Our Cousin 'Aamokat has some very valid points and would like an answer from the CPP.
Explain and defend specifically the list of violations below:
1. Our family member and members of the Manuela Miranda family who were also disenrolled found evidence of irregularities on the enrollment committee including not enrolling people who met the Band's membership requirements who were lineal descendants of enrolled tribal members in good standing.
2. Our family member and members of the Manuela Miranda family then informed the tribal council of the irregularities.
3. The tribal council and the enrollment committee were then asked to have those enrollment committee members in question to not be allowed to rule on the cases of my family and that of the M. Mirandas due to bias and conflict of interest.
4.Among the people who turned in challenges to my family's and the M. Miranda family's tribal membership were nieces, nephews, sons and daughters of two of the enrollment committee members in question. So those committee members should have stepped aside in ruling on the disenrollees cases also on the basis of conflict of interest.These are clear violations of Article V of the Band's constitution and bylaws which states below:
"IT SHALL BE THE DUTY OF ALL ELECTED OFFICIALS OF THE BAND TO UPHOLD AND ENFORCE THE CONSTITUTION, BYLAWS, AND ORDINANCES OF THE TEMECULA BAND OF LUISENO MISSION INDIANS; AND, ALSO TO UPHOLD THE INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS OF EACH MEMBER WITHOUT MALICE OR PREJUDICE."
So read your tribal constitution and then get back to us.Anyone else notice how our anonymous critic gets less and less specific in his posts after we shoot down his arguments time and time
again?
CONTINUED
Explain and defend specifically the following list below:
1. In our disenrollment cases our attornies were not allowed to be present at any of the disenrollment proceedings.
2. We actually got letters from the tribal council before our appeal hearings that "note taking implements of any kind will not be allowed in the hearing room."WE WERE NOT ALLOWED TO TAKE NOTES OR EVEN TO ASK QUESTIONS!
3. We were denied copies of any of the official transcripts of any of the disenrollment proceedings.
comment: that made it very hard to mount a defense and prove that key parts of the disenrollment procedures were not followed because without those transcripts it was our word verses the committee's word.
4. Articles were added on by the Enrollment Committee after the deadline had passed for us to turn in counter arguments against those items which we had never seen beforehand.
5. The tribal council issued a bogus ruling that our family, the Hunters, were not included in the petition to end all disenrollments that had been passed the previous year.
Note: This ruling was issued just two days before the Record of Decision informing my family we were disenrolled and seven months after the law ending disenrollment had been passed.Follow up note: The tribal council claimed that the Enrollment Committee could not be overruled by the General Membership despite the fact that a sitting councilman is in the tribe today because the General Membership had overturned the committee' decision not to enroll his family twenty years previous. By the way, that sitting councilman is none other than Russell "Butch" Murphy.
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Pechanga
The Drip "Source of Life"
15 comments:
To the disenrollees: Likely no answer will satisfy all of you. The questions here go to process, not facts relating to membership qualifications. The few diehards who cannot accept their true condition as non-members, as proved by their disenrollment, will continue tilting at windmills. Plain as day, you disenrollees simply did have the facts on your side. Pablo Apis never had the status of a Pechanga Indian. He died about 3 decades before the establishment of the Pechanga Indian Reservation. Hence, he could never have played a leadership role there. Your direct descent from Pablo Apis thus left you with your Indian ancestry intact while separating you from a Pechanga origin. In turn, your removal from the membership roll corrected an error in it. End of story. Go on with your lives as Americans.
The questions here go to process?
Are you kidding? Because we never got a fair trial as the processes, as they were implemented, violated Pechanga law all the way through.
Are you saying that the ends justify the means and that people can be accused of something at Pechanga, in this case not being legitimate citizens of the Band, and can just be convicted without a fair trial?
Withour fair and impartial procedures lawfully followed a society becomes lawless.
Is that what you want for Pechanga?
Well, maybe in your opinion we the disenrolled don't meet the membership requirments but that is strickly your opinion.
It was never proved otherwise that we don't meet the requirments SO THAT MAKES OUR DISNENROLLMENTS NULLL AND VOID!
As for Pable Apish's descendants not being Pechanga, I can present arguments to the contrary but if you read my post carefully you would see that I was talking about all the disenrollments of two family lines in the last five years and if you knew anything about our tribal culture you would know that 'aamokat means Hunter in the native language.
So obviously I am from the Hunter family and time permitting, I will post some of your tired old arguments and once again refute them about the Hunters as I know your position as good as you do and it doesn't hold water.
What our anonymous "friend" will say is that the name Walla, which was the name of my ancestor Paulina Hunter listed for here maiden name in the record of her marriage to Thomas G. Hunter, is not in any of California Mission Indian pardrones (censuses) of the early 1800's. So how do we know that Paulina was even Indian, much less Pechanga?
And while this is true that the name Walla is not in the pardrones, what anonymous fails to mention, realize, or know is that most mission Indians from the period had considerable experimentation with the use of surnames, according to Dr. John Johnson, Pechanga's own hired expert on the ancestry Paulina Hunter and the foremost expert on mission Indian genealogy.
Johnson explains that accross the board mission Indians used different spellings of the same last name and even different last names from generation to generation before one name stuck as an inherited name for future generations.
The reason is that last names was a European custom that mission Indians of the period were just starting to adopt.
Johnson identifies Quasicac as Paulina's family name in the pardrones and in fact her father, Mateo Quasicac, was actually the only Indian listed in the pardrones as being born at the place called Pechanga over 70 years before there was even a Pechanga reservation.
In fact Johnson has been quoted as saying that there is no family today that has more of a right to be called Pechanga Indians than my family, the Hunters!
Anonymous will also say that the BIA never has tracked Paulina Hunter as a Pechanga Indian but if that was the case than why do members of the Hunters who have gone through probate for their share of Paulina's allotment all have official Dept. of Interior probate documents that list their deceased loved ones as Mission Indians (Pechanga Band) even those family members who have gone through probate after our disenrollment?
Clearly the BIA still considers us Pechanga Indians.
I WILL CONTINUE MY COMMENTS TO ANONYMOUS'S ANTICIPATED QUESTIONS ON ANOTHER POST.
CONINTUED: anonymous also likes to say that witnesses such as Pechanga Indian Dolores Tortuga during the 1915 probate hearings for Paulina Hunter's Pechanga land allotment were only saying that she was their neighbor not that she was a Pechanga Indian.
Well when the examiner asked Tortuga, "were you acquainted with the deceased PECHANGA INDIAN allottee Paulina Hunter?"
Tortuga responded: "yes, I knew as a neighbor when WE PECHANGA INDIANS lived on the Pauba Ranch near Temecula, California."
It is clear to any reasonable person that Tortuga was including Paulina Hunter in the inclusive "we Pechanga Indians."
Tortuga's testimony was collaborated by Jose David Rodriguez during those same 1915 probate hearings and Rodriguez added that Paulina was his neighbor on the Pechanga reservation, which is backed up by the fact that Paulina's name is on every census record of the late 1800's up until the year of her death in 1899.
Add on the fact that elder Antonio Ashman, called a vaunted (much praised) elder on the Pechanga tribe's own official Web site, said, when asked, "did you know Paulina Hunter as a member of the Pechanga Band," in an official notarized statement, his response was "I knew her as such."
In addition we have notarized statements from seven current Pechanga elders who said they have always recognized us, the Hunters, as Pechanga Indians verses only three from the CPP faction of the tribe who say we are not.
so who are you to believe, the three biased members or the seven without a stake in the outcome of our case?
In closing, don't you think the biased enrollment committee would have used as ammunition to get rid of us that we are not even Indians (which anonymous will try to imply) if there was even a shred of truth to it?
THE FACTS AREN'T ON OUR SIDE?
REALLY THE ONLY THING AGAINST US WAS DOCUMENTS FROM THE MID 1800'S THAT WE COULDN'T FIND THAT DR. JOHNSON, AGAIN THE TRIBE'S OWN HIRED EXPERT, SAID THAT NO FAMILY COULD FIND AS THEY HAVE BEEN LOST FOR OVER 150 YEARS PLUS HEARSAY SO CALLED EVIDENCE FROM MEMBERS OF THE CPP THAT ARE DIRECTLY CONTRADICTED BY MANY OTHER CURREBNT TRIBAL ELDERS.
Now for the descendants of Pablo Apish (sometimes spelled Apis).
Quesetion: what do current famlies now enrolled at Pechanga with names such as Calac, Luker, Magee, Barrientos, Bardwell, Pico, and Miranda all have in common?
Answer: they are all descendants of headman of the Temeculas, Pablo Apish.
In fact over 70 of his descendants were listed in the first written enrollment roll of 1979.
It was the descendants of Manuela Miranda, one of his grandaughters, who were disenrolled, not all of the descendants of Apish.
The reasoning behind their disnenrollment was that the enrollment committee claimed that M. Miranda cut her ties to the tribe around the time the people moved to the reservation.
That she is not listed as living on the reservation during the first census records in the late 1800's.
The people who claim the M. Mirandas don't belong fail to mention the reason is because her parents had died when she was a young girl and she had to move in with another relative in another city.
But Her and her descendants contiuned to be part of the Pechanga community and have always been recognized by the non CPP tribal members.
However, the descendants of her sibling, Candaralria Nesecat Flores, with virtually the same family history, are still in the tribe, including current CPP member Francis Miranda who on the enrollment committee voted to kick her own blood out of the tribe.
Ironcially C. N. Flores is not listed as living on the Pechanga reservation during the late 1800's either.
Interesting that in two of the years during the 1890's she is listed as living at the Soboba reservation, not Pechanga.
So why are the descendants of C.N. Flores still in the tribe while the descendants of her sibling M. Miranda are kicked out of the tribe?
Can we say corruption?
Another thing, the descendants of M. Miranda and Paulina Hunter were enrolled under the 1978 requirments which stated applicants had to be descended from orignial Pechanga Temecula People but they were judged under the more restrictive 1996 requirments which added on, the requirment that their ancestor had to be living on the reservation when it was created.
Despite the fact that the tribe had concluded during the passing of the 1996 ruling that the requirments were not retroactive to existing members. That they were only for new applicants.
Part of the proof of descent from the 1978 enrollment application was an information request form that included the following as proof:
"Affidavits from living people of your lineal descent from Original Pechanga (Temecula) Indian people."
"A cerification by a known recognized member."
"Please furnish the Enrollment Committee with proof of your ancesetor relationship to an ORIGINAL ALLOTTEE or TEMECULA INDIAN."
Clearly the M. Mirandas and the Hunters met the requirments when they were originally enrolled.
GENTLE READERS, AS OUR RESIDENT ANONYMOUS CRITIC LIKES TO SAY SOMETIMES, WHO DO YOU BELIEVE, HIM WITH HIS GENERAL STATEMENTS WITH NO FACTS BEHIND THEM, OR US WITH PLENTY OF FACTS TO BACK UP OUR POSITIONS?
People will wonder why I posted some of the negative responses our critic may make and has made in the past.
I just wanted to answer them before he got a chance to say them again as we can answer any challenges to the truth.
One more fact that I didn't mention that is undisputed by both us and the enrollment committee of the tribe is that we, the Hunters, have a land patent from the United States government as Temecula Indians.
So both us and the M. Miranda famliy are undisputed Temecula Indian families.
There, all the information I need to post is here and I will close here with the official name of the tribe in the Band's constitution.
It is called "The Temecula Band of Luiseno Mission Indians, sometimes referred to as the Pechanga Band of Mission Indians" in the preamble of the constitution.
The Band is also called "The Temecula Band of Lusiseno Mission Indians, Pechanga Reservation, Est. 1882" on the title page.
So clearly both of our disenrolled family lines should still be in the tribe.
So have at it Anonymous critic whoever you are.
I am done for now but I hope our famlies and supporters join in the discussion.
Very well said. Will the critic please address these issues? We are all waiting.
Interesting how this person continues to disrespect tribal elders, who helped establish this reservation. So, so low.
I doubt our critic will be back in the short run to respond as he usually just pops in to make his general statements and to tell us to get on with our lives and then leaves for a time.
Besides, I have used up most of his arguments and answered them already.
He will wait for things to settle down and probably come back later to post his misinformation again when the answers to his claims are not up front.
It's a fear thing. The only reason he/she would come around to these sites is out of fear, for the truth.
To Anonymous of Feb. 5, 2009 4:37 PM:
Chaamolliwun Chaampiiwimi Pi' Po'kiiyam Paulina Hunter Pechaagayam 'Ataxxum Puyamaangay!
Chaam Qay Naqmawun 'Omom T'eetilawun. Omom Qay Poplovum!
So if you are Pechanga and I am not, then what did I just say?
I realize a lot of us don't know the language either but at least for three years I tried and if I made some mistakes, it has been almost three years since I have been allowed to go to my language classes.
That is another thing those who care nothing about the Pechanga culture have tried to rob us of, our culture.
What do you people want to bet that our resident critic wouldn't have a clue what I just wrote?
Translation: "We remember our ancestors and Paulina Hunter's family are Pechanga people forever!
We don't hear what you(plural) are saying. You(plural) are no good!"
Good job,language student
I think i could learn this great language.
I like your style, the fact that your site is a little bit different makes it so interesting, I get fed up of seeing same-old-same-old all of the time.
It's great when you are just surfing the web and find something wonderful like this!
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