Monday was Indigenous People’s Day and Indian Gaming Association Chairman Ernie Steven wanted to make sure it was celebrated correctly. At the Global Gaming Expo education session “Shattering Ceilings: Women Leaders in Tribal Gaming,” Stevens introduced three tribal women who could “tell people who we are, tell people our true history,” he said.
For the next 45 minutes Holly Cook Macarro, an expert on political matters focused on tribal legislative and policy and principal at The Angle; Porch Band of Creek Indians Tribal Chair Stephanie Bryan; and Melanie Benjamin, the Chief Executive/Chairwoman of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, told stories of how they came to become tribal leaders, despite odds often stacked against them.
Stevens called them warriors. “There’s a time to go down the rough road. There’s a time to talk about some of the struggles we’ve been through. But today we want to celebrate and in order to celebrate, we want to talk about some good things.”
But for Cook Macarro, Bryan, and Benjamin, the “good things” came after enduring biases, challenges to their standings, and sometimes outright discrimination.
When Cook Macarro first went to Washington, D.C., almost 20 years ago to advocate for tribal concerns, she stood out not only because she’s a woman, but because often she was only the indigenous person in the room.
“I spent most of the beginning years of my career walking into rooms that were made up of white men and sometimes they thought they knew more about Indian country than I did,” Cook Macarro said.
One time a white man insisted his knowledge of Indian country surpassed hers.
Cook Macarro told him, “’I just want you to stop. Because you don’t know.’ And it was really an experience for me and something that just became clearer. … That experience clarified for me that we’re the best at telling our own stories.”
In Alabama with the Porch Creek Indians, Bryan had to fight off attempts by state officials to shut down the tribe’s operations. She said that the tribe was constantly being attacked through lawsuits filed by Alabama’s attorney general and other frivolous litigations.
All Porch Creek’s holdings were concentrated in three resorts in Alabama. Bryan, remembering advice from her grandmother to never “have all your eggs in one basket,” decided it was time for the tribe to expand.
“We developed a strategic plan to diversify our portfolio,” Bryan said. “And that’s how we began to purchase properties in Aruba, Curacao, Pennsylvania, Chicago, and more recently, Magic City in Florida. The landscape has definitely changed for members of the Creek Indians. I lived in the core of a poverty-stricken community and I watched our community grow and become prosperous.”
Benjamin’s experiences were even more horrific than her peers’. When she was young, her family of 12 was asked to leave a Minnesota reservation and move to St. Louis as part of a repatriation program. Benjamin’s family wasn’t sent to an idyllic neighborhood, but an inner-city slum.
“Families were sent to big cities to become part of the melting pot,” Benjamin said. “That didn’t work for many of us, so my dad moved us back north.”
Benjamin’s mother ended up supporting the family, working two jobs to make sure that each child “always had that number-one priority of the family unit. When I was able to carry the title of chief executive/chairwoman, I wanted to make sure that (tribal young people) had opportunities, whether they had experience or not, to mentor them and require them go to school, to get an education.”
Each speaker mentioned the importance for young tribal members to find, talk to, and listen to their elders. But there was also a sense that leadership and traditional values can co-exist and the answers, especially for young women who want to advance their careers, are close at hand.
The so-called ceilings that formerly prevented women from advancing have been demolished.
“We have a wealth of talent on our reservation,” Benjamin said. “We have ceremonial people, we have medicine people, we have teachers, we have artists, we have singers, and all of those people give me strength. So when I walk into a room, I shatter those ceilings because of those people.”
