Pala: A history of a southern California Indian community

Scope and method of study. Five miles east of Oceanside, California, and south of the rolling hills of the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base sits Mission San Luis Rey de Francis, founded by Franciscan friars over two centuries ago. Some twenty-five miles farther inland along State Highway 76 lies the Pala Indian Reservation. Today this 11,893-acre federal reservation is home to over 600 people who claim membership to the Pala Band of Mission Indians. California possesses over forty separate reservations or designated Indian lands, and the nation's fourth most populous county, San Diego, alone has twenty-one independent federally recognized reservations. Forty miles northeast of the city of San Diego, the Palo Reservation is tucked unassumingly among the hills and mountains of the San Luis Rey River Valley. As in other communities, jobs, school, religion, and family constitute the cultural fabric of the Pala Indians. Still, their Cupeno-Luiseno heritage plays an integral role in the people of Pala's world-views, and perhaps more important, how they react to certain conditions in their lives. For those living at Pala, a sense of identity and self is drawn in part from the waters of the San Luis Rey River which slowly meanders through the reservation. For millenia this river's history has paralleled that of the people who have lived along its banks. With every changing ebb and flow the river's course has helped determine the lives of the people at Pala, tend as the river continues to changes, so too does its people.;Findings and conclusions. Clearly the people of Pala represent a viable community and culture. Their future is invariably tied to the environment and the people who surround them. For more than two centuries the Pala Indians have witnessed constant change and cultural fragmentation, resulting in a constant struggle to maintain an identity as a people.