Indians' Wish List: Big-City Sites for Casinos [View All]

[Postmanx]

NY Times

DENVER, April 1 - The Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians have not had land in Colorado since many of their women and children were massacred in their sleep by soldiers at Sand Creek in 1864. Driven out of the state, they live today in poor rural areas scattered around Oklahoma.

But the tribes are now offering Colorado a gift of $1 billion and are willing to give up their ancestral claims to nearly half of the state, all in exchange for a 500-acre piece of land near Denver on which they hope to build one of the world's largest casinos, complete with a five-star hotel, a golf course, a mall and an Indian cultural center.

Currently there are efforts by several tiny landless bands of Indians in California to build casinos in three cities on San Francisco Bay. There are also proposals by three tribes, now in Oklahoma, to construct casinos in Ohio, where they once lived. And there are tribes in Wisconsin and Oklahoma, originally from New York, that have proposed exchanging their land claims for the right to build casinos in the Catskills.

Certainly, the push for off-reservation gambling is not what Congress had in mind when in 1988 it passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act legalizing Indian casinos. Congress envisioned that the law would help impoverished tribes on remote and already existing reservations in states like South Dakota or New Mexico open small casinos as a way to create jobs and, perhaps, foster long-needed economic development.