack or two lobbed against the PAC, though when or where that will come is not really certain, it seems that political attacks recently have usually come in public Council meetings, the infamous Leno letter notwithstanding. I could be wrong, maybe there won't be any attacks at all. But based upon the underground anti-ABC/PPP campaign that I've had to witness the last three years, it still might be safer to assume some sort of smear strategy will be waged. And why not? If a strategy works I would expect people to stick to it.
The real question is how effective will the PAC be? In reality we have kind of witnessed a similar occurrence before, in the Grand Ronde Voices Across America, the only other group I remember who would send out questionnaires to candidates and make those available to any interested parties. That was effective, as the three years I followed that process every year at least one of their endorsees was elected. Whether they regret endorsing some of the candidates they did might be another issue, but I do remember looking forward to reading the candidates' responses to questionnaires, as they were more informative than most campaign letters. There seemed to be a truly interested group of Tribal members back then and maybe, just maybe, this PAC is the kind of thing that will stir them.
I do know this. When I look at the Wisdom, Integrity, Family party letters of the last two years and many of their endorsers, a good deal of those people are not people who I see perusing Grand Ronde On-Line very often, much less this blog. Yet some, when I've spoken with them, seem pretty certain about why they are supporting those candidates that they do, which has made me immensely curious as to what gets discussed at their Sunday meetings in Sheridan, and what it is about me, as well as Angie Blackwell, Buddy West, Kathleen Tom, and Wink Soderberg, that incites such a strong desire to see the Council cleaned of our presence. I probably will never know, even though some of their supporters, or at least individuals who attended their meetings, clearly like me and one or two of them have even gone so far as to repeat what has been said about me and others at those meetings. The likely truth is that many of their supporters just know and like them on a personal level, and they just flat-out don't like me, Angie, Buddy, Wink, or Kathleen, and never will, which for many voters is reason enough to cast their ballots the way they do. I don't obsess over the idea, but more than anything it just makes eager to see more transparency in the selection process and political rallies of any perceived political groups in our Tribe. Republicans and Democrats both hold public conventions this summer, in fact they are televised. Voters get to see and hear what gets said and done at the rallies of both the party they support and the party they oppose. That's the way it should be.
The PAC, I think, is a step in that direction, one that was taken before but is happening all over again. I am glad.

Swiftcanoeing

Wednesday night meetings have become, I think, regular. Now I am perfectly aware that by our Tribal laws we are required to hold them twice per month, so to use the word “regular” in historical context is kind of redundant. Of course they’ve always been regular, duh!

But what I really mean is that Wednesday night meetings have come to mirror different American social institutions, like book clubs, bowling leagues, organized pick-up games down at the local parks, etc. They have come to feature the same cast of characters, many of whom show up early, converse, and at times even plot attacks. In our job because you are privvy to so much information that most people aren’t, when we convene the meetings a quick scan of faces in the crowd can often predict what will be brought up under Other Business and by who. There are a handful of people whose mere presence at the meeting immediately sets my mind racing, because while the reasons aren’t always obvious, I fully expect them to attack somebody, once in a while me. Sadly, that new instinct has been born of experience.

The July 2 meeting was close to being that kind of meeting, with the exception that there would not necessarily be people lining up to attack me, but they would be there to attack the anonymous person who had mailed out a letter that was basically an indictment of our Tribal Vice-Chair and his family. Who spoke, and what they said, I could have just about scripted out myself ahead of time. And it was hard to bite my tongue, because there is a certain word we have in English that is used to describe the act of doing the same things that we denounce, usually unawares, and if there were some magical way to convert this into oil, what happened Wednesday night could have solved our nation’s fuel crisis. I am exaggerating of course, but you get the point. In thinking of the names of those present that night, I could probably come up with half a dozen or so that had at one point been attached to some sort of negative political letter, which goes to show that many of us still rarely equate our actions with that which we despise. Even from my college days, I remember being taught the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance.

What I find most ironic about the whole situation is that Monday night I had watched a special news story on CNN about John McCain and his military service. Evidently General Wesley Clark, an Obama supporter, had made some remarks about how that McCain being shot down in a plane during Vietnam didn’t automatically qualify him to be president. I understand what Clark was trying to say, but he might have chosen his words more carefully. The McCain camp was outraged by the comments, and as would be expected sent an emissary to respond, a fellow Vietnam veteran who interviewed for the piece. To this day I will never understand why the McCain campaign, in this story, would send one of the leaders of the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth to denounce perceived attacks on McCain’s military service, and the reporter covering th story obviously picked up on the same thing. Not surprisingly, the McCain rep felt there were sharp differences between this present debacle and what happened to John Kerry in 2004…

I spoke briefly and vaguely toward this Wednesday night, noting that when first elected I always believed that politics in Indian Country would and should be different than mainstream, especially presidential politics. But they aren’t, and I pointed out that there were people in the audience who had spat on the now-infamous Leno-family letter but who had applauded when attacks were made at me, or Angie Blackwell, or Kathleen Tom. If we are serious about changing the politics, I told people, the practice of turning a blind eye to attacks on those we don’t like or support politically and acting indignant when we or those in our group are on the receiving end needs to end. We need to make this kind of crap unacceptable regardless of who it happens to.

My improvised speech drew applause, though that did little to satisfy me. Only the future will show if all the grandstanding Wednesday night was legitimate and sincere, or just that, grandstanding. I have no choice but to wait and see.