Gambling on the future

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 22, 1997 | by Sean Paige

For generations, Navajo elders have told and retold the Legend of the Great Gambler who, after losing everything in a high-stakes wager with the people, vows someday to return and destroy them. "Maybe the Gambler was the white man," muses Navajo chanter and medicine man Alfred Yazie, "or maybe he's coming back in the form of casinos."

Superstition or not, this story is credited by some with having led Navajos on the nation's largest reservation (in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah) to reject casino gambling in a Nov. 4 referendum, resisting pressures from tribal leaders for the second time in five years. "There is really nothing good that can come from gaming besides money," says Edison Wauneka, a tribal official who opposes casinos. "While it can make a lot of money, at the same time it's going to hurt a lot of people."

But apparently not every American Indian tribe shares the Navajo's chastening lore or ethical trepidations. Instead, many are betting heavily that casino gambling, called the "new buffalo" by some, will free them from the suffocating grip of federal paternalism. More than any other group of Americans, critics say Indians have reason to see the federal safety net as an entangling web from which escape is rare.

Casino-driven winds of change are sweeping through Indian country. Only days before the Navajo just said no, in a Capitol Hill hearing-room a world away from Arizona's high plateau, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt was denying that a $300,000 political donation from Wisconsin's Oneida tribe led him to reject a casino bid by their poorer Indian neighbors, the Chippewa.

Here was one tribe waging a big-dollar Washington lobbying campaign to block the economic development of another. Such a scenario would have seemed all but impossible a decade ago, before a 1987 Supreme Court ruling (California vs. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians) blazed the trail for Indian casino gaming. Few then would have predicted that the handful of reservation bingo parlors operating before 1988, when Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, or IGRA, in less than a decade would become a $6 billion industry with roughly 280 casinos owned by 184 tribes.

The most famous rags-to-riches story of the Indian casinos is that of Connecticut's Mashantucket Pequot tribe. Although obscure in the 1970s when only two tribal members lived on a tiny reservation, Pequots on the reservation now number more than 400 and have become an economic dynamo fueled by more than $1 billion a year in casino revenues. Another involves the once-destitute Sycuan Kummeyaay band in Southern California, each of whom today receives a reported $4,000 a month from casino "per-capitas." In a few cases -- in California and Minneso-ta, for example -- once-desolate reservations have become gated communities full of luxury homes.

These are the Cinderella stories. But while the prospects for many Indians have brightened and aspirations of others are soaring, the silver lining is not without its dark cloud.

Thus far, casinos mainly have enriched a handful of smaller tribes located near urban areas. Just eight operations account for about 40 percent of Indian casino revenues, according to the General Accounting Office. About 10 percent of the Indian casinos are losing money, experts say, though most are breaking even and a lucky few have broken the bank. Clearly, casinos aren't the answer for tribes such as the Navajo that are geographically isolated or culturally indisposed. And casino-related corruption reportedly is on the rise. Also the new economic and political muscle some tribes are flexing is raising old conflicts about land, sovereignty, money and power -- not just between Indians and "the dominant culture" but among tribes themselves.

In 28 states that allow Indian gaming, tensions are mounting between governors who want more authority over casinos (and a reasonable cut of the profits) and tribes that are protective of their sovereignty, aren't required by law to divulge their finances and sometimes are operating in open defiance of state law. Tribes are confident they can win any court battle thanks to a dismal swamp of judicial decisions and jurisdictional disputes.

And some in Washington also are having second thoughts. The $13.8 billion Interior Department appropriations bill, just signed, established a one-year moratorium on any new tribal gambling compacts not already approved by states. Wyoming Republican Sen. Mike Enzi, who offered the amendment, hopes the pause will give the National Gambling Impacts Study Commission time to complete a review of gaming's economic and cultural consequences. Enzi also wants to include feedback from non-Indians and give states more leverage in negotiating gaming compacts with tribes. "Gambling deals have no place being struck without the approval of the people on and off the reservations. The effects of gambling don't stop at the tribal border," says Enzi, pointing to studies showing that $3 in costs are created for every $1 in tax revenues that gambling generates.