Al Jazeera: Catawba Nation looks to North Carolina for casino

In central South Carolina, clay is pulled from the land near the Catawba River by a Native American tribe of the same name. The loam is processed much akin to the way it was thousands of years ago, coiled into pots, scraped and burnished with river rocks and fired over an open pit until it can endure.

And in that ancient pottery tradition – the oldest in North America – lies the story of the Catawba people, according to the tribe’s elected chief, Bill Harris.

It is also motivation for its economic future. South Carolina’s Catawba Indian Nation, the state’s only federally recognized Indian tribe, is looking to a casino resort and high-stakes bingo as a way to insure its cultural future.

Central to the tribe’s plan for economic development: holding the federal government to its promise, the tribe will be allowed to expand throughout their ancestral lands. They have set their sights on 16 acres across the state line, in Cleveland County, North Carolina, where they hope to build a 220,000 square-foot gaming facility and 750-room resort. They estimate the $340 million casino project would initially create at least 4,000 jobs in a county where unemployment lingers around 10 percent.