REGION: San Pasqual tribe could expel about 80 members
Questions of who belongs, who benefits from casino raised
By EDWARD SIFUENTES - Staff Writer | ∞
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.
1 comment:
Can you imagine if an audit on the Tribal roles was done here? What if something similar were to happen for the Grand Ronde Tribe? How scary...talk about "split families"
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