Tribes Buying Back Ancestral Lands

Maurice Lyons was a boy when white ranchers fenced a lush canyon in the heart of the Morongo Band of Mission Indians reservation to keep his people from sharing its game, pasturelands, wild grapes and sage.

“Back then, I hunted deer and rabbit in the canyon with a beat-up old single-shot .22 rifle,” he recalled. “We didn’t have anything else to live on in those days, so there were hard feelings about those fences.”

Now, as chairman of one of the wealthiest casino-owning tribes in the state, Lyons is making a priority of buying back ancestral territory, starting with Millard Canyon, near Banning. It is part of an effort to consolidate the reservation -- a checkerboard of desert parcels about 100 miles east of Los Angeles -- and, even more important, fulfill a tribal longing to reclaim land that had been taken away.

Other casino-owning tribes up and down the state also are quietly buying property near their reservations as part of long-term economic development strategies, or merely to protect it from encroachment.

The advantages of owning a successful casino, tribal leaders say, are cultural as well as economic. In addition to paying for social services, infrastructure improvements, business investments and political donations, gambling operations help tribes reconnect to a fundamental aspect of their besieged past: land lost through tax sales, fraud and violence.

“It has long been an aspiration of tribes across America to reclaim their traditional lands in any way possible,” said Victoria Bomberry, a professor of Native American studies at UC Riverside.

“During the early days of the Red Power movement in the 1960s, for example, tribal elders emphasized the importance of reclaiming that land,” Bomberry added. “A lot of people who have come of age since then are now in a position to try to achieve that dream.”

UCLA law professor Carole Goldberg would add, however, that it can be a costly dream.

“On one hand, the tribes are buying property with revenue provided by non-Indians, which seems to mitigate some of the unjustness of it all,” she said. “But sellers know they have a unique commodity, and may raise prices dramatically to take advantage of the value that contiguous land has for Native Americans.”

In many cases, the tribes aim to eventually take the acquired property into trust, a lengthy process that would ultimately insulate it from state and local laws by making it a part of their sovereign territory. Sometimes, however, tribal elders say, they are simply content to own the land.

In Northern California, the Wintun Indians have acquired thousands of acres of farmland. The Jackson Rancheria Band of Miwuk Indians, also in Northern California, took into trust 1,000 contiguous acres a year ago. In Temecula, the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Mission Indians recently bought a ranch surrounding one of the oldest oak trees in the United States.

In northern San Diego County, three buffalo now roam on a cattle ranch bought earlier this year by the Pala Band of Mission Indians. In Palm Springs, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians has purchased wilderness land in the surrounding mountains. In Indio, the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians is looking into buying a network of sandstone gorges it regards as sacred.

“Being able to buy a place like this and put it under tribal protection,” said Cabazon tribal elder Joe Benitez, “is a side of Indian gaming most people, including elected officials, know nothing about.”

The Morongo tribe says it recently purchased all of the available private property in Millard Canyon simply so that its 1,000 tribal members can traverse it with their kin and their memories.

The tribe does not intend to wipe out the previous owner’s fences and dead fruit orchards.

Striding along the canyon’s dirt road in alligator skin boots, Lyons, 53, said, “This canyon and everything in it, including that rusting barbed-wire fence, tells our story.”

The Morongo tribe’s history is not unlike that of many in Southern California with successful casinos.

When its reservation was established in 1877, it had no significant resources beyond sand and gravel. In the 1960s, tribal members were still living in dilapidated trailers, surviving on federal subsidies and fetching water from open ditches.

Non-Indians for decades used the tribe’s barren homeland as a dumping ground for garbage and waste ranging from lawn trimmings to toxic chemicals.

All that changed with the advent of reservation gambling in 1983. Within 10 years, the tribe was awash in cash, having eliminated the last welfare case on its 32,000-acre reservation.

A few miles south of Millard Canyon rises the latest symbol of Morongo determination: a 23-story, $250-million casino-resort hotel expected to open next year. The complex will stand 10 stories higher than the Riverside County Administration Center and is expected to generate about $2.8 billion in economic benefits for the Inland Empire over the next five years.

In the meantime, tribal planner Tom Linton continues to investigate possible land acquisitions. “We recently bought a 45-acre ranch inside the reservation borders,” he said, “and 280 acres adjacent to the freeway, which had been sold in the late 1950s by a tribal family in desperate need of money.

“Not everything we buy will be developed,” Linton said. “Some will be left just the way it is.”

That kind of talk “may not sound logical to some non-Indians,” acknowledged tribal attorney Howard Dickstein. “But in many cases, these land acquisitions are attempts to fulfill an emotional promise handed down for generations: If there is any way possible, we will get our land back.”

George Costa, an agricultural advisor to the 40-member Wintun Indians in Colusa, about 75 miles north of Sacramento, would not argue with that.

“We don’t know how long gaming will be here, but our members’ grandparents were farmers; they have farming in their blood,” he said. “For that reason, over the past eight years, we’ve purchased more than 3,500 acres of farmland, all within four miles of the reservation.

“The casino profits bought the agricultural property,” he said, “but the tribe’s new high-tech rice, alfalfa and walnut farms are already paying their own way.”

The Pechanga Indians, who have a history that predates Spanish and Anglo arrivals by thousands of years, have bought roughly 1,000 acres in Temecula, said tribal spokesman Russell “Butch” Murphy. That includes a 750-acre spread -- crowned by a very old 96-foot-high oak with limbs that spread 590 feet in circumference -- that was taken into trust last May.

“It took a major struggle with a company that wanted to put high-power lines through that ranch before we could take it into trust,” Murphy said. “Now that it’s ours, it will remain as it was when we purchased it: open land.”

For Cabazon Indian tribal elder Benitez, piecing together the full story of his people means gaining control of federally controlled canyon lands etched into the desert by flash floods and earthquakes.

On a recent weekday, the bleak terrain surrounding the canyons near Mecca, which have been used for centuries by Native Americans for spiritual gatherings, was strewn with evidence of urban encroachment: discarded couches, tires, televisions, carpeting and glass.

In the gorges, however, is a quiet, primeval world of ironwood and smoke trees, sheer 1,000-foot-high walls that change color by the minute from pink to gray, and ravens that call from towering cliffs.

Gazing up at a hawk soaring silently overhead, Benitez said, “I’ve been coming here since I was 6 years old. My mother, aunts and uncles -- and their parents -- came here to refresh their connection with Mother Earth over a camp-out, with songs and maybe a sweat lodge.

“Indian families still come to this canyon just to sit and think,” he said. “It’s a sacred place. We’d like to protect it.”