SAN JACINTO, CALIF. — After leading the Soboba Band of Luiseno Indians for nearly three decades, Robert Salgado is facing one of his greatest challenges: to try to set aside years of suspicion and trust the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.
It hasn't been easy for him.
For the last three weeks, the two sides have met behind closed doors to try to prevent the kind of violence that led to the deaths of three tribal members in wild shootouts with deputies last month.
Salgado says the path for the Sheriff's Department is clear.
"I'm not talking about them bending over backwards for us, but the Justice Department has told them in these meetings that, as chairman, I am like the president of the United States," Salgado said. "We are a sovereign nation."
An agreement is expected as early as Wednesday.
"We are dotting the I's and crossing the Ts now," Salgado said, sitting at his kitchen table. "It will be a memorandum of understanding about how we communicate in the future."
Salgado still bristles at how deputies responded to last month's shootings, how he's been treated and some of what's been said about the tribe.
He's also unhappy with Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Stone, who urged the tribe last week to boot him out as chairman and bring in "new blood."
"I don't think we will see an end of this unsettling loss of life on the reservation until there is a change of leadership," Stone said in a recent interview. "I have met with Salgado over the years, and our encounters have been professional; but I witness him in public and he reverts to this whole cowboys-and-Indians thing. We all understand what happened in the past, and we can't change it. We need a new generation looking forward."
Stone recently visited residents of a mobile home park near the reservation who complained of gunfire and bullets falling onto their roofs.
San Jacinto Mayor Jim Ayres and the City Council asked the tribe to withdraw an application to annex more than 500 acres of land for a hotel and casino complex until the violence is quelled.
But Salgado, 65, is having none of it.
No one, he says, has the right to tell Indians how to run their sovereign nations.
"Why didn't Stone come to me man to man and say that? And who is the mayor of San Jacinto to tell us what to do?" he asked.
"Where were these people when we had nothing? Now that we are self-sufficient, it makes them fearful."
