As reported in the CoCo Times, a county-funded university study says the Scott’s Valley Band of Pomo Indians, which hopes to acquire land to build a thirty-acre casino in North Richmond, has no ancestral ties to the East Bay. The county, which opposes casinos near cities, will use the study to make its case against the tribe before the Department of the Interior.
Tribal chairman Don Arnold was dismissive. “Indian people were here a long time ago,” he told the Times. “Pomo is not an Indian tribe. It’s a dialect. Did we name ourselves a dialect? We were Indian people. … Who are you going to believe: the Indian or the white guy?”
