KUMEYAAY OPINION

EDITOR's FORWARD:

With the slightest few facts about Kumeyaay Indian history in San Diego County, it seems unconscionable (to me) that a reasonable person would dare judge or attempt to interfere with the Native American aboriginal people's legal and moral right to sovereign self government.
After all, THEIR ancestors held the land in the greater San Diego area more than 10,000 years, and THEIR Grandfathers and Grandmothers were severely punished, culturally deprived, enslaved, and even murdered during the California Genocide and California Mission periods in the greater Southern California area, “The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide” by Rupert Costo1 also Rupert Costo2.
We need only consider HOW our non-Native races colonized and took 'ownership' to the jewels of the Kumeyaay ancestral lands — beautiful San Diego Bay, beautiful La Jolla, beautiful Point Loma, beautiful Rancho Sante Fe, beautiful Ensenada, beautiful Tijuana, all the beautiful beaches and parks in Southern California — to put the aboriginal California Native American Indigenous issues into some factual perspective.
As a tribal photojournalist for more than a decade, I witnessed firsthand the historic conditions of Native American Indian poverty, the lost cultural direction, and how the Kumeyaay Casinos and Indian Gaming casino revenue is slowly providing some financial relief to some Native American aboriginal peoples for the unnatural economic and spiritual burdens that non-native officialdoms so unmercifully thrust upon them.
In particular, I recall a well-known Kumeyaay tribal chairman, a sovereignty defender, who told me the "big thing" on the reservation when he was a child was when the "government cheese truck" came by and "handed out cheese" to the Indians so they could eat. These were the U.S. Government commodities trucks, food distribution programs for Native Americans in the 1960s.
Times have certainly changed for some of the San Diego County aboriginal peoples. Today his small Kumeyaay band gives away millions of dollars a year to charity, his Kumeyaay tribe employs thousands of people, and his Kumeyaay band pays millions of dollars in payroll taxes.
Still, many Indigenous peoples in the greater Southern California area are struggling to survive.
I recently visited EL MAYOR, Baja California, Mexico, the Colorado River Delta Region, where the Colorado River empties into the Gulf of California, and I was greatly touched by the environmental tragedy there, how the lack of water, the poisoned water, is devastating wildlife and the lives of the Cucapa Cocopah Indigenous people there, "Fighting Over the Last Drops as Colorado River Reaches Its End" CNN.
But there is also great hope for our Southern California Native American tribal peoples, as well.
I've seen Kumeyaay elders, Kumeyaay people returning to the reservations, piecing together their languages — their cultural collective — to restore and preserve their traditional ways by establishing their own Native American colleges and universities, like Kumeyaay Community College, on the Sycuan Indian Reservation, and getting their young people involved and active through education and traditional, cultural ceremony.
Yes, I see a very bright future ahead for the Kumeyaay-Diegueño peoples....

GARY G. BALLARD
Webmaster, Editor

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Kumeyaay Bird Singers, Sycuan Indian Reservation, Kumeyaay Community College (formerly DQ University at Sycuan), are pictured here in this photograph around a burning campfire learning and singing ageless traditional Yuman bird songs.

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