The Cupeno Removal - Part 4

Part 4 on the Cupeno Removal by Jeff Smith at the San Diego Reader is out.

Here is a link to the article:

At a certain point, the Cupeño stopped looking back. 10 This land is mine: The Cupeño removal of 1903, part four of four by Jeff Smith

Here is an excerpt:

During the meal, Inspector Jenkins’s head count totaled 97. Manuella Sibimoat was missing. When a Union reporter asked why the old woman would flee, Isabella Owlinguish said that when she and Manuella were young, they were held prisoners at Pala. “It was a revolting story,” wrote the reporter, “like a tale out of the middle ages.”

After she spoke, Isabella “threw off her shawl and shouted ‘see!’ and showed great calloused marks on her thin shoulders. ‘These we had to keep fresh our memories of Pala mission! What we suffered there how many years ago I cannot say, fifty, sixty, maybe more. Bearfoot could not forget. She would not look again upon that place… Does the white man think it strange that we did not want to come?’”

Full Article:

At a certain point, the Cupeño stopped looking back. 10 This land is mine: The Cupeño removal of 1903, part four of four by Jeff Smith

The Cupeno Removal - Part 3

Part 3 of a 4 part series by Jeff Smith at the San Diego Reader is out.  It is titled:

Against the Inevitable - This land is mine: The Cupeño removal of 1903, part three of four

Here is an excerpt:

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On April 19, Cecilio Blacktooth and three other tribesmen rode to San Bernardino to buy horses. “We will never give in,” he told the Los Angeles Herald, “but will perish gladly if the last sight we see is our Agua Caliente.

“Some will scatter to other tribes, but the old men and women would not leave and have begged to be taken above Warner’s Ranch in the mountains…to look down upon the graves of their ancestors.” Pala is “so barren,” he added, “not even rabbits will live there.”

Blacktooth didn’t mention that at least 15 Luiseño Indian families already did. They lived on allotments assigned by the government ten years prior. The relocation would force them to share a reservation with another tribe.
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Read the full article at this link:

Against the Inevitable - This land is mine: The Cupeño removal of 1903, part three of four

The Cupeno Removal Part 2

Jeff Smith at the San Diego Reader continues with his 4 part series on the Cupeno Removal.

Here is a link to part 2:

In search of the unwanted, This land is mine: The Cupeño removal of 1903, part two of four

Here is an excerpt:

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On April 5 the San Diego Union ran a headline: “WARNER’S RANCH INDIANS SAY THEY WILL NOT MOVE TO THE NEW RESERVATION; THINK THEY WOULD STARVE.” The Cupeños are almost all united against the move, the story said, and will “scatter to the hills rather than go to Pala to starve.”

Lummis told officials in the Department of the Interior that Pala was the tribe’s second choice for a home.

“Not true!” said Josephine Babbitt, schoolteacher at Kupa for 12 years. “They had no second choice.” Babbitt told the Cupeños that Lummis was a liar. She also pointed out that, while he said the Cupeños would have “a valley all their own,” they must share the reservation with another tribe: 76 Pala Indians already lived there.


Read the full article here-->   In search of the unwanted, This land is mine: The Cupeño removal of 1903, part two of four

The Cupeno Removal

There is an article in the San Diego Reader about the Cupeno Removal of 1903.

Here is a link and an excerpt:

This land is mine: The Cupeño removal of 1903 The blackest of crimes committed against Warner Ranch Indians.

By Jeff Smith, March 30, 2016

Visitors to the Indian village at Kupa were often struck by the silence. No loud voices, no sudden shouts. Even children played quietly. A stillness spread from the bowl-shaped Valle de San Jose below, past Warner’s Ranch, and up to where Cupeños busied themselves with the tasks of the moment — tasks their people had performed since time for them began.

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On May 13, 1901, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the California Supreme Court’s decision: J. Harvey Downey and his stockholders legally owned Agua Caliente — aka Kupa. It did not matter that the Cupeños lived there centuries before the Spanish came. In the original case, Barker vs. Harvey, attorneys for John Downey, J. Harvey’s uncle, argued that no natives were on the site in 1844, when John J. Warner obtained the land grant. And they never filed a claim to the Board of Land Commissioners in 1851.

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Courts from San Diego to Washington DC read “vacant and abandoned” to mean no Indians were on the property. But in 1893, Warner said that wasn’t true. Eighty-five years old and gravely ill, Warner gave a deposition at his home in Los Angeles. The southern half of the valley was abandoned, he said, not the northern, which included Agua Caliente/Kupa. He “never heard of them being displaced.” The original grant even stipulated that he could not interfere with roads and other usages,” meaning the native village.
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Read the full article at the link below.

This land is mine: The Cupeño removal of 1903 The blackest of crimes committed against Warner Ranch Indians.

Pala's Chairman Robert Smith Writes A Letter

The Chairman of the Pala Band of Mission Indians wrote a letter to the San Diego Reader in response to an article written by Siobhan Braun titled Can you find the big secret in this casino? Reservation’s reservations.

You can read all of Chairman Smith's letter here under the heading Attention to Detail:

San Diego Reader Editorial Inbox - Attention to Detail by Robert Smith

Part of Chairman Smith's letter reads:

"Additionally, the blood requirement to receive a land allotment in 1913 for any Native American was 50 percent. This was determined by the federal government, not by the Pala tribe."

Margarita Brittain received an allotment in 1913 along with all her children which makes her children 1/2.

Here is the 1913 Allotment roll.  Margarita Brittain is listed as 4/4 and her children as 1/2.  Thus all the disenrolled members of Pala are eligible for enrollment under Pala's Constitution as they posses 1/16 Blood of the Band.

1913 Pala Enrollment Approved by Secretary of the Interior by kupa821