Publisher’s Note: This quarter’s Adams Analysis (normally distributed to premium subscribers only) met with both a strong positive reaction – plus a suggestion from our good friend Victor Rocha (Pechanga.net) to post the article on our site so everyone could read it. Good idea Victor!
In January 2015, The Economist magazine published an article on Indian gaming, “Of Slots and Sloth: How Cash from Casinos Makes Native Americans Poorer.” The unnamed author concluded that Indian gaming corrupts native cultures and makes individual Indians lazy, creating poverty rather than reducing it among Native Americans. The culprit is “‘per capita” payments, the money that some tribes distribute to tribal members from casino profits.
The Economist article relied on a study conducted between 2000 and 2010, published in American Indian Law Journal. The study concluded that casinos increase poverty on Indian reservations, based on a correlation of the gross casino income of twenty-four tribal casinos in the Pacific Northwest and poverty rates among tribal members. The Economist article attempted to put some meat on the bones of the studyby interviewing members of the Siletz Tribe in Oregon. But only two tribal members were interviewed and quoted; neither was a tribal official or worked in the tribe’s casino.
A week after the article in The Economist was published, the chairman of the Siletz Tribe, Deloris Pigsley, took issue with it in Indian Country Today. Pigsley pointed out many errors in facts and faulty methodology for both The Economist article and the original study. Ms. Pigsley was very careful and measured in her response. But she was clearly very angry, as were most Native Americans who read the article. Pigsley said, “After reading The Economist article, the Siletz Tribe can only conclude that the reporter came to Siletz with a headline already in mind and was only looking for interviewees who would provide statements that support that story.”
The article struck me very similarly. It is not as personal to me as it is to a tribal member, but it is still personal. In 1990, I left casino management to become a consultant. In my first ten years of consulting, at least half of my clients were either Indian tribes or companies working with Indian Tribes, including the Siletz Tribe. As a consultant to the Comstock Casino, I helped negotiate and implement the operating agreement between the Siletz Tribe and Comstock to build and manage the tribe’s casino. Deloris Pigsley was also chairman at the time. The tribe had clear goals for the casino and its cash flow: it wanted to use the casino to develop its economy and provide employment for its members. Within a year, the tribe was ready to move forward without outside assistance. It hired the senior Comstock employee as general manager and assumed control of the casino and its own destiny.
My second reason for reacting personally reaches much further back in my life. My last two years of high school were in Gardnerville, Nevada. It was a very small school; thirty-three of us graduated in June of 1960. About half of those graduating were members of the Dresslerville Indian Colony, including our class president and my best friend, Harold Wyatt. Harold was a good scholar, a great athlete, and very popular with teachers and other students. But in his mind he was an Indian first – not because that was the way he would have wanted his priorities, but because white society had forced it upon him. He taught me a lot about life and living with prejudice. In particular, he fought against the characterization of Indians as lazy and drunken. Harold spent his life – he died at 40 – working hard and being sober. Of course, that did little to change prejudice; facts and truth hardly affect bigotry.
The article in The Economist said exactly what white bigots have said about Indians for the last two hundred years: give them a little money and they just lie around and drink. And that brings me back to the Siletz Tribe. Actually, the word “tribe” is a misleading because the Siletz Tribe is a confederation of 27 tribal bands with different languages and cultural histories. The tribe is a construct of the federal Indian policy after the Rogue River Wars of 1855-56. All of the bands that were parties to the subsequent treaty were forced onto a single reservation. In the next hundred years, they were squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces and into a new collective identity. Having created the Siletz Tribe in 1856, the government elected to terminate it in 1953. The tribe fought hard against the termination, regaining federal recognition in 1977. Today there are less than 5,000 enrolled tribal members, the majority of whom do not live on the reservation.
The history of Siletz is very much the history of most tribes in the western part of the United States. Through its superior military power, the American government forced tribes onto reservations. The reservations did not provide enough land or freedom of movement for the tribes to maintain a traditional lifestyle. That was not an accidental outcome; besides pacifying the tribes and assuming control of the majority of Indian lands, federal policy was meant to end the heathenness of “wild” Indians. The Dawes Act of 1887 authorized the division of tribal land into small individual allotments. An allotment ceased to be part of the reservation and became “fee simple” land, subject to taxation and sale. The intent of the Dawes Act was to encourage tribal members to live as individuals, not as members of a collective entity. As a byproduct, it gave white investors the opportunity to buy more of the tribal land.
Possibly the greatest damage done to Indian tribes and individual tribal members was done in the name of education. In the early 20th century, Indians of school age were taken from the reservations, their families, and their tribes, and sent to government schools. In the schools they were not allowed to speak their native languages or dress and act in traditional ways. They were given culturally acceptable and pronounceable American names. They were not allowed to practice their religions and were required to participate in Christian religious ceremonies. The flagship boarding school, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, sought to “Kill the Indian and save the man.”
The history of American Indian policy is one of conflicting values. The United States is one of a very few nations in the world created by individuals with only commerce as a common bond, rather than by a movement of peoples. Indian tribes are by definition ethnic groups bonded together by language, common beliefs, culture, and place. The federal government has repeatedly tried to make Indian tribal members into individuals who are primarily interested in commerce. And the tribes have always resisted those efforts and attempted to maintain their collective identity.
The history of the Siletz Tribe reflects that struggle of individual versus collective value systems. The tribe has managed for over a hundred years to preserve its collective and cultural identity. They are Americans, but they are also Indians and as such they have a separate history, culture, and vision of their future. The Siletz uses the casino cash not to enrich individuals, the way private casino owners do, but to enrich the tribe. Sixty percent of the profits are reinvested in education scholarships, transportation, social and recreational activities for elders, tribal language and cultural instruction, history programs, and the purchase of additional land. The tribe owns a golf course, two RV parks, and a number of pieces of commercial property in several cities in Oregon. The tribe is doing what it can to diversify economically so that it is not dependant on casino gambling. Its tribal council and tribal elders feel a responsibility for future generations of tribal members. It is an axiom in Indian country to plan for the seventh generation.
The Economist interviewed Mr. Fisher, an unemployed tribal member. He said it just wasn’t worthwhile to work at the casino or elsewhere, or go to school. Fisher made an old and familiar argument: by the time he paid transportation costs, baby sitters, and other expenses related to a job, he would be losing money, compared to getting government payments. So he chose to live on $1,200 a year he receives from the tribe, its annual distribution from casino profits, plus his girlfriend’s welfare payments. Fisher’s case is reflective of individual choice, not of American Indian heritage and culture, nor of “inevitable” impacts of tribal casino revenues.
To infer from isolated anecdotes that poverty is the result of casino cash or native heritage is simply prejudice dressed up in more sophisticated language. To me it sounds exactly the same as what I heard as a teenager, the bigotry and prejudice that motivated Harold Wynn. For a different view of the impact of Indian gaming, I recommend a very recent interview of Peter Nabokov in the National Geographic. Nabokov, the author of eight books on American Indians and a professor of American Indian Studies, says that Indian gaming has been very beneficial to the tribes and to the nation as a whole. In Nabokov’s opinion, casinos have strengthened tribes.
The Economist article demonstrates that prejudice cannot be defeated by logic or fact. And that is true regardless of whether the prejudicial party writes for an internationally known magazine or dances around a bonfire dressed in a hooded robe.
But that is just my opinion, isn’t it?
