2 Tiny Tribes Lost Their Bet

She arrived here 66 years ago as a bride, a white scarf over her head, her prim dress buttoned high under her chin. Today, her smile is still easy, her mind still sharp, her tongue as quick as those that flicker from the mouths of rattlesnakes that burrow into the desert outside her home.

But Catherine Siva Saubel is 86 now, a widow with white, wispy hair and deep furrows in her cheeks. And she fears that she may die a relic. Not just a relic of a vanishing Native American culture, a fate that she has long accepted. But a relic of a time when Native Americans had not yet found their path out of poverty: the casino.

In recent weeks, the Legislature abruptly turned its back on a series of projects that would have significantly expanded gambling in California. For Native American bands accustomed to getting their way in the Capitol, it was a flurry of inactivity; six tribes’ proposals failed amid infighting and partisan rancor.

Saubel’s small and scattered tribe -- she is chairwoman of the Los Coyotes band of Cahuilla and Cupeno Indians -- was lost in the dust cloud.

With the backing of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Los Coyotes band had hoped to team up with another small tribe, the Big Lagoon Rancheria band of Humboldt County, to build a $160-million casino-resort complex not on reservation land but in Barstow. But those plans are on hold at least until the Legislature’s 2007 session and are not a sure bet.

For that, Saubel blames not the usual anti-gambling interests but her fellow Native Americans. The Los Coyotes-Big Lagoon proposal failed after avid and costly lobbying by larger Indian bands, all of whom already operate casinos.

Saubel readily acknowledges that she is trapped by contradiction. She believes the wealth generated by casinos, which benefits about 9% of California’s Native Americans, has contributed to the demise of Indian culture. Yet she is fighting to build a casino of her own because she sees it as her tribe’s only hope for economic salvation.

“These people call themselves Indians. They don’t know anything about the Indian culture,” she said on a recent morning in her home on the Morongo Indian Reservation. “What we have, we have always shared. We respected one another. But not anymore. Money has corrupted them all.”

‘I Just Knew’

Saubel was born in 1920, one of 11 siblings, on the 29,000-acre Los Coyotes reservation in a rugged patch of San Diego County. Her family moved to Palm Springs when she was 4 because of her father’s respiratory condition; it was the first time she had seen a white person.

When she was 18, she met Mariano Saubel at a ceremony honoring the dead. She can still picture him as he looked that night, standing stoutly on top of a log next to a fire, his arms folded across his chest.

“I was standing with my friend,” she recalled. “I said: ‘That man is going to be my husband.’ She said: ‘Do you know him?’ I said: ‘No. I’ve never seen him before.’ I just knew.”

He took her to live on his family land on the Morongo reservation, between Banning and Cabazon. They had one son, Allen, and Mariano Saubel became a prominent voice in the community, serving on the Morongo council. But theirs was not a life of luxury; two homes burned to the ground over the years, and they were living in a trailer when Mariano Saubel died in 1985.

Catherine Saubel became a pioneer and a fixture in the Native American community. She is an expert on the history and culture of Cahuilla Indians and has collaborated with scholars on books and articles. (Cahuillas are a broad Native American group that includes a number of bands, including the Morongo and Los Coyotes.)

Saubel has lectured around the world about their history, customs and language, testified before Congress and served on historic preservation commissions. In 1964, she helped found the Morongo reservation’s Malki Museum, whose collection includes pottery, hunting materials and basketry. A linguist still visits with her every two weeks in an effort to record and preserve the Cahuilla language.

All along, she has shouldered a quiet sense of outrage, dating to the days when she was prohibited from speaking her native language at grammar school. But she has never felt so cynical -- or so alone -- as she does today, she said.

Among those opposing the casino proposal was the Morongo band of Mission Indians, who have been her hosts for more than six decades and who once asked her to preside over the formal blessing of their first bingo hall. That humble facility has since been supplanted by the 27-story, $250-million Morongo Casino Resort & Spa, one of the largest tribal casinos in the nation.

“They had some nerve,” Saubel said. “They were poor too, not that long ago.”

The Los Coyotes reservation is a magical place, Saubel said, of piney woods, rocky crags and wild turkeys. It is so remote and inhospitable, however, that only 80 of the tribe’s 350 members live there, and four investment teams have told them it would be impossible to operate a profitable casino there.

Meanwhile, Big Lagoon had considered building a casino on its reservation in Humboldt County, but environmental groups wanted to preserve the fragile ecosystem in the area.

Schwarzenegger’s office urged the two tribes in 2004 to combine forces, potentially resolving the court dispute over the Big Lagoon proposal while bolstering the overall economic impact of the complex. Under the proposal, the tribes’ management and development partner would be BarWest, a Detroit-based company owned partly by Marian Ilitch, whose family owns Little Caesars Pizza, the Detroit Red Wings and about a dozen other companies.

Many in the gaming industry believe that Barstow, a historically struggling city, could be an important site for a casino because it is a stopping point for thousands of Southern Californians who drive to Las Vegas. The project’s proponents say it would mean the creation of more than 3,000 jobs and $190 million in payments to the city over the next 20 years. If the casino complex caught on, it could be transformative for Barstow, said Gregg Lint, chairman of Barstow Citizens for Real Economic Development.

“More people will have jobs. More people will buy houses. The more people you have, the more businesses will come in. It’s self-perpetuating,” he said.

But the compacts the bands signed with the governor stumbled in the final weeks of the Legislature’s session.

Assemblyman Jerome Horton (D-Inglewood), who was among those opposing the plan, said legislators were responding to various concerns, including the fear that they would be establishing a dangerous precedent by allowing the casinos so far from reservations. Other Native American bands had aired similar proposals in recent years; none has come to fruition.

Horton acknowledged that legislators had been pushed hard by Native American bands unhappy with the deal.

Some of the larger bands thought future negotiations with the state could be hampered by provisions of the Los Coyotes-Big Lagoon deal, including rules to allow for union organizing and one that would give the state a quarter of the casinos’ net winnings after those winnings topped $200 million. Those provisions were seen as more generous to the state than those used at most California casinos; in theory they could erode profits throughout the state if they became standard practice.

But Horton said it was not a case of large bands bullying smaller ones. Instead, he said, “it was a policy decision.”

And Waltona Manion, a Morongo spokeswoman, said the larger bands were merely fighting to maintain the integrity of Indian casinos because, she said, voters who approved landmark casino legislation in recent years believed the facilities would be built on reservation land.

“I am telling you flat-out: This is an issue of principle and not economics,” Manion said. “It ... comes down to credibility. We feel like we made a promise to California voters. It is time to honor that promise.”

A Life Apart

At the Morongo casino, gamblers flock to slot machines called “Mr. Cashman” and “Mrs. Money Maker” and try to win the Mercedes SLK 280 perched on a pedestal in the lobby. There is a lounge called Mystique, and flat-screen TVs hanging from the ceiling advertise dance parties, fashion shows and drawings for free cruise trips in the poker room.

Saubel can see the casino from her living room window. But the flies buzzing through the kitchen of her cluttered home, the Perry Mason reruns on the TV and her flowered housedress make it seem like a world away, and she has never been inside. Her house is on a wind-swept patch of dirt. The remains of one of her burned homes, a tiny stone structure, are in the backyard. Her front door is watched closely by four shaggy dogs, three of which are friendly.

On the Morongo reservation, she said, only one other person speaks a dialect of the local Native American language. The rows of apricot trees that were once tended on the reservation -- the fruit dried and taken by wagon to a nearby railroad stop -- are long gone. Tall, dry weeds cover most of the property today.

There are rarely any Native American ceremonies there, she said. She shook her head when recounting that some Native Americans in the area of Banning Pass announced recently that they were going to hold a fair to celebrate their culture. They wound up renting a Ferris wheel instead.

Despite her marriage, she said, she receives no direct benefit from the Morongo casino. She lives mostly on Social Security benefits, she said, and could sell her land only back to the Morongo Reservation “at their price,” she said.

She would like to return to the Los Coyotes reservation. But her home there, like many of the others, has no plumbing or electricity.

The Los Coyotes band has been saving money from intertribal funds generated by existing casinos under a revenue-sharing provision approved by California voters in 2004, but it’s not enough to pay for substantial improvements on the band’s remote ancestral property.

A casino, she said, would make the difference for her and other members of the tribe who want to return to the reservation.

On the Morongo reservation, she said, “it turns out I’m still a stranger. I just want to go home.”

scott.gold@latimes.com