This week in 2004, Mark "No business of the White Man" Macarro, head of the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians, allowed the enrollment committee to disenroll the descendents of Manuela Miranda. These descendents were family to committee member, Frances Miranda, a hateful person. Here's one story of that family.
An article from Vince Beiser from 2006 is still worth the read for those who don't know what gaming has done. We will be bringing back older articles to help those new readers find out what is happening in Indian Country while Congress turns a blind eye.
For many Native American tribes, the success of their gambling operations ends a run of misfortune and dispossession that dates back to when white men first dubbed them Indians.
Since full-scale reservation gambling was sanctioned by Congress in 1988, its annual take has grown to some $20 billion, with more than one hundred tribes doling out profits directly to their members.
The Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians whose reservation is a patch of largely useless scrub-and-rock desert southeast of Los Angeles, rake in well over $200 million a year from a 522-room casino/resort with eight restaurants and 2,000 slot and video-poker machines. The cut for each Pechanga adult: $270,000. But if being an Indian has taken on the imprimatur of wealth, high stakes have also led tribes to deal some of their people out.
Bands from California to Connecticut have expelled thousands of long-standing members, often on flimsy grounds of inadequate Indian ancestry. By thinning their numbers, casino-operating tribes have figured out how to split the pot fewer ways.
This decision concerns the disenrollment of John Gomez Jr., whose entire extended family, consisting of 135 adults and all of their offspring, was declared in 2004 no longer to be Pechanga. Gomez and his relatives are descended from Manuela Miranda, who all sides agree was part of the Temecula tribe from which the Pechanga originate.
Decades after the federal government established the Pechanga reservation in 1882, Miranda's granddaughter - Gomez's grandmother - left the impoverished area. But Gomez's people never stopped identifying themselves as Pechanga. Gomez's father returned to the reservation every summer when he was a boy, and later he took his children there for family occasions.
In 1998, Gomez settled his own family a few miles from the reservation, in the town of Temecula, and he soon went to work for the tribe as its legal analyst. His brother has served as the executive chef of the casino's restaurant, his cousin was the casino's head of human resources, and other relatives helped draft the tribe's constitution. In 2002, Gomez and a cousin were elected to the Pechanga enrollment committee. Deluged with applications after the opening of its first gambling hall in 1995, the tribe imposed a moratorium the following year on accepting new adult members, although children of existing members were still permitted to apply. OP: The moratorium was pushed by the splinter group under the guise of allowing the enrollment committee to "catch up" on applications. It was really put there to keep rightful people from their "share" of per capita
Some of the new applicants were undoubtably opportunistic pretenders, but others had lived their entire family lives as unquestioned tribal members and simply never had reason to formally enroll. According to Gomez, he and his cousin found that the committee was not processing applications filed before the moratorium and was failing to enroll some members' children. Only after he called for an investigation, says Gomez, did questions about his own ancestry arise.
The Pechanga authorities (Tribal Chairman Mark Macarro) say they are just belatedly enforcing long-standing rules regarding descent and historical residence, the specifics of which are outlined here. Most tribes require that members show proof of a blood quantum: a minimum of one full-blooded grandparent or great-grandparent. But with so much at stake, how that Indian status is proven has become a matter of intense dispute. Macarro's ancestor called a subsequently disenrolled Indian, Paulina Hunter, aunt. Lineal descent allows Macarro to say, my "great-great grandmother was an Indian. Macarro grew up in Colton, not on the reservation.
When a former chairman of California's Redding Rancheria tribe and seventy-five members of his extended family were disenrolled in 2004, they dug up the remains of two ancestors for DNA testing. Three experts agreed that the genetic evidence confirmed that they were bona fide Redding Rancherias. Yet the tribal council stuck to its decision - meaning that the roughly $3 million in casino payouts that had been going to the ousted clan now gets divided up among the tribe's remaining 230 members.
This memo, from a group that calls itself the Concerned Pechanga People, contained the first claims that Gomez's family did not meet the criteria for membership. (Several of these "concerned" Pechanga just happened to be related to the enrollment committee members Gomez had accused of stonewalling applications.) When it was presented to the full committee in December 2002, the memo set off a series of accusations and counter-accusations about the illegitimacy of other members' Pechanga roots. At one point seven of ten members on the enrollment committee were forced to step down pending reviews of their own status.
In other tribes, too, disenrollment has been used as a club to settle scores and to protect political power. An entire family was expelled from one California band after its members pushed for a recall election of the tribal council. Part of the impetus for the Redding Rancheria disenrollments, according to the tribe's own lawyer, was "all kinds of interpersonal things. There were a lot of things family members did to others that were resented."
Forced to prove their Pechanga lineage, Gomez and his family searched through government archives and boxes tucked away in homes, eventually amassing hundreds of historical documents, many as old as the baptismal record from 1864 catalogued here. But using such documentation to "authenticate" Indian ancestry is dubious at best. I
n the late nineteenth century, census takers simply eyeballed those living on reservations to determine whether they were one-quarter, half, or full-blooded Indian. Indians themselves, fearing their land would otherwise be confiscated, often felt compelled to say they were white or Mexican. Indeed, California municipalities offered bounties on Indian scalps until the late nineteenth century, giving their owners an obvious incentive to hide their true identity.
John Gomez's case hinges not on his ancestor's blood, but as the ruling examines here, on where precisely Manuela Miranda lived at a specific time. In 1875, the Temecula were forced off their land by neighboring ranchers backed by San Diego County sheriffs. Many of them drifted away to towns; others resettled in the nearby Pechanga valley, which the government eventually designated as the Pechanga reservation.
Over the years most residents abandoned this inhospitable land, and the reservation began to be repopulated only after the community finally got electricity in 1970. The tribe's constitution, passed in 1978, says that members must prove "descent from original Pechanga Temecula people."
But in 1996 the tribal council tightened the rules, declaring for the first time that members had to have an ancestor from the subset of Temeculas who relocated to the Pechanga valley.
Gomez and his family point to minutes from the 1996 meeting indicating that the more stringent qualifications were not meant to be applied retroactively to established members such as themselves. Manuela Miranda was born in 1864 in the Temecula village. She never knew her father, and her mother died when she was five, at which point she went to live with an older half-sister. After the ranchers pushed them out of the village, the half-sister moved to the Pechanga valley and a teenage Miranda was soon married off to a non-Indian, with whom she settled and eventually had tn children in nearby San Jacinto.
As is indicated here, the enrollment committee acknowledges that Miranda identified herself as an "Indian of the Pechanga Reservation" in a 1916 probate record. But at the age of sixty-four, when applying to have her name added to a new federal listing of California Indians, she said otherwise. Miranda's complicated relationship to her tribe is far from exceptional. Large numbers of Indians have moved off their reservations, often with the encouragement of government programs. And marriage outside the tribe and race has been commonplace since the late nineteenth century.
In fact, today fewer than half of all Indians even claim full-blood status. Unfortunately for Gomez, the enrollment-committee members with ties to the Concerned Pechanga People were reinstated before his case was considered: in resuming their positions, they were able to rule against him. The committee states here that Miranda never relocated to the Pechanga valley, and therefore her progeny are not Pechangas. Yet Gomez's family insists that Miranda kept in close contact with her relatives on the reservation, and in affidavits elderly tribal members have sworn that they always viewed her as one of their own.
Even though Miranda's half-sister also lived off the reservation for many years, the committee decided that her living descendants are members in good standing. (One of these descendants, Frances Miranda, is among the enrollment-committee members who voted to remove Gomez.) For her people and for each of the remaining 850 adults in the tribe, the ouster of Gomez's clan raised their individual share of casino money by some 15 percent.
Gomez's disenrollment does not mean that he is not an Indian (as is made clear here) but it does put him outside the Pechanga tribe, costing him more than his monthly casino check, his job, and the health and life insurance that came with it. He is now barred from visiting ancestor's grave sites. His grandmother is no longer allowed to attend classes at the reservation's senior-citizen center. And his cousins' children have been expelled from the Pechanga elementary school, where they were learning the tribe's language. (Members of Gomez's family also made up the core of the tribe's softball team, and their expulsion forced the Pechanga to withdraw from intertribal play.) For others, disenrollment does mean that they are declared no longer to be Indians of any sort. Thus they lose government scholarships, job training, and other benefits reserved for Native Americans.
Most federal programs require that recipients be at least one-quarter Indian, but a tribe's judgment is frequently the only proof of that blood quantum. Members of Gomez's family can attest to this dilemma: since being disenrolled many of them have lost their federally funded Indian health care. There are now more than one thousand people fighting ejections from California tribes alone, and far more are embroiled in similar disputes nationwide. Yet for the disenrolled there is little recourse.
Gomez followed the protocol specified here and appealed this decision to the tribal council, which, predictably, also ruled against him. Next he turned to state and federal courts, hoping they would be able to settle conflicting interpretations of tribal law and historical record. But the same sovereignty that allows Indian tribes to run casinos and sell fireworks on their lanes also puts them largely outside the jurisdiction of the courts. A federal judge, ruling last September on another California case, wrote, "These doctrines of tribal sovereign immunity were developed decades ago, before the gaming boom created a new and economically valuable premium on tribal membership." Although the judge was unwilling to challenge the 1978 Supreme Court decision that made membership an internal tribal matter, she nevertheless found the case "deeply troubling on the level of fundamental substantive justice."
Gomez recently helped form the American Indian Rights and Resource Organization, which is calling on Congress to address the current spate of disenrollment abuse. The group has staged a series of protests, including one in January at the annual Western Indian Gaming Conference in Palm Springs. As Gomez and a few dozen others picketed outside, their former tribal compatriots were inside the city's capacious exhibition hall, cutting deals from prospective caterers. more protestors may join Gomez's side: in March the Pechanga started disenrollment proceedings against another ninety of its adult members. American Indians, it appears, are still being driven from their lands, their heritage stolen from them.
But today the ranchers are other Indians, and bounties can exceed $290,000 a head.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Children from reservation school. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Children from reservation school. Sort by date Show all posts
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Friday, June 11, 2010
Mark Macarro Pechanga's Paper Trail of Tears Leaves Elders Dead, Dishonored
An article from Vince Beiser from 2006 is still worth the read for those who don't know what gaming has done. We will be bringing back older articles to help those new readers find out what is happening in Indian Country while Congress turns a blind eye.
For many Native American tribes, the success of their gambling operations ends a run of misfortune and dispossession that dates back to when white men first dubbed them Indians.
Since full-scale reservation gambling was sanctioned by Congress in 1988, its annual take has grown to some $20 billion, with more than one hundred tribes doling out profits directly to their members.
The Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians whose reservation is a patch of largely useless scrub-and-rock desert southeast of Los Angeles, rake in well over $200 million a year from a 522-room casino/resort with eight restaurants and 2,000 slot and video-poker machines. The cut for each Pechanga adult: $290,000. But if being an Indian has taken on the imprimatur of wealth, high stakes have also led tribes to deal some of their people out.
Bands from California to Connecticut have expelled thousands of long-standing members, often on flimsy grounds of inadequate Indian ancestry. By thinning their numbers, casino-operating tribes have figured out how to split the pot fewer ways.
This decision concerns the disenrollment of John Gomez Jr., whose entire extended family, consisting of 135 adults and all of their offspring, was declared in 2004 no longer to be Pechanga. Gomez and his relatives are descended from Manuela Miranda, who all sides agree was part of the Temecula tribe from which the Pechanga originate.
Decades after the federal government established the Pechanga reservation in 1882, Miranda's granddaughter - Gomez's grandmother - left the impoverished area. But Gomez's people never stopped identifying themselves as Pechanga. Gomez's father returned to the reservation every summer when he was a boy, and later he took his children there for family occasions.
In 1998, Gomez settled his own family a few miles from the reservation, in the town of Temecula, and he soon went to work for the tribe as its legal analyst. His brother has served as the executive chef of the casino's restaurant, his cousin was the casino's head of human resources, and other relatives helped draft the tribe's constitution. In 2002, Gomez and a cousin were elected to the Pechanga enrollment committee. Deluged with applications after the opening of its first gambling hall in 1995, the tribe imposed a moratorium the following year on accepting new adult members, although children of existing members were still permitted to apply.
Some of the new applicants were undoubtably opportunistic pretenders, but others had lived their entire family lives as unquestioned tribal members and simply never had reason to formally enroll. According to Gomez, he and his cousin found that the committee was not processing applications filed before the moratorium and was failing to enroll some members' children. Only after he called for an investigation, says Gomez, did questions about his own ancestry arise.
The Pechanga authorities (Tribal Chairman Mark Macarro) say they are just belatedly enforcing long-standing rules regarding descent and historical residence, the specifics of which are outlined here. Most tribes require that members show proof of a blood quantum: a minimum of one full-blooded grandparent or great-grandparent. But with so much at stake, how that Indian status is proven has become a matter of intense dispute.
The Meskwaki tribe of Iowa last year began requiring DNA tests for all would-be members. A North Carolina band is spending nearly $1 million on outside consultants to authenticate birth and death certificates. When a former chairman of California's Redding Rancheria tribe and seventy-five members of his extended family were disenrolled in 2004, they dug up the remains of two ancestors for DNA testing. Three experts agreed that the genetic evidence confirmed that they were bona fide Redding Rancherias. Yet the tribal council stuck to its decision - meaning that the roughly $3 million in casino payouts that had been going to the ousted clan now gets divided up among the tribe's remaining 230 members.
This memo, from a group that calls itself the Concerned Pechanga People, contained the first claims that Gomez's family did not meet the criteria for membership. (Several of these "concerned" Pechanga just happened to be related to the enrollment committee members Gomez had accused of stonewalling applications.) When it was presented to the full committee in December 2002, the memo set off a series of accusations and counter-accusations about the illegitimacy of other members' Pechanga roots. At one point seven of ten members on the enrollment committee were forced to step down pending reviews of their own status.
In other tribes, too, disenrollment has been used as a club to settle scores and to protect political power. An entire family was expelled from one California band after its members pushed for a recall election of the tribal council. Part of the impetus for the Redding Rancheria disenrollments, according to the tribe's own lawyer, was "all kinds of interpersonal things. There were a lot of things family members did to others that were resented."
Forced to prove their Pechanga lineage, Gomez and his family searched through government archives and boxes tucked away in homes, eventually amassing hundreds of historical documents, many as old as the baptismal record from 1864 catalogued here. But using such documentation to "authenticate" Indian ancestry is dubious at best. I
n the late nineteenth century, census takers simply eyeballed those living on reservations to determine whether they were one-quarter, half, or full-blooded Indian. Indians themselves, fearing their land would otherwise be confiscated, often felt compelled to say they were white or Mexican. Indeed, California municipalities offered bounties on Indian scalps until the late nineteenth century, giving their owners an obvious incentive to hide their true identity.
John Gomez's case hinges not on his ancestor's blood, but as the ruling examines here, on where precisely Manuela Miranda lived at a specific time. In 1875, the Temecula were forced off their land by neighboring ranchers backed by San Diego County sheriffs. Many of them drifted away to towns; others resettled in the nearby Pechanga valley, which the government eventually designated as the Pechanga reservation.
Over the years most residents abandoned this inhospitable land, and the reservation began to be repopulated only after the community finally got electricity in 1970. The tribe's constitution, passed in 1978, says that members must prove "descent from original Pechanga Temecula people."
But in 1996 the tribal council tightened the rules, declaring for the first time that members had to have an ancestor from the subset of Temeculas who relocated to the Pechanga valley.
Gomez and his family point to minutes from the 1996 meeting indicating that the more stringent qualifications were not meant to be applied retroactively to established members such as themselves. Manuela Miranda was born in 1864 in the Temecula village. She never knew her father, and her mother died when she was five, at which point she went to live with an older half-sister. After the ranchers pushed them out of the village, the half-sister moved to the Pechanga valley and a teenage Miranda was soon married off to a non-Indian, with whom she settled and eventually had tn children in nearby San Jacinto.
As is indicated here, the enrollment committee acknowledges that Miranda identified herself as an "Indian of the Pechanga Reservation" in a 1916 probate record. But at the age of sixty-four, when applying to have her name added to a new federal listing of California Indians, she said otherwise. Miranda's complicated relationship to her tribe is far from exceptional. Large numbers of Indians have moved off their reservations, often with the encouragement of government programs. And marriage outside the tribe and race has been commonplace since the late nineteenth century.
In fact, today fewer than half of all Indians even claim full-blood status. Unfortunately for Gomez, the enrollment-committee members with ties to the Concerned Pechanga People were reinstated before his case was considered: in resuming their positions, they were able to rule against him. The committee states here that Miranda never relocated to the Pechanga valley, and therefore her progeny are not Pechangas. Yet Gomez's family insists that Miranda kept in close contact with her relatives on the reservation, and in affidavits elderly tribal members have sworn that they always viewed her as one of their own.
Even though Miranda's half-sister also lived off the reservation for many years, the committee decided that her living descendants are members in good standing. (One of these descendants, Frances Miranda, is among the enrollment-committee members who voted to remove Gomez.) For her people and for each of the remaining 850 adults in the tribe, the ouster of Gomez's clan raised their individual share of casino money by some 15 percent.
Gomez's disenrollment does not mean that he is not an Indian (as is made clear here) but it does put him outside the Pechanga tribe, costing him more than his monthly casino check, his job, and the health and life insurance that came with it. He is now barred from visiting ancestor's grave sites. His grandmother is no longer allowed to attend classes at the reservation's senior-citizen center. And his cousins' children have been expelled from the Pechanga elementary school, where they were learning the tribe's language. (Members of Gomez's family also made up the core of the tribe's softball team, and their expulsion forced the Pechanga to withdraw from intertribal play.) For others, disenrollment does mean that they are declared no longer to be Indians of any sort. Thus they lose government scholarships, job training, and other benefits reserved for Native Americans.
Most federal programs require that recipients be at least one-quarter Indian, but a tribe's judgment is frequently the only proof of that blood quantum. Members of Gomez's family can attest to this dilemma: since being disenrolled many of them have lost their federally funded Indian health care. There are now more than one thousand people fighting ejections from California tribes alone, and far more are embroiled in similar disputes nationwide. Yet for the disenrolled there is little recourse.
Gomez followed the protocol specified here and appealed this decision to the tribal council, which, predictably, also ruled against him. Next he turned to state and federal courts, hoping they would be able to settle conflicting interpretations of tribal law and historical record. But the same sovereignty that allows Indian tribes to run casinos and sell fireworks on their lanes also puts them largely outside the jurisdiction of the courts. A federal judge, ruling last September on another California case, wrote, "These doctrines of tribal sovereign immunity were developed decades ago, before the gaming boom created a new and economically valuable premium on tribal membership." Although the judge was unwilling to challenge the 1978 Supreme Court decision that made membership an internal tribal matter, she nevertheless found the case "deeply troubling on the level of fundamental substantive justice."
Gomez recently helped form the American Indian Rights and Resource Organization, which is calling on Congress to address the current spate of disenrollment abuse. The group has staged a series of protests, including one in January at the annual Western Indian Gaming Conference in Palm Springs. As Gomez and a few dozen others picketed outside, their former tribal compatriots were inside the city's capacious exhibition hall, cutting deals from prospective caterers. Soon more protestors may join Gomez's side: in March the Pechanga started disenrollment proceedings against another ninety of its adult members. American Indians, it appears, are still being driven from their lands, their heritage stolen from them.
But today the ranchers are other Indians, and bounties can exceed $290,000 a head.
For many Native American tribes, the success of their gambling operations ends a run of misfortune and dispossession that dates back to when white men first dubbed them Indians.
Since full-scale reservation gambling was sanctioned by Congress in 1988, its annual take has grown to some $20 billion, with more than one hundred tribes doling out profits directly to their members.
The Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians whose reservation is a patch of largely useless scrub-and-rock desert southeast of Los Angeles, rake in well over $200 million a year from a 522-room casino/resort with eight restaurants and 2,000 slot and video-poker machines. The cut for each Pechanga adult: $290,000. But if being an Indian has taken on the imprimatur of wealth, high stakes have also led tribes to deal some of their people out.
Bands from California to Connecticut have expelled thousands of long-standing members, often on flimsy grounds of inadequate Indian ancestry. By thinning their numbers, casino-operating tribes have figured out how to split the pot fewer ways.
This decision concerns the disenrollment of John Gomez Jr., whose entire extended family, consisting of 135 adults and all of their offspring, was declared in 2004 no longer to be Pechanga. Gomez and his relatives are descended from Manuela Miranda, who all sides agree was part of the Temecula tribe from which the Pechanga originate.
Decades after the federal government established the Pechanga reservation in 1882, Miranda's granddaughter - Gomez's grandmother - left the impoverished area. But Gomez's people never stopped identifying themselves as Pechanga. Gomez's father returned to the reservation every summer when he was a boy, and later he took his children there for family occasions.
In 1998, Gomez settled his own family a few miles from the reservation, in the town of Temecula, and he soon went to work for the tribe as its legal analyst. His brother has served as the executive chef of the casino's restaurant, his cousin was the casino's head of human resources, and other relatives helped draft the tribe's constitution. In 2002, Gomez and a cousin were elected to the Pechanga enrollment committee. Deluged with applications after the opening of its first gambling hall in 1995, the tribe imposed a moratorium the following year on accepting new adult members, although children of existing members were still permitted to apply.
Some of the new applicants were undoubtably opportunistic pretenders, but others had lived their entire family lives as unquestioned tribal members and simply never had reason to formally enroll. According to Gomez, he and his cousin found that the committee was not processing applications filed before the moratorium and was failing to enroll some members' children. Only after he called for an investigation, says Gomez, did questions about his own ancestry arise.
The Pechanga authorities (Tribal Chairman Mark Macarro) say they are just belatedly enforcing long-standing rules regarding descent and historical residence, the specifics of which are outlined here. Most tribes require that members show proof of a blood quantum: a minimum of one full-blooded grandparent or great-grandparent. But with so much at stake, how that Indian status is proven has become a matter of intense dispute.
The Meskwaki tribe of Iowa last year began requiring DNA tests for all would-be members. A North Carolina band is spending nearly $1 million on outside consultants to authenticate birth and death certificates. When a former chairman of California's Redding Rancheria tribe and seventy-five members of his extended family were disenrolled in 2004, they dug up the remains of two ancestors for DNA testing. Three experts agreed that the genetic evidence confirmed that they were bona fide Redding Rancherias. Yet the tribal council stuck to its decision - meaning that the roughly $3 million in casino payouts that had been going to the ousted clan now gets divided up among the tribe's remaining 230 members.
This memo, from a group that calls itself the Concerned Pechanga People, contained the first claims that Gomez's family did not meet the criteria for membership. (Several of these "concerned" Pechanga just happened to be related to the enrollment committee members Gomez had accused of stonewalling applications.) When it was presented to the full committee in December 2002, the memo set off a series of accusations and counter-accusations about the illegitimacy of other members' Pechanga roots. At one point seven of ten members on the enrollment committee were forced to step down pending reviews of their own status.
In other tribes, too, disenrollment has been used as a club to settle scores and to protect political power. An entire family was expelled from one California band after its members pushed for a recall election of the tribal council. Part of the impetus for the Redding Rancheria disenrollments, according to the tribe's own lawyer, was "all kinds of interpersonal things. There were a lot of things family members did to others that were resented."
Forced to prove their Pechanga lineage, Gomez and his family searched through government archives and boxes tucked away in homes, eventually amassing hundreds of historical documents, many as old as the baptismal record from 1864 catalogued here. But using such documentation to "authenticate" Indian ancestry is dubious at best. I
n the late nineteenth century, census takers simply eyeballed those living on reservations to determine whether they were one-quarter, half, or full-blooded Indian. Indians themselves, fearing their land would otherwise be confiscated, often felt compelled to say they were white or Mexican. Indeed, California municipalities offered bounties on Indian scalps until the late nineteenth century, giving their owners an obvious incentive to hide their true identity.
John Gomez's case hinges not on his ancestor's blood, but as the ruling examines here, on where precisely Manuela Miranda lived at a specific time. In 1875, the Temecula were forced off their land by neighboring ranchers backed by San Diego County sheriffs. Many of them drifted away to towns; others resettled in the nearby Pechanga valley, which the government eventually designated as the Pechanga reservation.
Over the years most residents abandoned this inhospitable land, and the reservation began to be repopulated only after the community finally got electricity in 1970. The tribe's constitution, passed in 1978, says that members must prove "descent from original Pechanga Temecula people."
But in 1996 the tribal council tightened the rules, declaring for the first time that members had to have an ancestor from the subset of Temeculas who relocated to the Pechanga valley.
Gomez and his family point to minutes from the 1996 meeting indicating that the more stringent qualifications were not meant to be applied retroactively to established members such as themselves. Manuela Miranda was born in 1864 in the Temecula village. She never knew her father, and her mother died when she was five, at which point she went to live with an older half-sister. After the ranchers pushed them out of the village, the half-sister moved to the Pechanga valley and a teenage Miranda was soon married off to a non-Indian, with whom she settled and eventually had tn children in nearby San Jacinto.
As is indicated here, the enrollment committee acknowledges that Miranda identified herself as an "Indian of the Pechanga Reservation" in a 1916 probate record. But at the age of sixty-four, when applying to have her name added to a new federal listing of California Indians, she said otherwise. Miranda's complicated relationship to her tribe is far from exceptional. Large numbers of Indians have moved off their reservations, often with the encouragement of government programs. And marriage outside the tribe and race has been commonplace since the late nineteenth century.
In fact, today fewer than half of all Indians even claim full-blood status. Unfortunately for Gomez, the enrollment-committee members with ties to the Concerned Pechanga People were reinstated before his case was considered: in resuming their positions, they were able to rule against him. The committee states here that Miranda never relocated to the Pechanga valley, and therefore her progeny are not Pechangas. Yet Gomez's family insists that Miranda kept in close contact with her relatives on the reservation, and in affidavits elderly tribal members have sworn that they always viewed her as one of their own.
Even though Miranda's half-sister also lived off the reservation for many years, the committee decided that her living descendants are members in good standing. (One of these descendants, Frances Miranda, is among the enrollment-committee members who voted to remove Gomez.) For her people and for each of the remaining 850 adults in the tribe, the ouster of Gomez's clan raised their individual share of casino money by some 15 percent.
Gomez's disenrollment does not mean that he is not an Indian (as is made clear here) but it does put him outside the Pechanga tribe, costing him more than his monthly casino check, his job, and the health and life insurance that came with it. He is now barred from visiting ancestor's grave sites. His grandmother is no longer allowed to attend classes at the reservation's senior-citizen center. And his cousins' children have been expelled from the Pechanga elementary school, where they were learning the tribe's language. (Members of Gomez's family also made up the core of the tribe's softball team, and their expulsion forced the Pechanga to withdraw from intertribal play.) For others, disenrollment does mean that they are declared no longer to be Indians of any sort. Thus they lose government scholarships, job training, and other benefits reserved for Native Americans.
Most federal programs require that recipients be at least one-quarter Indian, but a tribe's judgment is frequently the only proof of that blood quantum. Members of Gomez's family can attest to this dilemma: since being disenrolled many of them have lost their federally funded Indian health care. There are now more than one thousand people fighting ejections from California tribes alone, and far more are embroiled in similar disputes nationwide. Yet for the disenrolled there is little recourse.
Gomez followed the protocol specified here and appealed this decision to the tribal council, which, predictably, also ruled against him. Next he turned to state and federal courts, hoping they would be able to settle conflicting interpretations of tribal law and historical record. But the same sovereignty that allows Indian tribes to run casinos and sell fireworks on their lanes also puts them largely outside the jurisdiction of the courts. A federal judge, ruling last September on another California case, wrote, "These doctrines of tribal sovereign immunity were developed decades ago, before the gaming boom created a new and economically valuable premium on tribal membership." Although the judge was unwilling to challenge the 1978 Supreme Court decision that made membership an internal tribal matter, she nevertheless found the case "deeply troubling on the level of fundamental substantive justice."
Gomez recently helped form the American Indian Rights and Resource Organization, which is calling on Congress to address the current spate of disenrollment abuse. The group has staged a series of protests, including one in January at the annual Western Indian Gaming Conference in Palm Springs. As Gomez and a few dozen others picketed outside, their former tribal compatriots were inside the city's capacious exhibition hall, cutting deals from prospective caterers. Soon more protestors may join Gomez's side: in March the Pechanga started disenrollment proceedings against another ninety of its adult members. American Indians, it appears, are still being driven from their lands, their heritage stolen from them.
But today the ranchers are other Indians, and bounties can exceed $290,000 a head.
Sunday, June 14, 2015
Mark Macarro and The Pechanga Tribe's Paper Trail of Tears: The Manuela Miranda Descendants Belong ...
An article from Vince Beiser from 2006 is still worth the read for those who don't know what gaming has done. We will be bringing back older articles to help those new readers find out what is happening in Indian Country while Congress turns a blind eye.
For many Native American tribes, the success of their gambling operations ends a run of misfortune and dispossession that dates back to when white men first dubbed them Indians.
Since full-scale reservation gambling was sanctioned by Congress in 1988, its annual take has grown to some $20 billion, with more than one hundred tribes doling out profits directly to their members.
The Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians whose reservation is a patch of largely useless scrub-and-rock desert southeast of Los Angeles, rake in well over $200 million a year from a 522-room casino/resort with eight restaurants and 2,000 slot and video-poker machines. The cut for each Pechanga adult: $290,000. But if being an Indian has taken on the imprimatur of wealth, high stakes have also led tribes to deal some of their people out.
Bands from California to Connecticut have expelled thousands of long-standing members, often on flimsy grounds of inadequate Indian ancestry. By thinning their numbers, casino-operating tribes have figured out how to split the pot fewer ways.
For many Native American tribes, the success of their gambling operations ends a run of misfortune and dispossession that dates back to when white men first dubbed them Indians.
Since full-scale reservation gambling was sanctioned by Congress in 1988, its annual take has grown to some $20 billion, with more than one hundred tribes doling out profits directly to their members.
The Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians whose reservation is a patch of largely useless scrub-and-rock desert southeast of Los Angeles, rake in well over $200 million a year from a 522-room casino/resort with eight restaurants and 2,000 slot and video-poker machines. The cut for each Pechanga adult: $290,000. But if being an Indian has taken on the imprimatur of wealth, high stakes have also led tribes to deal some of their people out.
Bands from California to Connecticut have expelled thousands of long-standing members, often on flimsy grounds of inadequate Indian ancestry. By thinning their numbers, casino-operating tribes have figured out how to split the pot fewer ways.
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
21st Century TRAIL of TEARS: Pechanga's Mark Macarro Leaves Members Culturally HOMELESS
An article from Vince Beiser from 2006 is still worth the read for those who don't know what gaming has done. We will be bringing back older articles to help those new readers find out what is happening in Indian Country while Congress turns a blind eye to the abuses of corrupt tribal governments.
For many Native American tribes, the success of their gambling operations ends a run of misfortune and dispossession that dates back to when white men first dubbed them Indians.
Since full-scale reservation gambling was sanctioned by Congress in 1988, its annual take has grown to some $20 billion, with more than one hundred tribes doling out profits directly to their members.
The Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians whose reservation is a patch of largely useless scrub-and-rock desert southeast of Los Angeles, rake in well over $200 million a year from a 522-room casino/resort with eight restaurants and 2,000 slot and video-poker machines. The cut for each Pechanga adult: $290,000. But if being an Indian has taken on the imprimatur of wealth, high stakes have also led tribes to deal some of their people out. OP: The income varies with the success of the casino and the number of adults getting per capita payments.
For many Native American tribes, the success of their gambling operations ends a run of misfortune and dispossession that dates back to when white men first dubbed them Indians.
Since full-scale reservation gambling was sanctioned by Congress in 1988, its annual take has grown to some $20 billion, with more than one hundred tribes doling out profits directly to their members.
The Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians whose reservation is a patch of largely useless scrub-and-rock desert southeast of Los Angeles, rake in well over $200 million a year from a 522-room casino/resort with eight restaurants and 2,000 slot and video-poker machines. The cut for each Pechanga adult: $290,000. But if being an Indian has taken on the imprimatur of wealth, high stakes have also led tribes to deal some of their people out. OP: The income varies with the success of the casino and the number of adults getting per capita payments.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Pechanga Indian Removal Acts
I'll be on vacation for a week, and I'd like to offer up some previous posts that our new readers can catch up on. Time constraints wouldn't allow be to organize these better. Please tell your friends about this blog and come back often! Here's one from January 2008.
The explosion of Indian Gaming in California has lead to some acts that tribes such as Pechanga Band of Temecula would like to keep as “family secrets.” Removing Indians from tribes, pronouncing them non-Indians, had the same effect as Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Acts had in 1830’s America. Get the Indians we don’t want or like out of the way.
In 2004 and 2005, as part of the Concerned Pechanga People’s Indian Removal Policy, members of the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Mission Indians were forced to give up their membership in the tribe whose reservation is in Temecula, CA. Life-long members, who have had land on the reservation for centuries were forcibly expelled from the tribe. This act of paper genocide has had devastating effects on 25% of the Pechanga people.
Elders no longer qualify for the health care that they lobbied the tribe to provide for all its members. The young are not allowed to attend the reservation’s school, being forcibly blocked and told to leave, much in the manner of the white racists who blocked black children from integrating schools in Little Rock in the 1950’s.
Those who were removed, face an unsecured financial future. Many worked for the tribe, were part of all events, meetings, have their dead buried in the Pechanga Cemetery. Now, that has ended. In order to increase the per capita ($15,000 per month at the time of the first removal) some of the descendents of Pablo Apis, the family of Manuela Miranda were terminated from the tribe. Per capita grew to $20,000 per month (plus bonuses) for those remaining, members of the Concerned Pechanga People initiated a misinformation campaign, one that has successfully terminated over 300 Native Americans of Pechanga descent at the time of the second removal (the descendents of Paulina Hunter.) The per capita is now reportedly $40,000 per month.
Blood relatives are banished from the reservations, families who are no longer in the tribe, but live on the reservation property that they’ve owned since the late 1800’s live in fear that the tribe will take away their water, which has been threatened by some of the remaining tribal members. Will Pechanga really turn off their lifeblood, as easily as they took away their civil rights? It’s not difficult to think so, after the atrocities that the CPP have already committed.
The Concerned Pechanga People
This is the group of people that let the blackness of greed take over their hearts and minds.
The Splinter Group
This group is an offshoot of the 1980’s Splinter Group, led by Russell Murphy and assisted by Frances Miranda and Ihrene Scearse (later on the enrollment committee and committed to removing tribal members). Non-enrolled members of Pechanga, they started attending meetings and disrupted the regular goings on of the business. They announced that they were separating from the band and forming their own Tribe. They petitioned the BIA to recognize them, but the BIA refused.
With few exceptions, no member of the splinter group applied for membership because they knew they could not meet the constitutional requirements established by the Pechanga Band.
The actions of the splinter group raise legitimate questions: Are they really Pechanga? Are they able to document their lineal descent from an Original Pechanga Temecula Person as the Pechanga Bands Constitution and Bylaws require? Did they figure that disruption of tribal matters was the way to go?
This is not the portrait of a tribe in need, asking the people of California to allow tribes to have Las Vegas type gaming such as portrayed in the Prop. 1A and Prop. 5 television commercials of the 1990’s. This is about power, greed and violations of civil rights, voting rights, and elder abuse. It’s about tribal governments wielding sovereignty like a club and it’s about individual Indians that have nowhere to turn for justice.
I’ll explore this more in future posts, with thoughts on expanded gaming in California and what it feels like to be told you aren’t who you know you are.
The explosion of Indian Gaming in California has lead to some acts that tribes such as Pechanga Band of Temecula would like to keep as “family secrets.” Removing Indians from tribes, pronouncing them non-Indians, had the same effect as Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Acts had in 1830’s America. Get the Indians we don’t want or like out of the way.
In 2004 and 2005, as part of the Concerned Pechanga People’s Indian Removal Policy, members of the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Mission Indians were forced to give up their membership in the tribe whose reservation is in Temecula, CA. Life-long members, who have had land on the reservation for centuries were forcibly expelled from the tribe. This act of paper genocide has had devastating effects on 25% of the Pechanga people.
Elders no longer qualify for the health care that they lobbied the tribe to provide for all its members. The young are not allowed to attend the reservation’s school, being forcibly blocked and told to leave, much in the manner of the white racists who blocked black children from integrating schools in Little Rock in the 1950’s.
Those who were removed, face an unsecured financial future. Many worked for the tribe, were part of all events, meetings, have their dead buried in the Pechanga Cemetery. Now, that has ended. In order to increase the per capita ($15,000 per month at the time of the first removal) some of the descendents of Pablo Apis, the family of Manuela Miranda were terminated from the tribe. Per capita grew to $20,000 per month (plus bonuses) for those remaining, members of the Concerned Pechanga People initiated a misinformation campaign, one that has successfully terminated over 300 Native Americans of Pechanga descent at the time of the second removal (the descendents of Paulina Hunter.) The per capita is now reportedly $40,000 per month.
Blood relatives are banished from the reservations, families who are no longer in the tribe, but live on the reservation property that they’ve owned since the late 1800’s live in fear that the tribe will take away their water, which has been threatened by some of the remaining tribal members. Will Pechanga really turn off their lifeblood, as easily as they took away their civil rights? It’s not difficult to think so, after the atrocities that the CPP have already committed.
The Concerned Pechanga People
This is the group of people that let the blackness of greed take over their hearts and minds.
The Splinter Group
This group is an offshoot of the 1980’s Splinter Group, led by Russell Murphy and assisted by Frances Miranda and Ihrene Scearse (later on the enrollment committee and committed to removing tribal members). Non-enrolled members of Pechanga, they started attending meetings and disrupted the regular goings on of the business. They announced that they were separating from the band and forming their own Tribe. They petitioned the BIA to recognize them, but the BIA refused.
With few exceptions, no member of the splinter group applied for membership because they knew they could not meet the constitutional requirements established by the Pechanga Band.
The actions of the splinter group raise legitimate questions: Are they really Pechanga? Are they able to document their lineal descent from an Original Pechanga Temecula Person as the Pechanga Bands Constitution and Bylaws require? Did they figure that disruption of tribal matters was the way to go?
This is not the portrait of a tribe in need, asking the people of California to allow tribes to have Las Vegas type gaming such as portrayed in the Prop. 1A and Prop. 5 television commercials of the 1990’s. This is about power, greed and violations of civil rights, voting rights, and elder abuse. It’s about tribal governments wielding sovereignty like a club and it’s about individual Indians that have nowhere to turn for justice.
I’ll explore this more in future posts, with thoughts on expanded gaming in California and what it feels like to be told you aren’t who you know you are.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Redux: Concerning Disgraceful Actions by the Pechanga Tribal Council
Original Pechanga and Mrs. OP are on vacation. Here is a previous post concerning the Paulina Hunter Family Disenrollment. Thank you all for your continued support of this blog. Please tell your friends.
Concerning Disgraceful Actions by the Pechanga Tribal Council
In a notice dated August 7, 2006, the descendants of Paulina Hunter, an original allottee of the Pechanga Indian Reservation, were informed that the Pechanga Tribal Council and the Pechanga Enrollment Committee had denied their appeal to over-turn the Enrollment Committee's earlier decision to disenroll the family.
The Hunter Family members were disenrolled in March of this year when the Enrollment Committee concluded that their ancestor, Paulina Hunter, was not a Temecula Indian.
Along with disenrollment notices from the Enrollment Committee, a memo from the Tribal Council explained that it had decided that a law passed by the Tribe's governing body in July 2005 to bar future disenrollments applied to all tribal members except the Hunter Family.
The disenrollment of the Hunter family was initiated when several statements were presented to the Enrollment Committee (Bobbi LeMere, Ihrene Scearse, Frances Miranda, Ruth Masiel) claiming Paulina Hunter was non-Indian or not a member. One such letter came from a convicted felon currently serving time in the California State Prison system for child molestation. (Since original post, he was released to the Temecula area)
In response to the allegations, the descendants of Paulina Hunter provided numerous documents as proof that Paulina Hunter was indeed of Indian ancestry and was an original Pechanga/Temecula Indian.
In fact, a report prepared by Dr. John Johnson, the curator of anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, at the request of the Enrollment Committee concluded that a "preponderance of the evidence" from surviving historical records and census documents shows that Paulina Hunter was a Pechanga member who lived in Temecula and was allotted reservation land. There is no greater authority on this issue than Dr. Johnson.
"My feeling is it's a faulty interpretation of the record to reject this family. Paulina Hunter was definitely a core member of the Temecula Band of Luiseño Indians," Dr. Johnson said. "I don't understand the decision other than it is not based on fact. It is based on conjecture and politics."
The disenrollment of the Hunter family is the second such disenrollment of a large family from the Pechanga Band. Each has occurred just months before scheduled tribal elections for Chairman and Tribal Council.
The expulsions of the 2 families removed significant opposition to the current administration and others running for tribal office. Each "disenrollment" was done in violation of both tribal and federal laws which are intended to protect the rights and privileges of tribal members.
Specifically, the members were denied the due process and equal rights protections provided in the Indian Civil Rights Act, as well as language in the Band's Constitution and Bylaws which mandates that tribal officials uphold the individual rights of each member without malice or prejudice. The disenrollments reduced the Pechanga Band's enrollment by nearly 30%, and each enrolled member, including those responsible for the violations of human and civil rights, could reap additional profits in the tens of millions of dollars.
Here's a story that was in the LA TIMES in 2007:
Clan says tribe dealt it a bad hand - A family finds itself cut off from the Pechanga group and its casino wealth despite long ties to the reservation.
By David Kelly
September 09, 2007
When Pechanga Indian leaders hired anthropologist John Johnson in 2004, they had one request: find out if the Madariaga clan were truly members of the tribe.
Generations of them had grown up on the reservation. Family patriarch Lawrence Madariaga, 90, had built his home there, erected the local clinic, served on tribal committees and lived on Hunter Lane, named after his great-grandmother, Paulina Hunter. He even received a lifetime achievement award from the tribe.
That didn't quiet suspicions among some who felt that family members were frauds unfairly pocketing $20,000 each in monthly checks from casino profits.
Johnson, curator of anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and an expert on Luiseño Indian genealogy, spent months poring over documents and concluded that the family was indeed descended from Hunter. And based on the evidence, he said he was 90% certain she was a Temecula Indian from the Pechanga reservation. Members must show proof of lineal descent from an original tribal ancestor.
Johnson presented his findings to the tribal enrollment committee, explained what it meant and then watched it all be ignored.
Last year the committee voted out the family -- a total of 90 adults and about 50 children.
The monthly checks stopped. The healthcare stopped. The children were forced from the tribal school. Family members were able to keep their homes on the land allotted to Paulina Hunter in 1897 but were restricted as to where they could go on the reservation.
Since their ouster, family members say, payments to remaining members are now about $30,000 a month.
Lawsuit filed
In May, they filed a lawsuit against tribal leaders, including Mark Macarro, the chairman, demanding to be reinstated. They said their lineage was better documented than most and that their ancestor was one of the original residents of the reservation.
The case is now pending in federal court in Los Angeles.
Macarro did not respond to interview requests, but in a statement on the tribe's website he denied that casino money played a part in the disenrollments. He said tribes need the ability to "correct past errors and protect the integrity of their citizenry."
"The responsibility of determining who is and is not a citizen of the tribe falls squarely on Indian tribes," he said.
The same argument has been used across the nation as tribes, nearly all with casinos, have expelled thousands of members.
Concerning Disgraceful Actions by the Pechanga Tribal Council
In a notice dated August 7, 2006, the descendants of Paulina Hunter, an original allottee of the Pechanga Indian Reservation, were informed that the Pechanga Tribal Council and the Pechanga Enrollment Committee had denied their appeal to over-turn the Enrollment Committee's earlier decision to disenroll the family.
The Hunter Family members were disenrolled in March of this year when the Enrollment Committee concluded that their ancestor, Paulina Hunter, was not a Temecula Indian.
Along with disenrollment notices from the Enrollment Committee, a memo from the Tribal Council explained that it had decided that a law passed by the Tribe's governing body in July 2005 to bar future disenrollments applied to all tribal members except the Hunter Family.
The disenrollment of the Hunter family was initiated when several statements were presented to the Enrollment Committee (Bobbi LeMere, Ihrene Scearse, Frances Miranda, Ruth Masiel) claiming Paulina Hunter was non-Indian or not a member. One such letter came from a convicted felon currently serving time in the California State Prison system for child molestation. (Since original post, he was released to the Temecula area)
In response to the allegations, the descendants of Paulina Hunter provided numerous documents as proof that Paulina Hunter was indeed of Indian ancestry and was an original Pechanga/Temecula Indian.
In fact, a report prepared by Dr. John Johnson, the curator of anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, at the request of the Enrollment Committee concluded that a "preponderance of the evidence" from surviving historical records and census documents shows that Paulina Hunter was a Pechanga member who lived in Temecula and was allotted reservation land. There is no greater authority on this issue than Dr. Johnson.
"My feeling is it's a faulty interpretation of the record to reject this family. Paulina Hunter was definitely a core member of the Temecula Band of Luiseño Indians," Dr. Johnson said. "I don't understand the decision other than it is not based on fact. It is based on conjecture and politics."
The disenrollment of the Hunter family is the second such disenrollment of a large family from the Pechanga Band. Each has occurred just months before scheduled tribal elections for Chairman and Tribal Council.
The expulsions of the 2 families removed significant opposition to the current administration and others running for tribal office. Each "disenrollment" was done in violation of both tribal and federal laws which are intended to protect the rights and privileges of tribal members.
Specifically, the members were denied the due process and equal rights protections provided in the Indian Civil Rights Act, as well as language in the Band's Constitution and Bylaws which mandates that tribal officials uphold the individual rights of each member without malice or prejudice. The disenrollments reduced the Pechanga Band's enrollment by nearly 30%, and each enrolled member, including those responsible for the violations of human and civil rights, could reap additional profits in the tens of millions of dollars.
Here's a story that was in the LA TIMES in 2007:
Clan says tribe dealt it a bad hand - A family finds itself cut off from the Pechanga group and its casino wealth despite long ties to the reservation.
By David Kelly
September 09, 2007
When Pechanga Indian leaders hired anthropologist John Johnson in 2004, they had one request: find out if the Madariaga clan were truly members of the tribe.
Generations of them had grown up on the reservation. Family patriarch Lawrence Madariaga, 90, had built his home there, erected the local clinic, served on tribal committees and lived on Hunter Lane, named after his great-grandmother, Paulina Hunter. He even received a lifetime achievement award from the tribe.
That didn't quiet suspicions among some who felt that family members were frauds unfairly pocketing $20,000 each in monthly checks from casino profits.
Johnson, curator of anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and an expert on Luiseño Indian genealogy, spent months poring over documents and concluded that the family was indeed descended from Hunter. And based on the evidence, he said he was 90% certain she was a Temecula Indian from the Pechanga reservation. Members must show proof of lineal descent from an original tribal ancestor.
Johnson presented his findings to the tribal enrollment committee, explained what it meant and then watched it all be ignored.
Last year the committee voted out the family -- a total of 90 adults and about 50 children.
The monthly checks stopped. The healthcare stopped. The children were forced from the tribal school. Family members were able to keep their homes on the land allotted to Paulina Hunter in 1897 but were restricted as to where they could go on the reservation.
Since their ouster, family members say, payments to remaining members are now about $30,000 a month.
Lawsuit filed
In May, they filed a lawsuit against tribal leaders, including Mark Macarro, the chairman, demanding to be reinstated. They said their lineage was better documented than most and that their ancestor was one of the original residents of the reservation.
The case is now pending in federal court in Los Angeles.
Macarro did not respond to interview requests, but in a statement on the tribe's website he denied that casino money played a part in the disenrollments. He said tribes need the ability to "correct past errors and protect the integrity of their citizenry."
"The responsibility of determining who is and is not a citizen of the tribe falls squarely on Indian tribes," he said.
The same argument has been used across the nation as tribes, nearly all with casinos, have expelled thousands of members.
Monday, February 3, 2020
Stop Disenrollment: Disgraceful Actions by the Pechanga Tribal Council
Here is a previous post concerning the Paulina Hunter Family Disenrollment. Thank you all for your continued support of this blog. Please tell your friends.
Concerning Disgraceful Actions by the Pechanga Tribal Council
In a notice dated August 7, 2006, the descendants of Paulina Hunter, an original allottee of the Pechanga Indian Reservation, were informed that the Pechanga Tribal Council and the Pechanga Enrollment Committee had denied their appeal to over-turn the Enrollment Committee's earlier decision to disenroll the family.
The Hunter Family members were disenrolled in March of this year when the Enrollment Committee concluded that their ancestor, Paulina Hunter, was not a Temecula Indian.
Along with disenrollment notices from the Enrollment Committee, a memo from the Tribal Council explained that it had decided that a law passed by the Tribe's governing body in July 2005 to bar future disenrollments applied to all tribal members except the Hunter Family.
 |
| Mark Macarro Pechanga Chairman |
Concerning Disgraceful Actions by the Pechanga Tribal Council
In a notice dated August 7, 2006, the descendants of Paulina Hunter, an original allottee of the Pechanga Indian Reservation, were informed that the Pechanga Tribal Council and the Pechanga Enrollment Committee had denied their appeal to over-turn the Enrollment Committee's earlier decision to disenroll the family.
The Hunter Family members were disenrolled in March of this year when the Enrollment Committee concluded that their ancestor, Paulina Hunter, was not a Temecula Indian.
Along with disenrollment notices from the Enrollment Committee, a memo from the Tribal Council explained that it had decided that a law passed by the Tribe's governing body in July 2005 to bar future disenrollments applied to all tribal members except the Hunter Family.
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
May 28, 1830 Andrew Jackson Signs Indian Removal Act HOWEVER TRIBES are NOW REMOVING INDIANS
 |
| Andrew Jackson |
With the Indian removal Act in place, Jackson and his followers were free to persuade, bribe, and threaten tribes into signing removal treaties and leaving the Southeast.
With DISENROLLMENT, we have TRIBES REMOVING their OWN PEOPLE. Here's the Pechanga Band Of luiseno Indians story:
The Pechanga Indian Removal Acts: Violations of Civil Rights
Monday, June 2, 2008
The Pechanga Indian Removal Acts: Violations of Civil Rights
Steve Craig and the folks at apoliticalblog.com have graciously asked me to contribute to their blog. Here is the first submission The Pechanga Indian Removal Acts
The Pechanga Indian Removal Acts
Posted on January 16th, 2008 by Original Pechanga
The explosion of Indian Gaming in California has lead to some acts that tribes such as Pechanga Band of Temecula would like to keep as “family secrets.” Removing Indians from tribes, pronouncing them non-Indians, had the same effect as Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Acts had in 1830’s America. Get the Indians we don’t want or like out of the way.
In 2004 and 2005, as part of the Concerned Pechanga People’s Indian Removal Policy, members of the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Mission Indians were forced to give up their membership in the tribe whose reservation is in Temecula, CA. Life-long members, who have had land on the reservation for centuries were forcibly expelled from the tribe. This act of paper genocide has had devastating effects on 25% of the Pechanga people.
Elders no longer qualify for the health care that they lobbied the tribe to provide for all its members. The young are not allowed to attend the reservation’s school, being forcibly blocked and told to leave, much in the manner of the white racists who blocked black children from integrating schools in Little Rock in the 1950’s.
Those who were removed, face an unsecured financial future. Many worked for the tribe, were part of all events, meetings, have their dead buried in the Pechanga Cemetery. Now, that has ended. In order to increase the per capita ($15,000 per month at the time of the first removal) some of the descendents of Pablo Apis, the family of Manuela Miranda were terminated from the tribe. Per capita grew to $20,000 per month (plus bonuses) for those remaining, members of the Concerned Pechanga People initiated a misinformation campaign, one that has successfully terminated over 300 Native Americans of Pechanga descent at the time of the second removal (the descendents of Paulina Hunter.) The per capita is now reportedly $40,000 per month.
Blood relatives are banished from the reservations, families who are no longer in the tribe, but live on the reservation property that they’ve owned since the late 1800’s live in fear that the tribe will take away their water, which has been threatened by some of the remaining tribal members. Will Pechanga really turn off their lifeblood, as easily as they took away their civil rights? It’s not difficult to think so, after the atrocities that the CPP have already committed.
The Concerned Pechanga People
This is the group of people that let the blackness of greed take over their hearts and minds.
The Splinter Group
This group is an offshoot of the 1980’s Splinter Group, led by Russell Murphy and assisted by Frances Miranda and Ihrene Scearse (later on the enrollment committee and committed to removing tribal members). Non-enrolled members of Pechanga, they started attending meetings and disrupted the regular goings on of the business. They announced that they were separating from the band and forming their own Tribe. They petitioned the BIA to recognize them, but the BIA refused.
With few exceptions, no member of the splinter group applied for membership because they knew they could not meet the constitutional requirements established by the Pechanga Band.
The actions of the splinter group raise legitimate questions: Are they really Pechanga? Are they able to document their lineal descent from an Original Pechanga Temecula Person as the Pechanga Bands Constitution and Bylaws require? Did they figure that disruption of tribal matters was the way to go?
This is not the portrait of a tribe in need, asking the people of California to allow tribes to have Las Vegas type gaming such as portrayed in the Prop. 1A and Prop. 5 television commercials of the 1990’s. This is about power, greed and violations of civil rights, voting rights, and elder abuse. It’s about tribal governments wielding sovereignty like a club and it’s about individual Indians that have nowhere to turn for justice.
I’ll explore this more in future posts, with thoughts on expanded gaming in California and what it feels like to be told you aren’t who you know you are.
Please take a look at the whole article, please check out the link and COMMENT.
The Pechanga Indian Removal Acts
Posted on January 16th, 2008 by Original Pechanga
The explosion of Indian Gaming in California has lead to some acts that tribes such as Pechanga Band of Temecula would like to keep as “family secrets.” Removing Indians from tribes, pronouncing them non-Indians, had the same effect as Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Acts had in 1830’s America. Get the Indians we don’t want or like out of the way.
In 2004 and 2005, as part of the Concerned Pechanga People’s Indian Removal Policy, members of the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Mission Indians were forced to give up their membership in the tribe whose reservation is in Temecula, CA. Life-long members, who have had land on the reservation for centuries were forcibly expelled from the tribe. This act of paper genocide has had devastating effects on 25% of the Pechanga people.
Elders no longer qualify for the health care that they lobbied the tribe to provide for all its members. The young are not allowed to attend the reservation’s school, being forcibly blocked and told to leave, much in the manner of the white racists who blocked black children from integrating schools in Little Rock in the 1950’s.
Those who were removed, face an unsecured financial future. Many worked for the tribe, were part of all events, meetings, have their dead buried in the Pechanga Cemetery. Now, that has ended. In order to increase the per capita ($15,000 per month at the time of the first removal) some of the descendents of Pablo Apis, the family of Manuela Miranda were terminated from the tribe. Per capita grew to $20,000 per month (plus bonuses) for those remaining, members of the Concerned Pechanga People initiated a misinformation campaign, one that has successfully terminated over 300 Native Americans of Pechanga descent at the time of the second removal (the descendents of Paulina Hunter.) The per capita is now reportedly $40,000 per month.
Blood relatives are banished from the reservations, families who are no longer in the tribe, but live on the reservation property that they’ve owned since the late 1800’s live in fear that the tribe will take away their water, which has been threatened by some of the remaining tribal members. Will Pechanga really turn off their lifeblood, as easily as they took away their civil rights? It’s not difficult to think so, after the atrocities that the CPP have already committed.
The Concerned Pechanga People
This is the group of people that let the blackness of greed take over their hearts and minds.
The Splinter Group
This group is an offshoot of the 1980’s Splinter Group, led by Russell Murphy and assisted by Frances Miranda and Ihrene Scearse (later on the enrollment committee and committed to removing tribal members). Non-enrolled members of Pechanga, they started attending meetings and disrupted the regular goings on of the business. They announced that they were separating from the band and forming their own Tribe. They petitioned the BIA to recognize them, but the BIA refused.
With few exceptions, no member of the splinter group applied for membership because they knew they could not meet the constitutional requirements established by the Pechanga Band.
The actions of the splinter group raise legitimate questions: Are they really Pechanga? Are they able to document their lineal descent from an Original Pechanga Temecula Person as the Pechanga Bands Constitution and Bylaws require? Did they figure that disruption of tribal matters was the way to go?
This is not the portrait of a tribe in need, asking the people of California to allow tribes to have Las Vegas type gaming such as portrayed in the Prop. 1A and Prop. 5 television commercials of the 1990’s. This is about power, greed and violations of civil rights, voting rights, and elder abuse. It’s about tribal governments wielding sovereignty like a club and it’s about individual Indians that have nowhere to turn for justice.
I’ll explore this more in future posts, with thoughts on expanded gaming in California and what it feels like to be told you aren’t who you know you are.
Please take a look at the whole article, please check out the link and COMMENT.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Letter Against Pechanga's Civil Rights Violations and other things
One of our young people drafted a letter to those on the Indian Affairs Committee. Feel free to adapt it for your use. It would be a good idea to send it to your representatives.
Dear Senator,
I am writing because you are on the Indian Affairs Committee. I am one of thousands of Indians have been kicked out of our tribes since the advent of Indian Gaming. The majority of eliminated people come from tribes that have Casino's. The issues tend to simply mathmatecal, less members equates to a bigger per capita check. 250 of us, or 25% of our tribe, have been removed from the tribal. rolls with no due process, resulting in the loss of civil right, voting rights, health care and our rightful per capita. Additionally, we have lost education assistance for our children, especially for those who went to school on the reservation. When the tribe removed our families and the children who went to school, they sent members of the tribe to escort the children out of the school, saying that they werent to come back to school tomorrow because they are not Pechanga. CHILDREN! Who have only known their whole life that they are Pechanga. To put it mildly, many tears have been shed over the loss of the our tribe, our identity, and more importantly for the children their friends and their school.
My ancestor is Paulina Hunter and I am from the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Mission Indians of Temecula, California. In my family's case, 90 members, who can prove our lineage, in fact, Pechanga proved it with their own expert, were disenrolled. We have hundreds of certified documents saying that we are Pechanga. Certifed documents that have come from both State and Federal Government that proves our case.
Being kicked out was simply about money, our tribe payed out money to its members, called per capita. Since our family and another has been removed the money to members has increased from $250,000, to upwards of $350,000. We have dead buried in the Tribal cemetery who DIED knowing that they were Pechanga. My Aunt died knowing she was Pechanga. When she was buried, in the cemetary the Tribal Chairman helped bury her, saying that SHE was Pechanga and set a great example for all Pechanga's Members. Make no mistake, we can and have proved our lineage. The tribe hired the foremost expert, John Johnson, in California who stated in a 12 page letter to the tribe, "based on the preponderance of evidence that my ancestor, Paulina Hunter, was in fact Pechanga"! They refused to consider the evidence that they had payed for. We had members of our Tribal Council fall asleep during our meeting with them. Members of the committee also had a bias over land that we were given by the government over 100 years ago, including the Tribal Chairman, Mark Macarro.
This hasn't happened to just our family. To others on other reservations, such as the Cherokee Nation. Assemblymember Diane Watson has gotten involved since that tribe has kicked out 2,800 members who were black, and forcing an investigation into their lineage. She has spoken out for the Cherokee Freedman's and has recently come under scrutiny for doing so. The United Native America has filed a congressional ethics complaint against her. This level of scrutiny shows one thing, that right thing has yet to be done in this matter.
Now California is voting on compacts that would expand gaming in California, rewarding Illegal actions taken by the band. The ones that were just held up by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Governor likes the Compact because it will bring money to the state. But, the compacts reward the tribes for civil rights violations. Is that what we want our government to support in our own country?
Our Family has set up a blog for ours and many others around the country, Please take the time to look at what has come out over the last few months. The address is: http://originalpechanga.blogspot.com
It's past time for the government to get involved here. I'm asking for your help in looking into this matter and in coming to a decision that supports all the citizens civil rights in this matter
Dear Senator,
I am writing because you are on the Indian Affairs Committee. I am one of thousands of Indians have been kicked out of our tribes since the advent of Indian Gaming. The majority of eliminated people come from tribes that have Casino's. The issues tend to simply mathmatecal, less members equates to a bigger per capita check. 250 of us, or 25% of our tribe, have been removed from the tribal. rolls with no due process, resulting in the loss of civil right, voting rights, health care and our rightful per capita. Additionally, we have lost education assistance for our children, especially for those who went to school on the reservation. When the tribe removed our families and the children who went to school, they sent members of the tribe to escort the children out of the school, saying that they werent to come back to school tomorrow because they are not Pechanga. CHILDREN! Who have only known their whole life that they are Pechanga. To put it mildly, many tears have been shed over the loss of the our tribe, our identity, and more importantly for the children their friends and their school.
My ancestor is Paulina Hunter and I am from the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Mission Indians of Temecula, California. In my family's case, 90 members, who can prove our lineage, in fact, Pechanga proved it with their own expert, were disenrolled. We have hundreds of certified documents saying that we are Pechanga. Certifed documents that have come from both State and Federal Government that proves our case.
Being kicked out was simply about money, our tribe payed out money to its members, called per capita. Since our family and another has been removed the money to members has increased from $250,000, to upwards of $350,000. We have dead buried in the Tribal cemetery who DIED knowing that they were Pechanga. My Aunt died knowing she was Pechanga. When she was buried, in the cemetary the Tribal Chairman helped bury her, saying that SHE was Pechanga and set a great example for all Pechanga's Members. Make no mistake, we can and have proved our lineage. The tribe hired the foremost expert, John Johnson, in California who stated in a 12 page letter to the tribe, "based on the preponderance of evidence that my ancestor, Paulina Hunter, was in fact Pechanga"! They refused to consider the evidence that they had payed for. We had members of our Tribal Council fall asleep during our meeting with them. Members of the committee also had a bias over land that we were given by the government over 100 years ago, including the Tribal Chairman, Mark Macarro.
This hasn't happened to just our family. To others on other reservations, such as the Cherokee Nation. Assemblymember Diane Watson has gotten involved since that tribe has kicked out 2,800 members who were black, and forcing an investigation into their lineage. She has spoken out for the Cherokee Freedman's and has recently come under scrutiny for doing so. The United Native America has filed a congressional ethics complaint against her. This level of scrutiny shows one thing, that right thing has yet to be done in this matter.
Now California is voting on compacts that would expand gaming in California, rewarding Illegal actions taken by the band. The ones that were just held up by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Governor likes the Compact because it will bring money to the state. But, the compacts reward the tribes for civil rights violations. Is that what we want our government to support in our own country?
Our Family has set up a blog for ours and many others around the country, Please take the time to look at what has come out over the last few months. The address is: http://originalpechanga.blogspot.com
It's past time for the government to get involved here. I'm asking for your help in looking into this matter and in coming to a decision that supports all the citizens civil rights in this matter
Friday, August 23, 2013
Shameful: Pechanga Tribes' Indian Child Welfare Act: Get Rid of Indian Children
We've read stories about Baby Veronica, the Cherokee child adopted out to white parents, whose birth father wanted his parental rights restored. This was an Indian Child Welfare Act issue and parental rights.
Attorney J Eric Reed of Dallas: “The constitutional questions surrounding every aspect of the Indian Child Welfare Act were vigorously debated by Congress, which enacted this legislation to protect the ultimate health and welfare of all indigenous children in the United States. Those hearings uncovered a very tragic reality in the systematic abusive child welfare practices toward Indians in state courts that resulted in the separation of great numbers of Indian children from their families and tribes..."
The Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians has done more harm than the adoptive parents of Veronica who loved her.
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
PECHANGA: Segregation NOW, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation FOREVER! Mark Macarro Running An Apartheid System
Shades of GEORGE WALLACE at the Pechanga Reservation. Pechanga Chairman Mark Macarro keeps Natives segregated. Well he and Wallace were from the party of Segregation and Jim Crow.
We have written before on the APARTHEID system in force at Pechanga Reservation in Temecula CA.
APARTHEID as described by the dictionary is:
a•part•heid
2. any system or practice that separates people according to race, caste, etc.
Pechanga is doing just that, determining that families with historical ties to the origins of the reservation are ‘no longer pure’ in their eyes. They may be Temecula Indian, but “they aren’t Pechanga.” Even though the expert hired BY Pechanga proved that we were using the TRIBE's own evidence.
Here is what Pechanga members who have been stripped of their citizenship in the tribe have lost:
Pechanga now has a group living on the reservation that have:
• Lost the right to vote
• Lost their rights to healthcare provided by the tribal government.
• Their children can no longer attend tribal schools, in fact some were FORCED from School.
• They can no longer be buried in the reservation cemetery with their relatives.
• Are not protected by the Tribal Rangers. Or in some cases FROM the TRIBAL RANGERS s
Here is a copy of the letter that was presented to those people living on the reservation who are called "non-members" even though most are living on land that was given to their ancestor when the reservation began, roughly 90 years before council member Russell "Butch" Murphy was adopted into the tribe. The Tribal Rangers trespassed on private property, to warn residents about.....trespassing charges for using the drinking fountains and restrooms
The threat from the Macarro lead tribal council is very clear: Fine of $5,000 and exclusion from their own property. THAT is APARTHEID, pure and simple. The tribe is trying to force residents who own property OFF the reservation, and now working to control water rights to land owners, so they have enough water to fill their new water feature at the Pechanga Resort and Casino.
We have written before on the APARTHEID system in force at Pechanga Reservation in Temecula CA.
APARTHEID as described by the dictionary is:
a•part•heid
2. any system or practice that separates people according to race, caste, etc.
Pechanga is doing just that, determining that families with historical ties to the origins of the reservation are ‘no longer pure’ in their eyes. They may be Temecula Indian, but “they aren’t Pechanga.” Even though the expert hired BY Pechanga proved that we were using the TRIBE's own evidence.
Here is what Pechanga members who have been stripped of their citizenship in the tribe have lost:
Pechanga now has a group living on the reservation that have:
• Lost the right to vote
• Lost their rights to healthcare provided by the tribal government.
• Their children can no longer attend tribal schools, in fact some were FORCED from School.
• They can no longer be buried in the reservation cemetery with their relatives.
• Are not protected by the Tribal Rangers. Or in some cases FROM the TRIBAL RANGERS s
Here is a copy of the letter that was presented to those people living on the reservation who are called "non-members" even though most are living on land that was given to their ancestor when the reservation began, roughly 90 years before council member Russell "Butch" Murphy was adopted into the tribe. The Tribal Rangers trespassed on private property, to warn residents about.....trespassing charges for using the drinking fountains and restrooms
The threat from the Macarro lead tribal council is very clear: Fine of $5,000 and exclusion from their own property. THAT is APARTHEID, pure and simple. The tribe is trying to force residents who own property OFF the reservation, and now working to control water rights to land owners, so they have enough water to fill their new water feature at the Pechanga Resort and Casino.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Norman Pico Sr. Pechanga Leader has Passed UPDATE
UPDATE: The viewing and funeral honoring Norman Pico Sr. wil be Thursday October 14th at the Pechanga Government Center.
Sadly, new from the Pechanga Reservation in Temecula is that Norman Pico Sr., Pechanga elder, a longtime member of Pechanga's Gaming Commission and brother of the late tribal chairman Gabriel Pico has passed at age 70.
Norman Pico was also the supervisor of the Pechanga Pow Wow, which just had its 15th anniversary. He also was a board member of the Riverside-San Bernardino County Indian Health Inc., serving on several committees, and on the board of the Indian Child & Family Services. He was involved in Perris youth baseball.
Mr. Pico had lived in Perris and on the reservation most of his life, family members said.
Mr. Pico is survived by his wife, Deborah; two sons, Randolph and Norman Jr.; a daughter, Kathy; 12 grandchildren; one great-grandchild; and numerous nieces and nephews.
In 2004, Mr. Pico ran for tribal chairman against the current tribal chair, Mark Macarro, whose council is well known for terminating tribal members to expand the per capita payments of those they allowed to remain in the tribe. Mr. Pico did not support the ouster of families, while Macarro was supported by the CPP, who wanted to remove hundreds from the tribe.
In fact, in Dec. 2002, there was an exchange of emails where Macarro contends the tribe's bylawas were "screwy" and in a subsequent email, Macarro states "I could care less about your heart". "If you want to pop your cork, that's fine by me." An example of the Macarro temper that is well known on the reservation. (and YES, we do have copies of the emails.)
Mr. Pico worked hard to help the tribe move forward, he stood up for what is right. He fought against the wrongs perpetrated by the splinter group, the CPP, that has usurped power over rightful blood Pechanga people.
Sadly, new from the Pechanga Reservation in Temecula is that Norman Pico Sr., Pechanga elder, a longtime member of Pechanga's Gaming Commission and brother of the late tribal chairman Gabriel Pico has passed at age 70.
 |
| Norman Pico Sr. |
Mr. Pico had lived in Perris and on the reservation most of his life, family members said.
Mr. Pico is survived by his wife, Deborah; two sons, Randolph and Norman Jr.; a daughter, Kathy; 12 grandchildren; one great-grandchild; and numerous nieces and nephews.
In 2004, Mr. Pico ran for tribal chairman against the current tribal chair, Mark Macarro, whose council is well known for terminating tribal members to expand the per capita payments of those they allowed to remain in the tribe. Mr. Pico did not support the ouster of families, while Macarro was supported by the CPP, who wanted to remove hundreds from the tribe.
In fact, in Dec. 2002, there was an exchange of emails where Macarro contends the tribe's bylawas were "screwy" and in a subsequent email, Macarro states "I could care less about your heart". "If you want to pop your cork, that's fine by me." An example of the Macarro temper that is well known on the reservation. (and YES, we do have copies of the emails.)
Mr. Pico worked hard to help the tribe move forward, he stood up for what is right. He fought against the wrongs perpetrated by the splinter group, the CPP, that has usurped power over rightful blood Pechanga people.
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Pechanga's Decade of Abuse, Not Torture, But OKAY with Boxer and Feinstein As Long as the MONEY Flows..
There is a gathering storm, of oppressed Native Americans, who have been harmed by their own tribes, sometimes by those who were fraudulently enrolled, or adopted with NO blood of the band.
In 2004 and 2006, as part of the Concerned Pechanga People’s Indian Removal Policy, members of the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Mission Indians were forced to give up their membership in the tribe whose reservation is in Temecula, CA. Life-long members, who have had land on the reservation for centuries were forcibly expelled from the tribe. This act of paper genocide has had devastating effects on 25% of the Pechanga people.
Elders no longer qualify for the health care that they lobbied the tribe to provide for all its members. The young are not allowed to attend the reservation’s school, being forcibly blocked and told to leave, much in the manner of the white racists who blocked black children from integrating schools in Little Rock in the 1950’s.
Those who were removed, face an unsecured financial future. Many worked for the tribe, were part of all events, meetings, have their dead buried in the Pechanga Cemetery. Now, that has ended. In order to increase the per capita ($15,000 per month at the time of the first removal) some of the descendents of Pablo Apis, the family of Manuela Miranda were terminated from the tribe. Per capita grew to $20,000 per month (plus bonuses) for those remaining, members of the Concerned Pechanga People initiated a misinformation campaign, one that has successfully terminated over 300 Native Americans of Pechanga descent at the time of the second removal (the descendents of Paulina Hunter.) The per capita is now reportedly $40,000 per month.
Blood relatives are banished from the reservations, families who are no longer in the tribe, but live on the reservation property that they’ve owned since the late 1800’s live in fear that the tribe will take away their water, which has been threatened by some of the remaining tribal members. Will Pechanga really turn off their lifeblood, as easily as they took away their civil rights? It’s not difficult to think so, after the atrocities that the CPP have already committed.
Monday, November 26, 2018
CLINT EASTWOOD'S film, INDIAN HORSE on RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS Screened at Pechanga Tribe, which RIPPED Native Children from their OWN SCHOOL
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| Clint Eastwood Executive Producer of Indian Horse |
Sad bit of irony, yes? A film by Clint Eastwood on the trauma of Native American children screened on a reservation that ABUSED their own children.
At the Pechanga Casino Resort in Temecula, Calif. a mostly Native American audience filed into the resort’s theater to attend the California Indigenous and Native American Film Festival’s screening of “Indian Horse,” a film about an indigenous residential school in Canada.
Pechanga has an Apartheid system of segregation and descendants of the HUNTER family were escorted OFF Tribal school property after disenrolling their parents. Here is my cousin Akeva McKeaver explaining how Pechanga Tribal Rangers forcefully removed her children from school.
Wow...just WOW.... Please share on social media
Sunday, March 26, 2023
Pechanga Resort & Casino BUFFET: Chairman's Corruption and Abuse IS RAW, INDIGESTIBLE and DAMAGING
We aren't talking about the salad bar at Pechanga Resort & Casino. We aren't talking about HOW TO WIN at PECHANGA CASINO We're talking about the abuses heaped on lineal descendants of Original Pechanga people by Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians Chairman and National Congress of American Indians' Vice President Mark Macarro.Stories of ABUSE must be
shared, not kept like "family secrets"
Injustice
The Pechanga General Council, the final arbiter of the LAW at Pechanga voted to END all disenrollment. Pechanga Chairman Mark Macarro IGNORED the will of the people, acted OUTSIDE THE PECHANGA CONSTITUTION and disenrolled the Hunter descendants. Threats to the remaining tribal members kept them in line and from speaking out.
Apartheid
As discussed in this linked article, YES, Pechanga practices apartheid and NO we aren't comparing the level to South Africa, but if you don't call them out on it, who is to say it won't get worse? It's still distasteful as it is.
Segregation
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Disenrollment as GENOCIDE A Year in the Life of the Nooksack 306 -
We MUST tell the stories of what has happened to us. We MUST share the details of the corruption, the shameless theft of our rights. Here, Michelle Roberts writes about the Nooksack 306, who are currently being disenrolled by the Nooksack Tribe.
Genocide: A Year In The Life of The Nooksack 306
By Nooksack Tribal Councilwoman Michelle Roberts
I am the great granddaughter of Annie George, the daughter of ancestral Nooksack Chief Matsqui George. I belong to the Nooksack Tribe, and last year I was elected to our Tribal Council by the Nooksack People.
Thursday marks the one-year anniversary of the date when disenrollment against my extended Nooksack family and I—known as the “Nooksack 306”— began. Since December 19, 2012, we have been persecuted in ways unimaginable anywhere else in America.
I live on the Nooksack Reservation, which is situated in Whatcom County, just east of Bellingham, in Northern Washington. I have 3/4 American Indian blood. I am also part Filipino-American by way of my grandfather. But because of my “Indipino” mixed blood, Nooksack Tribal Chairman Bob Kelly proclaimed in recent Secretarial election propaganda that my family and I have “weaker ties to Nooksack than the rest of us who are currently enrolled here.” (Incidentally, Bob Kelly has been adopted into our tribe; he has zero Nooksack blood.) In other words, we have been blatantly discriminated against, through tribally funded mailings and a federal taxpayer funded election. Meanwhile, federal officials, ranging from local BIA Superintendent Judy Joseph to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Assistant Secretary Kevin Washburn, have turned a blind eye to the illegal use of a federal election as a weapon of discrimination and genocide. That simply would not happen anywhere else but in Indian Country.
I have sued in Nooksack Tribal Court for racial discrimination under the Nooksack Constitution Equal Protection Clause and for misuse of tribal funds. But the Tribal Court Judge dismissed my claims, citing Bob Kelly and his Council faction’s ability to assert the Tribe’s sovereign immunity from any suit. That resulted from recent changes that they made to the Nooksack judicial code, to shield themselves from the very civil rights claims that they foresaw my family and I bringing against them. To date I have not been able obtain any legal recourse at all for violation of my civil rights. That simply would not happen anywhere else in America.
This summer, I was abruptly fired from my day job as the Human Resource Manager at the Nooksack River Casino, where I had worked for six years. I was fired simply because I was “an employee at will.” Twelve other members of my family have likewise lost their tribal jobs this year. In reality, I was fired by Bob Kelly and his Council faction because I have spoken out against the injustices that my family and I have suffered. I also cannot seek any legal recourse for blatant workplace retaliation. That simply would not happen anywhere else but in Indian Country.
During back-to-school season this fall, several of my nieces and nephews and other youth in our family from ages 3 to 19, were denied a $275 schools supply stipend by Bob Kelly and his Council faction—simply because they are among the 64 Nooksack children “proposed for disenrollment.” Our children were humiliated when they were denied financial aid for new backpacks and supplies, only to see all of their friends with new things for the first day of school. If that were not awful enough, this month our families’ holidays were dampened when Bob Kelly and his Council passed a Resolution that likewise denied us and our children $250 in Christmas support because we are “subject to pending disenrollment proceedings.” That simply would not happen anywhere else in America.
For the last year, I have not been notified of various Tribal Council meetings, despite my elected seat on the Council. At the meetings that Bob Kelly and his Council faction have told me about, he has ordered me to leave them due to unspecified “conflicts of interest” relating to the pending disenrollment process against me and my voting constituents. Or I have been allowed to participate by conference call, only to be muted by Bob Kelly from his off-reservation home when I spoken from my heart. That simply would not happen anywhere else but in Indian Country.
Over the last year, I have been unsuccessful in my formal pleas that Bob Kelly and Council his faction convene some form—any form—of public meeting of the Nooksack People. Still, there has not been a democratic meeting at Nooksack this entire year. That despite the clear requirements of our Constitution that the Chairman at least convene an open tribal meeting of the Nooksack People on the first Tuesday of every month. A government shutdown for an entire year – that simply would not anywhere else in America, not even Washington, DC.
On two occasions this year, nearly 200 enrolled members of my Tribe—some proposed for disenrollment, some not—have signed a petition for the recall Bob Kelly, due to his failure to honor the Nooksack Constitution or any notion of democratic government. On both occasions, he and his Council faction simply refused to allow the recall petitions to go to a vote of the Nooksack electorate. They suppressed the Nooksack People’s right to vote, twice. That simply would not happen anywhere else but in Indian Country.
Meanwhile, we possess federal probate records, expert opinions from two Ph.D. anthropologists, recorded sacred oral testimony from one of our deceased matriarchs, and even a 1996 legal opinion and enrollment record from the Tribe’s lawyer, all of which all makes clear that we are, and have always been, properly enrolled Nooksack. But we have no place to go with this proof. That is because over the course of the entire last year, Bob Kelly and his Council faction have deliberately denied my family and I—and really, our entire Nooksack Tribe—access to any political process, access to any electoral process, access to any judicial process, and access to any other forum where Indian democracy or due process might reign.
That simply would not happen anywhere else in America.
Wednesday, August 3, 2016
Pechanga Donations to Hillary vis DNC MAY VIOLATE FEC rules: Discovered on WIKILEAKS Emails
Funny how you find things out. Wikileaks has some DNC emails exposed in their recent release of the corrupt Hillary Rodham Clinton's party. Corrupt birds of a feather sticking together. Pechanga practices Apartheid...has a segregated reservation...perp walked Hunter children from the reservation school, denies them the right to use water fountains and playground unaccompanied. What's next..a YELLOW STAR?
I wonder if the general council of the tribe were informed that they were paying $100,000 to the convention fund...AND and additional $43,900 to the ...BUILDING FUND? BUILDING WHAT? THIS APPEARS to be a way to circumvent donation cap rules, an FEC violation
I wonder if the general council of the tribe were informed that they were paying $100,000 to the convention fund...AND and additional $43,900 to the ...BUILDING FUND? BUILDING WHAT? THIS APPEARS to be a way to circumvent donation cap rules, an FEC violation
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
NBA BANS Sterling for Life, but Takes NO ACTION on SPONSOR That Practices APARTHEID: PECHANGA
The NBA stood up today and fined NBA CLIPPERS owner Donald Sterling $2.5 Million and banned him for life. Now, he will be forced to sell the team and make $700 Million and live out the rest of his life in luxury.
Left unresolved is the NBA's inaction on taking sponsorships from Indian tribes, particularly Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians, from Temecula, that sponsors the Los Angeles Lakers, the "other" NBA franchise. They also sponsor the Angels.
Now the NBA has been informed about the Apartheid that Pechanga practices on Indian people on their reservation. We detail that here: Pechanga’s Apartheid Reservation. We wrote to then NBA Commissioner David Stern and Laker's owner, Jerry Buss about this sponsor in 2008:
Dear Commissioner Stern and Dr. Buss,
During the past 60 years, the National Basketball Association has built itself into one of the premier leagues in professional sports. From the first championships in the late 1940’s, through the George Mikan’s Lakers teams to the dynasty of the Celtics and the rivalry between the Celtics and Lakers and through the Michael Jordan years, the NBA has stood for fairness, and purity of sports.
Sadly the NBA finds itself sullied by gambling scandals. The publicity of the Donaghy incident has shaken the foundation of the game. Now, we find that NBA analyst and former superstar Charles Barkley has a $400,000 unpaid gambling debt and Sir Charles has admitted to spending $10 million gambling, but to him, “it’s not a problem”.Our concern is your sponsorships from Indian Casinos. How can you decry gambling on one hand, yet on the other, take millions of dollars in advertising and sponsorships from gambling enterprises. Your flagship team, the Los Angeles Lakers has a partnership with the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians.
Throughout Indian Country, thousands of native Americans have had their cultural heritage stripped from them, primarily by tribes in pursuit of gaming compacts. The Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians, of Temecula CA, is one of the most egregious civil rights violators in Indian Country.
The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly and KNBC News have done numerous stories detailing the activities of the tribe, including “Tribal Flush: Pechanga People Disenrolled En Masse.” and “Without a Tribe” reported by Colleen Williams of KNBC.
- The Pechanga Band has eliminated 25% of its citizenship and denied them due process, equal protection under tribal and federal laws, in violation of the Indian Civil Rights Act.
- The tribe stripped elders of their health care benefits and access to the tribal clinic.
- Forcibly removed the children of some members from the tribal school.
- The most recent disenrollment of 100+ adults and children was especially egregious as the General Membership, the Tribe's governing body, had previously passed a law which (1) repealed the Tribe's disenrollment procedures and (2) made it illegal for the Enrollment Committee to disenroll members. In violation of its own Constitution and the ICRA, Pechanga tribal officials breeched their duty.
We question the wisdom of accepting money from a gambling enterprise that is a known civil rights violator. We are asking that you sever your ties to Pechanga and investigate the issues detailed above and determine whether sponsorship from gambling casinos is in the best interests of the National Basketball Association.
Now the NBA, allowed Donald Sterling to go unimpeded after being fined for not renting/selling to Blacks and Latino for YEARS. This is NOT news. Is the crime racism, or embarrassing the league? Remember, Donald Sterling was going to get a LIFETIME achievement award from the NAACP...or more correctly, a SECOND award. Was it the money? What do you think?
Should the NBA look into their sponsors? Should they eliminate one which is a civil rights violator, practices APARTHEID and abuses their people?
Left unresolved is the NBA's inaction on taking sponsorships from Indian tribes, particularly Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians, from Temecula, that sponsors the Los Angeles Lakers, the "other" NBA franchise. They also sponsor the Angels.
Now the NBA has been informed about the Apartheid that Pechanga practices on Indian people on their reservation. We detail that here: Pechanga’s Apartheid Reservation. We wrote to then NBA Commissioner David Stern and Laker's owner, Jerry Buss about this sponsor in 2008:
Dear Commissioner Stern and Dr. Buss,
During the past 60 years, the National Basketball Association has built itself into one of the premier leagues in professional sports. From the first championships in the late 1940’s, through the George Mikan’s Lakers teams to the dynasty of the Celtics and the rivalry between the Celtics and Lakers and through the Michael Jordan years, the NBA has stood for fairness, and purity of sports.
Sadly the NBA finds itself sullied by gambling scandals. The publicity of the Donaghy incident has shaken the foundation of the game. Now, we find that NBA analyst and former superstar Charles Barkley has a $400,000 unpaid gambling debt and Sir Charles has admitted to spending $10 million gambling, but to him, “it’s not a problem”.Our concern is your sponsorships from Indian Casinos. How can you decry gambling on one hand, yet on the other, take millions of dollars in advertising and sponsorships from gambling enterprises. Your flagship team, the Los Angeles Lakers has a partnership with the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians.
Throughout Indian Country, thousands of native Americans have had their cultural heritage stripped from them, primarily by tribes in pursuit of gaming compacts. The Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians, of Temecula CA, is one of the most egregious civil rights violators in Indian Country.
The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly and KNBC News have done numerous stories detailing the activities of the tribe, including “Tribal Flush: Pechanga People Disenrolled En Masse.” and “Without a Tribe” reported by Colleen Williams of KNBC.
- The Pechanga Band has eliminated 25% of its citizenship and denied them due process, equal protection under tribal and federal laws, in violation of the Indian Civil Rights Act.
- The tribe stripped elders of their health care benefits and access to the tribal clinic.
- Forcibly removed the children of some members from the tribal school.
- The most recent disenrollment of 100+ adults and children was especially egregious as the General Membership, the Tribe's governing body, had previously passed a law which (1) repealed the Tribe's disenrollment procedures and (2) made it illegal for the Enrollment Committee to disenroll members. In violation of its own Constitution and the ICRA, Pechanga tribal officials breeched their duty.
We question the wisdom of accepting money from a gambling enterprise that is a known civil rights violator. We are asking that you sever your ties to Pechanga and investigate the issues detailed above and determine whether sponsorship from gambling casinos is in the best interests of the National Basketball Association.
Now the NBA, allowed Donald Sterling to go unimpeded after being fined for not renting/selling to Blacks and Latino for YEARS. This is NOT news. Is the crime racism, or embarrassing the league? Remember, Donald Sterling was going to get a LIFETIME achievement award from the NAACP...or more correctly, a SECOND award. Was it the money? What do you think?
Should the NBA look into their sponsors? Should they eliminate one which is a civil rights violator, practices APARTHEID and abuses their people?
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
UPDATE for Corrections:Chukchansi Embarrasses Indian People with Disenrollment of Alottees. Continues to Shrink Tribe
*Please see our update to this post below, where we clear up an inferrance to disenrollments at San Manuel.
Carmen George of the Sierra Star News continues her terrifc expose of the dishonor of the Chukchansi Tribal Council.
The first time Santa decided to only bring presents to some children at the annual Chukchansi Christmas with Santa Breakfast several years ago, parents were not warned.
Children received presents if they had descendants given government-awarded allotment lands , or if they belonged to one of two families that helped reestablish the tribe in the 80s.
The other children -- whose parents are also legal, enrolled members of the Picayune Rancheria of the Chukchansi Indians by proving they are lineal descendants of a Chukchansi ancestor -- did not receive gifts.
Most children did not understand the separation. Some cried. OP: Some call this ... apartheid
This holiday season, the tribe cut off gifts to more than just their children. Chukchansi families whose only claim to membership is their blood, called "petitioners" by the tribe, received disenrollment letters two weeks ago from the tribe.
An estimated 200 disenrollment letters arrived in mailboxes, members said. These letters arrived shortly after 55 other tribal members were disenrolled earlier this month.
Many that received the newest batch of letters say they trace their lineage back to the last Chukchansi chief, Chief Hawa and his daughter Princess Malliot. According to Fresno Bee archives from the 1950s, the Chukchansi princess and her Swedish husband owned a large ranch where the rancheria is today.
Disenrollments center on greed over casino profits, old family feuds, and a lost connection with what it means to be native, many have said.
Many tribal members interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions from tribal council.
OP: They request anonymity because free speech is not a right in Indian Country. Remember that when you go, your rights are not the same, remember the Richard Swan Beating Case by Pechanga Security?
Tribal council declined to comment for this story.
John Gomez, president of the American Indian Rights and Resources Organization, said to stop disenrollments, Congress needs to give the Indian Civil Rights Act enforceability, or the Bureau of Indian Affairs needs to step in regarding enrollment disputes, what they have historically stayed out of.
For now, many members said they hope Tribal Council elections Dec. 3 will help set things right.
Rick Cuevas, author of the Original Pechanga blog, created after hundreds in his tribe were disenrolled, said all people can help stop what's happening to thousands of American Indian people across the country.
"Our government exercised it's moral outrage at South Africa by divesting from business there until they changed their apartheid policies. Our state and federal government should do the same thing," Cuevas said. "They should not attend functions at tribes that practice apartheid on their reservation or that have stripped their members citizenship ... These are big money, small population tribes: The entire membership of the Redding Rancheria will now fit into four school buses; you'd only need two for the San Manuel adults. Pechanga's membership wouldn't even fill the closest high school football stadium ... on the visitor's side. Yet their money is enough to run the local politicians."
UPDATE: The quote above references San Manuel, which could infer that they are involved in disenrolling members of their tribe. That is NOT the case. This point was made to emphasize how small the population of some tribes are and I apologize to San Manuel for making it appear that their tribe belongs in the category of tribes like Pechanga, Redding, Chukchansi, Enterprise that have abused their people's civil rights, that is not the case.
We have posted many times of the good things that San Manuel has done:
http://www.originalpechanga.com/2011/06/san-manuel-tribe-donates-200000-to-arc.html
and in comparison to Pechanga:
http://www.originalpechanga.com/2011/03/san-manuel-tribal-chairman-focuses-on.html
and more on their charitable giving
http://www.originalpechanga.com/2011/02/san-manuel-band-donates-3-million.html
Carmen George of the Sierra Star News continues her terrifc expose of the dishonor of the Chukchansi Tribal Council.
The first time Santa decided to only bring presents to some children at the annual Chukchansi Christmas with Santa Breakfast several years ago, parents were not warned.
Children received presents if they had descendants given government-awarded allotment lands , or if they belonged to one of two families that helped reestablish the tribe in the 80s.
The other children -- whose parents are also legal, enrolled members of the Picayune Rancheria of the Chukchansi Indians by proving they are lineal descendants of a Chukchansi ancestor -- did not receive gifts.
Most children did not understand the separation. Some cried. OP: Some call this ... apartheid
This holiday season, the tribe cut off gifts to more than just their children. Chukchansi families whose only claim to membership is their blood, called "petitioners" by the tribe, received disenrollment letters two weeks ago from the tribe.
An estimated 200 disenrollment letters arrived in mailboxes, members said. These letters arrived shortly after 55 other tribal members were disenrolled earlier this month.
Many that received the newest batch of letters say they trace their lineage back to the last Chukchansi chief, Chief Hawa and his daughter Princess Malliot. According to Fresno Bee archives from the 1950s, the Chukchansi princess and her Swedish husband owned a large ranch where the rancheria is today.
Disenrollments center on greed over casino profits, old family feuds, and a lost connection with what it means to be native, many have said.
Many tribal members interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions from tribal council.
OP: They request anonymity because free speech is not a right in Indian Country. Remember that when you go, your rights are not the same, remember the Richard Swan Beating Case by Pechanga Security?
Tribal council declined to comment for this story.
John Gomez, president of the American Indian Rights and Resources Organization, said to stop disenrollments, Congress needs to give the Indian Civil Rights Act enforceability, or the Bureau of Indian Affairs needs to step in regarding enrollment disputes, what they have historically stayed out of.
For now, many members said they hope Tribal Council elections Dec. 3 will help set things right.
Rick Cuevas, author of the Original Pechanga blog, created after hundreds in his tribe were disenrolled, said all people can help stop what's happening to thousands of American Indian people across the country.
"Our government exercised it's moral outrage at South Africa by divesting from business there until they changed their apartheid policies. Our state and federal government should do the same thing," Cuevas said. "They should not attend functions at tribes that practice apartheid on their reservation or that have stripped their members citizenship ... These are big money, small population tribes: The entire membership of the Redding Rancheria will now fit into four school buses; you'd only need two for the San Manuel adults. Pechanga's membership wouldn't even fill the closest high school football stadium ... on the visitor's side. Yet their money is enough to run the local politicians."
UPDATE: The quote above references San Manuel, which could infer that they are involved in disenrolling members of their tribe. That is NOT the case. This point was made to emphasize how small the population of some tribes are and I apologize to San Manuel for making it appear that their tribe belongs in the category of tribes like Pechanga, Redding, Chukchansi, Enterprise that have abused their people's civil rights, that is not the case.
We have posted many times of the good things that San Manuel has done:
http://www.originalpechanga.com/2011/06/san-manuel-tribe-donates-200000-to-arc.html
and in comparison to Pechanga:
http://www.originalpechanga.com/2011/03/san-manuel-tribal-chairman-focuses-on.html
and more on their charitable giving
http://www.originalpechanga.com/2011/02/san-manuel-band-donates-3-million.html
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