The Blood of the Tigua
Officially, the issue tearing apart the West Texas' largest native American tribe is one of lineage. Who is and is not a member. But the real dispute is over money—earned in unimaginable amounds at the casino on their reservation and coveted by rival factions willing to risk everything.
Belen says: Pamela, Great article, my Great Grand Mother is full blooded Tigua. Thank you so much for taking the time to write this. It really helps me and my sisters who live in California to put things together. God bless, Belen (January 2nd, 2009 at 3:35am)
(Page 4 of 4)
Muñoz vigorously denies that the tribal council checked tribal rolls to consolidate power or for financial gain. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, he explains, had pressured the tribe to do so, warning that otherwise it might risk losing federal funding. (When I inquired, a BIA representative would say only, “It is an internal tribal matter, and we have no comment.”) “We have given these people every opportunity to prove their Tigua heritage,” Muñoz says firmly, “but they have not been able to show us any evidence that they have a one-eighth blood quantum, which the federal government requires. So who is being greedy? The tribal council, or those who are pretending to be Tigua for federal and tribal benefits?”
Last fall Marty Silvas was tried in state court on first-degree felony charges for stealing the drum; if convicted, he faced a possible life sentence. Vela’s younger brother, Sammy, was ready to testify as a character witness on his behalf, if needed, and her sister Rosemary sat behind Silvas throughout the trial in a show of support. On November 5 the jury found him not guilty, accepting the defense’s argument that Silvas, in his life-time position as the war captain, was the drum’s rightful owner and therefore could not have stolen it. But if his supporters felt any sense of vindication, it was short-lived. The following day, dozens of them—including Vela, her sister, her brother-in-law, and several cousins—were abruptly fired from their jobs on the reservation. Four days later they were informed by certified letter that they were banished from the tribe and had thirty days to move off of tribal land. They lacked Tigua blood, they were told, and were no longer welcome. Many of the banished tribe members, weary of the tribal in-fighting, packed up their belongings and collected small monetary settlements from the tribe in exchange for their homes, but Vela’s family and seven others held their ground. “I decided that if they wanted me to leave,” she explains, “they were going to have to carry me out.”
The stalemate soon turned into a siege. “We became prisoners in our own homes,” says Vela. Tribal police officers erected chain-link fences around the reservation’s housing complex in late December, blockading streets and posting officers at its entrance; any banished tribe members trying to enter were turned back, and those who ventured out to take their children to school or to head to work were forced to scale the chain-link fences under cover of darkness to get back inside. Vela kept her blinds drawn and her lights out, subsisting on food that her sister threw over the barricades. Christmas and New Year’s Day were grim affairs spent locked inside her home, and the weeks that followed were little better. “I would sit in the room where my son was born, I would walk through the other rooms in the house, and I would thank them for giving me good memories,” she remembers. “I knew that sooner or later they would force us out.” In January tribal police officers began driving by her home in the evenings, shining floodlights into her windows; by February a tribal maintenance crew had turned her water off. Her neighbors offered few protests. “People are afraid to oppose the tribal council because so many of them now work at the casino,” asserts Marty Silvas. “The council members run the casino, and the council members sign their paychecks. Anyone who challenges them pays for it.”
Soon after dusk fell on February 18, Vela received a panicked call from her cousin, who lived down the street. “I picked up the phone and heard yelling and screaming. My brother-in-law said, ‘They have guns, Gracie,’” she recalls. “I looked out the window, and about nine men were crossing my yard, carrying shotguns and revolvers.” Vela sat in her living room and watched as officers kicked in her door; she offered no resistance when they handcuffed her and led her to the edge of the housing development, which was awash in the revolving red-and-white lights of tribal police cars. “Everyone was standing on their front lawn—my neighbors, my co-workers, my son’s friends—and they were all quiet,” remembers Vela. “When I went by, they turned their heads, they lowered their eyes. No one said a word.”
ON A HOT, CLOUDLESS MORNING IN JUNE, when the banishments had begun to fade from memory, the tribe gathered in the courtyard of the white adobe mission church to celebrate the Feast of Saint Anthony. Pistoleros in ceremonial dress fired their shotguns in the air, scattering pigeons perched on the bell tower and raining cardboard-shell debris onto the well-wishers below, signaling the beginning of the Tigua’s holiest day of the year. Behind them, four Tigua men with eagle feathers in their hair held aloft a statue of Saint Anthony draped in pink bunting; they were followed by a long procession of tribe members, their cheeks stained with red ceremonial paint, who walked along Old Pueblo Road in traditional attire: the men in moccasins and fringed, earth-colored tunics, the women in turquoise jewelry and embroidered calico dresses trimmed with lace, their hair festooned with colored ribbons. The penitents lined up in front of the mission church, where the tribe’s leaders stood holding varas: thick, green willow branches from the banks of the Rio Grande that are used in the holiday’s ritual scourging. According to tradition, the whipping is meted out only by the chief and his assistants, but in recent years, the governor and several members of the tribal council have taken part in the rite, as they did that June morning. The Tigua kneeled in the stone courtyard before the men with varas, receiving a series of stinging lashes as they gave penance to Saint Anthony.
The pistoleros fired their shotguns again, and amid the cries of the Tigua dancers who lined up on either side of the courtyard, the low rumble of the juanchido could be heard for the first time in five years. Saint Anthony, the finder of lost things, had answered the tribe’s prayers in March, when the sacred drum was quietly returned for a $1 million reward. The deal was brokered by El Paso attorney Roy Brandys, who has thus far refused to disclose the identity of the person who was in possession of the drum or to grant an interview; he has, however, previously represented both Marty Silvas and his brother Manny in civil litigation. Vince Muñoz believes that the person who returned the drum was none other than Marty Silvas, whom he says stole the juanchido as a means of extortion. Silvas bristled at the charge, explaining that he was a victim of familial betrayal. “I was backstabbed by my own brother,” he told me, his voice filled with emotion. “He became greedy, just like the tribe.” According to Silvas, the drum was returned by his now estranged brother Manny—the former lieutenant governor of the tribe—who knew where it was hidden. “When I heard the drum had been returned, I thought it must be a fake,” Silvas said. “But then I saw it on television. I know every little crack on that drum. I know where the paint is worn away and where the surface is smooth, and I knew it was the juanchido.”
Under the hot morning sun, the Tigua had started to dance. The women waved corn husks over the ground as if planting seeds; the men shook bright red rattles, which sounded like rain. I strained to see the juanchido—which sat in the shade of a juniper tree, surrounded by men who sang traditional songs—but I was not able to catch a glimpse of it. Vince Muñoz stood proudly outside the mission church, watching the Tigua dancers, and I marveled, as he must have, at how far the tribe had come in only a few years. But while this was a day for rejoicing, there was something inexpressibly sad about the festivities, from which so many of the banished tribe members were absent. Even the return of the drum was bittersweet, since no one—not even Marty Silvas, who had staked his life on the juanchido—had escaped suspicion for having compromised tradition for a $1 million bounty.
As I looked at the mission church and the neighboring casino, these peculiar bookends to the Tigua’s history, I wondered at the tribe’s three-hundred-year journey from the sacred to the profane. That morning, as the rhythms of the drum resounded in the church courtyard, it was clear that though the tribe had at last attained the most American of ideals—money and power—they had come at a very high price indeed.
My Library
