Tribe Wants to Deal Out 10% of Its Members
The Pechanga Band of Luiseno Mission Indians is seeking to drop 10% of its members, making them ineligible to receive casino profits -- amounting to more than $120,000 a year each.
The 130 people affected are fighting to retain their tribal membership, seeking a federal court ruling to prevent individual members of the tribe's enrollment committee from dumping them. The tribal leaders argue that the key ancestor of the group at issue cut her ties with the reservation 80 years ago. They also maintain that neither state nor federal courts have the right to intervene.
Court documents filed in the dispute have shed light on benefits of casino gambling that have not previously been disclosed: Each adult member of the Pechanga Band receives up to $10,000 a month in casino profit-sharing checks and other perks from the Temecula tribe.
Individual tribes are not compelled to disclose how much money their casinos produce. But the total revenue generated by the 53 tribes in California with casinos is estimated to be about $5 billion.
The Pechanga Band is not the only tribe embroiled in disputes over who qualifies to reap the benefits of casino revenues. Before the advent of casinos on reservations, tribal membership was not much of an issue because there were few benefits worth arguing over.
But today, five years after voters approved the law giving tribes exclusive rights to operate Nevada-style slot machines on their reservations, bloodline issues have become increasingly divisive.
In Northern California on Wednesday, the Redding Rancheria cut nearly one-fourth of its membership after a vote of seven tribal council members. The council rejected arguments from the ousted members that DNA tests showed a 99.89% probability that they were descended from Virginia Timmons, one of the rancheria's 16 original members.
With the Pechanga tribe, the people whose membership is in dispute claim descent from Manuela Miranda, granddaughter of Pablo Apish, the Pechanga Band headman who received a 2,223-acre land grant from California Gov. Pio Pico in 1845.
"But now, with all the money coming in -- and tribal family feuds raging on the reservation -- the enrollment committee is claiming my clients have insufficient documentation and that their applications should never have been approved," said Jon Velie, an Oklahoma attorney representing the group.
