Surfers weren’t the only tollway winners

Thanks to the California Coastal Commission, this was a righteous week for South County surfer dudes and environmentalists.

The proposed and much-dreaded Foothill South tollway extension that had been hanging over their heads like concrete slabs was voted down, and it was time to party.

Because surfers and environmentalists are so identified with California, there’s a tendency to think they were the only big winners, that they were the only ones who had a major stake in the outcome.

But no one was happier than Rebecca Robles of San Clemente. To her, though, the argument wasn’t about a lifestyle or a philosophy; it was about something in her bones that even she says is sometimes hard to articulate.

She remembers being a little girl and walking with her mother and hearing the wind blow. “God’s voice,” her mother said to her.

“She always instilled in us a connnectedness to the land,” said Robles, now in her 50s and the mother of three grown sons. “Not just the land, but to nature, people around us.”

Her mother was a member of the Acjachemen Nation, which includes the Juaneno band to which Robles belongs. Part of the six-lane tollway would have coursed around and near the ancient Acjachemen (pronounced a-HOSH-a-men) village and sacred site where Robles’ ancestors lived centuries ago.

“I thought it would destroy this place,” she says, looking down over the San Mateo Valley in southeastern Orange County that was home to the village known as Panhe. “It’s the one place in Orange County where we can come and practice our spirituality.”

She wants me to feel it, too, on this tranquil morning, where a near stone silence surrounds us. She says she feels a burden to explain to me the importance of her roots. She talks lyrically about the transcendent quiet and how her ancestors would have fished and worked the ground and raised their children -- long before anyone would have heard of surfing.

“You heard a lot about surfers, a lot about endangered species, but very little of the sacred site issue got in the news,” she says of the toll road debate. “Some of the time, I felt, boy, we’re invisible.”

If that appears bitter in print, she is not. To the contrary, she celebrates the convergence of interests that defeated the tollway. She knows an impassioned band of Indians could never, by itself, have stopped the bulldozers.

Many times since her childhood, she pictured the life that those in her bloodline would have lived in the valley near the creek bed. “If it’s beautiful now,” she says, “imagine it then. Imagine a world . . . way over there if you saw a fire, you’d know the people who were making it. Or over there toward Dana Point, those people would be collecting abalone and shellfish.”

She knows there’s a romanticism in her words that eludes many people. “We’re a part of all of American culture,” she says, “but there’s a disconnection. Indians are everywhere, a huge part of the culture. But to me it seems like a big disconnection in history. The Spaniards came in 1769, so there’s kind of a gap where people don’t really know us. They don’t know who we are or what we are.”

She’s convinced the tollway would have done untold damage to the land around Panhe. She’d like to attribute part of the project’s defeat to a belief that people today have a greater appreciation for Native American culture.

“The way state laws were written, Indian history wasn’t protected,” she says. “But maybe that’s the juncture we’re at now, that this part of California history is being seen as irreplaceable.”

She wants people to appreciate Native American sites -- not out of a sense of guilt, but from a sense of importance.

“Places like this are important to us, because it’s our history, our connection to who we are,” she says. “But the other part that worried me is that I’m an American. I’m a Native American, but I’m an American. I love this country. I love this country. I believe in all the stuff about freedom and justice and our ideals. We lose our greatness as a country if we lose our ideals, if we let everything be destroyed.

“If what’s important to native people is their religious freedom . . . a toll road through a sacred site would have destroyed something that was irreplaceable. Most of the people, I don’t think, got it. Our allies eventually got it.”

Perhaps most important, the Coastal Commission got it.

So, to repeat, it was a good week for surfers. But it was just as good a week for a hard-to-pronounce Indian nation whose descendants walk among us.

“Wednesday was a tremendous, tremendous victory,” Robles says. “As good as it gets.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at [email protected]. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.