The Sobobas and the Riverside County Sheriff's Department have agreed to talk.

Not much more emerged from weeks of negotiations that followed back-to-back gunbattles on the Soboba Indian Reservation, which is at the northern edge of San Jacinto.

Three tribal members died in the shootouts, which came after deputies were fired on.

Contained within the agreement to talk were agreements to tone down the rhetoric and to do a better job on each side of understanding the other's position.

Sheriff Stan Sniff has gotten the go-ahead from the Board of Supervisors to create a full-time liaison to provide a permanently open line of communication between the department and the tribes in the county, but Lt. Patricia Knudson of the Hemet station has been assigned specifically to establish and maintain the line of communication with the Soboba Indian Reservation.

Though the agreement between the Sheriff's Department and the Soboba leadership seeks to define, at least in part, the relationship between them, substantial divisions remain.

Sniff was uncompromising during a news conference that followed the signing of the agreement at the Soboba Springs clubhouse on the issue of enforcing the law on the reservation. Deputies will not abandon their role, he said.

Robert Salgado, chairman of the Soboba Tribal Council, said that it is tradition on the reservation - his own understanding goes back to his grandfather - that, where the public roads end and the tribal roads start, civil authority ends and tribal authority begins.

“This is more of a first step,” Sniff said. It will bring no fundamental change in the way the department operates on the reservation, he said.

On the other hand, Sniff pledged the department to formal training in understanding the history and culture of the reservation, while Salgado, for his part, said the tribe will do a better job of trying to understand the way the Sheriff's Department operates and the laws that underpin the way they operate.

The two sides also agreed to meet monthly to continue the process of mutual learning and understanding.

Among the issues that rankled the tribal members after the most recent shooting was the Sheriff's Department's decision to close down the reservation, preventing anyone from entering or leaving, effectively imprisoning reservation residents in their homes.

Salgado also expressed frustration with the department's decision to set up a command post in the parking lot of the casino not far from where the shooting started.

While deputies will continue to answer calls for service on the reservation, the department does not have the resources to provide regular patrol on the reservation, Sniff said, one of the touchy points with the Sobobas.

The tribe has formed its own security force, but officers are neither armed nor sworn.

Salgado said it is unlikely the tribe will form an armed, certified police force because of the cost.

James Fletcher of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which helped broker the agreement, said there are three levels of law on a reservation, federal law, tribal law, and local law. Each represents a different way of policing, he said, with each calling for a different agency to do the policing.

How those levels of law enforcement mesh is one of the topics to be decided in coming months.

A third and silent presence in the room was a loose organization of ministers, who have been meeting weekly to pray and work for reconciliation.

Representing the tribe in that consortium was Lorina Duro, pastor of the Kut-Poki Ministries (translated as Soboba Lights), who said Sobobas see their reservation as theirs. “They consider their land their land,” she said, and there have been times when civil authority violated that sovereignty.

Under several court decisions, some reaching to the Supreme Court, Indian reservations are sovereign nations, though the sovereignty is tempered.

The reason they can operate casinos, for instance, is that the courts have decided that anything allowed in the larger population is allowed unregulated on the reservation.

As for the ministers' meetings, said Duro, “The spiritual effort comes before the natural.”

Randy Jones, pastor of the Valle Vista Assembly of God and a member of the ministerial group, said he feels the Sobobas have valid complaints. “Clint Eastwood-type sheriffs come onto their property,” he said. “They should go through the authority of the tribe.”

He said deputies have frequently made errors when seeking out tribal members. “They go to the wrong house, talk to the wrong people,” he said.

Father Mark Miller of the Church of the Resurrection, a charismatic Episcopal congregation in San Jacinto, said the ministers seek to mirror the Lord's Prayer, “on earth as it is in heaven,” in relations between the tribe and the larger community.