American Indian Culture and Research Journal

On a typically warm August morning in 2000 members of several Mission Indian bands from San Diego County’s San Luis Rey River Valley gathered at the Pala Reservation to sing and pray. Typical were not, however, the circumstances under which these people met this day. The gathering was to support California State Assembly Bill 2752, proposed to give the state’s Waste Management Board and its nine-member Native American Heritage Commission the authority to veto any landfill within a mile of an American Indian reservation or lands considered sacred to the American Indians. The bill was supported by local San Diego and Riverside County bands, including Pala, Pauma, La Jolla, Rincon, and Pechanga, as well as other Native groups throughout California, primarily to thwart a plan to establish a thirty-year county landfill in Gregory Canyon, approximately three miles east of Interstate 15 along State Route 76 and less than a mile from the Pala Reservation. Owned by Gregory Canyon, Ltd., a consortium led by a northern California investor, the landfill is to be directly adjacent to Gregory Mountain, at whose northwestern base sits Medicine Rock, sometimes referred to by the region’s Native peoples as Painted Rock or Big Rock. Also sacred to the Indians is Gregory Mountain itself, more commonly referred to by them as either Taquish Paki, meaning Taquish’s mountain, or Chokla. It is believed that the mountain is home to the spirit or deity Taquish, a powerful and malevolent figure in the peoples’ cosmology. Painted Rock and Taquish Paki are well known to the Indians of this region, as are other sacred sites and culturally interpreted rock formations throughout Southern California’s Indian Country.

Native Americans and their white rural neighbors have long been archetypal enemies in conflicts over natural resources. In particular regions of the country in the late twentieth century, tribes fighting for their treaty rights dealt with local white farmers, ranchers, commercial fishers, or sportfishers as the main obstacle to securing treaty-guaranteed access to fish, game, or water. As the tribes secured these rights, many rural whites joined an anti-Indian movement to oppose tribal sovereignty. Yet in some of these same resource conflict zones, beginning in the 1970s, members of Native and rural white communities unexpectedly came together to protect the same natural resources from a perceived outside threat. Environmental alliances began to bring together Native Americans and rural white resource users in areas of the country where no one would have predicted or even imagined them. In an evolution that has continued into the 2000s, some Native and rural white communities formed grassroots alliances that have become a key element in the protection of natural resources. By comparing case studies of these “unlikely alliances” in the states of Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Montana, South Dakota, and Wisconsin, I hoped to find reasons why these communities turned from conflict to cooperation. The evolution went through four general and often overlapping stages. First, Native Americans asserted their cultural autonomy and tribal sovereignty. Second, a backlash from some rural whites created a conflict around the use of land or natural resources. Third, the conflict declined in intensity, and the two groups initiated dialogue. Finally, the communities increased collaboration around the protection of their community livelihood and common natural resources. The neighboring groups believed that if they continued to contest the place, to fight over resources, there may not be any left to fight over. The stages of this evolution were complicated by divisions within both Native and white communities.

Within the last twenty years legalized gambling on American Indian reservations has become a major source of economic development for many tribes and nations. What is not well known is that a concomitant level of political power has manifested itself as Native Americans seek to preserve their recent economic gains. As a result of this development, Indian tribes and nations have engaged in a form of venue shopping that moves the political conflict over gaming from the courtroom to the statehouse. Recent evidence shows that when defending their gaming activities, American Indian tribes are behaving less like nations in a dispute with states in a federal context and more like organized interests seeking to influence state policy makers. Catalyzed by the substantial economic gains at stake in gaming, tribes are seeking access to non-Indian political institutions, such as state governments, as never before. Increasingly, tribal leaders are adopting interest-group behavior and employing sophisticated political strategies to gain access to the very institutions (state legislatures) that ultimately decide gaming issues. A recent multimillion-dollar lobbying scandal involving at least six Indian tribes from across the country highlights the stakes and importance of political influence for tribes. Several tribes, including the Tigua Indians of Texas, utilized Washington lobbyists to facilitate millions in tribal donations to important members of Congress. According to the investigation few of the donations reached their intended target. It appears tribes are having more success at the state level.

As Aaquumeh youngsters, we were constantly reminded to heed our elders, including the old ones who had lived before. We were encouraged to serve and respect them and to attend to their words, especially when they spoke of our heritage and past, so that we, in turn, could pass this knowledge on to the next generation. —Simon Ortiz American Indian children have systematically been denied the opportunity to learn about their origin stories and oral traditions in the mainstream American public school system and have suffered from approaches long documented as failing them. In fact, Indian Education: A National Tragedy—A National Challenge, a summary report of a special Senate subcommittee on Indian education, criticized schools as being ineffective and destroying the identity of Indian children. The report stated that “the goal, from the beginning of attempts at formal education of the American Indian, has been not so much to educate him as to change him.” The report emphasizes the need for more Indians to become involved in the education of their youth. Historically, Western European models of education did not take into consideration the rich resources available in American Indian communities, namely, elders and community members. Educators, researchers, and scholars genuinely interested in working with American Indian communities might do well to ask how traditional forms of Indian ways of learning about the world can be an integral focus of their work.

In 1743 Samson Occom, a twenty-year-old Mohegan, made his way north from his Native community to the English settlement of Lebanon, Connecticut. Occom eagerly anticipated learning to read through tutoring from Congregational minister Eleazar Wheelock. As he wrote, “When I got up there, he received me With kindness and Compassion and instead of Staying a Fortnight or 3 Weeks, I Spent 4 years with him.” A little more than a century later, in 1854, a student at the recently opened Cherokee Female Seminary wrote in the student newspaper this advice to her peers: “Let us begin now in new energy that we may gain that intellectual knowledge which will reward the hopes of our Nation, fitting us for doing much good among our people.” Some sixty years later, in 1915, during her first day at Santa Fe Indian School, a five-year-old girl from San Juan Pueblo clung to her mother’s shawl as she faced the challenges thrust upon her. Taken to the principal’s office, she pulled the shawl about her, recalling later, “The principal pointed to a clock up there and he asked me if I could tell the time. I just looked at it and I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to tell time, so I just covered my face [with my shawl] and the students laughed.”

In August of 1996 Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which President Bill Clinton then signed into law, “ending welfare as we know it.” For the past thirty years emphasis on work and self-sufficiency has slowly replaced income supports in welfare policy. Politicians assert that the new requirements, most notably the new time limits and work requirements have been a success. Others, however, are concerned by the social and economic implications of these new policies. Given the period of time that these policies have been in effect, we have the opportunity to review the assumptions on which PRWORA has been based and examine the practical consequences of the new welfare system. Research conducted since the late 1990s has addressed many aspects of the experiences of welfare clients living in urban areas. However, much less of the recent work has dealt with rural areas. Several scholars have examined the early experiences of rural welfare clients, especially minority group members. One such recent research effort focused on services provided under the new welfare policies and their effectiveness in assisting American Indian participants to find employment, leave welfare, and move out of poverty. This report to the National Congress of American Indians calls for additional research on several issues that have become key as the welfare program has matured and its requirements have changed within different state and community contexts.