MORONGO INDIAN RESERVATION — She arrived here 66 years ago as a bride, a white scarf over her head, her prim dress buttoned high under her chin. Today, her smile is still easy, her mind still sharp, her tongue as quick as those that flicker from the mouths of rattlesnakes that burrow into the desert outside her home.
But Catherine Siva Saubel is 86 now, a widow with white, wispy hair and deep furrows in her cheeks. And she fears that she may die a relic. Not just a relic of a vanishing Native American culture, a fate that she has long accepted. But a relic of a time when Native Americans had not yet found their path out of poverty: the casino.
In recent weeks, the Legislature abruptly turned its back on a series of projects that would have significantly expanded gambling in California. For Native American bands accustomed to getting their way in the Capitol, it was a flurry of inactivity; six tribes' proposals failed amid infighting and partisan rancor.
Saubel's small and scattered tribe -- she is chairwoman of the Los Coyotes band of Cahuilla and Cupeno Indians -- was lost in the dust cloud.
With the backing of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Los Coyotes band had hoped to team up with another small tribe, the Big Lagoon Rancheria band of Humboldt County, to build a $160-million casino-resort complex not on reservation land but in Barstow. But those plans are on hold at least until the Legislature's 2007 session and are not a sure bet.
For that, Saubel blames not the usual anti-gambling interests but her fellow Native Americans. The Los Coyotes-Big Lagoon proposal failed after avid and costly lobbying by larger Indian bands, all of whom already operate casinos.
Saubel readily acknowledges that she is trapped by contradiction. She believes the wealth generated by casinos, which benefits about 9% of California's Native Americans, has contributed to the demise of Indian culture. Yet she is fighting to build a casino of her own because she sees it as her tribe's only hope for economic salvation.
"These people call themselves Indians. They don't know anything about the Indian culture," she said on a recent morning in her home on the Morongo Indian Reservation. "What we have, we have always shared. We respected one another. But not anymore. Money has corrupted them all."
'I Just Knew'
