The Santa Rosa Removals

Christina Arzate grew up hearing the stories of her grandfather, Juan Castro Tortez, a cattle farmer. He would herd his flock down from the mountains of the Santa Rosa Band of Cahuilla Indians reservation to the San Jacinto Valley. He raised his five children on the reservation, including her mother, Sylvia Arzate Tortez, who told her of riding a wagon down the mountain with her father into the valley.

"[Juan] Castro 'Chihuahua' [Tortez], one of the few old-time Indian cowboys left," Lester Reed captioned this photo in his book "The Old Timers of Southern California." The 1967 book documented the lives and history of cattle drivers, with a section focusing on the Native vaqueros, like Castro, in the San Jacinto Valley and Riverside.

“It would take three days, and they would stop and leave all their pots and pans there so whenever they would come back they were able to provide for themselves on that long journey,” she recalled from her mother’s stories.

Arzate was raised in Winchester, Calif., but eventually her family decided to move back to the reservation.

“When I got married, one of the things that I always wanted to do was raise my children on the reservation,” Arzate said. “So all my kids were born there. We ended up staying there for probably over 38 years.”

In the 1970s, when Arzate moved back to raise a family of her own, the reservation saw a housing boom as many in her generation were moving back to do the same. She fell in love with her new home and dreamed of making the reservation a better, more fair place for her family and fellow tribal members. In the spirit of fairness, Arzate ran for tribal council with goals of boosting the tribe’s economy, helping negate drug and alcohol abuse, making education a priority and reducing nepotism with the allocation of tribal funds.

She won and was the tribal chairperson from 2003 to 2005. But in a meeting one day, Arzate and her family were asked to leave the room. When they came back, they learned of a tribal council vote to kick the whole family (over 25% of the tribe’s members) out. The family was presented with a letter questioning the validity of their family line and they were given a “pending” status, which barred them from a vote to finalize the council's decision. A new tribal chairperson was elected and the council would not hear any arguments; effectively making Arzate–once the most powerful member of the tribe– and her family, legally no longer Santa Rosa tribal citizens.

“I think that was their way of getting control of the tribe and doing it in a very dishonest way,” Arzate said. “I don't believe that any of them truly believe that we're not from the reservation, they just took advantage of an opportunity, and used that to remove us for their greed and for their power.”

The family tried to appeal to the courts, politicians in Washington, D.C., the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and other tribal members, but it was useless.

“The BIA totally refuses to protect the individual Indian like they're supposed to,” Arzate said. “This is not only happening on our reservation, it's happened all over the country. It’s an epidemic.”

Like the other estimated 8,000 to 11,000 Native Americans who have been kicked out of their tribes nationwide, Arzate and her family’s tribal citizenship, right to vote in tribal elections, tribal health care, housing and so much more was ripped from them by a vote they were not present for. Each federally recognized tribe is legally its own sovereign nation ruled by an elected tribal council. A 1978 Supreme Court case, Santa Clara vs. Martinez, solidified that the final say of membership is left to a tribal government–even if that government may profit politically and financially when members are kicked out. There is nothing the Supreme Court or even the president can do to reinstate a person’s membership.

“After that decision, tribes really became emboldened,” David Wilkins, a professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota and the lead researcher on tribal disenrollment, said.

Although the act of being kicked out of a tribe, known officially as tribal disenrollment, affects less than .5% of the Native American population, the number of affected people is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years.

According to indigenous rights lawyer Gabriel Galanda, Southern California, where 10% of disenrollment cases are currently happening, is the "hotbed for disenrollment" over money. Galanda attributes this rise in cases to political power plays, the creation of more tribal casinos, money distributed to tribal members from casinos and other tribal revenue (known as per capita payments), and other forms of payments California Indians may receive, like from the Indian Gaming Revenue Sharing Trust Fund.

“This is the new termination method adopted from the government that wants to destroy us–divide and conquer,” Arzate said. “I feel almost shameful to be Native because I see what we do to each other. It's not good and it's not healthy. It feels like you can't be proud of who you are because of the way that we've learned to treat each other. I don't know how to fix it.”

Galanda’s firm has represented over 1,000 disenrollees over the years.

“In almost every situation, you have tribal politicians who are hungry for sustained power and they use the power that they currently enjoy and the money that flows through the tribal government to basically cause people to be disenrolled who they see as their political opponents,” Galanda said. “To get people to support them, they typically offer increased per capita checks or other goodies to either buy their silence or their public support.”

At the root of disenrollment is the perks and sense of pride that come with tribal citizenship. Those who are enrolled in a tribe enjoy a sort of triple citizenship; belonging to their tribal nation as well as being a citizen of their state and of the U.S. However, this wasn’t established until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 when Congress granted automatic citizenship to Native Americans born in the U.S.

According to Wilkins, Native Americans are uniquely positioned to be, in his estimation, the most protected class of American citizens. But tribes kicking out members and the U.S. government’s inability to do anything about it, proves that it’s just a fantasy.

“It's not just wrong. It's immoral, unethical and illegal,” Galanda said about disenrollment. “Every indigenous person in my estimation, has a birthright to belong to their indigenous community. And that birthright should never be taken from them.”

And yet, it still happens all too often.

Kicked out in California

The numbers are uncertain, but Wilkins has been studying disenrollment since the 1990s and put together the most comprehensive set of disenrollment data in his 2017 book, “Dismembered: Native Disenrollment and the Battle for Human Rights.” Tribes are not required to publicly divulge if they disenroll members, so much of the data-collecting phase Wilkins painstakingly did with his wife and co-author Shelly involved a lot of word-of-mouth, contacting tribes directly, collecting newspaper articles and traveling the country.

It’s unclear if the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which oversees much of the statistical and financial obligations of tribes, even has the real number. What is for sure is that requests for records filed under the Freedom of Information Act to the Bureau Indian Affairs and the agency that oversees it–the U.S. Department of the Interior–by Wilkins and, more recently myself, were rejected. The Wilkins’ shoe-leather method of collecting data yielded a fair assessment–at least 8,000 people have been disenrolled from their tribes.

Anti-disenrollment activists like Rick Cuevas, a disenrollee from the Pechanga tribe, put the number much higher at around 11,000. This number, of course, comes from relying on self-reporting, word of mouth and looser datapoints, but is still representative of the country’s indigenous population struggling with what many call self-termination.

“Self-termination” comes from a period in American history called the Indian termination era. From the mid 1940s to the mid 1960s the federal government forcibly assimilated Native Americans–dissolving their reservations, ripping children from their families by forcing them into boarding schools, banning many traditional practices and criminalizing the use of native languages.

California was particularly affected during this era, as many of its tribes were terminated by the federal government in the 1950s. In the 1980s, many of these tribes’ leaders searched for and begged once enrolled members and their families to rejoin the tribe to gain numbers to be re-recognized as a tribe. Wilkins says he believes this may be a reason many California tribes are disenrolling today.

Though it’s an unfortunate and definitely dark stain in the country’s history, for California tribes, termination and what followed was not anything new. When the Spanish colonized the California coast and set up the mission systems, forced assimilations and enslavement of Native people were commonplace. California Indians, once a free and proud people, continued to be conquered–even after the Spanish conquistadors left. Franciscan monks, Californios and Mexicans all took a shot at conquering the golden west and its aboriginal people. During the California gold rush in the late 1840s, Americans seeking to force Natives off their lands and out of site continued. Some researchers believe that this state of constant fear bore itself into the very fabric of Native American identity–their DNA.

This concept, known as historical trauma, has many believing the California Native tribes are just physically incapable of not continuing the cycle of abuse.

“It causes some kind of psychic trauma in the native groups that were terminated,” Wilkins said. “And they sometimes use that without maybe even necessarily knowing what they're doing, and lash out at themselves by choosing to disenroll.”

This theory is especially interesting when examining tribes, like Santa Rosa, that do not have gaming, but still disenroll.

“People tend to think that it's solely because of gaming,” Wilkins said. “And that's not the case. Gaming is a major factor in some tribes, but it's not the dominant factor in all tribes by any stretch of the imagination.”

Sylvia Arzate Tortez (center, wearing purple) surrounded by her grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren at her 80th birthday party in December 2019 (photo courtesy of Sylvia Auguletto via Facebook).

Gaming tribes–or tribes that participate in the legal act of adult gambling through the creation of business ventures like casinos–generally split profits with the members of the tribe in what are known as per capita payments. In 2018, the National Indian Gaming Commission's annual report showed tribal casinos earned $33.7 billion in revenue. The Sacaramento region (formally known as Region II and includes California and Northern Nevada), earned over $9 billion that year–the most profitable region in the country, accounting for 25% of the revenue.

Per capita payments, or “per caps,” though are a point of contention in California, where many of the gaming tribes in the state have some of the highest per capita payments in the country. Pechanga, for example, gave each adult member of the tribe $268,000 a year in per capita payments in 2004, according to Cuevas, who says the number has definitely gone up.

Cuevas benefitted from the monetary gains that come from tribal disenrollments himself. When 135 of his tribe were disenrolled, Cuevas saw his annual per caps go from around $230,000 to the $268,000 he enjoyed until his own disenrollment and that of 100 more in 2004.

Santa Rosa saw these gains when disenrolling as well. As a non-gaming tribe, their allocations were called “revenue sharing” rather than per capita payments. These were distributed to them through a unique California program called the Indian Gaming Revenue Sharing Trust Fund, which distributes a portion of casino profits from gaming tribes to non-gaming tribes.

Christina’s daughter, Sylvia Auguletto, said Santa Rosa's share of the fund totaled around $1 million a year prior to their disenrollment.

Starting in 2003, the year before their disenrollment, Santa Rosa tribal members saw about $12,000 a year. When Arzate’s family–totaling about 60 members–were disenrolled from Santa Rosa, they made up nearly half of the tribe’s membership. Collectively, they lost over $11 million in revenue shares in the 16 years since their disenrollment. This doesn’t include the new generations of their family coming of age now.

Hope in History

At the time of their disenrollment, Auguletto was pregnant with her second child. The first of her children born without her being an enrolled member.

Sylvia Auguletto's three children, pictured in the early 2000s (photo courtesy of Sylvia Auguletto via Facebook).

“I always thought I had a home forever and I just remember feeling–not only for myself, but for my baby that wasn’t even born– like they had stolen something from us and my kids–their birthright,” Auguletto said. “They can't take our blood, but they took our identity.”

For Arzate and her family, the fight to be re-enrolled has been exhausting and fruitless. After the vote, she was given very little time to vacate the house she had lived in and spent the last 30 years working to pay off.

“They tried to keep us off of the reservations, even though we had our homes there,” she said. “They brought the sheriff's in and tried to keep us from going to our houses, to our homes and to our kids.”

According to Arzate and her family, sheriff’s deputies posted at the entrance to the reservation held a list of those allowed in. The family was barred from entering. In an appeal to keep her home, Arzate filed a lawsuit with the Intertribal Court of Southern California. However, her home was owned by the All Mission Housing Authority, an organization that provides affordable housing to enrolled members of 14 Southern California tribes. When Arzate lost her tribal citizenship, she lost her claim to her home and was forced to vacate.

“I was almost done paying for my house. I only owed a couple thousand,” Arzate said. “I had plans to retire early because I knew that I would have a place to stay. I could be stable and I could enjoy my grandkids and not be worried about work. But it was just so easy for them to destroy all our lives.”

Some of her family, like her mother, still live on the reservation because they owned their homes and the land at the time of disenrollment. But Arzate’s old home is now owned by the tribe and rented out for profit to other tribal members, she said.

Auguletto said that family still living on the reservation is allowed to have guests, but cannot have a disenrolled family member live on their property. She owned a trailer parked on her grandmother’s property. When the tribe found out, her grandmother was told to expel her.

“They sent my grandma a notice saying that she would be evicted if I didn't leave the reservation,” Auguletto said.

Not only did they lose their citizenship and homes, but their healthcare as well. The local Indian Health clinic can only provide basic care to patients not enrolled in a tribe.

“They've cut our services,” Arzate said. “I have an uncle right now that needs heart medicine and I know that he's probably gonna die because he can't get into the clinic and he can't get that kind of care. We have to find other alternative ways of living and caring for ourselves.”

Arzate’s worry for her uncle has brought up a new fear for the family–burial.

“When we die,” Arzate said, struggling through tears. “Are they even going to let us be buried there in our family plot?”

Arzate worries about how to explain to her grandchildren that they are Native, but they do not have the same privileges that their other Native friends and family may have.

In February, Arzate tried to take her grandchildren to a college fair for Native American students, but could not because she and her grandchildren are not enrolled members of a tribe.

“The kids can't get scholarships for being native because they are not enrolled members,” Arzate said.

The majority of tribal and Native American scholarships require the student be an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe. Her grandchildren also lost the opportunity to be in sports programs paid for by the tribe.

In the years that followed their disenrollment, Auguletto said she could not shake the feeling of loss. Almost 15 years later, though still hurt, the family has started to realize that the situation may be irreparable.

“One of the hardest things that I ever went through was having to accept that's the way it is now and that I have to be able to not let it destroy me. I had to let it go,” Auguletto said.

But Arzate still holds onto hope that one day, when a new generation takes over the tribal council, they will look at records and hear family stories and realize the mistake that was made.