PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC PLACES : For San Diego Indians, Memory Is the Archive

A few miles from Interstate 15, from Lawrence Welk Drive and Champagne Boulevard, from pink Italianate housing tracts on gray-scrub hillsides, the Pala Indian Reservation sleeps in another time, in the burning inland sun.

Three thousand or so acres along dusty roads in northern San Diego County; a gravel pit rented out, an avocado farm managed by others, crumbling trailers slumped on or off brick supports and a soft thicket of willow trees, where the river once ran.

In 1903, the Cupeno Indians were moved here by force from their homes in Warner Hot Springs. A photograph survives showing the morning of their exile: Stunned, proud, poor, they stand bundled in heavy Victorian clothing by neat adobe houses. Other photographs continue the story: the women saying goodby to the graveyard, to simple wooden crosses marking parents, husbands, children; the wagon train crossing the steep, bare mountains to this valley--40 minutes’ drive today, four days’ walk then. They arrived without houses, tents, crops or help and begged door to door for food from Indians nearby.

The Mission San Antonio de Pala is still here, still open. One of the fathers--a kind, warm Italian missionary from Rome--talks of the Cupenos as “crying on the past,” as if that is better than forgetting it. They nearly did, of course: the language, dances, tales, basket weaving, the wisdom beneath the sky that is God’s eyes--they were nearly lost. But old faces, old spirits bore witness, marked by the photographs on the walls of the cultural center.

This center, a plain brick and wooden shed, has the feeling to it of an old home passed down through generations. Photographs, mementos, children’s artworks, stories told as lives are lived, jumbled and with untidy ends. The Indians talk gently to those who come, resigned to the unwitting insults of those who simply know no better, who assume that before the rickety, government housing there were tepees and animal skins. Outsiders wouldn’t know of the neat thatched adobe homes, the modest Victorian outfits, the graveyard left untended on All Soul’s.

The last survivor of that “trail of tears” died a few years ago. A photograph of Roscinda Noasquez shows a small, shapeless old lady in cheap cotton, hair net in place, thick glasses hiding her soul. “Our people,” says her grandson, “they are nothing, but they are everything.”

Her grandson’s hair is long and black, his face as immobile as one that has had too many lifts--or one that comes from a place of truth. His grandmother raised him “to respect all things that matter with the pure sweetness of truth.” He wears beautiful Indian moccasins and laughs at those who see it as a statement. “Moccasins don’t make me Indian--I am Indian. I don’t believe in carrying symbols to show who I am, and if I did, I’d be carrying Gucci and Louis Vuitton as well.”

He calls it “walking in other worlds,” the years spent as a makeup artist in the theater, at La Costa, touring with rock groups. Once he painted fantasy faces, now he captures dreams in sand. Not so different; all that is missing is the spirit, which is everything.

Other juxtapositions in Pala . . . The tribal chief is also the fire chief, and only 29 years old. Meek and makeshift homes on the one hand, on the other $30 million won in a water-rights case. Stepping back into history in the dark mission chapel, cold through its thick stone walls, stepping out again into the Indian cemetery--to the ranks of babies’ graves and soldiers lost in service. The graves are covered with flowers, plastic, silk, fresh, with ornaments and photographs, with stuffed toys, powder compacts, shoes and carvings--not one disturbed, nor one forgotten.

A rough wind blows across the sage scrub. Cupenos sleep beneath the giant pepper trees and eucalyptus. Does this peace--this sense of being known--walk out there along Lawrence Welk Drive and Champagne Boulevard?