Generations and Other True Stories (31 page)

“Implementation of the blood quantum was done by the U.S. government as a means of getting rid of the Indian people,” says Mr. Pedraza. “Just like they tried to starve the people by killing the buffalo. The U.S. government gave us a blood quantum in order to diminish us.”

The Tiguas' tribal council has petitioned Congress to reduce the blood-quantum requirement from one-eighth to one-sixteenth and to change the official name of the tribe from “Ysleta del Sur Pueblo” to “Tigua Indians of Texas,” which is what they have always called themselves. They also request that “Tigua” become the official spelling of their name, rather than “Tiwa,” as it is in the 1968 law.

Lowering the blood quantum would more than double the size of the tribe, but all the new Tiguas would be children or other relatives of present members.

“It's sad to have to tell a family, ‘Yes, I can help you, ma'am, but not your husband or your children. They don't qualify,' ” says Governor Torrez. “We don't tell them they're not Indians. We just say they don't qualify.”

“Often the one-sixteenth knows more about tradition and follows his heart better than the full-blooded Indian,” says Mr. Silvas. He's also one-eighth Tigua blood, and his children are one-sixteenth. “It all depends on the family you're in. I've lived here all my life. I've been dancing since I was four years old. I started singing when I was three. That's the reason I'm the war chief right now. Everything that is supposed to be learned, I learned it. I might have a low blood quantum, but in my heart, it don't get more Indian than I am. A young lady from our reservation has said, ‘It's not the Indian blood that runs through our veins, it's the Indian in our hearts.' And nowadays that's all that matters.”

Although Mr. Silvas' children aren't eligible for medical and other benefits that the federal government grants to Indians, they're being brought up Indian. “My son goes to Tigua language classes at school,” he says. “And then he comes home and teaches me. In the old days, the older people would teach the kids. But now the kids teach the older people.”

Whether or not Congress lowers the blood quantum, he says, the one-sixteenth people are true Tiguas, and the tribe has an obligation to them. That's why the Tiguas must build a casino.

The complex of pueblo-architecture buildings that the Tiguas have built on their tiny reservation includes a popular restaurant, a shop where Tigua-made Indian souvenirs are sold, outdoor ovens where delicious Tigua bread is baked for the restaurant and for sale to the public, and a courtyard where dancers entertain tourists during the summer. But the part of the reservation that draws the biggest crowds is a huge bingo hall with expensive carpets, brass rails, and chandeliers.

It looks too fancy to be a mere bingo parlor. And indeed, the Tiguas hope that someday soon it will become a full-fledged casino, offering blackjack, craps, slot machines, and any other diversion that a Las Vegas casino might offer.

Then, if business is good, the tribe hopes to build a Las Vegas-style entertainment center including a large casino and hotel, perhaps at the intersection of Interstate 10 and Avenue of the Americas, a major thoroughfare between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez across the river in Mexico.

In the two years since the Tiguas first proposed the casino, however, the state has refused to sign the required compact, or treaty, that would allow the establishment of such a gaming facility on Texas soil. Gov. Ann Richards and Attorney Gen. Dan Morales contend that state law prohibiting casino gambling in Texas applies to the Tiguas as well as everybody else.

The Tiguas, on the other hand, claim their status as a sovereign Indian tribe entitles them to go into the gaming business as Indians in other states have.

“The gambling is our white buffalo,” says Mr. Silvas. “In the old days, the buffalo was the Indians' housing, it was our clothing, it was our food, everything we needed. We need something to hold the future. We need something to take care of our children. The gaming money will bring education, housing, health, job placement to our people, whether they qualify under the blood quantum or not. Everything that our people need will be there for them.”

“It's not for one person to get rich,” says Governor Torrez. “It's not like Donald Trump, becoming rich for his pocket by gaming. The money generated by gaming is going to the pueblo, to give us everything that's required for us to become better citizens. And the city of El Paso wants the gaming because we're going to generate a lot of jobs.”

The fight between the Tiguas and the state is in the federal courts now. To Miguel Pedraza, the drawn-out battle is just another example of the state's long indifference to the plight of his tribe.

“The state wanted to get out of the Indian business a long time ago,” he says. “The Sunset Commission shut down the Indian Commission. That was bad, because the Indian Commission was a mediator between the Indians and the state. It could negotiate a lot of problems that Indian people have, but now it's costing the state a lot more to go to court and fight us.

“It's like Hueco Tanks,” he says, referring to a huge jumble of boulders in the desert northeast of the reservation. Hollows in the rocks catch rainwater, and various tribes of Indians and their ancestors camped or lived there over the millennia. “We consider Hueco Tanks sacred ground,” he says. “We do a lot of our praying out there. We go there to give names to children. I've done it to my grandchildren. A lot of our grandfathers that we talk about and remember are associated with Hueco Tanks. There's a place we call the Grandfathers' Cave where we see names of our people who are here no more. It's sacred ground to us. We have begged the state many times that Hueco Tanks should be in our hands. But Hueco Tanks has been made a state park. And since that happened, vandals have destroyed a lot of the pictographs there, and the state has allowed mountain climbers to climb the rocks. They have drilled holes in the rocks.

“When people go and desecrate something that's part of you…it's like digging up graves.”

After half an hour, the governor, the lieutenant governor, the war chief, and the other members of the council walk back from the construction site where the bones of their ancestor were uncovered.

“What happened?” their white visitor asks.

“No comment,” comes the reply.

“No comment.”

“No comment.”

“We have a lot to be angry about,” Governor Torrez finally says. “But so be it. It was our destiny to be placed here. This is where the Life Giver intended for us to be. And he's a tough guy to go against.”

July 1994

No place is dearer to me than Fort Davis and the Davis Mountains, where I grew up in a hidden, isolated heaven during the 1940s and '50s. I can't imagine a better time and place in which to have been a child and an adolescent than then and there. Almost as dear to me are the Big Bend to the south, the Guadalupes to the north, and the desert flats that connect the mountain ranges. My favorite city is El Paso, the only city I saw when I was growing up, and the city where I began my manhood and my career
.

It's all changing now. Some of the changes are good, some downright evil. In the long run, I believe it's a bad thing that the world has discovered my country
.

Trouble Across the Pecos

One night David Finfrock was delivering his Texas weather report on Channel 5 in Dallas/Fort Worth and mentioned that some meteorological thing was happening “in the Trans-Pecos.” At the conclusion of his forecast, he returned to the anchor desk to exchange the usual TV happy talk with his colleagues.

“David,” said anchorman Mike Snyder. “What the heck
is
the Trans-Pecos, anyway?”

The somewhat bemused Mr. Finfrock replied that the Trans-Pecos is “the part of Texas that's on the other side of the Pecos.”

It's the fat arm that juts westward between the two Mexicos. It's 31,478 square miles, slightly larger than South Carolina and shaped much like it, drooping southward into Chihuahua and Coahuila as South Carolina droops into Georgia and the Atlantic.

Some 673,000 people live there. Of those, 615,000 live in El Paso County, the smallest of the nine Trans-Pecos counties, at the western tip of the state. If El Paso were to secede from Texas and join New Mexico, as it sometimes threatens to do, there would be only 58,000 people in the region, and its largest city would be Pecos—about twelve thousand population.

The Trans-Pecos used to be a secret place. Its several magnificent mountain ranges are isolated in a kind of western Shangri-La, surrounded by desert flats, many of which are covered with greasewood, mesquite, and cactus. Its towns are small and far apart, connected by narrow two-lane roads.

The only major highway—Interstate 10—hugs the flat places wherever it can and bypasses the little towns. On much of it, the mountains are only pale shadows on the horizon, and driving it is a long and tedious ordeal. Those doing it usually are in a hurry to get from Dallas or San Antonio to El Paso or some point beyond, or from California to some place east. Not many drop off the interstate to follow the lonely two-lanes southward to the beautiful grasslands and oak and piñon groves of the Davis Mountains or the rugged ranges of the Big Bend, or northward to the looming Guadalupes.

The Trans-Pecos is a place where not much has changed over the years except nature's cycle of rain and drought, the rising and falling of livestock prices, and the model years of the cars and trucks. The region is almost as empty and isolated today as it was more than a century ago, when the army and the Texas Rangers removed the last Indians and cattlemen moved their herds across the Pecos to settle the last Texas frontier.

Most who have lived there for the past century haven't minded their isolation. Many have cherished it. They're self-reliant people, independent, individualistic, conservative, distrustful of all government in which they aren't personally involved. Fort Davis, the seat of Jeff Davis County, has never even bothered to incorporate and become a real town, because its people haven't wanted a mayor and city council making rules for them.

Few outside the Trans-Pecos have known about it, or cared. Those who live there like it that way. The freedom they value most is the freedom to be left alone.

In a Texas rapidly becoming urban, the Trans-Pecos is one of the few remnants of what the state used to be, the last patch of almost pristine wilderness.

But the world has discovered the Trans-Pecos. Change is arriving, and with it, dread.

As the old ranch patriarchs and matriarchs have passed on, many of their holdings have been divided among heirs. Some have sold out to buyers from outside. Developers have bought parts of ranches and subdivided them into “ranchettes” of five or ten acres. They've cut roads into the canyons and up mountainsides and sold the land to retired people and fed-up urbanites as sites for small houses and mobile homes.

The City of El Paso has bought a twenty-five thousandacre ranch on the edge of the Davis Mountains, not to raise cattle, but to suck its water from under the earth someday and pipeline it to that always water-needful city. Neighboring ranchers fear the water under their land will be sucked into the pipeline, too, leaving them literally high and dry.

“If six hundred thousand people in El Paso need water, who are we to stand in their way?” asks Bob Dillard, Jeff Davis County judge and editor of the county's weekly newspaper,
The Mountain Dispatch
. “From a political standpoint, we're nobody. We have no clout.”

An Oklahoma company has purchased a ranch in the Sierra Diablo of Hudspeth County, not to raise cattle, but to move in daily trainloads of human waste from New York City and spread it over the land.

“If they want to put sludge on their property, that's all right with me,” says Topper Frank, who ranches eight miles from the site. “But nobody knows what it contains, or where it goes.”

About twelve miles from Topper Frank's place, a nuclear waste storage site is in the planning stage. It will receive waste from Vermont and Maine. And cities and states all over the country are casting glances at the wide-open spaces for possible dumping grounds for their own urban poisons.

Near Van Horn, a consortium of utilities companies is about to erect 150 wind turbines—one hundred-foot-tall towers with huge propellers on them—to generate electricity. “There's talk in Fort Davis, too,” Judge Dillard says, “of putting a wind farm on top of Star Mountain.”

The tall cliffs of Star Mountain are one of the spectacular sights along the road through Limpia Canyon, one of the most scenic highways in the state. “Can you imagine it with one hundred-foot-tall windmills on top?” Judge Dillard asks.

A group of businessmen in Pecos, on I-10, seventy-five miles north of Fort Davis, has proposed that an interstate be built through that same Limpia Canyon to Fort Davis and on southward through Marfa to Presidio and the Rio Grande. Its chances of approval are nil, but other highway construction already under way has people wondering.

“Suddenly the state is widening the highway between Fort Davis and Marfa,” says Judge Dillard. “Suddenly they're widening all the bridges in Limpia Canyon. Suddenly they're widening the road from Kent to Nunn Hill, one of the least-traveled roads in this country.”

Kent is a gas station-store on 1-10 at the northern end of the Davis Mountains. Nunn Hill is near the McDonald Observatory of the University of Texas at Austin, in the highest, most pristine reaches of the range.

“Suddenly we've been noticed,” Judge Dillard says. “I can't help thinking there's some kind of movement to…I don't know what. There are pressures that this part of the world has never seen before. They're pressures that are going to be really stressful for the people of this area, from a lot of different directions. And they're all land-use issues. What is going to happen to this place?”