Post by Okwes on May 16, 2007 9:50:11 GMT -5
Tiny, remote tribe owes existence to matriarch, future to her offspring
LA POSTA INDIAN RESERVATION
By Chet Barfield, STAFF WRITER
La Posta tribal chairwoman Gwendolyn Parada and tribal manager James "Potts" Hill oversaw last month's opening of the reservation's 349-slot casino.
NANCEE E. LEWIS / Union-Tribune
She is petite and shy but as tough as the granite boulders that crown the ridges of this mountain reservation. She is an aunt and “mother hen” to every adult member of her tiny tribe, a leader who inherited rather than sought the post of chairwoman.
And now, at age 47, Gwendolyn Parada is chief executive of San Diego County's newest, smallest and most remote Indian casino.
“It's weird how it all came about,” Parada said, referring not only to the 349-slot casino La Posta opened Jan. 15 but also to how her tribe got where it is. The La Posta band of Kumeyaay Indians could have ceased to exist had it not been for the determination of one person – Parada's mother, Marie LaChappa, who died in 2005.
Except for its casino, few people outside the East County backcountry know much about this isolated reservation, abundant with wildlife and natural beauty but little else. The few families who live here are all descendants of Marie LaChappa, and all have struggled.
La Posta Indians aren't rich, but they have close relatives who are. Every one of La Posta's 11 adults and 17 children is directly related to the Barona band, one of California's most affluent and well-recognized gaming tribes.
One of Gwendolyn Parada's brothers, Clifford LaChappa, is Barona's past chairman; another, Donald LaChappa, who died in 2005, was that tribe's longtime vice chairman. Most of her seven siblings remained enrolled at Barona all their lives and reaped the bounty of big-time gambling.
But back in the 1980s, before anyone knew how prosperous Indian gaming would become, Parada followed her mother out to the hard life, to the mountains of La Posta.
A family affair
According to the only version of La Posta's history available – the scant information Marie LaChappa shared with her children and grandchildren in her 85 years – the 3,600-acre reservation, established by the U.S. government in 1893, never had more than a small number of Kumeyaay occupants.
It is perched on the Tecate Divide, 4,000 feet above sea level. Signs of the area's earliest residents still can be found if you look hard – an acorn grinding bowl carved into a flat boulder. Tiny fragments of pottery along the bank of a winding gully.
By all accounts, the reservation was long abandoned by the 1960s. After Interstate 8 was built through a 1.3-mile corner of the reservation in 1967, someone from the government tracked down Marie LaChappa and her mother, Grace Banegas Cuero, then living nearby on the Campo reservation.
The women learned they were descendants of Indians listed on La Posta's rolls in the early 1900s, and that they were entitled to a few thousand dollars in compensation for the freeway egress.
Marie LaChappa and her mother also were told that the government was considering eliminating the La Posta reservation and selling it off because no Indians had lived there for decades.
Officials at the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs are unable to confirm that information, saying it would require an exhaustive search of the agency's archives.
Parada and others at La Posta say Marie LaChappa believed that a tribe she hadn't even known she was part of was about to be lost, and she refused to let that happen.
LaChappa used the freeway money to buy two 60-foot house trailers and moved with her elderly mother onto the reservation in 1971. Parada was at boarding school in Utah then, but she learned that her mother had enrolled her and a sister – the youngest of Marie LaChappa's eight children – in the La Posta band, doubling to four its reconstituted membership.
Parada, who had spent most of her childhood at Barona, didn't mind the change.
“Back then (band affiliation) didn't mean much,” she said. “Nobody ever thought about being enrolled.”
Lost to history
Evidence of the tribe's lost past lies in a small cemetery of unnamed graves at the foot of a hill near the reservation's western boundary. Sixteen crosses of wood or cement lean askew or tipped over amid weeds and buckwheat in the tiny plot ringed by a rusted fence.
These are probably ancestors of the La Posta tribe. No one today knows who is buried there. Nor did Marie LaChappa, although she may well have been a granddaughter of at least one of them.
Marie LaChappa's descendants describe her as tough and resourceful. She raised cattle. She grew tomatoes, corn and other vegetables. She hunted deer, rabbit and rattlesnake, shot squirrels from her front door for target practice and carried a rifle in the car in case she spotted a buck.
“My grandmother was the closest thing to me as a mother,” said Gwen Lindholm, 30, whose mother died when she was a child. “She taught me how to make Indian tacos and fry bread. She taught me how to skin a snake.”
Parada moved with her husband and two young children to La Posta in 1987. Her grandmother, Grace, had died a decade earlier, so Parada's home and her mother's were the only ones on the reservation. Her mother persuaded her to take on the largely symbolic role of tribal chairwoman, saying she was getting too old to read government reports and attend regional and state meetings.
The band membership had more than doubled by then. One of Parada's Barona sisters, Joan Estrada, had enrolled her daughter and five sons at La Posta in 1972 to boost its tiny roster.
Estrada's children grew up in Los Angeles but traveled to Barona, with side trips to La Posta, for extended visits in the summer and on holidays.
“My mom always made sure that we stayed in touch with where we came from,” said Richard Estrada, 37, one of four La Posta adults who don't live on the reservation. He lives at Barona but drives at least twice a week to La Posta, where he is on the tribe's executive council and three-member gaming commission.
His sister, Andrea Estrada, 34, moved from Los Angeles to La Posta 10 years ago to protect the youngest of her five children from city crime. Andrea Estrada remembers her first home on the reservation, a 1½ -bedroom trailer with cracked windows and no heat. She hung blankets on a bunk bed and huddled with her children in that “tent” to keep warm.
“I didn't know the real way of being an Indian,” she said, recalling what it was like learning to chop wood for the stove. “I only knew my way of being an Indian, living in the city.”
Improving fortunes
The Estradas and others on the reservation of seven homes say things began to improve in the mid-1990s when Parada asked her nephew, James “Potts” Hill, to assume the duties of tribal administrator and business manager. Hill, now 38, had moved to the reservation with his wife and two children. A grandson of Marie LaChappa, he chose to enroll at La Posta, unlike his siblings, who stayed on Barona's roster.
Hill took over the tribe's only economic venture, a sand plant, and set to work learning about grants and other funds available to struggling tribes. He got a small trailer and opened La Posta's first tribal office.
When Hill took over in 1995, La Posta was getting about $16,000 a year in funding. Since 2000, the tribe has averaged nearly $700,000 a year in infrastructure grants, according to federal public-records databases.
La Posta built and opened a meeting center/gymnasium, where a taekwando instructor gives weekly classes. It obtained hundreds of thousands of dollars to put in utilities and roads, water systems and environmental programs.
The tribe now has an office receptionist and environmental technicians on its staff. Members have heated homes. The reservation is still mostly open land, but the dirt road that winds through it is a lot wider and smoother than it used to be.
Along with government grants, La Posta gets $1.1 million a year in statewide revenue-sharing funds from tribes with large casinos. About half of the money is distributed to members, the rest is invested in tribal programs. Even with its new casino, La Posta will continue to receive those funds because tribes with fewer than 350 slots are classified as non-gaming under state gambling compacts.
It was Hill who fielded the numerous offers of casino investors who wooed the tribe after Indian gaming was legalized in California in 2000. Firms large and small insisted a casino could make money, even an hour's drive from San Diego. La Posta's casino is a mile farther off the freeway than the Campo tribe's Golden Acorn Casino nearby.
La Posta signed a gambling compact in 2003 and embarked on building a small casino – with a $22 million bank loan backed by Arizona's Yavapai Apache tribe. The 20,000-square-foot casino will be joined by a 188-seat International House of Pancakes restaurant in the next month.
The tribe's goal is to ensure education, housing and health-care funding for La Posta's 17 children. Hill has more children than anyone else at La Posta – seven, ranging from infancy to 19. His eldest, daughter Kaila, plans to work at the casino, study cosmetology and take over his job someday.
Like almost all of his cousins at La Posta, Hill said he has never coveted the riches of his Barona kin, and he tries to steer his children away from greed. But along with other La Posta parents, he worries about how becoming a casino tribe might affect teens like his eldest son.
“He's got all these big plans, like we're going to have a big house and a Hummer,” Hill said. “I tell him, don't look at this casino as solving all the problems but as a launch point to reinvest.”
Debating the future
Gwendolyn Parada knows pain. She has buried two of her three children – a 19-year-old son and 18-year-old daughter killed in vehicle accidents in 1998 and 2005 – alongside her mother, brother, sister and nephews in the new tribal-family cemetery. Having gone through that, she said it took a lot to convince her that a casino would be good for La Posta. She worried about visitors disturbing the reservation's stillness and solitude.
Mostly she worried about squabbles over the profits, as she has seen among other gaming tribes.
Now Parada sees the casino as a resource, if used in a good way, to build a more promising future for her 14-year-old daughter's generation and grandchildren yet to be born. She wants them not only to have money for college but, more importantly, the will and wherewithal to better themselves and their reservation.
Having helped bring back her tribe from near extinction, Parada wants La Posta to thrive.
“I want the kids to learn how to take care of the tribe, to take care of themselves,” Parada said. “We're a small tribe, but we want to be strong.”
Chet Barfield: (619) 542-4572; chet.barfield@uniontrib.com
LA POSTA INDIAN RESERVATION
By Chet Barfield, STAFF WRITER
La Posta tribal chairwoman Gwendolyn Parada and tribal manager James "Potts" Hill oversaw last month's opening of the reservation's 349-slot casino.
NANCEE E. LEWIS / Union-Tribune
She is petite and shy but as tough as the granite boulders that crown the ridges of this mountain reservation. She is an aunt and “mother hen” to every adult member of her tiny tribe, a leader who inherited rather than sought the post of chairwoman.
And now, at age 47, Gwendolyn Parada is chief executive of San Diego County's newest, smallest and most remote Indian casino.
“It's weird how it all came about,” Parada said, referring not only to the 349-slot casino La Posta opened Jan. 15 but also to how her tribe got where it is. The La Posta band of Kumeyaay Indians could have ceased to exist had it not been for the determination of one person – Parada's mother, Marie LaChappa, who died in 2005.
Except for its casino, few people outside the East County backcountry know much about this isolated reservation, abundant with wildlife and natural beauty but little else. The few families who live here are all descendants of Marie LaChappa, and all have struggled.
La Posta Indians aren't rich, but they have close relatives who are. Every one of La Posta's 11 adults and 17 children is directly related to the Barona band, one of California's most affluent and well-recognized gaming tribes.
One of Gwendolyn Parada's brothers, Clifford LaChappa, is Barona's past chairman; another, Donald LaChappa, who died in 2005, was that tribe's longtime vice chairman. Most of her seven siblings remained enrolled at Barona all their lives and reaped the bounty of big-time gambling.
But back in the 1980s, before anyone knew how prosperous Indian gaming would become, Parada followed her mother out to the hard life, to the mountains of La Posta.
A family affair
According to the only version of La Posta's history available – the scant information Marie LaChappa shared with her children and grandchildren in her 85 years – the 3,600-acre reservation, established by the U.S. government in 1893, never had more than a small number of Kumeyaay occupants.
It is perched on the Tecate Divide, 4,000 feet above sea level. Signs of the area's earliest residents still can be found if you look hard – an acorn grinding bowl carved into a flat boulder. Tiny fragments of pottery along the bank of a winding gully.
By all accounts, the reservation was long abandoned by the 1960s. After Interstate 8 was built through a 1.3-mile corner of the reservation in 1967, someone from the government tracked down Marie LaChappa and her mother, Grace Banegas Cuero, then living nearby on the Campo reservation.
The women learned they were descendants of Indians listed on La Posta's rolls in the early 1900s, and that they were entitled to a few thousand dollars in compensation for the freeway egress.
Marie LaChappa and her mother also were told that the government was considering eliminating the La Posta reservation and selling it off because no Indians had lived there for decades.
Officials at the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs are unable to confirm that information, saying it would require an exhaustive search of the agency's archives.
Parada and others at La Posta say Marie LaChappa believed that a tribe she hadn't even known she was part of was about to be lost, and she refused to let that happen.
LaChappa used the freeway money to buy two 60-foot house trailers and moved with her elderly mother onto the reservation in 1971. Parada was at boarding school in Utah then, but she learned that her mother had enrolled her and a sister – the youngest of Marie LaChappa's eight children – in the La Posta band, doubling to four its reconstituted membership.
Parada, who had spent most of her childhood at Barona, didn't mind the change.
“Back then (band affiliation) didn't mean much,” she said. “Nobody ever thought about being enrolled.”
Lost to history
Evidence of the tribe's lost past lies in a small cemetery of unnamed graves at the foot of a hill near the reservation's western boundary. Sixteen crosses of wood or cement lean askew or tipped over amid weeds and buckwheat in the tiny plot ringed by a rusted fence.
These are probably ancestors of the La Posta tribe. No one today knows who is buried there. Nor did Marie LaChappa, although she may well have been a granddaughter of at least one of them.
Marie LaChappa's descendants describe her as tough and resourceful. She raised cattle. She grew tomatoes, corn and other vegetables. She hunted deer, rabbit and rattlesnake, shot squirrels from her front door for target practice and carried a rifle in the car in case she spotted a buck.
“My grandmother was the closest thing to me as a mother,” said Gwen Lindholm, 30, whose mother died when she was a child. “She taught me how to make Indian tacos and fry bread. She taught me how to skin a snake.”
Parada moved with her husband and two young children to La Posta in 1987. Her grandmother, Grace, had died a decade earlier, so Parada's home and her mother's were the only ones on the reservation. Her mother persuaded her to take on the largely symbolic role of tribal chairwoman, saying she was getting too old to read government reports and attend regional and state meetings.
The band membership had more than doubled by then. One of Parada's Barona sisters, Joan Estrada, had enrolled her daughter and five sons at La Posta in 1972 to boost its tiny roster.
Estrada's children grew up in Los Angeles but traveled to Barona, with side trips to La Posta, for extended visits in the summer and on holidays.
“My mom always made sure that we stayed in touch with where we came from,” said Richard Estrada, 37, one of four La Posta adults who don't live on the reservation. He lives at Barona but drives at least twice a week to La Posta, where he is on the tribe's executive council and three-member gaming commission.
His sister, Andrea Estrada, 34, moved from Los Angeles to La Posta 10 years ago to protect the youngest of her five children from city crime. Andrea Estrada remembers her first home on the reservation, a 1½ -bedroom trailer with cracked windows and no heat. She hung blankets on a bunk bed and huddled with her children in that “tent” to keep warm.
“I didn't know the real way of being an Indian,” she said, recalling what it was like learning to chop wood for the stove. “I only knew my way of being an Indian, living in the city.”
Improving fortunes
The Estradas and others on the reservation of seven homes say things began to improve in the mid-1990s when Parada asked her nephew, James “Potts” Hill, to assume the duties of tribal administrator and business manager. Hill, now 38, had moved to the reservation with his wife and two children. A grandson of Marie LaChappa, he chose to enroll at La Posta, unlike his siblings, who stayed on Barona's roster.
Hill took over the tribe's only economic venture, a sand plant, and set to work learning about grants and other funds available to struggling tribes. He got a small trailer and opened La Posta's first tribal office.
When Hill took over in 1995, La Posta was getting about $16,000 a year in funding. Since 2000, the tribe has averaged nearly $700,000 a year in infrastructure grants, according to federal public-records databases.
La Posta built and opened a meeting center/gymnasium, where a taekwando instructor gives weekly classes. It obtained hundreds of thousands of dollars to put in utilities and roads, water systems and environmental programs.
The tribe now has an office receptionist and environmental technicians on its staff. Members have heated homes. The reservation is still mostly open land, but the dirt road that winds through it is a lot wider and smoother than it used to be.
Along with government grants, La Posta gets $1.1 million a year in statewide revenue-sharing funds from tribes with large casinos. About half of the money is distributed to members, the rest is invested in tribal programs. Even with its new casino, La Posta will continue to receive those funds because tribes with fewer than 350 slots are classified as non-gaming under state gambling compacts.
It was Hill who fielded the numerous offers of casino investors who wooed the tribe after Indian gaming was legalized in California in 2000. Firms large and small insisted a casino could make money, even an hour's drive from San Diego. La Posta's casino is a mile farther off the freeway than the Campo tribe's Golden Acorn Casino nearby.
La Posta signed a gambling compact in 2003 and embarked on building a small casino – with a $22 million bank loan backed by Arizona's Yavapai Apache tribe. The 20,000-square-foot casino will be joined by a 188-seat International House of Pancakes restaurant in the next month.
The tribe's goal is to ensure education, housing and health-care funding for La Posta's 17 children. Hill has more children than anyone else at La Posta – seven, ranging from infancy to 19. His eldest, daughter Kaila, plans to work at the casino, study cosmetology and take over his job someday.
Like almost all of his cousins at La Posta, Hill said he has never coveted the riches of his Barona kin, and he tries to steer his children away from greed. But along with other La Posta parents, he worries about how becoming a casino tribe might affect teens like his eldest son.
“He's got all these big plans, like we're going to have a big house and a Hummer,” Hill said. “I tell him, don't look at this casino as solving all the problems but as a launch point to reinvest.”
Debating the future
Gwendolyn Parada knows pain. She has buried two of her three children – a 19-year-old son and 18-year-old daughter killed in vehicle accidents in 1998 and 2005 – alongside her mother, brother, sister and nephews in the new tribal-family cemetery. Having gone through that, she said it took a lot to convince her that a casino would be good for La Posta. She worried about visitors disturbing the reservation's stillness and solitude.
Mostly she worried about squabbles over the profits, as she has seen among other gaming tribes.
Now Parada sees the casino as a resource, if used in a good way, to build a more promising future for her 14-year-old daughter's generation and grandchildren yet to be born. She wants them not only to have money for college but, more importantly, the will and wherewithal to better themselves and their reservation.
Having helped bring back her tribe from near extinction, Parada wants La Posta to thrive.
“I want the kids to learn how to take care of the tribe, to take care of themselves,” Parada said. “We're a small tribe, but we want to be strong.”
Chet Barfield: (619) 542-4572; chet.barfield@uniontrib.com