Post by blackcrowheart on May 22, 2007 9:54:07 GMT -5
The ka-ching doesn't ring for everyone
Indian casinos are thriving but they haven't made most Indians wealthy, and they can't solve the myriad problems that exist on reservations
Alison Owings
If you object to American Indian casinos, you might not laugh at a joke circulating in what is commonly called Indian Country.
Among the "Top 10 things you can say to a white person upon first meeting" is:
"What's your feeling about riverboat casinos? Do they really help your people, or are they just a short-term fix?"
Let us charge into the din and clangor of the fractious subject of Indian casinos and see if we can break even.
The casinos exist because native people were trying to get more for native people and, unlike in many other situations, got a break from Washington. This try started with legal actions by, among others, California's Cabazon tribe near Palm Springs, which was trying to expand its bingo and poker operations.
In 1987 came the break: a Supreme Court ruling restricting states' abilities to regulate gambling on reservations. The next year, Congress passed the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. It basically stated that tribes, as sovereign nations, can work out their own gambling arrangements with states -- if those states already allow gambling. California did. In 1999, then-Gov. Gray Davis signed compacts with 61 tribes, and in 2000 voters seconded the motion. This was not the end of the situation, as California voters well know.
Indian casinos nationwide now gross more than $20 billion annually, according to the National Indian Gaming Association. That is the headline. Back on reservations with casinos, there is much more to the story.
-- Ka-ching fact No. 1: Casinos have not made all, or most, American Indians wealthy.
They certainly have not made most California American Indians wealthy. A study by the Center for California Native Nations at UC Riverside (financed by the Pechanga Tribal Government, which has a very successful casino) concludes that casinos in California do help tribal members overall. "Between 1990 and 2000, tribal governments with gaming in California saw a significant reduction in the percentage of families in poverty, from 36 percent in 1990 to 26 percent in 2000." A 26 percent poverty rate? Hardly a jackpot.
The report also says the state's casinos (55 at last count) are not as ubiquitous as some people believe; only 11 percent of Californians live within 10 miles of "a gaming facility." Furthermore, those facilities had "significantly positive" economic impacts on neighboring communities, especially low-income ones.
Yet a misperception about rich Indians has caused at least three problems. For Indians, that is. It has led to attempts to get casino tribes to pay more to the state and has cut funding for programs meant for, so to speak, poor Indians. (In California, many American Indians have no affiliation with any California tribe, nor with any tribe that has a casino.) Also, the misperception has hurt fundraising for American Indian nonprofit groups, according to people who work for them. The well is going dry because of the gusher in the background.
The Native American Rights Fund even published a brochure, Dispelling the Myths About Indian Gaming, to address questions from "donors and potential supporters." It states, "Native Americans remain America's poorest people," and "Gaming on Indian reservations has not appreciably lowered the high levels of poverty on Indian lands nationwide."
That level is high: According to the 2000 census, twice as many native peoples lived in poverty as did non-natives.
-- Ka-ching fact No. 2: Indian casinos vary enormously in revenue. The universal reason: location, location, location.
Casinos near urban centers can do fabulously well, as in the most publicized case: the Pequot's Foxwoods casino in Connecticut, near the New York City metropolitan area.
A number of Southern California casinos thrive, including Pechanga, run by the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. I have not been there, but have dropped a dollar at the eye-popping desert palace owned by the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, east of San Diego. It is a high-stakes assault on every sensory nerve (picture colored lights bouncing off an indoor waterfall) ... and picture of profit.
The place was jammed. Shuttle buses conveyed gamblers to and from the farthest parking spots amid apparent acres of asphalt. It is no wonder tribes in Northern California want to open casinos close to the Bay Area: population.
But where did the so-called Great Fathers in Washington put many Indian reservations? Often in rural remote regions whites did not find worth exploiting. Would you drive 100 miles or more to play the slots? Hoping the answer is yes, and with the opportunity to extricate themselves from poverty too enticing to resist, tribes set up shop in these places, too.
One is the well-named Prairie Wind Casino on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, home of the Oglala Sioux people. Pine Ridge has an estimated 85 percent unemployment rate and about the same rate of alcoholism.
Wonderful things are happening in Pine Ridge, but financial wealth is not one of them. Prairie Wind, a large white plastic Quonset hut on the edge of the reservation, or as close to the population center of Rapid City as possible, is a dreadful-feeling place -- not only as clangy as every casino I've visited, but cramped and smoke-filled. (Upscale casinos, such as Sycuan's, have smoke-free gambling areas.)
Prairie Wind features about 150 slot machines. It was half-filled when I stopped by one weekend afternoon. The card tables were empty, and no one was in line for the congealed buffet items. The tribal employees were friendly -- holding the door open, smiling greetings, goodbyes -- and looked much healthier, too, for they were employed, than the frighteningly unhealthy-looking friendly people who tried to sell necklaces and prayer wheel replicas at the site of the Wounded Knee massacre to the east.
As I left Prairie Wind, I thought of what a Dakota friend, Jean Nahomni Mani, on South Dakota's even more remote Crow Creek Sioux Reservation, told me about her local casino, a place that looks the size of a Sierra ski rental shop. "Well, it provides some jobs." About 20, she later clarified, "which is very good."
One hears the same sentiment so much in Indian Country, that in places rife with unemployment, casino employment is reason enough to be pro-casino -- wherever that casino is.
Of some 560 federally recognized tribes nationwide, fewer than half have casinos. Of them, the Native American Rights Fund says, about 50 take in nearly half the revenue. The others are "only marginally profitable."
Elizabeth Lohah Homer, an Osage who grew up in Oklahoma and now runs a law firm in Washington, D.C. -- and represents gaming tribes -- puts the situation succinctly. She told me tribal gaming runs the gamut from Connecticut's Foxwoods to "some bingo machines in a double-wide."
-- Ka-ching fact No. 3: Indian tribes vary widely in how they spend casino dollars.
By law, the money must be used essentially for the "general welfare" of the tribe, for charity and funding local governmental agencies. Some tribal leaders are especially inventive and entrepreneurial, investing not only in reservation infrastructure, from health clinics to fire stations to schools (including a national boom in teaching native languages Indian schoolchildren were once forbidden to speak), but in renewable energy projects, communications businesses and free college tuition. The more enterprising tribes, one might argue, reflect the sentiment the gambling boom will not last.
Some call casinos "the buffalo of today."
Even if the money kept rolling in, other problems would probably take longer to solve. I thought about this while on the Muckleshoot Reservation outside Seattle. After touring a beautifully designed and built health center, featuring various interior swimming pools, an exercise and weight room, basketball court, handball court and more (and which was virtually empty), I walked toward an area where the tribe was about to host a weeklong cultural celebration and almost stumbled over a printed sign stuck in well-mown grass. It said gang activity is forbidden here. The tribal newspaper reiterated the problem: reservation gangs.
As Karen Artichoker, a Hochunk-Lakota friend, says, "Even though we tend to be somewhat isolated from American society, we do live in American society, and what impacts all Americans impacts us."
While some tribes put casino dollars only into works such as splendid health centers that benefit the whole tribe and such projects as improving roads near the reservation, others also pay modest to handsome dividends (per capitas or "per caps") to tribal members. The results are mixed.
A Navajo who visited a Northern California tribe that hands out per caps confided later, "They have so many drug problems, I don't know that giving $800 a month to a meth addict is a real good idea."
And what is the effect of much greater payments to tribal young people, asks a member of the Choctaw Nation, UC Berkeley's Native American Studies Librarian John D. Berry? This question was rhetorical, but telling. How do many formerly poor people of any group react when they hit the jackpot? Higher education and noble pursuits do not necessarily beckon first.
On one California reservation I visited, the per caps seem to have bought a lot of huge cars, including Hummers, even though many roads were still unpaved. So what is more helpful? A paved road and no car or a car that can handle a dirt road?
The daily radio show "Native America Calling" recently devoted an hour to the subject of per caps. "A new trend in Indian Country is for tribes to distribute a share of casino profits to their members, much like corporate shareholders, for the holidays," read the program description. "Although this eases the financial pressure of Christmas, it also has created some subplots like disenrollment of tribal members and DNA testing of newborns. It has also brought into question a moral issue of accepting gambling money. Are tribal per capita payments good or bad?"
There is pressure on casino tribes to spread their money -- sharing resources is a long-held cultural tradition, of course -- and indeed California tribes with gaming do share, via the Revenue Sharing Trust Fund, which the state developed in 2000 to help nongaming tribes. Tribal governments with casinos have paid about $150 million into the fund.
It works, says the Center for California Native Nations. "Tribal governments without casinos have expanded the number of services offered to tribal members at a rate similar to that of tribes with gaming."
Still, "conditions on Indian reservations in California" shows "large gaps" with conditions "enjoyed by other Americans."
The trust fund is one thing. So is being generous. Being compelled to pay out beyond one's own land is another. When the question arises (particularly by non-American Indians), "Shouldn't the country's rich casino tribes support tribes without any casinos at all?" Elizabeth Homer scoffs.
Ha! Do we make Delaware support West Virginia?
-- Ka-ching fact No. 4: Casinos are controversial in Indian Country, too.
One clue is a 2006 book of essays, "Indian Gaming." Chapters by American Indian contributors range from mostly positive messages to, "Tribes Have Traded Sovereignty Rights for Casino Profits." Author Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, argues that any sovereign tribe that made a compact with a state government opened up a dangerous door to "more infringement."
In Indian Coutry, "sovereignty" trumps most words, certainly including casinos. Yet virtually all native people who oppose casinos and vote in tribal elections against them would maintain, I believe, it is their right to decide the matter because they are members of a sovereign nation. My sense, after a few years of immersion into topics pertaining to Indian life, is that most American Indians are for casinos because the income is needed. And it is needed because the federal government has not fulfilled its treaty obligations.
As for their sovereignty, they hope it is safe.
Finally, a note of perspective. The de Young Museum in San Francisco displays a flat basketlike "gambling tray" attributed to the Modoc or Atsugewi people. It is about 2 feet in diameter and about a century old. According to various accounts, such trays were common in the West and involved a game played by women. Dice made from nutshells that had been cut in half and packed with charcoal were thrown, and scores kept.
Meanwhile, the Tohono O'odham eking out a sparser life in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, participated in a number of practices meant to give the impression they lived with abundance. One was gambling.
The activity has long been useful to American Indians.
Alison Owings is a writer in Mill Valley. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.
Indian casinos are thriving but they haven't made most Indians wealthy, and they can't solve the myriad problems that exist on reservations
Alison Owings
If you object to American Indian casinos, you might not laugh at a joke circulating in what is commonly called Indian Country.
Among the "Top 10 things you can say to a white person upon first meeting" is:
"What's your feeling about riverboat casinos? Do they really help your people, or are they just a short-term fix?"
Let us charge into the din and clangor of the fractious subject of Indian casinos and see if we can break even.
The casinos exist because native people were trying to get more for native people and, unlike in many other situations, got a break from Washington. This try started with legal actions by, among others, California's Cabazon tribe near Palm Springs, which was trying to expand its bingo and poker operations.
In 1987 came the break: a Supreme Court ruling restricting states' abilities to regulate gambling on reservations. The next year, Congress passed the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. It basically stated that tribes, as sovereign nations, can work out their own gambling arrangements with states -- if those states already allow gambling. California did. In 1999, then-Gov. Gray Davis signed compacts with 61 tribes, and in 2000 voters seconded the motion. This was not the end of the situation, as California voters well know.
Indian casinos nationwide now gross more than $20 billion annually, according to the National Indian Gaming Association. That is the headline. Back on reservations with casinos, there is much more to the story.
-- Ka-ching fact No. 1: Casinos have not made all, or most, American Indians wealthy.
They certainly have not made most California American Indians wealthy. A study by the Center for California Native Nations at UC Riverside (financed by the Pechanga Tribal Government, which has a very successful casino) concludes that casinos in California do help tribal members overall. "Between 1990 and 2000, tribal governments with gaming in California saw a significant reduction in the percentage of families in poverty, from 36 percent in 1990 to 26 percent in 2000." A 26 percent poverty rate? Hardly a jackpot.
The report also says the state's casinos (55 at last count) are not as ubiquitous as some people believe; only 11 percent of Californians live within 10 miles of "a gaming facility." Furthermore, those facilities had "significantly positive" economic impacts on neighboring communities, especially low-income ones.
Yet a misperception about rich Indians has caused at least three problems. For Indians, that is. It has led to attempts to get casino tribes to pay more to the state and has cut funding for programs meant for, so to speak, poor Indians. (In California, many American Indians have no affiliation with any California tribe, nor with any tribe that has a casino.) Also, the misperception has hurt fundraising for American Indian nonprofit groups, according to people who work for them. The well is going dry because of the gusher in the background.
The Native American Rights Fund even published a brochure, Dispelling the Myths About Indian Gaming, to address questions from "donors and potential supporters." It states, "Native Americans remain America's poorest people," and "Gaming on Indian reservations has not appreciably lowered the high levels of poverty on Indian lands nationwide."
That level is high: According to the 2000 census, twice as many native peoples lived in poverty as did non-natives.
-- Ka-ching fact No. 2: Indian casinos vary enormously in revenue. The universal reason: location, location, location.
Casinos near urban centers can do fabulously well, as in the most publicized case: the Pequot's Foxwoods casino in Connecticut, near the New York City metropolitan area.
A number of Southern California casinos thrive, including Pechanga, run by the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. I have not been there, but have dropped a dollar at the eye-popping desert palace owned by the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, east of San Diego. It is a high-stakes assault on every sensory nerve (picture colored lights bouncing off an indoor waterfall) ... and picture of profit.
The place was jammed. Shuttle buses conveyed gamblers to and from the farthest parking spots amid apparent acres of asphalt. It is no wonder tribes in Northern California want to open casinos close to the Bay Area: population.
But where did the so-called Great Fathers in Washington put many Indian reservations? Often in rural remote regions whites did not find worth exploiting. Would you drive 100 miles or more to play the slots? Hoping the answer is yes, and with the opportunity to extricate themselves from poverty too enticing to resist, tribes set up shop in these places, too.
One is the well-named Prairie Wind Casino on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, home of the Oglala Sioux people. Pine Ridge has an estimated 85 percent unemployment rate and about the same rate of alcoholism.
Wonderful things are happening in Pine Ridge, but financial wealth is not one of them. Prairie Wind, a large white plastic Quonset hut on the edge of the reservation, or as close to the population center of Rapid City as possible, is a dreadful-feeling place -- not only as clangy as every casino I've visited, but cramped and smoke-filled. (Upscale casinos, such as Sycuan's, have smoke-free gambling areas.)
Prairie Wind features about 150 slot machines. It was half-filled when I stopped by one weekend afternoon. The card tables were empty, and no one was in line for the congealed buffet items. The tribal employees were friendly -- holding the door open, smiling greetings, goodbyes -- and looked much healthier, too, for they were employed, than the frighteningly unhealthy-looking friendly people who tried to sell necklaces and prayer wheel replicas at the site of the Wounded Knee massacre to the east.
As I left Prairie Wind, I thought of what a Dakota friend, Jean Nahomni Mani, on South Dakota's even more remote Crow Creek Sioux Reservation, told me about her local casino, a place that looks the size of a Sierra ski rental shop. "Well, it provides some jobs." About 20, she later clarified, "which is very good."
One hears the same sentiment so much in Indian Country, that in places rife with unemployment, casino employment is reason enough to be pro-casino -- wherever that casino is.
Of some 560 federally recognized tribes nationwide, fewer than half have casinos. Of them, the Native American Rights Fund says, about 50 take in nearly half the revenue. The others are "only marginally profitable."
Elizabeth Lohah Homer, an Osage who grew up in Oklahoma and now runs a law firm in Washington, D.C. -- and represents gaming tribes -- puts the situation succinctly. She told me tribal gaming runs the gamut from Connecticut's Foxwoods to "some bingo machines in a double-wide."
-- Ka-ching fact No. 3: Indian tribes vary widely in how they spend casino dollars.
By law, the money must be used essentially for the "general welfare" of the tribe, for charity and funding local governmental agencies. Some tribal leaders are especially inventive and entrepreneurial, investing not only in reservation infrastructure, from health clinics to fire stations to schools (including a national boom in teaching native languages Indian schoolchildren were once forbidden to speak), but in renewable energy projects, communications businesses and free college tuition. The more enterprising tribes, one might argue, reflect the sentiment the gambling boom will not last.
Some call casinos "the buffalo of today."
Even if the money kept rolling in, other problems would probably take longer to solve. I thought about this while on the Muckleshoot Reservation outside Seattle. After touring a beautifully designed and built health center, featuring various interior swimming pools, an exercise and weight room, basketball court, handball court and more (and which was virtually empty), I walked toward an area where the tribe was about to host a weeklong cultural celebration and almost stumbled over a printed sign stuck in well-mown grass. It said gang activity is forbidden here. The tribal newspaper reiterated the problem: reservation gangs.
As Karen Artichoker, a Hochunk-Lakota friend, says, "Even though we tend to be somewhat isolated from American society, we do live in American society, and what impacts all Americans impacts us."
While some tribes put casino dollars only into works such as splendid health centers that benefit the whole tribe and such projects as improving roads near the reservation, others also pay modest to handsome dividends (per capitas or "per caps") to tribal members. The results are mixed.
A Navajo who visited a Northern California tribe that hands out per caps confided later, "They have so many drug problems, I don't know that giving $800 a month to a meth addict is a real good idea."
And what is the effect of much greater payments to tribal young people, asks a member of the Choctaw Nation, UC Berkeley's Native American Studies Librarian John D. Berry? This question was rhetorical, but telling. How do many formerly poor people of any group react when they hit the jackpot? Higher education and noble pursuits do not necessarily beckon first.
On one California reservation I visited, the per caps seem to have bought a lot of huge cars, including Hummers, even though many roads were still unpaved. So what is more helpful? A paved road and no car or a car that can handle a dirt road?
The daily radio show "Native America Calling" recently devoted an hour to the subject of per caps. "A new trend in Indian Country is for tribes to distribute a share of casino profits to their members, much like corporate shareholders, for the holidays," read the program description. "Although this eases the financial pressure of Christmas, it also has created some subplots like disenrollment of tribal members and DNA testing of newborns. It has also brought into question a moral issue of accepting gambling money. Are tribal per capita payments good or bad?"
There is pressure on casino tribes to spread their money -- sharing resources is a long-held cultural tradition, of course -- and indeed California tribes with gaming do share, via the Revenue Sharing Trust Fund, which the state developed in 2000 to help nongaming tribes. Tribal governments with casinos have paid about $150 million into the fund.
It works, says the Center for California Native Nations. "Tribal governments without casinos have expanded the number of services offered to tribal members at a rate similar to that of tribes with gaming."
Still, "conditions on Indian reservations in California" shows "large gaps" with conditions "enjoyed by other Americans."
The trust fund is one thing. So is being generous. Being compelled to pay out beyond one's own land is another. When the question arises (particularly by non-American Indians), "Shouldn't the country's rich casino tribes support tribes without any casinos at all?" Elizabeth Homer scoffs.
Ha! Do we make Delaware support West Virginia?
-- Ka-ching fact No. 4: Casinos are controversial in Indian Country, too.
One clue is a 2006 book of essays, "Indian Gaming." Chapters by American Indian contributors range from mostly positive messages to, "Tribes Have Traded Sovereignty Rights for Casino Profits." Author Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, argues that any sovereign tribe that made a compact with a state government opened up a dangerous door to "more infringement."
In Indian Coutry, "sovereignty" trumps most words, certainly including casinos. Yet virtually all native people who oppose casinos and vote in tribal elections against them would maintain, I believe, it is their right to decide the matter because they are members of a sovereign nation. My sense, after a few years of immersion into topics pertaining to Indian life, is that most American Indians are for casinos because the income is needed. And it is needed because the federal government has not fulfilled its treaty obligations.
As for their sovereignty, they hope it is safe.
Finally, a note of perspective. The de Young Museum in San Francisco displays a flat basketlike "gambling tray" attributed to the Modoc or Atsugewi people. It is about 2 feet in diameter and about a century old. According to various accounts, such trays were common in the West and involved a game played by women. Dice made from nutshells that had been cut in half and packed with charcoal were thrown, and scores kept.
Meanwhile, the Tohono O'odham eking out a sparser life in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, participated in a number of practices meant to give the impression they lived with abundance. One was gambling.
The activity has long been useful to American Indians.
Alison Owings is a writer in Mill Valley. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.