Neighbors Blockade Sludge Mountain : Environment: A dispute over Native American property rights divides members of a tribe in the Coachella Valley.

If this were suburbia, the battle among neighbors might be conducted in a more conventional way: in court or at City Hall or through the homeowners association.

But here in the Coachella Valley, angry residents--reinforced by out-of-towners--have blockaded a neighbor’s property since Monday, erected overnight tent encampments and staged passionate Native American ceremonial dances under the full moon.

The protests are aimed at Geraldine Ibanez, a member of the Torres-Martinez band of Desert Cahuilla Indians, who decided to make a buck off her 120 acres. She is leasing the land to companies that have found the hot, dry desert valley a great place to bake the tar-like sludge from Southern California sewage treatment plants into fertilizer for farms and back-yard gardens.

Some of Ibanez’s neighbors--her fellow tribal members--say they resent the smell, flies, dust and sight of the sludge. Most galling to them is a 250-yard-long pile as high as the date palms that grow a few miles away. Locals call that heap Mount San Diego, in droll recognition of the source of the sludge.

The protest has pitted members of the Torres-Martinez tribe against one another in a pitched debate over Native American property rights. And the round-the-clock blockade has attracted support from the United Farm Workers, Greenpeace, the American Indian Movement and even a local school board member who worries about school buses passing by the site.

At issue is just who, exactly, can tell Ibanez how to use her property.

Ibanez--who lives on her husband’s reservation near Temecula more than 50 miles away--contends that she can do as she pleases with her land. Although most reservation land in the country is held in trust by the federal government for tribes to govern and allocate to its members, some Native Americans--including members of the small Torres-Martinez tribe--were awarded land in their own individual names, essentially as homesteaders.

“These allotments were given out by the (federal Bureau of Indian Affairs) to individual tribal members, and nobody can interfere with our right to do with it what we want,” said tribal member Kim Lawson, who supports Ibanez’s position. “Some of us are worried that if the tribe can stop one individual from operating a business, what’s to stop them from preventing others from doing the same? We treasure that freedom.”

But George Auclair, spokesman for the tribal council, says such individual freedom can only stretch so far before the tribe must step in. “She doesn’t need our permission for a little business, but the tribe has to decide whether something this big is OK,” he said. “And we wouldn’t have allowed this if we knew it was going to grow so large.”

The problem here, though, is that no written rules exist within the Torres-Martinez tribe on how to resolve such disputes. It has no constitution and resolves disputes through customs and traditions that have been passed down over the years, Auclair said.

The basic, unwritten tribal policy, he said, “is that you can do what you want on your property as long as it doesn’t bother other people or the environment.”

Muddying the debate is whether the tribal council’s opposition to Ibanez has the support of the entire voting membership of the tribe, which has about 180 members.

Lawson said that at a general tribal meeting last spring, a majority of voting members supported Ibanez’s business--a decision that, he said, the sitting tribal council has ignored. And he protests that the tribal council has refused to call a full tribal meeting since then, to again poll its members on its sentiments about sludge.

Instead, the tribal council fired off a letter to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, asking it to stop the sludge-drying operation.

In July, the Bureau of Indian Affairs ordered the operation to cease, but the operator refused and there has been no enforcement. The closure was ordered not over the issue of whether the land use violated local tribal policy, but because Ibanez’s land lease with the sludge company had not received federal approval and because the sludge operation had not undergone an environmental assessment.

Ibanez’s lawyer refused to be quoted for the record on the matter.

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Mike Smith, deputy area director for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Sacramento, said the agency has since received a proposed lease between Ibanez and Terra Farms Inc. for the sludge operation. The bureau is seeking guidance from the White House Council on Environmental Quality on whether to approve the lease even before an environmental assessment of the sludge site is concluded.

If the site passes environmental muster, he said, the bureau is likely to lift its cease-and-desist order and allow the operation, at least until the environmental tests are reviewed. But if the Council on Environmental Quality insists that no business lease be approved until the environmental assessment is completed, the operation will be ordered closed.

Smith said the tribe has the authority to govern land use on the reservation--but the tribe has no written laws in place to do so.

“There is dispute within the tribe itself about this issue,” Smith acknowledged. “Not all the people in the tribe are opposed to it. The blockade involves only a handful of tribal members; the rest are from San Francisco or Washington state . . . or other places.”

Terra Farms took over the operation after another company, which had dried sludge on Ibanez’s property since 1990, went bankrupt and, according to Terra Farms President Jay Houston, left the property a mess.

The tribe tolerated the previous sludge company until subsequent ground-water tests, done after the first company left the site, detected the presence of heavy metals and fecal coliform bacteria. The tests also showed high levels of nitrates and salts that already plague the Coachella Valley’s water supply because of years of heavy agricultural use.

But Houston maintains that someone sabotaged the wells by dumping sludge directly into them, and that more recent water monitoring tests by his company show no underground water contamination. The EPA conducted its own tests, and the results are expected to be released any day.

To help mend bad tribal feelings, Houston said, he would remove the unsightly Mount San Diego sludge, which was created by the previous operator, to a West Covina landfill. If he is kicked off the property, Houston said, the huge sludge pile will just remain a blight on the desert landscape.

Ten trucks carried 210 tons of the sludge off the site Monday--just before the blockade was established. Remaining are about 500,000 tons of sludge, which has lost too much of its nutrient content to be of value anymore as fertilizer, he said.

Meanwhile, the blockade has stopped the daily delivery of 1,000 tons of sludge to Ibanez’s land. Instead it is being trucked to more distant drying sites or is simply being dumped in urban landfills by hauling companies.

Auclair, the tribal council spokesman, pledges that the blockade will continue for as long as it takes to shut down Terra Farms. And when it does, he said, he hopes the Bureau of Indian Affairs will clean up Mount San Diego “or San Diego will come up here and take its (sludge) back.”