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.