assimilate into society. "They were spanked for speaking their own Iipay language."  Consequently, Beaver's generation wasn't interested in learning the language and lost the ability to do so.  Now he is sorry that he did not learn the Indian songs about his family heritage that he Grandfather used to sing.  When they grew up, his generation, now fifty-something, began leaving the reservation to live because there was not enough housing and no jobs.
  Before the great depression the Indians were migrant workers.  One of Curo's grandfathers, a German, owned a ranch in El Cajon.  His Indian grandfather was a migrant worker on that ranch.
  The children of those two men played together, grew up, and later married and became Beaver's parents.  His German grandfather lost his ranch during  the depression, but because he had always been a fair employer, he was invited by the Indian grandfather to come to live on the Barona Reservation,  which they did. His Indian grandparents slept outside under the oak trees their entire life.    The Barona and Viejas Indians used to be of the same tribe.  Their home was in the El Capitan Valley. Capitan Grande had always been an Indian village.  In fact, in l885, Ulysses S. Grant had issued a proclamation to keep white men away from their l8,000-acre reservation.  In 1909, the City of San Diego decided it needed a place to store water for the growing city population.  In 1919, they began negotiations to buy the land so they could build the El Capitan Reservoir.  By 1930, It was a done deal.
  The city "generously" bought the land for fifty cents an acre. The tribal leadership used the money to buy Barona Ranch, which was already in foreclosure and the Viejas land.  The Capitan Grande tribe split up and about 75 Indians moved to Barona and 40 moved to Viejas.
  During the 1960's when the San Diego Mission de Alcala wanted to expand their building site, they dug up an area that turned out to be thew historic Indian burial site.  The bones revealed some terrible evidence . . . "That's when we realized the Mission Indians had been tortured and used as slave labor.  They had been used as beasts of burden.  The mission system had been used, not for the religious improvement of the poor Indians, but for the land grab for Spain."
  Before the mission system, the local Indians lived in small migratory family groups of l2 to l5 members.  They did not wander aimlessly. They had established trails and followed he food sources.  They would fish and gather seashells by the coast, pinion nuts in the mountains, agave in the dessert and hunt deer and small animals. They made blankets out of skins and wore skirts made of shredded willow bark.  If the worse came to be, they would make a mush out of the acorns gathered from the oak trees.  Beaver said that the acorn mush is terrible stuff but his tribal elders still like to eat it because it reminds them of their heritage.

(Continued on page 5)

  Lakeside -- If a man has three homes--one at the beach, one in the mountains, and one in the desert--he would be considered a rich man.  That's how Beaver Curo, an Indian man from Barona, thinks about his ancestors...the migratory Indians who lived in San Diego County for perhaps thousands of years.
  Beaver recently visited the members of the Lakeside Historical Society to tell them his story and the story of his family. He said that people often ask him what it was like to live on an Indian Reservation. "  It was a wonderful place to grow up--nothing but us."  He fondly remembered that he built himself a bike with parts he found at the dump. When he got a "banana seat" he proudly rode all over the reservation to show it off.  He and his friends would ride their bikes all the way to Ramona and hardly pass a car.  He said that their shower was a concrete block stall, with frogs living in it., "We didn't know you guys had bath tubs."
  During his growing up years, going into Lakeside was a very big deal.  His brother would even hide in their car to sneak a ride to town.
  He admits to being "raised white" because being an Indian was a bad thing.  People wanted their children to