Trailer owners evicted
In November 2000, the Indians gave Booth and 40 other trailer owners at Red Rooster tribal eviction notices, even though they didn't have a California court order to evict anybody except Booth. "The tribe showed up with four carloads of CRIT tribal police, four carloads of Riverside County sheriff's deputies and a federal BIA investigator who told me, 'You're out of here'," Booth said.
Riverside County Assistant Sheriff Gayle Janes said his officers were at Red Rooster in November 2000 to keep the peace -- not enforce the tribe's evictions. "Tensions were very high on both sides," he said. "I don't believe a tribal appeals process was ever offered to these people at all." Janes added: "It's like being in a separate country: If the tribal court evicts people, that's none of our business."
Then, on a rainy day the following January, about 20 trailers that hadn't been towed out or were cemented down -- including Booth's -- were bulldozed and set on fire, Booth said. The fiberglass rooster was found dangling upside down over the river.
Today, all that's left of Red Rooster is a row of rusting metal trailer beds and a massive mound of concrete, broken glass and debris: vacuum cleaner parts, a sneaker, a recliner, a rusty bike, a water heater.
"That was my income, my livelihood, my only home," said Booth, touring the wreckage. "It tore a lot of people apart. They were firemen, electricians, truck drivers. ... They'd water ski, fish, do their barbecuing, drink a little beer, relax. No dopers, no prison people, just good solid American people."
The Indians had lived on the river for centuries before the white man came and built the series of dams that ruined it, said Russell Welsh, the 70-year-old vice chairman of the 3,500-member reservation.
"Before the taming of the Colorado this reservation was a utopia, a paradise where you could gather herbs and basket-making material, fish and game," he said. "The river's been like a mother to us, and it's been abused, it's been polluted, everybody's fighting for it."
The Mohaves, largest of the four CRIT tribes, call themselves Aha Makavi, "People of the River," Welsh said. The west bank includes several of their sacred sites, he said.
Priscilla Eswonia, a Mohave elder, remembers swimming in the river alongside giant salmon when she was a girl. Her uncle, a Mohave deer singer, told her the Indians originally came from the Pacific Ocean. "Our creator put the river down here for us to live," Eswonia said. "That's how all our songs begin."
The tribe gets along fine with the many west bank tenants who abide by their leases, according to Welsh. But, he said, "There's some radicals that don't want to cooperate. I think we have every right to say 'yah-hey, get off my land.' "
"We don't want to fight those people, but they're trying to make us losers," he added.
Judge's ruling stuns residents
The west bank residents feel CRIT has an unfair monetary edge over them: The tribe gets $1 million a year from California casino tribes for being a "non-gaming tribe" in this state, yet operates the Blue Water Casino Resort on the east bank of the river, in Parker, Ariz. That may change soon, however. CRIT plans to build a casino on the California side of the river.
Some 400 west bank tenants joined forces and raised more than $300,000 to fight the Indians in court. Last fall, U.S. District Judge John Walter ruled that because the Indians have sovereign immunity he wouldn't even consider the legality of the evictions, or the tenants' claim that the Indians don't own the land.
The ruling stunned the residents. "It's unfair for the tribe to hide behind sovereign immunity to maintain control of property they don't own," said weekender Tim Moore, noting that a judge appointed by the U.S. Supreme Court had found in 1993 that the land belonged to California, not the tribe.
"If you took the (2002) federal ruling to its absurd extreme, the Colorado River Indian Tribes could erect a toll booth on the Golden Gate Bridge and could not be removed because they have sovereign immunity," said attorney Dennis Whittlesey, who represents the tenants. "If they can go one mile beyond reservation land claiming sovereignty, can't they go 500 miles? Where does it stop?"
Where sovereignty stops is being debated not just on the west bank, but in Congress. Sen. Dan Inouye, D-Hawaii, recently said Indian tribes at the least "should be as sovereign as any state in the union" and said he will push for a bill giving them control of all law enforcement on tribal lands.
Jacob Coin, a Hopi Indian who is director of the California Nations Indian Gaming Association, argues that tribes already are more sovereign than states, and always have been. "If you allowed even one state law to govern tribal lands, a huge chunk of tribal sovereignty would be destroyed. Our founding fathers said the United States didn't give them sovereignty, the Creator gave it to them."
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