UPDATE: Pechanga Chairman Mark Macarro's cousin doesn't like this article. In fact, he gives it his "moron alert". That means it left a mark, even though there are some inaccuracies with this story. Dr. Johnson was PAID BY PECHANGA to research the HUNTER family and HE PROVED us Pechanga.
Jim Marino of the Santa Ynez Valley Journal asks the question. And calls out Pechanga of Temecula in the article. Pechanga has said, "Yes, we know that people who LIVED in the 1880 Temecula era SWORE that your ancestor was a Pechanga, but we'd rather believe an imprisoned child molestor than a vaunted elder"
Jim writes:
With the rise of Indian gambling casinos all over the country — and in particular those 60 casinos in California with more on the way — the question naturally arises: Who exactly qualifies to call themselves an “Indian”?
The basic answer to what appears to be a simple question is that an “Indian” is whoever the particular tribe says is an Indian. Now any person can claim to be part Indian, just as many say they are part Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. OP: Basically, tribes like Pechanga, Redding, Picayune, San Pascual, Enterprise are making a laughing stock of tribal history.
Pechanga portion:
One such vivid example here in California occurred at the Pechanga tribe, another massive and profitable gambling casino between Riverside and San Diego. Once boasting about 900 members, in one fell swoop, tribal Chairman Mark Macarro disenrolled an entire extended family, the Gomez family, in a move commonly recognized as an effort to fatten the profits for the remaining members and families.
To sell this disenrollment to other suspicious tribal members, who suspected Macarro’s true motives, he paid for and commissioned an ethnological investigator from here in Santa Barbara County, John R. Johnson, curator of anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. He is a renowned authority on California Indians and was hired at the tribe’s considerable expense.
His thorough investigation and report to the Pechanga tribal government concluded, essentially, that the Gomez extended family was as much entitled to enrollment as anyone else. The tribal government promptly dismissed his report out of hand, ignoring his findings. To this day, the Gomez family has not been re-enrolled. Because Indian tribes are allowed to disregard the U.S. Constitution, even though tribal members are, by law, U.S. citizens, the Gomez family has no legal recourse.
Thank you Jim, and please keep reading the Santa Ynez Valley Journal.
3 comments:
With all due respect, the Dr. Johnson report had to do with the lineage of the Hunter family, whose ties, just as our own, are well chronicled.
John, I'm sure Dr. Johnson would have came to the same conclusion for your family. Even if there was a corn field instead of a casino.
It shouldn't be "who is a Native American". As I am still recognized as a Native Californian Indian by the BIA, even though I am no longer recognized by my tribe as an member.
It is undisputed that my ancestor Paulina Hunter lived in the original Temecula Indian village, and that she was forcibly removed with the rest of her people and dropped off at a place called Pechanga (since the records show her living in the village, and then also on the first census records). Pechanga was a place well known to her, as it was the birth place of her father.
Now more than a hundred years after her death, people are trying to say that she was some other kind of Indian, who just happened to live with the tribe in the original village, and the people from that tribe mistakenly believed she was a member. They say that she just happened to be kicked out of the original village to move to Pechanga with the rest of the Tribe to live. They say that the government mistakenly gave her a allotment on the reservation as a Pechanga Indian. They also say that she is listed on the original Pechanga Reservation records as a Temecula Pechanga Indian is also a mistake (that I might add happened year after year, every year until her death). That tribal members from the period must have also been mistaken when they gave signed and witnessed depositions stating that they knew her as a member of the tribe.
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