It will be very difficult from this day forward to have serious respect for The Wall Street Journal, a newspaper with which we have often disagreed but had at least appreciated for its range of writers and coverage and for its long-term existence. The appreciation vanished this week as we read The Journal’s March 1 editorial, entitled “Big Chief Pataki,” which excoriated New York Governor George Pataki and took a pretty wide stereotypical and prejudicial swipe at American Indians.
Now, the criticism of a politician is not beyond our scope. No doubt, over the seasons, we have taken the New York governor to task ourselves on a number of issues. Most recently, however, we have seen his approach of using Indian economic recovery options to ameliorate his state’s financial woes and land claims as pragmatic and open-minded. The New York governor, we believe, is generally on the right track with Indian nations across the state. His plan to negotiate six new casino compacts with Indian nations, although still saddled with some political baggage, has opened up diplomatic channels and fostered government to government negotiations that could lead to real economic gains across the board.
The Wall Street Journal, in its editorial against the Pataki plan, did not rely on serious information. It chose instead to marshal innuendo and misinformation of the cheapest order and displayed a complete lack of understanding for the Indian gaming industry and its resulting economic, social and cultural benefits.
To start, the editorial called Pataki New York State’s “new Indian chief and gambling boss.” The appellation of the title “chief” is familiar to every American Indian who has ever been stereotyped, in the workplace and other public situations. Being called “chief” for Indians, when delivered with the same derisive tone as The Journal’s editorial, is tantamount to a black man being called “boy,” and is just as insulting. Perhaps the insult will give the governor an idea of what is like to be an Indian.
Later in the editorial, The Journal also calls Pataki “Great White Father,” another term we had thought hackneyed to death long ago. The name-calling is belittling and prejudicial and it marks the editorial down to the lowest of journalistic levels. But The Journal doesn’t stop there. The gratuitous insults are matched in their appalling intentions by its dishonest arguments. Apparently driven by a nearly religious hostility toward Indian gaming, the editorial makes these main points:
o Gaming enterprises are bad, bringing, “lowlifes and organized crime, drugs, prostitution, loan sharking and money laundering. The mob infiltrates and corruption in local government often follows…”
This is misinformation of the highest order. The FBI, the DEA, local police departments, not to mention hostile investigative reporters, have scrutinized Indian gaming and have found remarkably little evidence that either the mob or so-called “lowlifes,” have infiltrated Indian gaming. A notorious Boston Globe series a season ago (apparently the main source for The Journal editorial writer) found only one case, involving mob influence on a small tribe in California, and that itself was three years old. Indian gaming is among the most regulated industries in America.
In fact, none of the dangers mentioned in the editorial have even penetrated the barriers of regulation and self-regulation, imposed and self-imposed, that surround Indian gaming enterprises. The evidence for this assertion is simply not there. This is the type of cheap accusation worthy of talk-radio demagogues, not serious journalists, and in fact it derives mainly from the dishonest exaggerations spread by Congressmen Frank Wolf, R-Va., and Christopher Shays, R-Conn. and refuted by the very GAO reports they commissioned.
Certainly, Indian Country Today would investigate such allegations and it would publish those findings, not to demean the Indian
gaming industry but always to attempt to encourage the highest integrity possible in this most important sector for Indian revival.
o Tribes are currently seeking recognition “because of the windfall that usually follows.” It attacks the federal recognition process as “out of control and rife with special favors,” when in fact the process is extremely slow and difficult.
The editorial mentions the Ramapough Mountain Indians on the New York-New Jersey border as perhaps one of these tribes, an especially puzzling reference since the Ramapough petition has been repeatedly turned down by the BIA’s Branch of Acknowledgement and Research. However, the Ramapough, as with nearly every other tribe seeking state and/or federal recognition, started their process many years before gaming became an option for Indian economies. Their story is one of racial discrimination against the mixed-race tribal remnants in the East, in this case of the Leni Lenape, that anthropologists treat as “tri-racial isolates.”
o The editorial dismisses the “economic development” argument by pointing to Atlantic City, warning readers to consider “the mean streets behind the glittering boardwalk.” Indian gaming, it says, “promises more than it delivers.”
Although there exist no Indian casinos in Atlantic City, let’s consider the actual objectives of Indian gaming. For tribal nations seeking to recover from centuries of dispossession of land and resources, destruction of culture and severe economic deprivation, not to mention racism, gaming is always intended as a means to rebuild the nation. The industry has helped to re-empower American Indian communities and fuel the bases of social services necessary to bring their peoples out of poverty. For tribes across the United States, economic and cultural recovery is the primary objective of the gaming option. Many are actively seeking diversification into other economic bases, including a quite impressive range of tourism, manufacturing and other business options. Perhaps The Wall Street Journal editors should read this newspaper’s Trade & Commerce section.
Local and regional non-Native communities have also benefited greatly. A 1999 Lexecon, Inc. study of Indian gaming in Arizona found that the seven tribal casinos had directly created over 1,800 on-going jobs for non-members and contributed $128 million annually in purchases of goods and services. The Gila River Indian Community alone used its gaming revenues to support capital improvements generating 1,100 new jobs and adding over $98 million to the state’s economy. These findings have been replicated over and over in every region of the country.
o The editorial expresses great fear of the “land into trust” swaps that are sometimes available to tribes, which it calls, “another bit of gaming corruption.”
This bit of name-calling exposes the core of the editorial writer’s ignorance. There is no corruption in this opportunity. Trust responsibility and the designation of trust lands served this country well at various points in history. It became the reality of land tenure for peoples who held substantial territory that even when conquered and occupied, never could quite be cleansed of its original Native title.
The Journal’s position on Indian gaming in New York State and nationally is part and parcel of a growing national backlash against Indians. It seeks to disparage and to castigate Indians with all the same stereotypical images, denying the real economic base of the issue and mangling the facts.
These are stereotypes — “pow wows with Mohawks,” “Big Chief,” “Great White Father” — that have plagued Indians from the time of earliest contact to the present. They are the reasons why, notwithstanding the results of a recent Sports Illustrated survey on the topic, the so-called “mascot” issue is so vitally important. The primary stereotype is of Indians as “fleecers” of good Americans, when in fact the reality is quite the opposite. The intent is to create a wrong perception on purpose.
Strangely a newspaper otherwise known for its business insight has not a clue about the real financial and social benefits of Indian gaming for the tribes, their neighbors and even the states within which they are positioned. It is glaringly evident that the newspaper misrepresents the facts, even confusing the history of American Indian gaming with that of Las Vegas and Atlantic City. But we suspect the problem runs much deeper than that. The editors of The Wall Street Journal simply don’t want to know the facts.
The editorial raises another specter. It intimates that the Seneca, Mohawk and Oneida Indian nations are controlled by gaming interests, “the same white guys hiding behind the curtain.” These tribes are perfectly capable of determining their interests and running their own business affairs — with or without partners — but The Journal prefers the image of Wizard of Oz characters pulling the levers of a make-believe Indian world. Nothing could be more insulting to American Indians than the subtext evoked by The Journal.
The Wizard was after all, a character created by L. Frank Baum, who, ten years before he penned his famous book, published the Saturday Pioneer, a weekly newspaper in Aberdeen, S.D. Before and after the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 28, 1890, Baum published two editorials that called for the annihilation of the Sioux people. Following the murder of Sitting Bull, Baum published the statement on December 20, 1890 that with Sitting Bull’s demise: “the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced: better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.”
After the Wounded Knee massacre Baum’s newspaper on January 3, 1891 reprised its earlier genocidal message: “The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.” Baum was born in 1856 in Chittenango, N.Y.
By denigrating American Indian nations and delivering a fusillade of misrepresentations, factual errors, and disparaging stereotypes The Wall Street Journal has done little better than perpetuate the rather bleak journalistic tradition of Baum’s Saturday Pioneer.
