"Water We Believed Could Never Belong to Anyone": The San Luis Rey River and the Pala Indians of Southern California

Among the testimonies given at a 1986 joint senate hearing before the Select Committee on Indian Affairs and the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, a representative of the San Luis Rey Indian Water Authority stated the following:

It is our goal to help you see, as we see, that the San Luis Rey River was a special gift to us, an offering from another power which gave us physical and spiritual strength, purpose and life to our tribes and to our people. . . . To deny us water is to deny us life. ¹

Similar to other Native Americans throughout North America, the Indians on the Pala Reservation in California's northern San Diego County have for centuries identified with the lands upon which they live. In part, this identity is drawn from the waters of the San Luis Rey River that slowly meanders its way through the nearly twelve-thousand-acre reservation. ²

Five miles east of Oceanside and south of the rolling hills of the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base sits Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, founded by Franciscan friars two centuries ago. Some twenty-five miles farther inland, just beyond the Pala Basin, where Couser Canyon Road and California State Highway 76 cross, lies the Pala Reservation. Straddling the San Luis Rey River, the reservation is surrounded by the river valley's many dry, chaparral-covered foothills and mountains, which continue eastward through the Pauma Valley up to the tall cedars atop Palomar Mountain. Throughout this region are numerous other Indian reservations, all of them unique, yet sharing similar cultures and a similar need for water. These cultures include the Cupeño, Luiseño, Kumeyaay, and Cahuilla. Today at Pala, traditional identification is focused primarily on Cupeño-Luiseño heritage. ³

At the heart of the reservation, next to the small village of homes where so many of Pala's residents live, sits the asistencia San Antonio de Pala, founded by the Franciscans in 1816. Established as an auxiliary to the more coastally oriented Mission San Luis Rey, San Antonio de Pala has, since its inception, ministered continually to the Indian population throughout the region. ⁴ Through a somewhat vague consensus historians and preservationists have elevated the asistencia at Pala to full mission status, and of the twenty-one other Franciscan missions that span much of California's coastal region, it is the only one actually on an Indian reservation. Though Pala is unique in this respect, like most of the California missions, it also sits adjacent to a river. And it is by this river that the people today live much as their ancestors did before the successive arrival of the Spanish, Mexicans, and Anglo-Americans.

This traditional identification with the San Luis Rey River at Pala is, perhaps, best understood by its people's creation stories. Passed down from generation to generation, these voices from Pala--which has retained its traditional Luiseño name, meaning water--tell us not only about a people's past culture, but about their own understanding of the world in which they continue to live. ⁵

Whaikut Piwkut was the man, the sky or Milky Way, whit[e]ish-gray. Harurai Chatutai was the woman, the earth. . . . She was with child. . . . Then came forth the children in order of their birth . . . Yula Nahut . . . Chakwut Wakut . . . Nosish Ayaraka . . . [and] Pala. ⁶

In another Luiseño story, one of the Temecula people, a chief named Nahachish, traveled throughout his peoples' land giving place names to various locations he visited:

He sang a song. He sang that he was going to leave that part of the country, but he did not know where to go. He went to Picha Awanga, Pichanga, between Temecula and Warner's Ranch, and named that place. . . . He went into a...