Experienced in film and television production, Jordan Perzik is currently working toward a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Jordan Perzik has a passion for ecological projects and also seeks to increase awareness of Native American cultures throughout southern California. He is an active member of the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum of the Cahuilla Indians. Native to the greater Palm Springs area, the Cahuilla Indians today are found across nine reservations in the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa Mountains, as well as the Coachella Valley.

 

The groups in the Coachella Valley were known to Spanish settlers as the Agua Caliente Band, due to the sacred hot mineral springs that formed a central part of their cultural identity. The 32,000-acre Agua Caliente Indian Reservation was established in the 1880s, after the Indians strongly protested the exploitative land-deeding protocol that followed the entry of the Southern Pacific Railroad into the area. With more than 10,000 acres of land situated within Palm Springs city limits, the tribe fought long and hard to exert its rights to the land and obtain the use and economic benefits it was entitled to from the 1880s through the 1950s. Today, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians is engaged in a legal battle to claim senior water rights in the Coachella Valley and prevent the continued degradation of the area’s water resources in the aquifer.