Tuesday, March 30, 2004 | 11:09 a.m.
TEMECULA, Calif. -- Hundreds of Indians are fighting for their place on tribal rolls at a time when membership can mean instant wealth for those who belong to casino-owning tribes.
Nearly one-fifth of the 61 tribes that have gambling compacts with California are fractured by membership disputes.
Many of those who have been kicked out of tribes in California say the motive is greed -- an attempt by tribal leaders to reduce membership so they can keep more casino profits for themselves and other favored members.
"The perception is the tribes are not acting like Indians. They're are acting like sheikdoms and cutting out anyone they don't like," said Patrick Romero Guillory, a tribal attorney representing members who were removed from the rolls of the Santa Rosa Rancheria in Fresno and himself an Opelousa Indian from Louisiana.
Tribes in other states, including Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma and Minnesota, also have struggled with enrollment disputes. The common factor is distribution of money.
In Minnesota, for example, the Shakopee Mdewakanton Dakota are fighting over profits from their Mystic Lake casino, which generates payments to individual tribal members of up to $1 million a year. In Oklahoma, the membership status of black Seminole Indians is at issue. The Seminole tribe won a $56 million judgment to be divided among members for lands it lost in Florida nearly 200 years ago.
But roughly three-quarters of the disputes identified by The Associated Press involve California tribes, the legacy of what experts said were divisive and inconsistent federal policies that disproportionately affected tribes in the Golden State.
At least 1,160 people in 14 California tribes are fighting over tribal status, according to an Associated Press review of court documents and interviews with tribal leaders, attorneys and former tribal members.
Casino wealth has transformed tribes that, in many cases, were impoverished just a decade ago. Members of many casino-owning tribes receive checks for tens of thousands of dollars annually.
The membership disputes fall into two categories. In some cases, families have been kicked out of tribes by other members who challenged their eligibility. In other cases, people say they were wrongfully excluded from tribal rolls years ago and are being refused when they seek to return.
The enrollment disputes present a particularly sticky situation in California because the state's tribes don't have their own courts, a holdover from a federal policy that targeted California.
As sovereign nations, tribes reserve the right to determine their membership, leaving little outside legal recourse for those who feel they've been wronged.
John Gomez Jr. and about 130 members of his extended family are plaintiffs in one of the few disputes in court. His attorneys are experimenting with a little-used state law that allows tribal members to sue each other as individuals in state court.
The family, which was ejected March 17, makes up about 13 percent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Mission Indians in Temecula, where members receive annual casino revenue payments of up to $120,000 each.
Gomez Jr. doesn't live on the reservation. At a recent family meeting at his spacious house in an upscale Temecula cul-de-sac, Jaguars and high-end SUVs filled the driveway.
The tribe's enrollment committee says Gomez's grandmother moved off the reservation and cut her ties with the tribe in the 1920s. But Gomez said his grandmother, Manuela Miranda, was forced to leave when she was married off at age 13 but never forgot her Pechanga heritage.
Tribal Chairman Mark Macarro and Councilman Russell "Butch" Murphy both declined comment. In an earlier printed statement, however, Macarro said Gomez's claims were "wholly without merit" and that the tribe had the right to determine its own membership under tribal sovereignty.
"This is an issue to them of money, and for us it's not about money. This is who we are, this is what we've known," said John Gomez Sr., Gomez's father and one of the plaintiffs in his son's lawsuit. "How do you not become Pechanga? How do I tell my grandson that he used to be an Indian and he's not anymore?"
A hearing in state court is scheduled for April 19 to challenge the family's ejection.
The same law is being used by 76 family members who were kicked out in January by the Redding Rancheria, a tribe of about 200 in California's northern Central Valley between Sacramento and the Oregon border. Members receive about $3,000 per year in casino revenue, according to those ejected.
The tribe rejected arguments that DNA tests showed more than a 99 percent probability the family was descended from one of the rancheria's original 16 members. The DNA was examined by an expert hired by the tribe, and both sides were presented to tribal members for a vote.
Family members exhumed the bodies of two ancestors to obtain the DNA, said Mark Maslin, the family spokesman. The case is now before a state appeals court.
"My wife said she feels like quitting, but she said she can't because it's like letting go of her grandmother's hand," Maslin said.
Tribe attorney David Rapport said the rancheria followed tribal policy for removing members.
"I know from dealing with the leadership of the tribe that they were not motivated by casino money at all," Rapport said. "These decisions are decisions the tribes are empowered to make and outsiders aren't entitled to judge or second-guess them. They are at the very core of tribal sovereignty."
Experts say unfair and inconsistent federal policies focused on California tribes sowed the seeds for the current disputes decades ago.
Thousands of California's original Indians were exterminated during the Gold Rush under a policy perpetuated by powerful mining companies and local politicians, said Carole Goldberg, a law professor and director of the American Indian Studies program at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Between 1850 and 1860, the number of California Indians plummeted from 150,000 to 30,000, she said. The federal government never signed treaties with the surviving Indians, who were left homeless and impoverished.
Around the 1920s, the federal government tried to make amends and sent agents to allot land to tribal members, establishing reservations for the survivors that were called rancherias. By then, however, most surviving tribal members had scattered.
In some cases, rancherias were deeded to just one or two families at a time, said Howard Dickstein, a tribal attorney based in Sacramento. In other cases, unrelated bands were pushed together on one plot of land.
"You had tribes that were created at that time that didn't have an organic unity, and it was a setup for the kinds of things that are happening now," he said.
The situation got worse after World War II when the federal government, as part of a movement toward Indian self-determination, ended federal recognition and assistance for 40 tribes in six states. About 90 percent of those tribes were in California, Dickstein said.
When the tribes were reinstated in the 1970s and 1980s through a series of lawsuits and congressional legislation, the government listed those living on the rancherias at the time of termination as the official tribal members.
Many tribes wrote constitutions that counted only those families among their members.
Hundreds of people now claim they are descendants of original members who lived on the rancherias but weren't counted or who moved away before termination because of the poverty.
Others have been kicked out of their tribes since the advent of gambling because they can't prove their ancestors' residency on the rancherias or presence on decades-old census lists.
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