When a Museum Serves as a Tribal Elder

In 1951, Albert Patencio, the ceremonial leader of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, burned the tribe’s ceremonial house to the ground and ordered the burial of the sacred ceremonial bundle. He told those of his tribe who had gathered for the somber occasion that all customs and traditions of the tribe were finished.

Their past, with all its wisdom, songs, laws and values, ceased on that day. And the present closed in around them in a swarm of real estate developers, lawyers and politicians.

The land these Native Americans had occupied for 3,000 years, and which had been officially granted to them as wild desert in 1891 by the government of the United States, came to be known as Palm Springs. And their 30,000 acres came to be worth a fortune.

Fifty-one years and innumerable legal and political battles after Patencio’s declaration, the tribe is set to break ground on an ambitious museum that will preserve what precious little remains of the old ways. Moreover, the planned 100,000-square-foot, $37-million Agua Caliente Cultural Museum will honor the tribe’s history of survival--in the harsh desert climate and on the brutal battleground of the 20th century Palm Springs real estate market.

“We call the museum our ‘tribal elder,’” says Ray Patencio, Albert’s grandnephew and son of the tribe’s last ceremonial singer, Joseph. Patencio, who previously served on the tribal council for 26 years and is gaming commissioner for the tribe’s two casinos, says his decade-long involvement on the museum board has been a profound personal learning experience: “There’s so much I didn’t know about my own culture. This place is our history.”

The museum will also have modern relevance, with exhibits focusing on land and water rights, and sovereignty issues. “Everyone still thinks of us as Indians in feathers. Everyone wants to hear about our traditions and ‘Do we live in tepees?’” says Mildred Browne, the wildly energetic 50-something chairwoman of the museum board. “For people to take us seriously, they need to see us as who we are now, what we’ve accomplished and what we’ve had to fight for.” Then she laughs and adds, “Everything!”

The 357 members of the Agua Caliente Band--or tribe--are part of the Cahuilla Nation (pronounced ku-WEE-yah). The 2,500 members make up seven distinct tribes on 10 California Indian reservations between Morongo and the Salton Sea. The Agua Caliente Band’s reservation is within the city limits of Palm Springs, a geographical stroke of good luck that has allowed it to build a significant empire of assorted real estate holdings, casinos, hotels and a bank. But it came the hard way.

For several thousand years, the Cahuilla Indians thrived in this area, fishing in the now-dry Lake Cahuilla, gathering acorns and other seeds, hunting on the steep slopes of the San Bernardino Mountains. When the Spanish arrived in 1776, the Cahuilla proved adept traders. “They were extremely competent at dealing with outsiders,” says Lowell Bean, professor emeritus at Cal State Hayward and the author of several books on the Cahuilla. “Their leaders were good managers and could work well outside of their own culture.”

Many of the tribe converted to Catholicism but still maintained their traditional religious beliefs and rituals. The 1848 Gold Rush brought the white man and his laws, which were variously brutal, paternalistic and opportunistic. In 1891, a congressional act legally established numerous Indian reservations throughout the country. In the case of the Agua Caliente Band, every square mile or so of Indian land alternated with a square mile of what was then railroad land, creating a checkerboard of 30,000 acres.

At the turn of the century, various advocate groups urged--and forced--Indian children to attend English-speaking schools far from their reservations and their cultures. The aim was assimilation and education but the consequence was the near annihilation of many indigenous cultures. The layout of the Agua Caliente Band’s reservation meant that its assimilation was all the more thorough, as the tribe lived side by side with a growing Anglo community.

By the time Albert Patencio set fire to the ceremonial house, a simple wooden structure where the tribe’s sacred ceremonies and social meetings were held, only a handful of tribe members could speak Cahuilla. Fewer still knew the complex, lengthy songs that told of creation and also served as the tribe’s legal guidelines and genealogical records. The songs required years of dedication to learn. They needed to be sung exactly or, they believe, the singer risked bringing disaster to the tribe.

“When my father died [in 1979] he took all the songs with him,” Ray Patencio says. “You couldn’t get anything out of him, he didn’t want to talk about it.” Several thousand years of tribal memory was gone. “As a child I would go with my father and sit and listen to him sing,” Patencio says, “but I didn’t speak the language, so it meant nothing to me. I’d rather have been going to a movie or playing outside on the street with the other kids.”

Patencio, who, like most of the tribe, is Catholic, doesn’t challenge the wisdom of his elders in refusing to pass on their knowledge. “They did what they felt was right,” he says. “Why? Because there was no interest in the old ways? To protect the children? Because the old ways had no application in modern society? I don’t know. If they put a stop to it, they had their reasons.”

“They agreed that in order to go forward they wouldn’t pass on the language,” Browne says of her parents. “They had to understand the politics and laws that had been thrown at them. They couldn’t change but they knew their kids could. They knew we had to adapt.”

Browne and Patencio’s generation focused its energy on building a financially solvent, politically sovereign tribe against significant odds. In the first half of the century, the tribe had battled for water and land against a powerful ranching fraternity. And, then, in 1959 came the Equalization Act. This forced the tribe to allocate most of its land to individual members, ostensibly to ensure that each member got an equal share. The small, personal allotments were easier for developers to purchase or tie up in cheap, long-term leases at a time when Palm Springs real estate values had begun to skyrocket.

The act also required the appointment of guardians for tribe minors and “conservators” for adults deemed by the court as unable to manage their own affairs. Ninety-two of the band’s 104 members were so deemed. Many conservators sold their charges’ land well under market value (often to friends) and levied tribe members with quasi-legal management fees. One 13-year-old boy, dying of a spinal tumor in the early 1960s, was charged $20,000 in fees by his guardian, out of his $23,000 estate.

Patencio and Browne, who were newlyweds in 1965 with a baby (they have since divorced but remain good friends), were forced to pay more than $45,000 in various fees to their conservator. After a federal investigation, Congress changed the law in 1968, though no money was returned. The tribal council has since repurchased the 1,800 acres lost during those years.

“In those days the cultural aspect of our tribe was not high on our list of priorities,” Patencio says with an understated smile. “We had to develop sophistication. We had to learn how to protect ourselves. Even now you can’t sit back, you have to constantly be aware of litigation in Congress, legislation and political attitudes, not just what affects us but all tribes of the Indian Nation.”

By the late 1980s, the tribe had consolidated its fiscal and legal status, says Patencio, “And we began to look at other areas where we could focus our attention. We thought, ‘Why aren’t we preserving our history and culture?’”

Initially, a storage facility for artifacts was planned. But as the tribe’s enthusiasm for the project grew, so did its ambition. In 1991, a nonprofit corporation independent of the tribe was formed--the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum. With the support of the tribal council and with funds raised at events such as the annual Agua Caliente Heritage Festival, in 1995 the nonprofit built a small, temporary museum in the city center.

Meanwhile, plans continued for a permanent site at Indian Canyons, seven miles south of downtown Palm Springs. The square footage allotted in the original plans has since quadrupled and an executive director was hired. The architect’s very eco-friendly plans are due in September and the serious fund-raising is about to begin. Browne is sharpening her scissors for the ribbon-cutting in 2005.

The “tribal elder” will tell the tribe’s history through a series of exhibits that feature photographs, videotaped testimonies and other cultural artifacts. There will be an auditorium, space for traveling exhibits, and an expansion of the current museum’s education programs in language, singing and crafts. The focus of the museum, says Browne, is on the tribe’s empowerment, not its victimization. “This is what we are proud of, this is who we are.”

What remains of the past is very much part of the present. Older Cahuillas still sing and teach the few remembered songs to the young. The language class is well attended. And the tribal identity of members, so bound to the land they have fought to keep, is stronger than ever.

“I can’t think of it as a loss,” Browne says of all that has been irretrievably forgotten. “Because we’re not those Indians in a glass case.” The tribe is moving on. She tells a story of going up into the mountains to gather acorns in a traditional manner. “It was hard work, I tell you. I had those acorns drying on a blanket by the pool and I knew I was supposed to grind them up and I kept looking and looking at those acorns. In the end, I just thought, ‘I’ve got so many other things I want to do besides grinding acorns!’”

Like creating a museum.