Bad Blood: Money Seekers Claiming San Pasqual Indian Ancestry Reopen Rift

On the surface, there wouldn’t seem to be a compelling reason to claim kinship with the San Pasqual Indians, who live on a patchwork reservation in the dry, dusty hills above Valley Center, northeast of Escondido.

The tribal chairwoman herself says that, if she didn’t already live there, she probably wouldn’t move onto the reservation, what with drug trafficking, car thievery and rampant vandalism she says occurs there.

Though some Indians live comfortably in mobile homes with carefully tended gardens, most residents on the reservation, where traditional municipal building codes don’t apply, seem to live in ramshackle, throw-together structures or old homes in dire need of attention. They drive along mostly dusty roads to their homes, passing abandoned, junked cars along the way. Most rely on wells for their water, which can be a hit-and-miss affair.

Hundreds Lining Up

Yet, in recent months, hundreds of people have applied for formal enrollment in the tribe, and there is in-fighting among already enrolled Indians about whether other, long-time reservation residents possess true San Pasqual Indian bloodlines.

The reason: People who can prove that they are San Pasqual Indians will soon be able to cash in on their heritage, for thousands of dollars.

The Indian band is preparing to dole out $2 million on a per capita basis to each man, woman and child who can rightfully claim to be at least one-eighth San Pasqual Indian. Depending, then, on how many people are eventually adjudged to have San Pasqual heritage, some families stand to receive tens of thousands of dollars as their share of the federal government award.

The money represents a $1,725,000 award to the San Pasqual Indians by the U.S. Claims Court in 1983--and since put into a bank, collecting interest and now totaling $2.5 million. The settlement was in consideration for a canal put across reservation decades ago--before the reservation had been settled and without Indian approval--to carry water from Lake Henshaw to Escondido and Vista.

The San Pasqual Indian tribal government decided to set aside 20% of the settlement for “economic development on the reservation,” and to dole out the remaining 80% to band members. Indian leaders have not decided how to spend the 20%.

But the windfall has people--many of whom left the impoverished reservation years ago in favor of a mainstream life style--checking their family trees, factoring in their marriages to non-San Pasqual Indians and determining whether they, their children or grandchildren can qualify for a piece of the pie.

The payoff has also rekindled a history of bickering among some San Pasqual Indians over one another’s rightful claim to the band, and has refocused attention on bureaucratic sloppiness by the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the turn of the century, when the first official roll of the band was established.

The last official census of the San Pasqual Indians, conducted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1959 and approved in 1966, listed 229 official San Pasqual Indians.

Prompted in part by the word of the pending windfall, another 475 people have applied for formal enrollment with the San Pasqual Indians. Many have a legitimate claim, being the children or grandchildren of San Pasqual Indians but were born after the 1959 census and not yet formally enrolled in the BIA records as San Pasquals.

Others may not have enrolled themselves in 1960 as San Pasqual Indians because there was no pressing motive or need. But now, they say, there is a very tangible reason to claim their heritage.

Probably more than half the new applicants, however, have no claim to San Pasqual blood and are simply trying to finagle their way into some easy money, said Diana Martinez, the spokesman and tribal chairwoman for the Indians.

“Some have San Pasqual lineage, but it’s too thin,” she said. “I figure that maybe 200, at most, out of the 475, will qualify. There are lots of rumors that people affiliated with other tribes are trying to enroll in ours.”

A few people share a lingering bitterness that members of the band’s two or three most prominent families are enrolled as San Pasqual Indians--and have been since 1910--even though, they allege, they have little or no true San Pasqual blood.

Rift Dates to 1910 Census

That controversy goes to a 1910 BIA census of the San Pasqual Indians, when people were included within the band simply because they lived in the San Pasqual Valley. Apparently, little or no effort was made to determine whether those counted by the BIA agents were indeed San Pasqual Indians, and to what blood degree.

Should some of those families who were counted in the 1910 enrollment now somehow be disqualified as San Pasqual Indians, the membership rolls of the San Pasqual Indian band would be cut in half or more--effectively doubling the individual money shares to the remaining members.

The likelihood of such widespread disqualifications is considered slim or none, the BIA says, but it hasn’t stopped people like Mary Matteson from raising a ruckus.

Matteson and several others, admittedly making up a minority viewpoint, complain that the 1910 BIA census included people of Mexican descent who had no blood ties to the Mission Indians who settled the San Pasqual Valley.

Matteson, 72, specifically complains that the heads of one prominent family on the reservation today were considered full-blooded San Pasqual Indians, even though the matriarch was from the Modesto area, the patriarch was from Mexico and they simply had settled in the San Pasqual Valley.

In the ensuing years, she said, their descendants--claiming San Pasqual blood--”moved in here like locusts, even though they are Mexicans, not Indians.” Formal membership to the band includes the right to 5 acres of reservation property, free and clear.

“We want them to prove they are San Pasqual Indians,” Matteson protests. “Back in 1910, the BIA didn’t know beans from hash.”

Poor Job Is Claimed

Other Indian leaders at San Pasqual agree with Matteson that the BIA may have botched the original enrollment in 1910, but they say it is a wrong that now cannot be corrected and has to be accepted.

“If you were red, white, black or yellow, you still got your name on the original roll just because you lived in San Pasqual Valley,” said Jim Quisquis, who chairs the reservation’s enrollment committee today. “Back in those days, bloodline wasn’t an issue. The programs that we have today that talk in terms of bloodline didn’t exist then.”

Frances Muncy, acting tribal operations officer in Riverside for the Southern California Agency of the BIA, agrees that the BIA would have to be pushed hard to rectify any errors--and then only if the complaining party can prove that a San Pasqual Indian really is not. The burden of proof, she said, rests with those making the allegations.

“I don’t think there’s any way you can get people to stop complaining (about the 1910 enrollment),” she said. “It’s coming to a head now because of the money. But I’ve told Mary (Matteson) she can blame the bureau from now till Doomsday, but nothing much will be done about it unless the tribal enrollment committee makes its own recommendation” to disqualify certain people.

And that seems unlikely.

“We can’t go back to 1910, and now it’s like beating a dead horse,” Quisquis said.

Casual Approach Recalled

Eighty-one-year-old Felix Quisquis, another member of the enrollment committee, says he can recall the carelessness of BIA agents in taking a census on the reservation, even in later years.

The Quisquises are distant relatives.

“The Indian agent would point over to another hill and ask me who lived there. I’d tell him who I thought lived there, and he wouldn’t even check it out. It was a lot of word of mouth. And that’s why our rolls are all screwed up.”

Paul Contreras, vice chairman of the tribe, said he resents people like Matteson bringing up the ancestry issue once again.

“If they’d stop worrying about the past and start looking to the future, maybe some things would get done around here,” he said.

The enrollment process is not expected to be completed for several months, and it is then open to appeal to the BIA by people who feel they were unfairly left off, or by others who say they can prove someone who was included should not have been.

Meanwhile, reservation leaders are looking to the day the money will be in hand, especially because there is no locally generated tribal income.

Martinez said the money might go for a water-filtration system, a church, a youth club, a cemetery or a store.

“We’ve got the $2.5 million in accounts all over the country,” Martinez said, “and we’ve got so many dreams. This is our moment.”