Indians Reportedly Ending Suit on Reburial

A Ventura County Chumash Indian group has ended a legal battle with two rival groups and will drop a lawsuit over reburying the bones of its ancestors, an attorney for two of the Indian groups said Friday.

The bones were found in a flood-control channel near Point Mugu.

The Southern Council of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation in December filed a $50-million lawsuit against two other Indian groups, as well as county, state and federal agencies, protesting their plan to exhume the remains of at least 60 Chumash Indians from the Calleguas Creek flood-control channel and rebury them several miles away in a county park.

Thomas E. Malley, an attorney for the two Indian groups named in the suit, the Candelaria American Indian Council and the Ventureno Band of the Chumash, said at a news conference that the Coastal Band agreed this week to drop the suit.

“The matter has not been formally dismissed, but we expect no further opposition,” Malley said.

Attorneys for the Coastal Band could not be reached to confirm the dismissal of the lawsuit. But Malley presented copies of a motion to dismiss the suit drafted by Coastal Band attorneys, as well as a cover letter that refers to an agreement to drop the case.

Against Their Religion

Candelaria and Ventureno group representatives have said that reburial is the best way to protect the remains from vandalism and flooding. The Ventura County Board of Supervisors has tentatively agreed to lease the 427-acre Oakbrook Park in Thousand Oaks to the two groups, which plan to bury the remains there.

Coastal Band representatives had charged in the suit that disturbing their ancestors’ remains is against their religion. The lawsuit said reburial would violate constitutional guarantees, including freedom of religion.

A hearing to dismiss the suit is scheduled in U. S. District Court on Monday, Malley said.

A federal court judge in a December hearing refused to order a temporary halt to the reburial, ruling that the Coastal Band’s objections were “more akin to personal preference” than a widely held religious belief.

Testimony from Coastal Band members failed to show that the reburial “would seriously interfere with or impair these religious practices,” U. S. District Judge Pamela A. Rymer said in her ruling on the Coastal Band’s request to stop the reburial.

The reburial project was prompted by threats from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to withhold $785,000 in flood-control funds unless the county acted to save the human remains from being washed to sea. The funds were promised after Ventura County was declared a federal disaster area in 1983 following flooding that destroyed levees and surged out of the lower Calleguas Creek flood channel.

The emergency agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, both named in the suit, developed the reburial plan with county and state officials.

Archeologists from the Center for Public Archeology at California State University, Northridge, discovered the Indian remains a year ago after they were called in as county consultants. The county was required to survey the site because the area was granted federal protection as an archeological zone in 1976.

The Ventura County Board of Supervisors in October rejected four proposals to protect the bones, including a $5-million plan to reroute the Calleguas Creek flood-control channel from the burial site. Instead, the county agreed to spend about $80,000 to hire archeologists to determine how many Chumash Indians are buried there and to excavate their remains.

The skeletal remains, which date back to the 3rd Century, are in storage, Jesse Roybal, a representative of the Candelaria group, said.