Column: Family politics at Mashantucket casino

Wednesday, June 18, 2008  

"Are the Haywards, the family of former Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Council Chairman Richard “Skip” Hayward, the person widely credited for the creation of Foxwoods Resort Casino, being denied their fair share of the success it has brought the tribe?

Patricia Byron, Skip Hayward's younger sister, who just lost her new job as a concierge at MGM Grand at Foxwoods, says they are.

In fact, Byron says, members of the Tribal Council, who she says were responsible for chasing Skip Hayward out of tribal government a few years ago, are now taking aim at others in his family.

Byron's other brother, two nieces and her husband all lost their jobs in the tribe's recent round of cost-cutting layoffs.

She believes her family has been singled out because of their efforts to reform tribal government, including, most recently, a petition circulating among tribal members that calls for the recall of the Tribal Council.

”It's a way of getting back at us. It's revenge,” Byron said in an interview Tuesday in which she talked about the stress she and other members of her family have been under in recent years, worrying about their jobs and their family's future on a reservation that was originally preserved by their grandmother, Elizabeth George.

Byron said she first stayed with her grandmother on the reservation when she was 5 years old and was among the first to move there as a young woman when her brother was securing federal housing grants and rebuilding the community, long before anyone ever dreamed of a casino.

Now, she says, she and others in her family feel betrayed."

Get the Story:
David Collins: Foxwoods Forgetting Its Roots? (The New London Day 6/18)
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