SACRAMENTO, Calif. – An outcry from Indian country charges that a TIME Magazine cover story on Indian gaming failed even to make an attempt at balance.
“The TIME reporters turned their backs on the facts,” said Morongo chairman Maurice Lyons.
TIME’s lengthy cover story, written by Pulitzer-winning editors at large Donald Barlett and James Steele, questions whether rank and file Indians are actually benefiting from the tribal casino boom. The story casts a wide net covering several different aspects of Indian gaming.
However, Indian gaming consultant Michael Lombardi, who debated the article’s authors in a live broadcast on Los Angeles National Public Radio station KPCC, thinks they did not cast the net far enough.
“I was amazed at the lack of understanding that these gentlemen had for what Indian gaming is supposed to be,” said Lombardi. The main problem, according to Lombardi, was the lack of understanding of the basic premise of tribal sovereignty.
The argument of the story is that only a relatively few Indians have gained financially from gaming, while scores of wealthy non-Indian investors have lined their pockets far more than the rank and file tribal members. The TIME article links this problem to vague language and loopholes in the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), signed in 1988 by President Reagan.
Lombardi maintains that IGRA was not set up to promote monetary equity amongst tribes, but to promote tribal ability to conduct their own independent governance and to give tribes a chance to develop their own financial enterprises.
“What the TIME article does not understand is that the system is not supposed to be fair,” said Susan Jensen, a spokeswoman for the California Nations Indian Gaming Association. “It’s not supposed to be a panacea for the widespread poverty on Indian reservations.”
Lombardi draws a parallel between Indian gaming and state lotteries. Taking Indian gaming, state lotteries, Nevada and Atlantic City gaming operations altogether, Lombardi argues that the $12.7-billion earned through Indian gaming accounts for a little more than two percent of the total of $600 billion dollars spent on gaming in the United States.
Lombardi said he is upset that TIME did not offer any viable alternatives to gaming or that it failed to write about the miserable conditions of tribes before gaming.
“Where were the articles on (the) Morongo (tribe) when they were starving? Where was their outrage then?” he asked.
Lombardi likened the article to the 19th century East Coast newspaper editorials that called for retribution in the wake of Col. George Armstrong Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn. He said that he was surprised that the article did not balance the story with an interview with an Indian legal expert, tribal leader or even anyone at the larger industry lobbying organizations like the National Indian Gaming Association.
The TIME article began with the one adult member of the Augustine Band of Mission Indians. Augustine has been the focus of many a newspaper editorial blasting Indian gaming. The one adult member, Maryanne Martin, did not even know she was Indian until age 22 and now has a multi million-dollar casino and is still eligible for federal aid.
Lombardi defends Martin and other microscopic California tribes by stating that it was common practice in California in the 19th century to offer a bounty on the heads of California Indians. He likened their situation to surviving Jews in Germany and Armenians in Turkey.
“We should be thanking the creator, that in the case of Augustine, even one person has survived,” said Lombardi (who is on the payroll of the Augustine tribe as a consultant.)
Though largely unbalanced, the TIME article does bring up some legitimate points, which even those who receive their money from Indian gaming are willing to acknowledge. Tribal disenrollments have been a particularly pesky plague on tribes that suddenly find themselves successful and an issue that tribes have been eager to sweep under the rug.
Recently at a breakout session of the National Congress of American Indians entitled “Cultural Impacts of Tribal Enterprise,” questions regarding disenrollments were met with blank stares from tribal officials leading the discussion.
However, several suddenly successful tribes have been inundated by requests from those seeking tribal membership solely for financial gain. Some tribes, like the Pechanga Band of Luise?o Indians, who in October were facing problems from some tribal members pushing for disenrollment decided to walk a more cautious middle ground. Pechanga decided that instead of disenrolling members they would freeze membership at current levels.
As the TIME article maintained, pettiness and cronyism are problems also plaguing several, but certainly not all, tribal governments. As previously documented in Indian Country Today, scandals over the past few years of the Suquamish and Puyallup tribes of Washington state attest to the fact that these problems are alive and well in Indian gaming, and Indian country in general.
The secrecy that shrouds financial backers and many of their deals also poses a problem. Though many tribes openly acknowledge their benefactors, access to financial records can easily turn into a brick wall.
Morongo tribal chairman Lyons said that the role of investors was forged out of necessity. “Where in their article do they address the failure of the mainstream private sector to invest in Indian country?” he asked.
Lyons continued that the noted abuses by non-Indian financiers stemmed largely from the tribes’ desperate poverty and their “inability to obtain financing anywhere else.”
In some cases, the TIME writers completely missed the boat in their investigation. There was no mention of the mini-empires carved out by lawyers who represent multiple gaming tribes in California, and the still murky roles of at least two of these lawyers in the scandal that led to the resignation of BIA deputy director Wayne Smith earlier this year.
Also missed by TIME was the quasi-socialist system set up by the tribes in California’s Proposition 1A in the so-called Revenue Sharing Distribution Fund. This fund forces richer tribes to pay into an account that is disbursed to tribes with small gaming operations as well as to those that have none at all in an attempt to redistribute some of the imbalance in wealth that the TIME article decries.
In a press release, the CNIGA stated that American Indian casinos have also been responsible for job creation that often benefits local communities. It cited numerous donations to local public safety organizations in the form of state-of-the-art equipment including fire trucks and emergency vehicles.
Additionally the CNIGA press statement argued that many tribes do not look to gaming as a panacea and many have diversified their economies.
“Casinos are providing California tribes with the investment capital needed to develop resort hotels, banks, retail shopping malls, service stations, aircraft manufacturing companies, bottling plants and other businesses,” said CNIGA.
Perhaps Washington DC-based American Indian attorney John Teshuda best summed up the issue.
“Indian gaming is not perfect,” he said, “but it seems to be the only thing that works.”
