Casino wars: ethics and economics in Indian country - Cover Story

Christian Century, Feb 16, 1994 by Jon Magnuson

THE "GHOST TRAIL" weaves through 7,000 acres across one of Washington state's largest Indian reservations. My informant tells me it carries no visible markings. For outsiders the path remains a hidden part of that indigenous community's spiritual geography. I'm told that some Salish avoid crossing the trail casually. They regard it as one that their forest spirits travel. Only initiates into the Seyouwin, or winter dance society, continue to perceive the trail; those who practice the thousand-year-old secret rituals are pledged to protect and honor it.

I stand in a parking lot with a longtime employee of the tribe's Treaty Protection Task Force, who musingly points out that the ghost trail ends a few yards in back of me at the doorway to the tribal casino, which operates 24 hours a day. This is my second visit to the tribe's gaming enterprise. We casually wander over to the renovated warehouse that now houses bingo games, roulette wheels and blackjack tables. The central image on a cedar totem pole near the entrance is a bear holding a deck of cards. Next to the door a world map invites visitors and customers to mark their points of origin. Hundreds of red and green tacks fill the display, representing dozens of countries in Europe and Asia, as well as North America. Approaching the casino's entrance, I lift my hand to trigger a motion activator hidden inside a Halloween skeleton. The "Addares Family" theme song echoes from a speaker mounted just out of sight.

It's busy this afternoon. As in big-time casinos, there are no windows, no clocks and no places to sit down apart from gaming and bingo tables. Employees are cordial, floors spotless. State regulations prohibit liquor from being served here, and although food is available, it's apparent that no one has come to linger, eat or socialize. The atmosphere reminds me of Las Vegas and Reno. There is a feeling of peculiar seriousness in such establishments, perhaps because the rules seem so straightforward. This is about winning. And money.

As is true on most Indian reservations, this casino is leased to a national gaming organization, with a contract stipulating that it turn over full operation to tribal leaders in three or four years. Meanwhile, plenty of sophisticated marketing techniques have been put into place. Not long ago this nondescript warehouse was an empty building on the edge of a bay next to a lonely ferry dock. What was once an abandoned storage area is now an expansive, neatly ordered parking lot filled bumper to bumper with cars and vans. Each day hundreds of bingo and blackjack fans enter what was once a sleepy tourist and fishing town, oblivious to ghost trails, Indian treaty rights, or the ancient masked dances that still go on near here on rainy winter nights. I get myself some coffee, and my friend introduces me to a young tribal woman dressed in medieval jester's garb, working as one of the hostesses. She is friendly, and mentions with pride that 60 percent of the employees are tribal members. She's a single mother with three children. The pay is good, she says. My colleague, one of the tribe's cultural specialists, points, smiling, to a blackjack table. He says the dealer, a man with long dark hair, is one of the leaders of the Seyouwin.

This small but obviously lucrative casino is only one example of the sudden growth of legalized gambling on Indian reservations. It is also a sign of the sweeping shift in public morality that is under way in virtually every municipality, Indian and non-Indian, across the country. Gambling has become an acceptable form of mass-market entertainment. In 1992 Americans spent more on legal games of chance than on films, books, amusement attractions and recorded music combined. That same year Americans spent three times as much money at Indian gambling casinos as on movie tickets. According to Wall Street forecasts, spending on gambling will double within a decade. "If there weren't more demand than supply, we'd all be doing something else," says Bruce Turner, a casino analyst for Baymond, James, and Associates.

Twenty states now have Indian gambling, ranging from bingo parlors to casinos as big and glamorous as those in Nevada. Fifty-eight tribes are currently involved in gaming ventures. The Foxwoods casino in Connecticut is the single largest contributor to that state's tax coffers; it alone will provide the state with $113 million this year. Minnesota, with its Native American gambling halls, currently has more casinos than Atlantic City. Eager to jump aboard the economic boom, a promoter in northwest New Jersey has recently offered to donate land to the Delaware Indians if a few members of that tribe will come back from Oklahoma to sponsor a casino.

THE USE of reservation lands for large-scale com- mercial gaming designed to attract non-Indian players is a relatively new trend. Two court cases in the early 1980s set the standard for states: In both Seminole Tribe v. Butterworth (in Florida) and State of California v. Cabazon the courts used the "criminal-prohibitory and civil regulatory" test. This test holds that if state law criminally prohibits a form of gambling, then the tribes within that state may not engage in that form of gaming free of state control. To further regulate tribal gaming, Congress passed the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988.