Appeal Democrat – By springtime, Bill Iyall figures the Cowlitz Tribe in Washington state will have 152 acres of new land in place and can make plans to break ground for its new casino in 2015.
Iyall, the tribal chairman, is confident that a plan to have the federal government hold the land in trust for the tribe will survive legal challenges, thanks to strong backing from the Obama administration. He says that’s how it should be.
“We are a ward of the federal government, and we’re their trustee, and they’re supposed to take care of us,” Iyall said.
Casino opponents, though, fear President Barack Obama and his team are going too far to take care of the 566 federally recognized tribes and to promote their gambling interests.
Last month, the Obama administration defended a Michigan tribe before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the tribe had sovereignty similar to a foreign country and that the state should not be allowed to shut down its off-reservation casino.
And now Obama wants Congress to change a law that prevents tribes that were recognized by the federal government after 1934 from getting new trust land, which could pave the way for more casinos.
The issue is particularly big along the West Coast, causing divisions from Washington state to California.
The Golden State is at the epicenter of the U.S. tribal gaming industry, which includes more than 420 gaming establishments run by 240 tribes in 28 states. They pull in annual revenues of $27 billion a year, according to the National Indian Gaming Commission, the federal body charged with regulating the casinos.
With 70 tribal casinos in California alone, “you reach a point where … enough is enough,” California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein told the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in November.
My concern is that California tribes — some of them — are no longer content with casinos on Indian lands,” she said, providing examples of nine tribes trying to open off-reservation casinos in California, Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, Oregon and Washington state.
Feinstein, who declined to be interviewed for this story, told the Senate panel that all of the casinos in her state have opened in just the past 15 years.
And she said that the size of the tribal gaming industry in California is now twice as big as any other state and is approaching the scale of Nevada’s $10 billion-a-year gambling operations.
