Indians' Wish List: Big-City Sites for Casinos

[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.

[NVMojo]

1. Someone needs to do a study on how many Indian casinos have failed

on remote and already existing reservation in the middle of fecking nowhere. The federal government stuck these people throughout the nation on some of the most godforsaken worthless land in the middle of nowhere for a reason, to die off. The fact that many are still there and barely holding on is amazing.

Casinos don't just work anywhere and those idiots in Congress should have figured that out when they looked at all the millions of dollars that have been spent on economic development in rural outposts of America and nothing has happened. GEE, Duh! Maybe they should let tribes have urban allotments to generate revenue? Imagine that. I do not think the tribes should give up existing land holdings though.

[Postmanx]

2. I think they do okay

Revenues for tribal casinos reached $18.5 billion last year, double the take of all the casinos in Nevada, according to the National Indian Gaming Association. That is up from $5.4 billion in 1995. With that kind of money in Indian gambling, the drive for permission to build casinos far from reservations is drawing protests from more established Indian gambling operations that do not want more local competition, as well as from tribes that built casinos on their own remote lands, limiting the kinds of profits they can make.

[DemBeans]

3. where are they getting all this money?

Wouldn't it be better to invest a billion dollars (!) in education, housing, or something a little more meaningful than bribery?

I dislike this drive toward urban casinos, because they deliberately target poor people (much as state lotteries do). I know that sounds patronizing, but it's exactly what they're doing.