“Mass Murder in California’s Empty Quarter – Tribal Treachery at the Cedarville Rancheria” by investigative journalist Ray A. March is a true-to-life account that at times echoes Tommy Orange’s fictional “There, There.”
The central characters in each story are displaced Indigenous persons who history has foisted into the streets of Oakland and Sacramento. Neither the fictional nor the real life characters deeply understand their cultures. As they grapple with the critical question “Who is an Indian?” and fear that they do not measure up, they fall into a deep confusion and dysfunction that irretrievably leads to chaos and murder.
“Mass Murder in California's Empty Quarter” comes at a time when a growing number of tribal citizens are victim of mass disenrollment—a greed-addled political practice that strips them of their Indigenous birthright. At the time of the Cedarville mass murder the disenrollment epidemic was rampant, with related violence on the rise. Family feuds over tribal political control, particularly of newfound gaming wealth, turned brutal, and subverted what is really means to be Indigenous.
March chronicles the intersection of murder and disenrollment in telling the horrific story of how, in 2014, a former Cedarville Rancheria chairwoman executed her brother, nephew, niece and the tribe’s administrator in plain sight, before they could evict her, deprive her of $80,000 in annual gaming per capita monies, and in effect disenroll her.
March’s book sounds as a much-needed wakeup call for anybody concerned about the state and future of Indigenous peoples in America.
Gabriel S. Galanda is the Managing Lawyer of Galanda Broadman, PLLC, an Indigenous rights law firm. He belongs to the Round Valley Indian Tribes, descending from the Nomlaki and Concow Peoples.
