Betting on Their Heritage

When last seen in the pages of Helen Hunt Jackson’s celebrated historical romance “Ramona,” the Indians of this valley were a desperate lot: poor, illiterate, first subjugated by the Spanish, then the Mexicans, then evicted and dumped in a dry canyon by the U.S. government.

But one glance at that dry canyon these days tells you that world has been upended. The Pechanga tribe of Temecula Valley is among the valley’s leading employers, netting millions of gambling dollars every month, lobbying in Washington, steadily adding acreage. When Gary DuBois, cultural resources director for the Pechangas, stands beside a particularly handsome stretch of open land near the tribe’s new casino-hotel project, a certain twinkle creeps into his eyes.

“You could put a museum there,” DuBois says half-casually, as if the idea has just occurred to him.

In fact, DuBois and other leaders of the 1,468-member tribe have been talking about that prospect for a year now. If the tribal membership approves and the plans pan out, the tribe will build a museum here, roughly midway between Los Angeles and San Diego, and borrow thousands of artifacts from the Southwest Museum, an underfunded but widely respected institution founded by Los Angeles collectors in the early days of the 20th century.

Not everybody is ready to embrace the idea. But together, the Pechangas’ money and the Southwest’s collection could yield one of the foremost Native American museums in the country--a historical postscript that Jackson could never have imagined during her days here in 1883.

“We don’t want the casino to define who we are,” says DuBois, who began the talks with a cold call to the Southwest Museum’s executive director, Duane King, a year ago.

“They have a very clear vision of what they’re doing,” King says. “They want to tell their story.”

By the time the first Spanish missionaries appeared in the Temecula Valley at the end of the 18th century, Indians had lived here for an estimated 10,000 years. In the decades following the Spaniards’ arrival, missionaries pressed Indians into labor and newcomers grabbed up more and more land, imposing and adjusting laws as Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, and as the U.S. wrested control of California from Mexico in the 1840s.

As the U.S. expanded westward, the pressure on Indian lands intensified. In the 1870s and 1880s, U.S. lawmen seized most of the land held by the Temecula Indians.

In her novel, Jackson describes the eviction, although she spelled the tribe’s name slightly differently.

“Where is Pachanga?” asks the heroine, Ramona, hearing of the tribe’s dispersal.

“About three miles from Temecula, a little sort of canyon,” answers her lover, Alessandro.

“I told the people they’d better move over there; the land did not belong to anybody, and perhaps they could make a living there,” he continues. “There isn’t any water; that’s the worst of it.”

Jackson’s novel, published in 1884, was intended to provoke national shame and reform--a sort of western counterpart to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 antislavery novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Instead, the love story in the foreground of “Ramona” largely outshone the cultural politics in the background, and the book wound up fueling westward tourism.

Its romanticized legacy is revived every spring, when hundreds of actors and thousands of Jackson enthusiasts gather in an open-air amphitheater near Hemet for weekend stagings of the annual “Ramona Pageant.” The pageant--billed as “America’s oldest and longest-running outdoor drama!”--has endured since the 1920s. This year’s production premieres April 20.

The Pechangas don’t participate. But some of the pageant’s fans, if they have a weakness for slot machines or card games, may nevertheless be playing a role in modern Pechanga history. The tribe’s reservation and casino lie about 20 miles southwest of the outdoor stage.

The reservation covers 4,500 acres of dusty foothills. The first glimpse most outsiders get of the reservation is the parking lot and the jumble of low-slung buildings that make up the current casino area. Day after day, cars and buses roll up, discharging gamblers, many of them retirement age.

Beyond the parking lot rises an economic engine that’s likely to propel the Pechanga economy well into the future: a 522-room hotel and casino, being built at a cost of roughly $270 million. It will replace the existing facilities upon its opening this summer. Sand-colored and designed in a restrained Southwestern style, it already looms as one of the tallest buildings in the valley.

The reservation’s first casino, which opened in 1995, consisted of three trailers featuring card games and five filled with slot machines. Now 2,000 slots sound round the clock, and the tribe has more employees than members, about 1,700 total, 115 of them Pechangas.

How much difference has the casino made?

By the 1960s, the reservation’s population had dipped below 100. As recently as 1993, the Pechanga tribal government had one paid employee. Tribe spokesman Russell “Butch” Murphy remembers sitting in an empty field near the road in 1994, “running a swap meet, about eight to 10 vendors. That was one of our big ventures.”

“Big” has a different meaning now, and relations with the outside world have evolved. Last year, the tribe reported that it set aside $58 million in revenue for reservation infrastructure, health care, housing and education. (The Pechangas decline to say how much money is dispersed in checks to individual families.)

Murphy notes that the tribe covers the cost of private school for any tribal children whose families want it, and at the moment is subsidizing the studies of 62 tribal members in college, grad school or trade school.

For the last two years, Temecula’s Chamber of Commerce has held its installation dinner on the reservation, and a Riverside County Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman says that by any community’s standards, the crime rate on the Pechanga Reservation is “very low.”

The advantages of adding a museum to this rapidly improving neighborhood, boosters say, could be educational and economic: Apart from allowing the Pechangas to celebrate their long-besieged culture, a museum would diversify the tribal business empire, adding a highbrow feature to augment the new casino-hotel complex. A museum wouldn’t hurt in the campaign to woo overnight national and international visitors either.

But filling that museum with borrowed objects from the Southwest collection means placing a hefty measure of trust in people off the reservation, and in Pechanga history, that’s usually been a formula for failure. DuBois’ answer to that is to look at it in a new way.

“Pechanga is like a microcosm of Indians nationwide--the loss of culture, the social coping mechanisms that were destroyed by the dominant culture,” DuBois says. “All the things we went through--just about every tribe in the country can understand. So we’d like to use the Southwest collection to tell that story.”

The Pechanga cultural resources department--a few offices and several display cases full of old baskets and stoneware--is housed in a ranch house on reservation-adjacent land the tribe bought up a few years ago. At the screen door stands DuBois in shades and a baseball hat, ready to give a reservation tour.

“To know where you’re going,” says DuBois, taking the wheel of a new Ford pickup, “you have to know where you came from.”

DuBois, 45, has experience on the reservation and off. He listens to the Eagles, carries a Palm Pilot and patiently spells out the word that the Pechanga used for themselves before the Spaniards came: Payomkawichum, which means “the western people.”

Like the majority of the tribe’s members, DuBois lived off-reservation (in San Bernardino County) as a child but often visited on Sundays for tribal meetings in the old schoolhouse.

(DuBois, who is one-quarter Pechanga and one-eighth Navajo, says it’s rare for any tribal member to have more than 50% Pechanga blood.)

After earning a bachelor’s degree at Cal State San Bernardino, he left California to earn a law degree from Washington University in St. Louis and a master’s in social work from the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, also in St. Louis. He later served as a law clerk to the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, won a fellowship with the U.S. Senate Indian Affairs Committee, and worked as a field officer for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Returning to the reservation with his wife and daughter in 1999, he sunk a small fortune into a well-appointed, off-the-grid modular home, powered by solar panels and whirring wind turbines in the backyard.

The turbines are a reservation rarity, but several Pechanga leaders have pursued off-reservation careers before returning. The tribal council’s chairman, Mark Macarro, studied political science at UC Santa Barbara. Tribal spokesman Murphy, who recalls growing up among 10 children in four rooms on the Pechanga Reservation, earned a degree at UC Riverside, and taught physical education and did recruitment at UC San Diego.

“Plenty of us were just waiting for the opportunity to come back,” DuBois says.

He rolls past the old and new casinos, then stops at the tribal government headquarters, a two-story building completed last year. Inside, seven elected council members deliberate amid considerable casino-fueled comfort, from remote-controlled blinds to leaf-patterned carpets designed to echo the Pechangas’ longtime canyon companions, the oaks. Just up the road stand a handsome new firehouse and recreation center with night lighting, also built with casino dollars.

But the most striking stop is the reservation’s residential area. For anyone seeking symbols of sudden and extravagant affluence, it falls far short.

Fewer than half of the tribe’s members make their homes on the reservation. And most of those residences are trailers and modular homes, some tidy and triple-wide, some ramshackle. All are connected by dirt roads.

The roads, DuBois says, are a matter of choice. In votes in recent years, the tribal membership has spent freely on the fire station and recreation center and so on, DuBois says, but there’s a rural familiarity to dirt roads that the Pechangas aren’t ready to leave behind.

And what about all the mobile homes?

Real-estate lenders, DuBois explains, bumping along in the Ford, don’t offer conventional mortgages to reservation dwellers. Since reservation land can’t be seized, it also can’t be offered as collateral. Thus, for those who choose to live on the reservation, the choice is either raise enough money to build a house without a home loan, or pick a trailer or modular home, for which there is financing available.

Real-estate transactions tend to happen more smoothly when the tribe and its collective fortune are involved. With two purchases in recent years, the Pechangas have added more than 1,000 acres to their holdings, including the 724-acre Great Oak Ranch, which once belonged to “Perry Mason” author Erle Stanley Gardner.

DuBois steers the Ford that way, kicking up a trail of dust as he heads first toward the hillside lodge and the handful of rustic cottages next door.

He points out the brick outbuilding where the fire-fearing author is said to have stored manuscripts, then heads onward to one of the largest oak trees in North America. Beneath and around it spread acre after acre of open land. It’s near here, just off Pala Road, less than a mile from the casino, that DuBois pauses with the museum-making gleam in his eye.

The idea of collaborating with the Southwest Museum, DuBois concedes, came to him long before it really made sense.

Founded in 1907, the Southwest Museum is the oldest museum in Los Angeles. It has gathered 350,000 artifacts from throughout North America--a collection considered the most significant of its kind outside a government museum.

But the Southwest suffers from tight budgets and modest visitor numbers, in part because of its location--on Mt. Washington, surrounded by a blue-collar residential neighborhood. The museum gets by on $2.3 million a year, and even after an expansion coming in the next year, the facility will have room to display less than 2% of its material.

Behind the scenes, curators sidle through crowded storage areas, past 13,000 pieces of basketry, 11,000 pieces of pottery, 1,000 kachina dolls, 1,300 Navajo textiles, and so on.

About 15 years ago, DuBois remembers, he first read in detail about the Southwest collection. At the time, he was on a break from grad school and the tribe had no resources to spare, but the beginning of an idea sprouted.

It bloomed last year, when he learned the Southwest was in search of a wealthy partner and holding talks with the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage. In spring 2001, DuBois called Southwest executive director King and invited him to visit the Pechanga Reservation.

Since then, Southwest officials have walked Pechanga land, Pechanga officials have toured the Southwest’s back rooms, and Autry officials have declared a retreat. Although neither DuBois nor King will talk about negotiation specifics, what the Pechangas are offering is a cash infusion, as well as a chance for the Southwest to show off more of its collection without giving up its independence, as the Autry merger might have required.

Still, nothing about the proposed Pechanga-Southwest partnership is sure until the Pechanga tribal membership and the Southwest Museum’s board of trustees hold votes. A tribal vote could come as soon as May, depending on how rapidly contract language can be settled, DuBois says. King declines to offer any timetable for a vote among his board of trustees, but affirms that in a year of steady progress, he’s seen no substantial obstacles.

The nation’s foremost museum collection of Native American artifacts, no matter what the Pechanga and Southwest do, belongs to the Smithsonian Institution, which in 2004 will open a National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington.

Among scores of mostly modest museums on tribal lands across the country, authorities say, the most ambitious is Connecticut’s Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, which opened in 1998. The tribe, which operates a major casino complex, has estimated that it spent $193 million on the museum, which relies heavily on dioramas and videos and high technology. But that museum features a modest artifacts collection, about 2,000 items.

In California, several tribes operate museums with relatively modest collections, including the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum, which opened in 1993 in Palm Springs, and the Barona Cultural Center and Museum in Lakeside, San Diego County, which opened in 2000.

The Pechanga proposal is more ambitious than those. As DuBois describes the working concept, the new museum would include more than 32,000 square feet of exhibition space (about three times the existing total at the Southwest Museum) set amid 40 to 60 acres of native plants. The museum would explore the history of Native Americans in Southern California and nationwide, and would be housed separately from gambling areas, so that families and school groups could visit without distraction.

Thousands of artifacts would rotate between the Southwest and the Pechanga Reservation. The collection’s ownership would stay with the Southwest, and the Pechanga museum would be run by professional curators hired by the tribe, although the Southwest’s staff could also have a role at Pechanga. DuBois guesses that it could take three to five years to design and build.

The great attraction of teaming with Southwest, DuBois says, is that “we’ll be a world-class museum. People will talk about the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, and they’ll talk about Pechanga.”

One challenge of a Pechanga-Southwest partnership, says Doug Sharon, executive director of the San Diego Museum of Man, “will be each party getting through their own internal politics, in terms of perceptions and past history--including the past history of the United States.”

Cheryl Hinton, who directs the reservation-based Barona Cultural Center & Museum, calls the Pechanga-Southwest talks a courtship with unique possibilities. But as a veteran curator who has worked in institutions on and off the reservation, Hinton also predicts that the collaboration will be complicated.

For conventionally trained curators, she says, working on a reservation often means acknowledging that “maybe there isn’t just one way to curate objects. I’ve seen elders come in and pick up a basket by a corner, and I’ll just about faint,” Hinton says.

“But they have these things lying around the house. I don’t say anything. I don’t correct elders,” she continues. “If you’re preserving culture, then you also need to accommodate those people whose culture you’re preserving.”

Among other Native American groups too, the Pechangas and the museum have some delicate footwork to do.

Anthony Morales, chairman of the Gabrielino Tongva tribal council in Los Angeles County, says he has mixed feelings about the proposal, in part because it could take Gabrielino artifacts out of Los Angeles County and the Pechangas haven’t made any attempt to contact him. Back at Pechanga, DuBois pledges that if questions arise over whether an artifact should be displayed, the Pechangas would defer to the wishes of other tribal leaders, as the Southwest Museum does now.

Now it’s late in the day, and DuBois has been talking about Pechanga past and Pechanga future for hours. The Ford rolls back up to the ranch house with the cultural resources inside and the hotel-casino rising about half a mile away. Just outside the home stands a modest shelter built of willow branches, with a few hundred potted plants nearby.

This is the beginning of an ethnobotanical nursery. Coaxed to life with the help of consultant William Pink, who is part-Pechanga but is enrolled at the nearby Pala Reservation, these are some of the plants that have given the tribe its clothes, tools and shelter for centuries: coastal live oak, deer grass, sumac, yucca, sage. Many of them are now rare in the valley, like dogbane, which can be poisonous to dogs but was frequently used in ceremonial garb. A cell phone peeking from his pocket, Pink pulls up a grass blade and pulls it apart, showing how his ancestors split the plant three ways, then wove the strands.

A few yards from the fledgling nursery is a pair of well-secured shipping containers, their interiors full of old Pechanga artifacts, including mortars and pestles, pottery chards, knives, pendants and fishhooks, each labeled.

“All the stuff you see here--it comes in every day,” DuBois says. As development marches across the valley, he adds, it’s typical for building-site archeologists to bring in 100 items a month or more. Items associated with burials, like human bones, are reinterred. The rest gets logged and shelved in the shipping containers--at least until the Pechangas have another place for them.

“Our way of thinking is that you can’t own these things,” DuBois says. “You can only take care of them.”

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Christopher Reynolds is a Times staff writer.