For some Indian tribes, casinos are a bad bargain

That image is true for a select few tribes fortunate enough to be close to large cities and thousands of gamblers. Successful casinos like the Mashantucket Pequots’ Foxwoods near New York and the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux’ Mystic Lake near Minneapolis are the exception, however, tribal leaders say.

“I call it the Pequot principle,” said U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs spokesman Rex Hegler. “There’s about five tribes that have done very well, but there’s 554 tribes in the country. People that think there’s nothing the tribes need now are confused.”

Most other tribal casinos make little more than enough to cover their payrolls. And several tribes like the Hualapais have seen their casino dreams crushed into dust, the victims of their remote locations, competition from other types of gambling or intergovernmental squabbling.

For them, casinos have become a trickster’s gamble, another in a long string of losing bets on economic development.

The Hualapais had to lay off about 15 people when their casino closed – a big impact for a tribe of about 2,000 with about two-thirds of its members in poverty, Walema said.

“There were a lot of disappointments because other reservations were making it big,” Walema said. “For us, it just didn’t pan out.”

The biggest factor, Coin and tribal leaders say, is the old business adage of location, location, location. Most reservations are, by design, in remote locations far from cities, freeways and airports.

“When you have a population base of 65,000 within 45 miles, you aren’t going to do as well as a Foxwoods or a Mystic Lake,” said Jerry Allen, assistant general manager of the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe’s casino near Sequim, Wash.

The tribe’s Seven Cedars Casino in a remote area of the Olympic Peninsula now has about 200 employees, down from a peak of 475, Allen said. The tribe also is hurt by an agreement with Washington state that bans slot machines, Allen said.

Casinos in Canada, Oregon and Idaho do offer the slot machines, which are more popular with gamblers and less costly to run than the blackjack and craps tables at Seven Cedars, Allen said.

“We have a real slot sandwich here so it’s a real challenge to keep people at home playing the table games,” Allen said.

“I wish we could make more money than we are right now, but it all depends on the machines,” Looks Twice said. “If we could get the state to allow more machines, then we could bring more money into the tribe.”

Poverty statistics such as unemployment and homelessness actually increased on the Pine Ridge reservation after the tribe’s Prairie Wind casino opened.

“Many of the people who live off the reservation thought, ‘Here’s my chance of getting a job,’ so they all came back home,” Coin said. “So that bumped up the numbers on how many people would be counted as unemployed and homeless.”

Tribal officials worry that the perception of successful Indian casinos will prompt Congress to cut funding for tribal programs. Tribes are fighting proposals this year that would cut off federal funds to relatively wealthy tribes and have successfully fought a bid to tax casinos and other tribal enterprises.

“Gaming is providing some opportunities, but tribes are still roughly 40 years behind similar communities in infrastructure needs and other areas,” said Hegler, the BIA spokesman. “We have 49 percent unemployment in Indian Country right now.”

The Hualapai tribe, for example, has only three police officers to patrol a reservation of 1,550 square miles.

“Unfortunately, back in Washington you have a lot of legislators making decisions about Indian Country without having any reservations in their jurisdictions,” Allen said. “When you see the Pequots or some of these other ones, it overglamorizes everything and does a disservice to Indian Country in general because it is, by and large, the exception to the rule.”

With the proliferation of Indian casinos, the public is beginning to view tribes as casino operators, not governments, said Hopi tribal chairman Wayne Taylor Jr.