The Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation and the Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians hail from neighboring lands that stretch from the vineyards of wine nation to the redwood forests of Northern California.
Their ancestors spoke totally different languages, however for generations communicated by means of the common gestures of dance. And each tribes have persevered regardless of a historical past of violence by the hands of outsiders and their compelled removing from territory they’ve known as house for hundreds of years.
Now, a dispute over a on line casino has pushed a wedge between the 2 tribes and raised questions in regards to the U.S. authorities’s method to creating amends for stealing their lands and threatening their cultures.
On the middle of the argument is a 128-acre hillside parcel in Solano County close to the tidal flats of San Pablo Bay, a 45-minute drive from San Francisco.
The 128-acre parcel the place the Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians desires to construct a $700-million on line casino resort in Vallejo, east of San Francisco.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Occasions)
The Scotts Valley Band desires the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs to put the land right into a federal belief, which might enable the tribe and buyers who personal the property to construct a $700-million on line casino resort on it.
The Trump administration in 2019 rejected the request to put the land into belief on the grounds that Scotts Valley had not established a ample historic connection to the parcel to warrant approval. However in 2022, a federal choose overturned that call, saying the federal government overstepped its authority and primarily based its dedication on defective reasoning.
Now the Yocha Dehe Nation accuses the Biden administration of reviving the mission with out severely contemplating its opposition to the plan.
Yocha Dehe leaders insist the property falls inside the conventional homeland of their Patwin ancestors and that the tribe ought to have a say in what occurs on the parcel.
“It’s a bit disrespectful to have a tribe come from 90-plus miles away to develop one thing in our homeland,” says Yocha Dehe Tribal Chairman Anthony Roberts.
Scotts Valley Tribal Vice Chairman Jesse Gonzalez disputed the Yocha Dehe tribe’s characterization of the mission, saying his folks have all the time been clear about their objectives for the land and the explanation why they’re justified in constructing on the parcel.
“For generations, our folks have confronted important hardships, together with the lack of our ancestral lands, making us one of many few landless Indian tribes in the USA,” Gonzalez stated by electronic mail. “This mission represents a transformative alternative to reverse this historical past, permitting our Tribe to reestablish a homeland and construct a sustainable future for our members.”
The Scotts Valley mission guarantees to turn out to be one of the vital high-profile landmarks within the North Bay. Plans name for an eight-story gaming advanced with a on line casino that might be open 24 hours a day, seven days every week, together with eating places, an occasions ballroom and an adjoining growth with 24 single-family properties and a tribal administration constructing. The mission additionally units apart 45 acres as a organic protect.
The on line casino would create an estimated 3,640 full-time jobs — a boon to a county that has the very best price of individuals dwelling beneath the federal poverty line within the Bay Space, in accordance with information collected by the county.
Farmland of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation in Brooks, Calif.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Occasions)
A spokesman from the Bureau of Indian Affairs assistant secretary’s workplace stated the company had no additional remark in regards to the mission past the one-page electronic mail it despatched The Occasions confirming that the 30-day public remark interval for an environmental affect assessment is underway.
Yocha Dehe Tribal Treasurer Leland Kinter, 48, stated his greatest remorse, apart from what he sees as an aura across the mission, is that his tribe and the leaders of the Scotts Valley tribe haven’t had significant contact in years due to the dispute.
To point out solidarity, he stated, the Yocha Dehe nation as soon as provided monetary help to the Scotts Valley tribe in the event that they agreed to construct on a extra culturally acceptable web site.
“We’ve got not talked to them since that point,” Kinter stated.
Anthony Roberts, tribal chairman of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, wears Indigenous jewellery made from abalone shell.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Occasions)
On a current morning, Roberts and Kinter surveyed the proposed on line casino web site from a car parking zone by the junction of Interstate 80 and California 37.
Craggy outcroppings rise from the golden slopes and oak groves of a hill the place cows graze on a solitary ranch. Grooves within the hillside squiggle down towards a pasture and bike path at its base.
Kinter and Roberts stated the indentations are streambeds that their Patwin ancestors dedicated to reminiscence for after they wanted water. Tribe messengers, often called runners, would have spent their days sprinting over hills and ridges like these from one village to a different, they stated, whereas miners would have quarried rock from the hill to make stone mortars and different instruments.
Roberts, 52, can’t see how such a large growth wouldn’t desecrate what’s to his folks a sacred and traditionally wealthy locale. And he wonders how the mission seems to be transferring ahead with restricted enter from his tribe or most people.
The Solano County Board of Supervisors, members of California’s congressional delegation and different leaders have additionally voiced opposition to the Scotts Valley Band’s makes an attempt to construct a on line casino within the space over time.
U.S. District Courtroom Choose Amy Berman Jackson wrote in her opinion supporting the Scotts Valley Band that the entire cause for the Indian gaming legislation is to offer dispossessed tribes “some semblance of the standing they loved earlier than, with the chance to maintain themselves economically.”
However the Yocha Dehe leaders query why Scotts Valley has sought to make use of a particular provision within the legislation that permits a federally acknowledged tribe to assemble a on line casino exterior its conventional house base — offered it could possibly present each a modern-day hyperlink and a “important” historic connection to the parcel it desires to construct on.
Roberts stated Scotts Valley can’t meet that threshold.
The Yocha Dehe’s historical connection to Solano County is obvious in some ways, Roberts stated. The tribe has been concerned in efforts throughout the North Bay to determine and correctly deal with Patwin burial grounds, human stays, historical relics and lumps the place ancestors who lived close to the shoreline piled their discarded mollusk shells.
The lads stated they’re sure that the on line casino parcel incorporates unearthed cultural gadgets too.
Close to the Solano County Superior Courtroom in Fairfield stands a statue of Chief Solano a frontrunner of the Suisunes, a Patwin folks of the Suisun Bay area of Northern California.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Occasions)
The county’s namesake is Patwin Suisun chief Sem-Yeto, who was given the identify of the Spanish missionary Francisco Solano at his baptism. A 12-foot statue of Chief Solano elevating his hand stands exterior an occasions middle within the county seat of Fairfield. A number of cities within the county are phonetically tied to Patwin villages — Suisun, Soscol, Ulatis and Putah — in accordance with the county’s official homepage.
The tribe lately led an effort with the Solano Land Belief to alter the identify of 1,500-acre Rockville Hills Regional Park to Patwino Worrtla Kodoi Dihi — that means “Southern Rock Dwelling of the Patwin folks.”
For Roberts, the on line casino dispute is about greater than Indian gaming rights and capitalism. Yocha Dehe operates its personal profitable on line casino, golf resort and large-scale farm farther north within the Capay Valley, close to town of Brooks.
It’s in regards to the means of a folks to say their tradition and affect in a state the place Indigenous societies had been as soon as prone to erasure.
The on line casino disagreement comes as landless tribes and tribes on reservations make strides towards reclaiming and co-managing stolen territory in California.
Oakland’s Indigenous-woman-led Sogorea Te’ Land Belief and members of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Nation lately held a celebration to mark their preservation of a 2.2-acre sacred web site often called the West Berkeley Shellmound.
On the fifth anniversary of his apology to Indigenous Californians for the injustices they’ve endured, Gov. Gavin Newsom lately introduced the state would assist the Shasta Indian Nation reclaim 2,800 acres of its ancestral land as a part of historic Klamath River dam and reservoir removals close to the border with Oregon.
The Yocha Dehe tribe’s advocacy helped to safe the current growth of Berryessa Snow Mountain Nationwide Monument by President Biden and the renaming of a sacred mountain inside the monument to Molok Luyuk — Patwin for “Condor Ridge” — in honor of the endangered fowl’s significance in tribal beliefs.
Gonzalez says his tribe’s presence within the space can also be nicely documented, and his ancestors ceded the land in an unratified 1851 treaty.
“America sought this land from our ancestors due to their long-standing presence and use of the realm,” Gonzalez stated. “Actually, the federal authorities acknowledged and decided that Scotts Valley’s ancestors possessed the authority to cede the land.”
A view of Clear Lake.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Occasions)
The Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians headquarters is positioned to the west of Patwin territory in Lake County, close to the place one of the vital horrific acts of violence dedicated towards Indigenous folks in U.S. historical past occurred.
On Reclamation Highway, a small historic marker beside Clear Lake recollects the Bloody Island Bloodbath at Bo-no-po-ti. On Might 15, 1850, the U.S. Cavalry, aided by vigilantes, murdered scores of Pomo folks, most of them ladies and kids, on the false suspicion that they had been concerned within the killing of two white settlers.
Such aggressions compelled Pomos to disperse removed from the lake, together with to the North Bay.
Arguing its case for the on line casino in courtroom paperwork, Scotts Valley famous that one of the vital essential ancestors of the present-day band, Chief Augustine, was baptized at a mission a brief distance from Vallejo in Sonoma.
Augustine and different displaced Pomos toiled as compelled laborers within the space — tending cattle, herding cattle to slaughter at San Pablo Bay and constructing adobe homes in Sonoma. Most ultimately made their approach again to Clear Lake.
The location of the Bloody Island Bloodbath, a mass killing of indigenous Californians in 1850 by the U.S. Cavalry at Clear Lake in Lake County.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Occasions)
Each the Pomo and Patwin folks suffered additional indignities within the twentieth century after the U.S. designated small reservations for them, solely to reverse course and strip them of these lands and their federally acknowledged standing within the Fifties and ’60s. The tribes needed to combat by means of the courts to win again their federal recognition, a authorized standing required for lands to be positioned in belief for them to construct on.
This cycle of governmental theft, recompense and reinjury lives on, the federal choose stated in her 2022 ruling.
In rebuffing Scotts Valley, the Trump administration “did not grapple with the inescapable historic incontrovertible fact that Scotts Valley was a tribe that had its recognition and land stripped away by the federal authorities and its folks scattered to the winds,” Berman Jackson wrote.
Roberts and Kinter don’t dispute that the Scotts Valley Pomo folks deserve justice for the atrocities and land seizures. However whereas Berman Jackson rejected the concept that the on line casino would drawback the Yocha Dehe, its leaders counter that the on line casino mission represents an occasion of the U.S. unfairly infringing on the sovereignty of 1 tribe in an effort to atone for injustices dedicated towards one other.
“Two wrongs don’t make a proper,” they stated.
“The Pomo folks have their very own story that facilities across the lake — it’s a really vibrant historical past,” Kinter stated. “The historical past right here is ours.”
