$2-Million Tribal Pay-Out Brings Indians Back Home

On the surface, there wouldn’t seem to be a compelling reason to claim kinship to the San Pasqual Indians, who live on a dusty reservation in the dry 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 on the reservation, with drug trafficking, car thievery and rampant vandalism she says occurs there.

While some Indians live comfortably in mobile homes with carefully tended gardens, most residents on the reservation--where traditional municipal building codes do not 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 junked cars along the way. Most rely on wells for their water.

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

The reason: those who can prove 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 a total of $2 million on a per-capita basis to all the men, women and children who can rightfully claim they are at least one-eighth San Pasqual Indian. Depending, then, on how many people ultimately are determined to have San Pasqual heritage, various families stand to receive tens of thousands of dollars as their share of the federal government award.

The money represents a $1.7-million award granted to the San Pasqual Indians by the U.S. Claims Court in 1983. It has been put in banks and, with interest, now totals $2.5 million. The settlement was in consideration for a canal put across reservation land decades ago, and without Indian approval, to bring water from Lake Henshaw to consumers in 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 give the remaining 80% to the various band members. Indian leaders have not yet decided how to spend the 20% allotment.

But the windfall has lots of 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 slice of the money pie.

The final decision, to be made by a committee of tribal members, is still several months away and is subject to review by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

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

Tabulated in 1959

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 word of the pending windfall, another 475 people have applied for formal enrollment with the San Pasqual Indians. Many have legitimate claims, being the children or grandchildren of San Pasqual Indians but born after the 1959 census and not yet formally enrolled in the bureau’s records.

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

Probably more than half of 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 spokeswoman and tribal chairwoman for the San Pasqual Indians.

“Some (of the new applicants) 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.”

Prominent Families

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.

That controversy goes to a 1910 census that included people who lived in the San Pasqual Valley, often with little or no effort to determine whether those counted by the bureau agents were indeed San Pasqual Indians, and to what blood degree.

Should some of those families 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, bureau officials say, but it has not stopped people like Mary Matteson from raising a ruckus.

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

Some Just Settlers

Matteson, 72, specifically complains, for instance, 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.” With formal membership to the band comes the right to five 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.”

Other Indian leaders at San Pasqual agree with Matteson that the bureau may have botched the original enrollment in 1910, but say that it cannot be corrected now, 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.”

Difficult to Prove

Frances Muncy, acting tribal operations officer in Riverside for the Southern California agency of the bureau, agrees also that the government would be hard pressed to rectify any errors--and that the burden of proof that someone was not an Indian would rest with those making a complaint.

“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,” said Quisquis.

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.

When the enrollment process is completed, it will be open to appeal to the Bureau of Indian Affairs by people who feel they were unfairly left off the roll, or by those who say they can prove someone who was included on the roll should not have been.

Meanwhile, reservation leaders are looking to the day the money will be in hand. “We’ve got the $2.5 million in accounts all over the country,” said Martinez, “and we’ve got so many dreams. This is our moment.”