-59th in a series–
Exit 33, Willows Road, Alpine (eastbound)
By Donald H. Harrison
VIEJAS INDIAN RESERVATION, California — I wrote the following story for the Sept. 19, 1997 edition of the San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage, of which I was editor. The sentiments expressed in this excerpt still apply today, and provide background for any visit to the Viejas Casino or Outlet Center at the Willows Road exit of the Interstate 8.
Indian honoree turns tables on his Jewish hosts
The American Jewish Committee tribute dinner at the downtown Hyatt Regency Hotel was to be a salute to Anthony Pico, the chairman of the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians, but Pico decidedly turned the tables, speaking so earnestly about the parallels between Native Americans and Jews, that he moved many in the audience to tears.
“We have both faced extermination and survived a holocaust,” Pico said after being presented the AJC’s David and Dorothea Garfield Human Relations Award.
“Indians were not sent to gas chambers; our prisoners-of-war camps came with blankets infected with disease that were more lethal than even bullets,” he said.
“In their zeal and greed to reach their manifest destiny,” the strangers took our land and took pride in the slogan that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” Pico added.
“In California, it was legal to shoot an Indian on sight, to purchase homeless Indians in auctions for slave labor, and steal Indian children from their parents to ‘save’ them from their primitive ways. Our religious ceremonies were banned as satanical and many have been lot from our memory as a result.”
Pico said that as a Native American, he can “sympathize with the ferocious love and militancy Jews bring to protecting Israel. We know the value of having a homeland, a place where you are free … to exercise your own destiny and be a family.”
“How Jews have managed to survive as a people amidst strangers in strange lands without a land for so many centuries is an absolute miracle as far as I am concerned,” Pico said. “Our reservations aren’t as grand as our original lands but they represent the continuation, security and a future to us. … Native Americans, like Jews, will always rise to fight when our homelands are threatened.”
“Tonight it seems appropriate for me to return the honor and pay tribute to the gifts that the Jewish community shares with all the world,” the Viejas chairman said. “One of the most important is showing how our people, struggling to be free, can preserve our humanity when the world chooses to treat us inhumanely,” he added.
“Jews have always been the first to speak out against injustice and inhumane practices in the United States,” he said. “I know the greatness in your heart and spirit comes from the terrors of the past. I also know from experience that it is not an easy thing to do to maintain tolerance and empathy for others when your own life is at stake. Living defensively takes a toll on the human spirit.”
“Too often the poverty of Indians takes on a romantic mystique. There is nothing romantic about being poor and powerless, scratching daily to eke out an existence that can bring out the worst as well as the best in people,” Pico said.
“It is a temptation for those who are oppressed to take on the cruelty of the oppressor.”
But Jews have chosen to turn the suffering into compassion, he said. “You have turned the pain of persecution into a crusade for the rights of others. And we commend you.”
“For Native Americans, this is a historic time … shaping a new future between our peoples, and the rest of America,” he said. I hope that this evening is the beginning of an alliance that will serve the cause of justice.”
“Tonight,” he added with rising emotion, “the tribes of Israel and the tribes of America have reached across their history and their experience to share something rare and wonderful. Tonight we honor the power of the human heart to love even when faced with hate. Tonight we celebrate the ability of people to rise above evil and cruelty. Tonight we honor the victory of dignity and pride over ignorance and prejudice. Tonight we honor humankind’s most noble cause and greatest challenge: living as a humanitarian.”
Pico thus brought to a crescendo an evening designed to forge a sense of unity among to diverse peoples. After Kumeyaay elder Tom Hyde offered a prayer in his language which he explained was to thank the Creator for arranging for his people “to be here among our friends the Jews,” Rabbi Lisa Goldstein of Hillel of San Diego responded with an invocation that told of the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam (repair of the world) as well as the saying of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslov “that each plant, each tree, each blade of grass, each has their own melody of praise that they sing to God.”
“So too does each nation, each people, each tribe, each community have its own role in repairing the world, to return the world to that state of perfection that God had intended,” she added before intoning ha motzi, the traditional Hebrew prayer over bread.
U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the keynote speaker for the event, emphasized what the Viejas Band has been doing to help repair the world since the operation of a gaming casino on the reservation enable the band to become economically self-sufficient.
“Here are a few of some of the diverse organizations they have supported,” Boxer enumerated: “The American Indian Women’s Center, Urban League of San Diego, San Diego Chinese Center, Chicano/ Chicana Youth Leadership Camp, Vietnam Veterans of America, Senior Women’s Basketball, Women’s Auxiliary of the San Diego Hebrew Home, San Diego Hospice, American Heart Association, San Diego Chamber Orchestra…”
The senator said “the very foundation that makes all these good works possible is under attack” with legislation pending in the United states Senate to strip Indian reservations of some degree of sovereignty, and efforts in the state of California to sharply entail the kinds of games that Indians may offer in their casinos.
Boxer won applause when she alluded to a fellow member of the Jewish community, who was not present at the event: “Fortunately here in San Diego County,” she said, “we have a U.S. attorney who respects tribal sovereignty, who has done everything in his power to resolve the dispute fairly and equitably. I am proud to say that I nominated Alan Bersin to be San Diego’s U.S. attorney.”
Under federal law, Indians are permitted to offer at their reservations only those games which are legal in the states where their reservations are located. Differences in interpretation of that law have caused disputes. For example, how different are automatically-dispensed California State Lottery tickets—in which the numbers are randomly assigned to the purchaser—from a video slot machine?
Bersin had resisted calls from the California state government to seize the video games on the reservations, and instead negotiated an agreement with the Indians that they would not expand such gaming pending a court decision in the dispute.
When the courts ultimately ruled against the Indians, Bersin and the Indians began implementing an agreement to phase the devices out – a phase-out that may result in considerably reduced revenues on the reservation.
Meanwhile the Pala Band of Indians (which currently as not gambling on its reservation) has been negotiating with the state of California a “model” compact, but the negotiations have dragged on for a long time, and fewer games then are now offered at the Viejas, Barona or Sycuan reservations are likely to be included.
Boxer suggested there is a perfect fit between the American Jewish Committee and the Viejas Band of Indians. Both “have had the wisdom and generosity of spirit to see that we are all in this together, that the best way to safeguard the rights of our community is to preserve an America where all groups can reside in peace and with mutual respect,” she said.
“The core mission of the American Jewish Committee—safeguarding the rights of their own people while nurturing a diverse America – is very much the credo of the Viejas,” she said. …
Another highlight was an announcement by four members of the State Assembly from San Diego: Republican Jan Goldsmith and Democrats Susan Davis, Denise Ducheny and Howard Wayne that the Legislature adopted a resolution calling for the renaming of a stretch of Interstate 8, east of El Cajon, passing the Viejas Reservation, as the Kumeyaay Highway. Said Wayne: “Chairman Pico, on behalf of the state of California, I say mazal tov.”
Next: Cowboys, Indians and Jews
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com