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 and water rights in the greater San Diego area more than 10,000 years. And THEIR Grandfathers and Grandmothers were "pushed into the rocks," severely punished, culturally deprived, enslaved, and even murdered during the California Genocide in the greater Southern California area, “The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide” by Rupert Costo also Rupert Costo.
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.
In 1848, Indians in California outnumbered whites by ten to one — can you imagine that — walking out of your house today and hiking to your favorite park or beach in an 1848 California countryside?
As a tribal photojournalist for more than twenty years, 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 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 San Diego County native people. Today the chairman's 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 deeply touched by the environmental tragedy there — how the lack of water, the poisoned water, is devastating wildlife and the lives of the Cucapa Cocopah aboriginal Indians there.
But there is also great hope for our Southern California Native American aboriginal peoples, as well.
I've witnessed Kumeyaay elders, Kumeyaay people returning to the reservations, piecing together their languages — their cultural collective — to restore, rebuild and preserve their traditional ways by establishing their own Native American colleges, universities and study groups, 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 of Southern California....
KUMEYAAY HISTORY in San Diego
KUMEYAAY GATHERING of local Southern California Indians
Kumeyaay Bird Singers, Sycuan Indian Reservation, Kumeyaay Community College