When it came to inspiration for her work, Katherine Spilde discovered there is no place like home.
As Katherine grew up on the White Earth reservation in Mahnomen, Minnesota, she never thought that it would lead to a career as one of the preeminent academics in gaming.
Both Spilde’s parents were teachers on the reservation. “Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes, and on the reservation the lake country is unbelievably gorgeous. There is an abundance of eagles and loons and deer, and wild rice grows naturally on the lakes. It is just stunningly beautiful and very culturally rich. Yet growing up there the unemployment rate and social conditions were very, very poor,” Spilde said.
Her lifetime work on tribal policy and gaming has significantly influenced the understanding of tribal government gaming as a tool for economic empowerment and political sovereignty for Indigenous communities.
Spilde’s inspiration was later sparked when she witnessed first-hand the economic and social turnaround on the reservation when the White Earth tribe opened the Shooting Star casino in her hometown.
Homegrown
With a homegrown love for anthropology and a career that took her across the world, Spilde became an award-winning professor and author of over 50 academic articles, she has authored numerous state policy studies and has worked extensively with over one hundred tribal governments on nation-building activities.
Today, Dr. Spilde is the Endowed Chair of the Sycuan Institute on Tribal Gaming in the L. Robert Payne School of Hospitality & Tourism Management at San Diego State University (SDSU), where she serves as a professor in tribal gaming and American Indian Studies. Spilde heads up the pioneering four-year Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in Hospitality and Tourism Management with an emphasis in Tribal Gaming Operations and Management at San Diego State University.
Leading authority
Professionally, Dr. Katherine Spilde is a leading authority on casino gambling legalization, regulation and operations and she has presented her public policy and economic development research across the United States and in multiple nations, including multiple appearances in Japan, Macau, Hong Kong, Russia, Finland, Canada, France, the Bahamas and Portugal.
She has also testified before the U.S. Congress four times on diverse issues including tribal land claims, federal recognition of tribal governments, and tribal economic development. In particular, Spilde’s work focuses on providing support to governments who seek to use gaming revenues for nation building and tourism enhancing projects.
As a cultural anthropologist and Professor in the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at San Diego State University (SDSU), where she serves as Endowed Chair of the Sycuan Institute on Tribal Gaming, she collaborates with tribal leaders, economists and operators to produce new research and teaching materials that consider real-world problems. A seasoned mentor, she supports students, executives and tribal leaders through sharing new methods of analysis and encouraging an environment of evidenced- based research for any and all government and industry questions.
Before moving to California in 2004 to take the position as Executive Director of the Center for California Native Nations at UCR, Dr. Spilde was Sr. Research Associate at the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, where she incorporated qualitative and quantitative research on tribal government gaming into the Kennedy School’s larger work on tribal nation building.
Matriarch and woman warrior
Dr. Spilde has received numerous awards for her work in the gaming industry. She has been presented with the Chairman’s Leadership Award by the National Indian Gaming Association (NIGA) multiple times for her work, starting in 2008 when she began teaching the new tribal gaming program at SDSU. In 2012, she won the same Award for her partnership with the Sycuan Tribe. In 2017, Dr. Spilde was honored by Chairman Stevens of NIGA for facilitating the creation of the Tribal Gaming Student Association (TGSA) at SDSU.
In 2023, her academic partnership with the Red Lake Nation College was awarded the Indian Gaming Association (IGA) Education Leadership Award. Her latest award was bestowed in April, 2025 when she was inducted into the first class of the “Matriarchs of Tribal Gaming” and named one of the inaugural “Women Warriors” for her lifetime of work on behalf of tribal nations.
Her accolades, like her work, are not limited to the tribal government gaming industry. In 2010, she was named one of “Twenty-five People to Watch in the Gaming Industry,” by Global Gaming Business Magazine. In 2007, she was named one of ten “Great Women of Gaming” by Casino Executive Magazine, and in 2003 she was honored as one of the “Top 10 People in Gaming Under 40” by Global Gaming Business Magazine.
Desperate time economically
The passion behind her drive is personal as well as political. “I grew up on the reservation in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and it was a really desperate time economically. I attended a Minnesota public high school on the reservation where my parents were teachers. As a child, I had no idea why it was so economically disadvantaged compared to nearby towns we visited for volleyball or basketball games. I knew I was growing up in Indian country because my cousins and my grandparents were still back on the family farms up in northern Minnesota. Obviously, many of my friends and coaches and teachers were tribal members and I knew about the tribal government in the town of White Earth. We had a lot of cultural experiences in our school and outside of school. Our school mascot was the Mahnomen Indians. But we did not learn about tribal sovereignty or federal Indian law or American history from a tribal perspective just because we were on the reservation.
“Unlike a lot of my high school friends, I was very fortunate to be able to go far away to college. I discovered cultural anthropology at the University of Hawaii and was able to look back at my childhood at White Earth with a different historical perspective and with an indigenous community of Native Hawaiians on campus. At the same time that I was studying these topics as an undergraduate, the tribe was opening a casino back home. And I thought to myself, why ‘a casino?’ I was very interested in how this would happen. Why a casino and not something else like a John Deere dealership? I had no idea about the legal framework or political discussions happening in Washington, DC at the time. So, at the time I wondered,’ Who would ever come to Mahnomen as a tourist?’
“I was studying cultural anthropology, so I thought, this is a cultural moment. Something is going to happen there culturally when the tribe opens a casino in this really small town. At that time the town of Mahnomen was around 1,000 people and in a very rural area. I thought, ‘Who’s going to work there? How are they going to make money?’ Of course, I understood the need to create more jobs, and I thought, it’s going to be great for employment. Unemployment was, at the time, I believe between 70% and 80%, which is an impossible condition.
“When they decided to open the casino, I knew nearly everybody involved, because I had grown up there and my parents were still there and working. I decided to study what I thought would be an example of cultural change, so I moved back to Minnesota in 1996 to interview people back home and do an ethnography of tribal gaming as my dissertation fieldwork.
“It was really the employment effects and the infusion of hope for the future that I could relate to because when I graduated in 1986, I had to leave home to find those things. Seeing that these opportunities were now available back home was really exciting to me. My high school friends, my friends’ parents, my own mom left being a teacher to go work at Shooting Star because it had better benefits, and it had dental. And it was fun; people like my mom didn’t travel much but working in the players club meant that she got to meet people from Canada and Fargo and other faraway places,” Spilde said.
Unbelievable to me
“What really set me up for the future in my career was that during my fieldwork I went to interview one of the local church leaders to learn about the impacts of gaming on the community from his perspective. Did he see any downsides? Churches often see tribal gaming as competition for their bingo games or a vice. He said something that changed my whole understanding of where the future of tribal policy and gaming would go. He said, ‘You know, the thing that’s most profound to me is what I’ve heard from our church leaders – that the tribe’s making money at the casino.’
“He told me, ‘There’s this perception that the tribes are rich now and they don’t need the church to help them, and we are going to cut them off.’
“This sort of behind-the-scenes insight was unbelievable to me, and yet I realized that this was what the future held for tribes. Rather than celebrate their entrepreneurialism and support them and see gaming as a Godsend, look at what happened. There has been an on-going backlash and battle at the federal level, at the state level, over tribal sovereignty and it is based on this idea that tribes are making all this money in gaming, so they don’t need their treaty rights anymore. Tribal gaming is used to justify so many attacks on sovereignty, including proposals to tax tribal land because they can afford it. The political backlash against foundational tribal sovereignty and against tribal rights, against tribal treaties, is often couched in these economic terms.
“This reverend saw this coming in 1996 and shared this with me, and I started to fear and then see for myself that this was how it was most likely going to play out. This was many years ago and yet I felt like I saw the future and I decided this is going to be the political angle for my dissertation and spreading the word about this phenomenon was how I was going to help tribes prepare for the backlash in advance,” Spilde related.
Lucky breaks
“Given my political interests, I decided not to go be a professor at first, so I went to work in D.C. on political issues, because I saw how this local backlash was already playing out in Congress when they created a federal study called the National Gambling Impact Study Commission. It was launched in 1997, and I finished my PhD in the spring of 1998 and went to DC hoping to get involved. I had no idea how I was going to do that at the time, but I was young and confident and somewhat naïve, which looking back can be a blessing.
“Through a couple of lucky breaks, rather than being a lobbyist trying to influence the research of the federal study, I got a job working for the study commission staff on their tribal gaming subcommittee and became one of the two or three people selected to write the final report. So, I was really able to take what I had learned in that one place and parlay that into a national expertise pretty quickly,” Spilde recalled.
“When I worked for the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, we were on the road doing hearings all over the country. As the staffer for the tribal gaming committee, I got to organize the hearings related to tribal gaming. In the end, I think I was able to flood the record with testimony from nearly a hundred tribal leaders.
“I got to meet tribal leaders and hear about tribes from all over the United States, visit them and get to know them. They got to know me and knew where I was from. They read what I was writing in my dissertation about this specter of the rich Indian and how to protect tribal gaming. So, they saw that I was a friend,” Spilde said.
Return on community
In 1999, Dr. Spilde was appointed the first director of research for the National Indian Gaming Association (NIGA) in Washington, D.C., where she was hired to create the National Indian Gaming Library and Research Center.
“Once the report was finished for the National Gambling Impact Study, NIGA Chairman Rick Hill came to me and said, ‘We really need help telling our story. We need more research.’ At that time the commercial gaming industry had gotten very organized. Frank Fahrenkopf created the American Gaming Association and was really putting out incredible material about the commercial gaming industry to influence the gambling commission in favor of Las Vegas-style casinos. And NIGA leadership realized, ‘We need the same thing, but for tribal gaming.’
“Once I got the position at NIGA, I went on the road. I visited 135 reservations when I worked at NIGA. I attended every regional conference and golf tournament and casino groundbreaking and would go back for the casino opening. What a privilege, what a dream. I was young, and I just got in my car, or I got on a plane and drove and visited everybody. Because of NIGA’s support, I was able to see the before and after in so many places and share in all the optimism.
”As an anthropologist, I always wanted the deep meaning of tribal gaming to come out in the mainstream to show what it has done in Indian Country, how it really works. In my classes, I share that the purpose of the tribal gaming revenues is what I call ‘return on community’. We need the casino to be profitable with the return on investment to translate the revenues into ‘return on community’. And the ‘return on community; is the purpose of it all,” Spilde declared.
National impact
After creating the National Indian Gaming Library and Resource Center in Washington, D.C, Spilde served as a Senior Research Associate at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she helped incorporate tribal gambling into the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. Along with NIGA and Joe Kalt and Jonathan Taylor, she helped produce the first national impact study of tribal government gaming in the United States while at Harvard. She also worked with the Oklahoma Indian Gaming Association and the Harvard team to produce a study of Oklahoma Indian gaming’s impacts when it was still limited to class two.
“While at NIGA, I testified before Congress a couple of times, and I was often perceived simply as a paid lobbyist. I realized that I was frustrated by that image because I’m a trained academic who can only share what I know to be true. I have a PhD that I am very proud of and worked hard for and I know I’m giving them robust academic outcomes, not just my opinions. At the Kennedy School of Government, they were focused on tribal economic development, but they didn’t really have a gaming element at that time. It was really focused on tribal economic development outside of gaming.
‘We worked with NIGA and the tribes on this first national impact study, which came out in 2005 using U.S. census data. It was unbelievable to see the progress. Again, no policy created by the federal government could have generated the impact that tribal gaming has in terms of improving poverty, increasing education, and the quality of homes and the improvements in family life.
“It had to be accomplished within that cultural framework, because each tribe integrates their casino revenues in a way that makes sense to them culturally,” Spilde related. It felt like a triumph to be able to show the story using data since tribal leaders telling their own story was often dismissed by Congress or opponents as being anecdotal or selective, which it’s not, Spilde said.
The Sycuan Institute
Established in 2005 through a $5 million endowment from the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, the Sycuan Institute on Tribal Gaming was created to support original academic research related to the legal gambling industry with an emphasis on tribal government gaming. In particular, the Institute is dedicated to the development of a professional class of tribal government gaming industry experts who understand the unique partnership between tribal governments and tribal economic development through gaming.
Today, Spilde is the Endowed Chair of the Sycuan Institute on Tribal Gaming in the L. Robert Payne School of Hospitality & Tourism Management at San Diego State University (SDSU), where she serves as a professor. Spilde heads up the first ever four-year Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in Hospitality and Tourism Management with an emphasis in Tribal Gaming Operations and Management at San Diego State University.
The B.S. in Hospitality and Tourism Management with an emphasis in Tribal Gaming Operations and Management integrates core hospitality management education with specialized courses focusing on tribal gaming. Students explore the cultural, political, legal, and operational aspects of tribal casinos, gaining insights into the unique challenges and opportunities within this sector.
The specialized curriculum courses cover topics such as casino operations, legal and regulatory issues, marketing, public relations, and the cultural and political contexts of tribal gaming. The program includes internships and practical experiences, allowing students to apply their knowledge in real-world settings. For professionals and students seeking specialized knowledge without committing to a full degree, SDSU offers a Certificate in Tribal Casino Operations Management fully online as well.
From scratch
“I was hired to come in and help finalize the program and develop all the classes and teach the classes. I don’t have a background in running a casino. I’ve never been a general manager, so I needed a lot of partners and support with all the course materials and guest speakers and case studies and internships.
“Our program in the Hospitality School is very personalized, so we have a lot of partners. The director of our school comes out of industry, and he’s the founding director and the only director we’ve had. His name is Carl Wilson and he’s been here 24 years and is a true visionary and a big supporter of tribal governments,” Spilde said.
Rock star
“My very first graduate, Justine Kelleher, got her BS in Tribal Gaming in 2009, the end of my first year at SDSU. And she’s now a rock star in the gaming industry. Many of my tribal gaming alums are now mentors to my current students. Students do two internships when they are in the program at SDSU. We know that our students need to get out there to experience casino operations and not simply learn in a classroom. They have to do their first internship as a rotational internship where they learn all the pieces of the integrated resort and how they work together. This internship takes a huge commitment from the host property since there are so many departments involved in the rotation.
“After that first internship, most of the students find that they are drawn to one or two different areas within the property. Then we collaborate with our partners and do a second internship with that student which is much deeper in one of those top areas of interest. Almost every student decides to stay with their employer, at least for a while, since they have such a wonderful experience of tribal gaming” Spilde stated.
A completely different world
“I’ve had so many people say to me ‘your program would be bigger if you taught commercial casino operations or just taught gaming in general.’ And I say, yeah, but that’s not the purpose and that is not the vision from the Sycuan Tribe. Tribal Gaming really is different. It’s not just a different version of gaming. It’s a completely different industry. Tribal gaming is a completely different world, how it’s regulated, who owns it, where it’s located, the purpose of the revenues; the return on community that you get to witness.
“This focus on purpose is something that is especially trending with the younger generation. We hear this all the time at SDSU. You know, they want experiences rather than things. They travel for the memories, not to buy and own things like souvenirs. That’s what they’re looking for in their work. They want to feel like it’s not just a job. They want their work to matter, to be a part of something really important.
“Our students really are engaged. Even if they leave tribal gaming to go to Vegas or work for other companies, generally, they’re drawn back just by that real, deep sense of purpose in Indian Country,” Spilde declared.
Entries in the Faces of Gaming series:
- Dr. Katherine Spilde – There’s no place like home (now reading)
- Mattress Mack – Furniture mogul, marketing genius, sports betting champ
- Jeff Connor, owner of Lockdogs – A better mousetrap
- Antonio Perez – An optimistic realist
- Kara Napolitano – Human rights advocate and trafficking expert
- Next Gaming CEO and skill-based slots evangelist Mike Darley
- Dennis Conrad – Executive, founder, creator, speaker, author, columnist, and innovator
- Adam Wiesberg – A journey from sign salesman to dealer to El Cortez GM
- Gary Ellis – Las Vegas entrepreneur
- Alan Feldman – From Mirage and MGM to responsible gaming expert
- John Acres – the Thomas Edison of gaming
- Alex Alvarado — Vice President, Casino Operations at MGM National Harbor and Casino Aficionado
- Lauren Bates — A successful VP at Konami and Chair of Global Gaming Women, all before her 40th birthday
- TJ Tejeda and EZ Baccarat – Reimagining a centuries-old game
- Chris Andrews — Don’t cry for the bookmaker
- Wes Ehrecke — From gasohol and pork chops to president of the Iowa Gaming Association
- Steve Browne – Casino philosopher, master gaming instructor and father of a rocket scientist
- Noah Acres – Shaking up the industry one player record at a time
- Kate Chambers – ICE queen, casino exhibition maven and keeper of fairy dust
- Joe Asher — From the newsstand and racetrack to sports-betting icon
- Paul Speirs-Hernandez — Randomness, chance, reward, and luck
- Ainsworth’s Deron Hunsberger — From finance and sales to president
- Roger Gros — Chronicler of the gaming industry for four decades and counting
- Debi Nutton — Everi board member, gaming trailblazer
- Cache Creek’s Kari Stout-Smith — Dancing backwards in high heels
- Andrew Economon — Making downtown Las Vegas cool again
- Richard Marcus — From the wrong side of the casino tables to the right
- Willy Allison — From New Zealand bloke to world game-protection leader
- Tom Jingoli — From gaming enforcement agent to COO of Konami Gaming
- Tino Magnatta — Interviewing the interviewer, 3,000 and counting since COVID
- Deana and Brady Scott — Still talking shop with the owners of Raving Consulting
- Kevin Parker — “Putting everything into everything I do”
- Laura Penney — Putting in the Work as CEO of Coeur d’Alene Casino
- Andre Carrier — Paying it forward
- Jean Scott — The original casino influencer, still frugal gambling after all these years
- Anika Howard — From Harrah’s First Interactive Employee to CEO of Wondr Nation
- Anthony Curtis — Gambling Guru, Las Vegas Expert, Customer Advocate with Street Cred
- Mark Wayman — An executive recruiter with a brand and something to say
- Melonie Johnson — From rural Louisiana to resort-casino leadership
- Brian Christopher — From actor, Uber driver, and cater waiter to slot celebrity
- Allan Solomon — From accountant and tax lawyer to pioneering casino owner
- Kenny Epstein — A Niche from Nostalgia
Tom Osiecki is a casino consultant who writes an occasional column for CDC Gaming called Faces of Gaming, about interesting and engaging people in the gaming industry.
Tom Osiecki is a marketing and management consultant for Raving Consulting and can be reached for consulting engagements at 775-329-7864.
If you know of a fascinating personality in the gaming industry you would like to see profiled, please send Tom Osiecki an email at tosiecki@cdcgaming.com
