By Michael Fleeman
ASSOCIATED PRESS
PALA -- Robert Smith remembers the rattlesnakes, big diamondbacks that lurked in the underbrush he was hacking away with a machete to make room for an avocado grove, many years ago.
"I was born and raised here in Pala. I started at the bottom, as a laborer," says the 37-year-old Smith, who is now chairman of the Pala Indian tribe and hopes to fight poverty by building California's first state-approved Indian casino.
But the plan has made the Palas the snakes in the grass. The Palas are split from other California tribes, which see the compact with the state as a tactic by Gov. Pete Wilson to rein in their own lucrative but technically illegal casinos.
Smith speaks with pride about the 55-acre avocado grove, the major source of income for the tribe in northern San Diego County, accounting for nearly all of the Palas' $1.4 million budget.
But it hasn't been enough. Despite a $500,000-a-year profit from the grove and money from other, smaller ventures, the Palas are among the state's poorest tribes. Indeed, they're among the nation's poorest people -- beset by 40 percent unemployment and household incomes averaging just $12,000 a year.
Desperate for new income, in March they entered into an agreement with the Republican governor to allow casino gambling on the reservation, 40 miles north of San Diego, in a scenic valley in the Palomar Mountain range.
The deal opens the way for the Palas to build a casino on what is now a 20-acre oak-shaded campground five miles off Interstate 15. Smith expects the project will create 600 jobs and bring in $42 million a year.
But the pact is opposed by richer tribes that already have gambling operations since it contains provisions that they fear will cut into their own casino businesses and infringe on their sovereignty.
The Palas' compact limits the tribe to 199 machines, unless they buy "credits" from non-gambling tribes. And it requires them to use an untested kind of machines, which look and play like Las Vegas slots but actually follow the same mathematical principles as California's own state-run lottery.
Forty of the state's 110 tribes already have gambling. Some run glittering, Vegas-style casinos, and they don't want to be forced into deals that limit the size of their operations or the kind of slots.
Now, under the complicated federal law that governs reservation gambling, the other tribes have until May 13 to sign a compact like the Palas' -- or face losing their machines.
Gambling tribes have fought the agreement on several fronts, waging a court fight and drafting a measure for the Nov. 3 ballot intended to circumvent the pact.
"My tribe is now threatened by a narrowly defined, special-interest agreement that reminds me of past promises of Washington, D.C., that were later broken as the result of greed and subterfuge," Richard M. Milanovich, chairman of the Agua Caliente Indians in Palm Springs, testified at a recent Sacramento hearing.
After failing to persuade a federal judge to hear their case, the tribes and their supporters took their cause to state court. A lawsuit by the tribes and their supporters, filed this week in San Francisco, seeks to have the Pala compact overturned.
For Smith, every attack on the compact comes with a sting. Although the other Indians are careful not to personally criticize him, he hears the whispers -- that the Palas are betrayers, that Smith doesn't have the support of his own members, that Smith was duped.
The worst moment came at the Sacramento hearing, attended by hundreds of Indians who oppose the compact and just a few in favor.
"It's a little uneasy sitting up there taking the attacks," he said. "I'm a human being like everybody else."
But Smith called the pact "the best deal for our tribe," an opportunity to "get our foot in the door," leaving open the possibility that after Wilson leaves office at year's end, Smith and other Indians can renegotiate a better deal with the new administration.
"It's very important to the tribe," he says. "It would help us enjoy the things we don't now have and do more for the members."
The debate rages, ironically, just as the Palas remember their own darkest hour. On the morning of May 12, 1903, their people were forced by federal authorities out of their homeland, in what is now Warner Springs, to the reservation 30 miles away.
The "eviction," now marked on the first Saturday of May with a journey back to Warner Springs, followed a number of efforts by the Indians to hold onto the land, which had become popular with white visitors because of the sulfur springs.
Pala literature tells a story with shades of the gambling battles to come: Tribes united in the mid-1800s to attack foreign settlers in Southern California, but the revolt failed when a Cahuilla chief dropped out of the coalition.
The lack of unity cost a revolt leader his life -- he was executed -- and a village where the Pala ancestors lived was burned.
Today, it is the Pala tribe that has left the coalition, or, in their view, the coalition left the Pala tribe. Either way, the Palas are on the outside, but tribal leaders say they had no choice.
"I can understand the other tribes' feelings, but I also feel like we should share in the same success that they have had," said Pala tribal elder Nadeane Nelson, 79, who works in the tribe's visitor center. "It's been a lot of years to have to work with almost nothing to keep things up. Now we'll have something."
Edition: SRVT, Section: D, Page: 19