Disenrolled Pechanga's Tale of Woe

I wonder if it has occurred to any officials of our government that in allowing tribes to proceed with building casinos and establishing gaming empires - they have allowed the creation of precisely the type of dictatorships we have been sending our troops to fight (and die fighting) overseas. These little "Hugos" and "Mahmouds" on their sovereign land waste no time in excising any dissident opinions from their midst, and keep who is left in check with intimidation. Part of an excellent article by Marc Cooper originally posted at the LA Weekly follows. Links are provide to the rest of the article - and it is worth reading.

Tribal Flush: Pechanga People "Disenrolled" en Masse

On the eve of what could be the largest gambling expansion in U.S. history, a tale of power, betrayal and lost Indian heritage
By MARC COOPER

John Gomez Jr. parks his silver family van in the back row of one more anonymous strip mall off California’s Highway 79, an hour and a half southeast of Los Angeles, on a windswept ridge overlooking the Temecula Valley. Gomez, his dark hair barely betraying a sprinkling of gray at his temples, steps out of the van and walks away from the mall, to a barren dirt lot marked off with adobe walls.

“This is where Pablo is buried,” he says as we peer over the locked iron gate.

Pablo is Pablo Apis, the celebrated 19th-century “headman,” or chief, of the Temecula/Pechanga Indians, who was given more than 2,000 acres of land in exchange for his work at the Mission San Luis Rey. Gomez, who is a direct descendant of Chief Apis, jiggles the lock on the gate. He has no key.

“This is where a lot of our people were buried,” Gomez continues, “including those killed in the famous Temecula Massacre.” He’s referring to the killing of several dozen Indians by Californio militias in the closing days of 1846. Apis survived and, indeed, the 1875 treaty between the Temecula tribe and the U.S. government, though never ratified, was signed at the chief’s village adobe home.

Today, on a corner of Apis’ original land grant, a few minutes down the road from the desolate burial ground, towers the $350 million Pechanga Resort & Casino, the glittering 14-story pleasure dome so familiar to Southern Californians from the promotional and political-advocacy commercials in near-constant rotation on local television stations. With 522 rooms, 185,000 square feet of casino floor, 2,000 slot machines, more than 150 table games and seven restaurants, along with Vegas-class showrooms, nightclubs and comedy lounges, the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, as the tribe is now known, runs the largest and perhaps most profitable of California’s nearly 60 Indian casinos. And now, under terms of a deal negotiated by Governor Schwarzenegger, ratified earlier this year by the Democratic-led state legislature and set to go before voters in the February 5 primary election, the Pechanga and three other Southern California tribes may soon triple their battery of slot machines, allowing each of the four Indian groups to operate twice as many slots as any Vegas casino. If the referendums go through, the four tribes — Morongo, Agua Caliente, Sycuan and Pechanga — will be responsible for the largest expansion of gambling in recent U.S. history.

Gomez, a 40-year-old paralegal, helped birth the Pechanga mega-resort, which opened in 2002 and today grosses as much as $1 billion a year. He worked as a legal and cultural adviser to his tribe, a representative and lobbyist, and, along with several of his family members, served on key tribal committees as the Pechanga moved, almost overnight, from obscure poverty to a position of awesome political and economic power.

But it’s Gomez’s tribe no more. At least as far as the tribal leadership is concerned. Gomez and 135 adult members of his extended family (and 75 or more children) have been purged from formal Pechanga membership; they have been “disenrolled.” They were accused of no crime, no misbehavior, no wrongdoing, no disloyalty. But a series of tribal kangaroo-court hearings, bereft of even the pretense of due process, ruled that one of the family’s deceased elders was not an authentic tribe member and, therefore, not withstanding their years of service to the tribe, they were all to be banned.

And so today John Gomez can only stand outside the cemetery where Chief Apis and his other forebears are buried. “My family’s history is the history of Temecula and the Pechanga,” says Gomez. “But now, somehow, we have become traitors.”

As we drive from the cemetery and cruise by the city park named for Chief Apis, Gomez says, “I loved my job. I loved my tribe. But growing up... growing up, man... I would never, ever have thought our tribe would come to this.”

What it’s come to goes beyond tribal pride. As a result of the disenrollment, many in the Gomez family, which accounts for some 10 percent of the total Pechanga tribe’s membership, have lost their federal standing and benefits as American Indians. Some have lost their jobs at the resort. All of the adults, including Gomez, lost the generous per capita monthly payout, derived from casino profits, that was given to each adult of the tribe. When the Gomez family’s expulsion was finalized in 2004, that was about $15,000 per month. Currently, for those who remain members of the tribe, the figure has risen to about $40,000 per month.

The sharp increase is due in part to a second wave of purges, finalized last year, which disenrolled another extended family, this one descended from Paulina Hunter and representing yet another 10 percent of the tribe. That second purge went ahead despite a tribe-commissioned expert probe that concluded that Hunter was, in fact, a Pechanga. Simply put: The fewer the tribal members, the bigger the payout.

Some of the elderly disenrollees found themselves cut off from tribal clinics they helped to build. Some of the younger ones lost their education subsidies. What all the disenrollees have in common is not only the sudden loss of significant income but erasure of their collective cultural history and identity.

“Yes, we lost homes and cars. Some went into bankruptcy,” Gomez says. “But mostly I was saddened for my family and for Indian country in general. It’s not just your money they’re taking away but also your heritage and your future.”

With Indian gaming revenues now near the $30 billion mark nationally, disenrollment has rocked and divided Indian reservations from coast to coast.

“Gaming has brought in the dominant culture’s disease of greed,’’ Marty Firerider of the California American Indian Movement told the Indian Country Today newspaper.

In Oklahoma, just to cite one example, 2,800 descendants of “freedmen” — former African-American slaves who were “adopted” by the Cherokee — are now being expelled. But the epicenter of the disenrollment crisis is in California, where more than a dozen gaming tribes have already purged as many as 4,000 members. Little recourse is available to the disenrollees because state and federal courts have so far ruled that under the cloak of sovereign immunity, the tribes alone can serve as final arbiters of membership. Likewise, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has mostly defaulted to the tribes. And the media has been met with a virtual stonewall from the tribes, which claim they have no need to justify their internal affairs. As a result, stories about the disenrollments in local media stir little public outrage. One exception took place this past Labor Day weekend, when Bill Cosby canceled a scheduled performance at the Chukchansi tribe’s casino outside Fresno. Over the past year the tribe has purged a whopping half of its 1,200 members, and the Coz wanted no part of the increasingly ugly dispute.

But now, with four powerful Southern California tribes ready to make literally billions of dollars over the next two decades if the Schwarzenegger-negotiated gambling expansion is approved in the February 5 primary, the disenrollments have taken on a new timeliness. Gomez and his allies have emerged as leaders of a growing national movement to legally and politically challenge the tribal purges, which were first set in motion among the Pechanga in 2002, 127 years after the 1875 eviction of the tribe from its ancestral land by Temecula ranchers. Not coincidentally, the case of the disenrolled Pechanga could move to political center stage over the next few weeks.

“Don’t be surprised if you see Gomez or some of the other disenrollees show up soon in some TV spots,” says an activist supporting the ballot initiatives (Propositions 94 through 97, one proposition for each tribe) that would cancel the expansion deals. “They are the faces of everything wrong with the runaway power of the tribe.”

Gomez first got into trouble with his Pechanga tribe in 2002, when, as a trusted legal adviser, he was elected to the tribal-enrollment committee, along with a cousin and a member of the Paulina Hunter family. These were sensitive positions. After the tribe won its first minor gambling concession in 1996, and after California voters approved major Indian gaming rights four years later, it was only natural that there would be an increase in those suddenly claiming membership.

“As soon as we were elected, we found that the committee was doing all kinds of strange things,” Gomez says. “On the one hand they weren’t adhering to an enrollment moratorium and on the other they weren’t properly processing the minor children of those already enrolled.”

Gomez and his new allies began an investigation.

The boom quickly dropped on them. Within weeks a letter emerged from a group called Concerned Pechanga People, a small faction closely allied with the tribal leadership and its chair, Mark Macarro, which accused Gomez and his family of not being legitimate Pechanga. By the end of the year, Gomez’s extended family were notified of pending disenrollment. During an internal process that lasted more than a year and a half, Gomez put together binders of documentation proving — at least to virtually every outside observer who has reviewed them — his Pechanga ancestry.

But the tribal leadership, in closed-door sessions that adhered to no formal due process or rules of evidence, held to its position that one key elder in Gomez’s lineage — Manuela Miranda — had left the traditional village after her marriage and, therefore, her descendants weren’t really Pechanga. The claim, according to several experts, is prima facie absurd, as the history of American Indians is based on such dispersion and diaspora.

“No matter,” says Gomez. “Their minds were made up. The tribe could provide no solid evidence to back their claim against us. We were just out, period.” Among those disenrolled with Gomez were his brother Marc, the executive chef for the casino; his father, John Gomez Sr., a major figure in tribal outreach; a cousin who was a top financial adviser to the tribe; a cousin who headed the tribal fire department; a cousin who was chief of the casino’s human resources; and a cousin who was an assistant in the same department.

The final disenrollment of the Gomez clan in 2004 sent shock waves through the Pechanga community. After all, Gomez had been very tight with Chairman Macarro, known broadly to Californians as the public face of Indian gambling. With his leather vest, ponytail, youthful good looks and soft-spoken tone, Macarro has been the prominent figure in tens of millions of dollars’ worth of pro-Indian-gaming advertising.

“Mark spoke at my uncle’s funeral. His brother sang at my son’s dedication to the tribe,” says Gomez. “I thought we were pretty close when we were lobbying together for the tribe. But then, as our power grew — and let me tell you, we have a lot of power in Sacramento — I could see this sort of Napoleonic complex emerge. He loved to send out BlackBerry messages with, like, ‘Fuck you! Fuck you, you guys. You don’t know what you’re doing.’ He became a control freak.”

Ironically, Macarro’s own lineage seems blurry, and he was not a significant presence on the reservation until after gaming was legalized in 1996.

Chairman Macarro, consistent with the tribe’s usual stand on these matters, refused to comment on this story. When KNBC produced a story on disenrollments last year, the tribe bought a pre-emptive rebuttal commercial designed specifically to air just before the news segment, then at the last minute granted a brief interview to reporter Colleen Williams. “This has never been about money,” Macarro told Williams in response to accusations of greed on the part of tribal leadership. “This is about the integrity of tribal citizenship here at Pechanga. If there was a corn field instead of a casino, these same challenges would have taken the same path to the same conclusion.”

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