Amah-Mutsun Ohlone Indians showed clear distaste Saturday for a
local casino proposal from the Stockton-based California Valley
Miwoks, but they didn’t let that dampen spirits at their annual
gathering Saturday.
Amah-Mutsun Ohlone Indians showed clear distaste Saturday for a local casino proposal from the Stockton-based California Valley Miwoks, but they didn’t let that dampen spirits at their annual gathering Saturday.
About 150 Amah-Mutsuns ate, talked, laughed and used games to teach their once-lost, now-found language Saturday in Las Animas Park – a place whose name, which means “souls of the dead” in Spanish, has Amah-Mutsun roots.
According to tribal historian Ed Ketchum, an old Gilroy land parcel acquired the name Rancho Las Animas because the local Indians believed this was where the dead tarried to atone for their earthly failings before moving on to their eternal resting place.
Meanwhile, about three or four miles south of Gilroy on state Highway 25, the California Valley Miwok Tribe and a coalition of local investors are looking at sites for a large casino resort.
“That’s so horrible,” said Amah-Mutsun member Nora Lopez, 31, of Redwood City, who grew up in Gilroy. “The motivation is greed.”
“It’s kind of an unspoken rule” that tribes don’t move in on each other’s turf, said Quirina Costillas of Ceres, who leads the Mutsun Language Foundation. Indians have long complained about the European seizure of Indian land, she said, but “now we have Indians stealing other Indians’ land.”
“It’s unacceptable for an outside tribe to move into our traditional tribal territory, and we as a tribe need to do what we can to stop this from happening,” Tribal Chairman Valentin Lopez said. He is urging his tribe to organize a formal resistance to the casino, perhaps by hiring law and public-relations firms. The tribal council will meet Saturday in Gilroy and discuss the issue.
The five California Valley Miwoks are federally recognized as a landless tribe and are thus eligible to negotiate with federal and state governments about establishing sovereign land, on which they could build a casino that would bypass local-government controls.
The Amah-Mutsuns claim to have about 600 enrolled members and believe about 300 to 400 more people could qualify for membership, according to Lopez, but the federal government does not formally acknowledge their existence.
The Miwoks must show evidence that their people once lived on the land they want for the casino, and their lawyer, Phillip Thompson of Washington, D.C., says he will provide documentation to prove this when necessary. He e-mailed The Free Lance a passage adapted from “California Indians” by Linda Spizzirri, which said both the Miwoks and Costanoan (aka Ohlone) people lived in the Bay Area and spoke the Penutian language.
“You look in the history books, and you find … the Ohlones and Miwoks were basically the same people, spoke the same language,” Thompson said last week.
That’s not accurate, said Costillas, who in the last eight years has used documents from Mission San Juan Bautista to single-handedly resurrect the Amah-Mutsuns’ historic language. Before her, the traditional tongue hadn’t been spoken in 70 years. Although she says she’s “not even semi-fluent yet,” she speaks Mutsun with her children and has translated Dr. Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham” as one of her many teaching tools.
Ketchum said it will be “interesting” to see how the Miwoks show kinship with the Ohlones. He said he knows of no such evidence.
Silvia Burley, the California Valley Miwoks’ tribal chairwoman, has declined to return reporters’ phone calls and referred all questions to Thompson.
The U.S. once recognized the Amah-Mutsuns, but Lopez claims the tribe’s status was stripped around the 1920s without due process. Now, after about 15 years trying to be recognized, Lopez says the tribe is less than a year away from filing a petition for reinstatement. He hopes the government will approve that request in three to five years but fears the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs could keep the tribe waiting for up to 25 years. Congress or the president could grant recognition faster, but Lopez said the tribe hasn’t ever been able to afford a lobbyist.
Lopez said he doesn’t know whether his tribe would seriously consider opening a casino of their own if they became recognized.
“I haven’t allowed us to discuss that,” he said. “I want to make sure the tribe is living for today and not for far off. … It would certainly be a consideration, but I would like to think of it as one of the last considerations. … (Historically,) our people did gamble … (but) we want to be a positive influence on our community.”
There has been no dialogue so far between the Amah-Mutsuns and California Valley Miwoks, Thompson said. Some Amah-Mutsuns have left phone messages for Burley, but these have all been “negative,” Thompson said. He said he plans to respond “when the time is appropriate.
“It’s nice to do from a standpoint of cultural, and traditional, and just plain respect, but it’s not a requirement,” he said.
