By John Stearns - Reno Gazette-Journal
Jessica Tavares walks through the United Auburn Indian Community’s neighborhood and feels the pain of her people.
The 51-year-old chairwoman of the Auburn tribe used to live on the Newcastle, Calif., site, where many of the tribe’s 215 members exist in abject poverty.
Some families live in small travel trailers without plumbing or electricity. Others are crammed in larger mobile homes. While a few others live in low-quality houses -- at least one of which relies on an outhouse out front for its restroom. Tarps cover some openings in trailers.
Dozens of junked vehicles litter the yards and the lone street winding through the neighborhood. Other clutter abounds. A large pile of garbage dumped by non-Indians becomes the site of an ongoing scavenger hunt through which Indians pick for scrap wood to burn for heat.
It’s a poor, sad, dirty existence -- an island of poverty in stark contrast to the adjacent custom homes selling for up to $400,000 in “The Warmington Collection at Southridge,” a subdivision of distinctive, stylish homes and manicured yards.
“It’s like being in a prison with no fence,” Tavares said while walking through the neighborhood on a cool October day. “It’s like you can’t get off (the site)
The site is casually referred to as “the reservation,” it’s really not Indian land or federal trust land. Instead, the tribe is trying to put land about 15 miles west, near Roseville, into trust for its planned casino to be operated by Station Casinos Inc. of Las Vegas.
Tavares hopes the casino frees the tribe from its economic and social imprisonment by generating money, jobs, and opportunity. The tribe wants to use casino proceeds to acquire 1,000 acres that it has an option to buy just north of Lincoln. On the land, it plans to build tribal housing. It also hopes someday to build a school, medical clinic and cultural center. Members expect to receive a monthly stipend from the casino.
The amount of money individual Indians can hope to receive from gaming varies wildly. A tribe in the Palm Springs area pays each of its members a stipend each month that tribal leaders describe only as “less than $5,000.”
Some Indian tribes operate casinos that don’t generate enough cash for any stipend at all.
Author Ian Frazier writes in his book, “On the Rez,” that “some tribes with imagination and persistence and reservations convenient to large population centers have become vastly rich with casino dollars, and the rise of tribal gambling has given some tribes economic power greater than Indians have known since the years when they had the continent to themselves.”
While many tribes are doing well, many others are making modest profits or just breaking even and hundreds of others don’t have casinos, Frazier says.
“A majority of Indians still live close to or below the poverty line. In short, profits from the gambling boom have had little effect on most Indians’ lives (in the United States).”
But many California Indian gaming tribes are doing quite well. And they made history in their agreement or “compact” with the state by agreeing to share revenues with the state’s noncompact tribes, according to Michael Lombardi, a Long Beach, Calif., consultant to numerous gaming tribes and former general manager of two California Indian casinos. No other state compact in the country does that, he said.
The compact calls for giving $1.1 million a year to noncompact tribes from a special trust fund into which gaming tribes pay. Noncompact tribes are defined as those operating zero to 349 machines. If the fund does not allow payment of $1.1 million, the available money will be divided equally among the qualifying tribes.
Also, many gaming tribes are using casino profits to diversify into other businesses -- from golf courses and shopping centers to banks, gas stations and convenience stores -- to expand their opportunities and reduce reliance on a single enterprise. They see casinos as their meal ticket to a much bigger economic world.
For the Auburn Indians, a future filled with substantial incomes and long-term security seems almost inconceivable to an outsider, when juxtaposed against where the tribe is today. Few of the members hold jobs, and Tavares can’t remember the last time one graduated from high school.
“There isn’t a lot of self-esteem,” she said.
Late on a recent Thursday morning, the neighborhood feels eerily deserted, as if everyone has gone to work. But in fact, most members of the tribe are within earshot. Not exactly hiding, but staying out of the way, peeking from inside their trailers at the white visitors. They warily regard a reporter, photographer and the tribal spokeswoman as they walk through the small community.
The reporter and photographer were warned that the members did not trust outsiders, especially media. The visitors were told to be prepared for verbal confrontations.
That didn’t happen, although one woman who came to speak with Tavares waved off an attempt to photograph her.
Many members grew up scared of the police and being told by outsiders to stay on the reservation, Tavares said. Difficult living conditions produce an atmosphere that isn’t conducive to holding a job or going to school and many members find it easier and more comfortable to stay on “the reservation” among their own people.
There is an inherent distrust of white people.
“They feel safer in here,” Tavares said.
But that doesn’t make it any easier, she said, remembering a childhood with six siblings in a ragtag house with bare boards for walls and no insulation. She shared a bed with a sister.
“I was always so embarrassed when was growing up,” she said remembering her home. “We were freezing to death all the time” and frequently sick. Meals typically consisted of a pot of beans.
Tavares remembers the contrasting lifestyle of her non-Indian friends, with whom she would visit and enjoy relatively sumptuous meals and warm houses.
“I was embarrassed to invite somebody to my house,” she said.
Tavares said the cold still bothers her and she remembers experiencing aching joints as early as her teen-age years.
For a long time, the home’s only heat was from kerosene lamps. Later, the house got electricity and wall heaters. She remembers draping her blanket> over a wall heater to warm it, then pulling it over herself to absorb the warmth. She remembers falling asleep once with the blanket on the heater. It caught fire and she ran out of the house holding the burning blanket to avoid setting fire to the house.
She still has a scar from the incident.
Conditions are no better for most of the residents today, Tavares said.
Elders struggle to pay for medication, with most surviving off $600-a-month Social Security checks.
Alcoholism is prevalent in the small community, but many members have managed to quit drinking, she said.
Some members’ spirits, like the many vehicles scattered about, are broken.
Asked why so many broken cars litter the landscape, Tavares answered: “They don’t have the money or the credit to get something decent.”
So members buy junkers, run them as long as they can, and then dump them because they can’t afford repairs. Then they buy another junker and the cycle repeats itself, endlessly.
“I bought many a $50 car,” Tavares remembers. “They ran damn good then.”
Tavares drives a more reliable vehicle today, but she’s by no means well off. She is married to a non-Indian who, ironically, is an auto technician. They live off the reservation. Life remains challenging, though. Her husband suffers from chronic back pain and needs chiropractic help, but they can’t afford it, she said.
Like her fellow tribal members on the reservation, Tavares anticipates better times ahead -- when pride, prosperity and promise rule the day, not pain and poverty.
They see the casino as the answer to their prayers.
©2000 Reno Gazette-Journal
