It’s a Great Day for Tribal Police Graduate : Law enforcement: Sycuan Reservation officer is first Native American sent to Police Academy by a tribal force.

Fifty-four officers graduate from the 128th class of the San Diego Police Academy today, which also happens to be California Indian Day.

That doesn’t mean a whole lot to 53 of the recruits, but it does to Rafael Riotutar, the first Native American ever sent to the nationally acclaimed academy by a tribal police force.

While Riotutar, 44, was a rarity at the academy, he’ll also stand out when he returns to work Tuesday for the tribal police force on the Sycuan Reservation, where he has worked as a security guard since October.

There are only five other Native Americans on the 45-member force, which polices the reservation in East County. Only one of them is a certified officer. Riotutar makes two.

Riotutar--a Chippewa-Cree Indian born on the Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation near Great Falls, Mont.--wants to see those numbers get bigger.

“What happens to a lot of Indians, because of your low self-esteem, you don’t dress good enough, and pretty soon you’re out of sync with the larger society. Then you drop out of school,” Riotutar said. “You don’t have any mentors. You don’t have anyone to encourage you. Most of my heroes I look up to are in prison now, like (American Indian Movement activist Leonard) Peltier--or they drank themselves to an early death.”

Riotutar may already be a role model for other Indians. Now the police force has decided to sponsor two other Native American security guards for the next Police Academy class, which begins in October. Three other non-Indians from the force will also be attending, Sycuan Tribal Police Cmdr. Ed Hodges said.

To Hodges, Riotutar’s graduation today is not such a hallmark event. Most of the officers on the force have been certified at some other police academy.

“With the exception of Riotutar and five others, we’re all certified academy graduates. We’ve got 305 years of experience among us,” Hodges said of the force, formed in January, 1990. Most of the officers have retired from other local law enforcement departments.

But to other Native Americans, Riotutar’s commitment means a lot.

“He sat there and said, ‘Loreen, I want to go to the San Diego Police Academy,’ and his eyes were all glowing and twinkling,” said Loreen Mendenhall, a career counselor at the Indian Human Resource Center, where Riotutar found out about the security guard job opening. “We said, ‘Wow.’

“It’s a major, high-level goal to set for oneself. I think it was being where he was, and seeing he was on a reservation where there were very few Indians employed in the higher categories of the job description.”

Resilience isn’t a trait Riotutar lacks.

When he was young, his family moved to Northern California.

“The key was, if you could leave the reservation, you would basically have a chance,” he said.

He dropped out of high school, but went back and finished through night school when he was 19. Then he joined the Marine Corps and later went to college on the GI bill, “taking anything, everything. The more I started to read, I realized I had to be in this world,” he said.

When he was young, Riotutar always returned to the Rocky Boy’s Reservation during the summer, for powwows and sun dances, and got involved in Native American politics in the early 1970s.

At one point, Riotutar went back to school for two years to study music.

A jazz and blues harmonica player, he played at last year’s Adams Avenue Street Fair. This year, he was too busy with his academy training. He went back to school to learn how to read music, hoping to stand out from other harmonica players.

“I decided to be one of the best chromatic harmonica players, and a harmonica player who could read music,” Riotutar said. “I also got involved in martial arts and boxing. It built discipline, that when you do something, you always want to do it really good.”

When Riotutar moved to San Diego a year ago with his wife and 16-year-old stepson--a football player for Grossmont High School--he was ready for some kind of change.

“There comes a point when you’re open to things, and you know you’re going to do a good job,” he said. “When I first moved down here, I was going to do whatever came my way, whether it was digging a ditch. But I was just hoping for something like this. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.

“I wanted to come here so I wouldn’t be trapped in my job. And I didn’t want to be working at Sycuan and have them say, ‘Just because he’s an Indian, he got the job,’ ” he said.

Riotutar was the only one of the 54 recruits who worked while attending the academy. That meant no days off for the first 15 weeks of the 25-week class. But the tribal police force subsidized him, and the past few months have been easier, he said.

When he goes back to the reservation, Riotutar wants to work as a liaison with the Sycuan community and as a field training officer for the new Indian recruits the tribal police force plans to send to the next academy.

Eventually, he hopes to attend a federal Bureau of Indian Affairs school that focuses on Indian laws, and work on a New Mexico reservation before ultimately returning to Montana.

“He was a good recruit,” said Senior Officer Dominic Boccia, Riotutar’s training officer. “Whatever department he wanted to go to now, he’d have a good chance of getting picked up.”

Riotutar did make one sacrifice to attend the academy. He cut his long braids, after 25 years. While it was a sad parting, Riotutar said he didn’t want his long hair to hold him back.

“I thought about it. I’ve had my hair for 25 years. That’s almost a whole life span of an Indian male. So I’m looking at it as another life,” he said. “When you’re young, you’re so malleable to change. You still want to look in the mirror and see that person that you like. But as you get older, you don’t need that mirror anymore.”