1 Dollar Delaware Beaded Moccasins

The Los Coyotes Band of Cahuilla and Cupeño Indians occupies a reservation in the San Ysidro Mountains of San Diego County — one of the most remote in California, without grid electricity until the late twentieth century. Their sovereign coinage program, like those of numerous federally recognized tribes, draws authority from the same legal framework that permits tribal nations to issue currency, a right periodically challenged but consistently upheld. The beaded moccasin motif ties specifically to Cahuilla material culture, though the Cupeño — a distinct people forcibly relocated to Los Coyotes in the 1903 Pala removal — carried their own parallel traditions.