Son of a tribe reborn pushes for a casino
Novelist who discovered Miwok heritage is voice for gambling site near Bay Area
SANTA ROSA -- Greg Sarris' fiction brings clarity to his life, to an orphan's search for identity amid the ramshackle cottages of Miwok and Pomo Indians, Mexicans, Portuguese and others toiling in dairies, canneries and fields of Sonoma County.
He writes of Jasmine, an Indian girl who is no sweet-smelling flower. He brings forth Auntie Faye, who speaks of extraterrestrials, curses and poisons. He presents Steven, the neighborhood mail carrier, who delivers secret letters to a forsaken son.
Robert Redford was so moved by Sarris' short story collection, "Grand Avenue" -- inspired by a street in the working-class South Park district of Santa Rosa near where Sarris grew up -- that he partnered with him to produce it as an HBO mini-series.
Now Sarris is the most visible advocate for a controversial $350 million Indian gambling resort near Rohnert Park and Highway 101 that appears on track to become the closest tribal casino to the lucrative Bay Area market.
The novelist, screenwriter and university professor -- who holds a doctorate from Stanford in modern thought and literature -- is living a true-life story seemingly more incredible than his fiction.
Two decades ago, he discovered a tribal heritage he never knew when he traced his birth to a tryst between a 14-year-old socialite in Laguna Beach and a young football star -- the great-grandson of a legendary Coast Miwok medicine man.
Blue-eyed and part Irish, Jewish, Filipino and Miwok, Sarris is now chairman of the 1,092-member Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. For eight years he worked with Indians in Sonoma County to win congressional approval in 2000 to re-establish a terminated tribe and the right to acquire reservation land.
Sarris, who says he grew up "always wondering who I was," says he's working to honor "my Indian relatives and ancestors."
But one notable critic, U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, gives the novelist's latest project -- the tribal casino venture on a light industrial site near Rohnert Park -- a thumbs-down review.
Boxer, D-Calif., co-sponsored federal legislation to restore recognition to the tribe after getting promises from the tribe -- and in Sarris' testimony before Congress -- that it had no casino aspirations.
"I talked to them and I asked: 'Do you want to pursue gaming?' " Boxer said in a recent interview. "They said, 'No.' I said, 'Really mean it?' They said, 'Really mean it.' Then they turned around and pursued gambling.
"I was shocked, disappointed and dismayed."
Boxer later recused herself from dealings with the tribe after her son -- attorney Doug Boxer -- went to work on behalf of the casino. Doug Boxer worked for Darius Anderson, a former chief fundraiser for Gov. Gray Davis who arranged the partnership between the tribe and Station Casinos Inc. of Nevada.
But Sarris said the planned Mediterranean-style resort -- including a casino, hotel and spa -- came about only after the tribe failed to attract investors for other endeavors, including wine grape growing, organic food processing and a cheese factory.
Cheryl Schmidt, director of Stand Up for California, an anti-gambling group that protests the tribe's pending federal bid to take land into trust, said the project "is going to be an urban casino" that will "increase traffic and import crime into the community."
But the tribe signed an agreement to pay $200 million over 20 years to Rohnert Park, including $1 million a year for local schools. Once the tribe takes land into trust as its reservation, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will be bound to negotiate a gambling compact under the congressional legislation recognizing the Graton Rancheria, said the governor's spokesman, Darrell Ng.
Sarris pledges the development will create 2,500 unionized jobs, plus an economic lifeline for a tribe that began re-forming in 1992 when hundreds of area Indians compiled photographs and scrapbooks resurrecting histories of homeless Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok ancestors.
In 1922, they were herded by the federal government onto 15.4 acres of steep terrain that was designated as the Graton Rancheria. Thirty-six years later, the government terminated the tribe.
Sarris, 54, a former literature professor at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University, now fills an endowed chair of Native American Studies at Sonoma State University, a position funded by a $1.5 million grant from the tribe.
He never set foot on the Graton Rancheria when it was in existence. Yet the tribe embraces him.
"Our meeting Greg and knowing him is not as a writer and a filmmaker, but as a concerned citizen and a leader," said tribal Vice Chair Lorelle Ross, 31.
Ross' mother, Gloria Armstrong, 61, grew up on the Rancheria near Santa Rosa. She lives in a badly splintered wood plank house with no insulation and a leaking roof on an acre left from the former tribal site.
While Ross talks about a casino bringing jobs, education and life-changing opportunities for tribal members, her mother says she'll be happy with a new roof and to stay on her plot of land.
"If someone offered us a million dollars, 2 million, I wouldn't leave," she said. "This land has spirit -- it's where the Indian people lived as human beings."
As the tribe recaptured its identity, Sarris found his.
In Santa Rosa, he grew up as the adopted son of George Sarris, who briefly owned a hardware store, and Mary Sarris, a J.C. Penney furniture saleswoman.
In the 1970s, his stepmother told him the last name of his birth mother. That sent him on an exhaustive hunt for his roots -- and to the tragic story of Mary Bernadette "Bunny" Hartman, a 14-year-old white girl in Laguna Beach who fell hard for a football star named Emilio Hilario.
Sarris said Hartman rode horses with a young Elizabeth Taylor. And he said Hilario, half Filipino and half Miwok, was the great-grandson of Tom Smith, a renowned medicine man from the Northern California coast.
Hartman became pregnant and was spirited by her mother to Sonoma County. There, she gave birth -- and died after a transfusion of the wrong blood type, Sarris said.
Hilario graduated from Laguna Beach High School and went on to play football for the University of Southern California in 1954. He served in the Navy and died of a heart attack in 1983, a year before Sarris learned who he was.
Finding purpose in his discovery, Sarris emerged as a leading American Indian author.
He penned "Watermelon Nights," a novel about a confused young man conflicted over his relationship with the Indian community in which he lived. He also published a non-fiction book on Mabel McKay, a Pomo Indian basket weaver and spiritualist whom he befriended while growing up in Santa Rosa before learning of his roots.
"I knew Indians, but never thought I was an Indian," Sarris said. "As an adopted kid, not knowing who I was, what I was or where I belonged, I always paid attention to stories about people. I was trying to figure it out: How do I fit in?"
Michelle Satter, feature film program director for Redford's Sundance Institute, said the Oscar-winning director helped bring Sarris' "Grand Avenue" stories to television because he "was very excited by Greg's voice and the honesty and emotional truth of his work."
But Linda Zubia Trujillo said she was stunned when a strange guy showed up two decades ago at her family home in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles and said he was "cousin Greg."
Zubia Trujillo, who has since moved to Santa Rosa, said she is the niece of Hilario. She recalled Hilario as a man -- nicknamed "Junior" -- who was "nice and mean at the same time and always talking about football."
But when Sarris came to her door, Zubia Trujillo said she and her mother thought "he was crazy.
"Mom said, 'Junior has got a son -- and the SOB is white!' "
Now Sarris has a tribe -- and a new saga to write. He's still learning, and dealing with the plot twists.
When Station Casinos originally bought a 1,700-acre site along a pristine San Francisco Bay inlet for the Graton casino, environmentalists erupted in protest. They told Sarris the grounds were not only a wildlife refuge but source of grasses long ago used for American Indian basket weaving.
Sarris later announced the tribe would move its casino to a 68-acre site near Rohnert Park. It also donated its option -- worth $4.2 million -- toward a local land trust's $19.6 million purchase of the bay property to preserve 1,679 acres as open space.
"I really think this will enable us, once again, to take our roles as keepers of the land," he said.
But the novelist and storyteller caught himself when pondering where his journey has led.
"I not sure I wanted to be a tribal chairman or running a casino," he said. "I had a lot of dreams -- and this wasn't one of them."
Countdown begins to end sheriff's patrols
(CALIFORNIA) -- Riverside County sheriff's officials soon expect to start the 60-day time clock that will officially terminate the tribe's contract for extra law enforcement on reservation land.
River Rock expansion a step closer
(CALIFORNIA) -- The Indian tribe that operates River Rock casino is seeking federal approval to expand its wastewater treatment system, a first step for building its long-planned destination hotel and resort.
Tribes taking varying paths in war on meth / Indians viewing issue as 'critical'
(CALIFORNIA) -- American Indian tribes and tribal groups are getting creative in fighting what they consider an epidemic on tribal lands - methamphetamine use.
These are some of the kinds of things that you as members of the Kashia Pomo Tribe have the opportunity to make policy on with your input on the tribes......
