At night its neon lights glow like many-colored incandescent jewels under the dark sky. The spacious building, with its many photographs of Indian art and of historic Indian sites and dwellings, its life-size carved-wood brown bear near the front door, its conference room and offices and industrial-size kitchen and day care center, is testimony to just how far the tribe has come in three decades.Įven more so is the glittering, $20 million Feather Falls Casino, which is located up a slight rise about a quarter-mile away, overlooking the rancheria’s 300-acre compound. It’s located amid oak-studded hills on the southern outskirts of Oroville.
Today, 30 years later, he’s sitting in his office at the sprawling brown-shingled headquarters of that same tribe, now known collectively as the Concow Maidu of Mooretown Rancheria. It was for $600, and it was payment for the fact that 12 years earlier the government had summarily disbanded his tribe, a small group of mountain Maidu Indians who historically had lived in the Feather Falls area east of Oroville.Īrchuleta is a round, genial man with an open, youthful face and jet-black hair. When Alan Archuleta was 10 years old-he’s 40 now, so it was 1973-he got a check in the mail from the U.S.
