On a Mission to Win Trust : Indians: Priest, school principal make effort to gain respect of Pala Reservation’s Luiseno and Cupeno tribes, which are still smarting over recent painful changes.

Father William Lawson wanders over to the old general store with the rusty Coca-Cola sign squeaking in the breeze and, beginning with simple pleasantries, tries to win the trust of the Pala Reservation.

“I go across the street to the store, and some Indians will be friendly and some will ignore me and not return my greeting,” said the priest, a quiet Virginian with paint stains on his hands.

“Because I am new here, I am not trusted. Because I am new, I am a stranger,” Lawson said. “Indian people do not open up to strangers. You know you have been accepted by the Indian people when they start to kid you.”

But he knows acceptance will take time for the 400 Indians here, many of them confused and angry by the wrenching changes at this 11,000-acre reservation in far northern San Diego County.

In recent months, the beloved Comboni missionaries left the San Antonio de Pala Mission and its Indian school here after 43 years. Then, the respected Sister Mary Yarger, herself an Indian with deep roots here, was cast from the mission school where she taught. And meanwhile, higher tuition is causing some poor Indians to pull their children from the mission school.

Amid these stunning changes, Lawson, a diocese priest more used to inner-city crisis than crickets in the country, has come to oversee the mission and the only mission school for Indians in the state.

In his black cleric garb, Lawson arrived here with another outsider, Robert Clark, looking every bit the school’s new layman principal in his gold-framed glasses and short-sleeved shirt.

The priest and the principal are slowly overcoming obstacles and forming relationships with the Indians. It’s not always easy.

This is a time of transition on the reservation, where the mission founded in 1816 and the 33-year-old school have been the center of life for the two tribes, the Luiseno and Cupeno, that have dwelt there for decades.

Raulene Beltran, a 26-year-old Indian who just enrolled her daughter in the school kindergarten, mourns Sister Mary’s departure.

“Sister Mary was from our background. She knew how to reach out,” she said. “Now, it’s gone cold.”

Another Indian, Jeff Ravago, angrily claimed that higher tuition is forcing Indian children from their school, and that non-Indians are increasingly taking their place. Besides the 400 Indians, about 800 others live on the reservation, usually spouses and renters who live in Indian-owned houses or trailers.

“I feel they’re slowly moving the Indian kids out of their school,” he said. “This school is for Indian kids.”

Even Indians without children but who grew up in the shadow of the school, where amiable dogs trot behind kids on their way to class, believe it is a profoundly different place since the Comboni priests left, preceded several years earlier by the nuns of the Blessed Sacrament.

“It really doesn’t seem like a Catholic school,” said David Garcia, 38. “The old preachers and the nuns are gone. What else is left? It’s sad.”

Principal Clark, an educator with 21 years experience with Catholic schools in Orange County, had to agree that “the initial announcement of all these things put people in a panic.”

But neither Clark nor Lawson likes to dwell on the past, believing that the future begins with better meeting the educational and spiritual needs of the present.

Still, there’s no escaping the fact that much has happened, starting with the departure in July of the Comboni missionaries, the benevolent priests who would share a simple meal with an Indian family or hoist an occasional beer with some working man on the reservation.

The Catholic order, begun in Italy in 1867, actually built the mission school and stayed at San Antonio de Pala Mission until they announced their work here was done and they would move elsewhere. When the independent order left, it put the mission and school in the hands of the Diocese of San Diego.

“They’re gone. They were good priests, but they’re gone,” said Eugene Magee, a 61-year-old Indian who, until he was interrupted, was trying to take a nap in his pickup truck, the Bible on the seat beside him.

The missionaries also had been generous in subsidizing the mission school, and that will be gone in time, too.

The diocese wants the school to become self sufficient. Over the next several years, both the diocese and the Comboni order have promised money to, as Clark said, “provide us with time to find alternative funding sources.” He is busy seeking government and private grants to support the school.

Sister Mary, who is part Luiseno Indian, had been principal at the mission school until she returned to the classroom because she missed teaching. When the diocese inherited the school’s budget troubles, cuts were decreed, and Sister Mary’s contract wasn’t renewed.

But there were other reasons Sister Mary left the reservation where she has countless friends and relatives.

Clark said that, when he was brought in, both he and Sister Mary realized it would be “awkward” working together because she had stepped down as principal.

“I think Sister would have been put in a situation where she’d still be looked at as administrator, and that would have made it difficult for me,” Clark said.

There also appears to have been pressure on Sister Mary, as principal, to raise money for the school.

“She didn’t display the interest in fund-raising that the previous principal did,” said Willie Pink, tribal vice chairman. “From an economic standpoint, she was a failure.”

Sister Mary, who now lives at Lake Elsinore, declined to be interviewed, saying only “the new pastor decided my philosophy would not agree.”

The school’s financial problems have contributed to an increase in tuition that is difficult to afford for many families. The median income for a family of four on the reservation is about $10,000, according to the tribal office.

Tuition is $800 a year for one child, $1,600 for two children, and $2,200 for three. Bus service costs $400 to $700, depending on the number of children.

Although the latest tuition increase is 3%, the fee has doubled over the past four years.

“I never turn anybody away who can’t afford tuition,” Clark said. Clark lets the 60% of parents who can’t pay full tuition contribute by doing work at the school, such as maintenance or painting.

Even so, enrollment at the kindergarten through eighth-grade school has dropped from 140 last year to 117 this year. Clark says 200 children should be enrolled. The school draws students not only from Pala, but from four other reservations--Pauma, Ramona, La Jolla and Pechanga.

About 80% of the students are Indian, but Clark said he would like to have more non-Indian pupils. Those students would get “a historic and cultural education they couldn’t get anyplace else,” he said.

Some Indians take the rising tuition and interest in non-Indian students as signs the school is turning its back on the Indian children. Some parents, like Ravago, father of two, have placed their children in public schools in Bonsall or Valley Center, where there is no tuition.

“They said a long time ago this school was built for Indians,” Ravago said, arguing that the school was built on land once owned by the tribe, so Indian children should have a free education. “Then these people come in and charge us. Heck, this land belongs to us.”

Despite such hard feelings, there seems to be little anger or resentment aimed personally at Clark or Lawson.

In fact, they’re beginning to feel rather welcome, although Lawson worries over how to weave the threads of trust and friendship with the Indians of his parish.

“It’s going to be a transformation that takes a long time,” said Lawson, who once worked in Milwaukee’s black inner city and now finds a different sort of challenge among the Indians.

He wants to help the Indians recover from their ancient emotional wounds and current differences among families so they can take a more significant role in guiding church and school activities and direction.

“There are a lot of hurt feelings over past wrongs,” Lawson said. “There needs to be a lot of healing among people themselves and with the church. . . . All of us are formed by our past, but we need not be enslaved by our history.”

Besides such spiritual undertakings, Lawson has the physical demands of serving a vast parish that includes five churches, including the mission. Although Lawson has an associate priest, it’s hard to serve Mass in so many places, especially considering that there were once five Comboni missionaries for the job.

Meanwhile, Clark bustles around the school, encouraging teachers and students alike. For him, being principal involves far more than fund-raising, it requires instilling a sense of self-discipline and respect among the children, respect for one another and for adults.

“I believe the Holy Spirit moves you and puts you where you need to be,” said Clark, who praises the school’s staff of seven teachers, none of them Indian, but some of whom have been there for years.

“Our kids are like diamonds in the rough,” said Kathleen Collins, who has taught here for five years.

Her colleague, Jim Parpovich, with 11 years at the school, likes the changes and the clearly defined goals brought by Clark. “We know what’s expected of us, and we’re all working as a faculty,” he said.

Outside the mission grounds, where Indians travel from their modest homes and jobs and congregate at the wooden general store built in 1897, there is a sense that, despite all the changes, things might just work out.

Magee, sitting in his pickup truck near the store, said Clark and Lawson are showing signs of becoming familiar with Indian ways, especially the penchant for kidding.

“When they first came, they’re pretty shy. They don’t know how to take a person. Indians like to tease. I see this priest is starting to do a little of that himself,” Magee said.

But Indians have sadly learned that all things pass, including people they come to accept and value. Looking over toward the mission grounds, where Clark and Lawson are going about their business, Magee said, “We’ll grow to like them, and they’re going to leave.”