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Steve Haycox: Let's hope Indian gaming doesn't come to Alaska

Gaming machines at the MIC Gaming Hall, owned and operated by the Metlakatla Indian Community of Alaska. Photo from Facebook
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Indian gaming is a $29.9 billion business and it's already in Alaska on a small scale. But have tribal casinos led to organized crime and resulted in federal recognition for illegitimate tribes? Professor Steve Haycox seems to think so, based on a new book written by an attorney whose worked has earned him comparisons to the Ku Klux Klan:

Gaming is an indigenous legacy; virtually all American Indian groups engaged in some type of organized games of chance, as reported by various tribes and their members, by contemporary non-indigenous observers and later anthropologists. But the modern Indian gaming industry began with the Florida Seminole tribe opening a high-stakes bingo hall on its reservation in the 1970s, in violation of Florida law. In 1987 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that because Indian reservations are sovereign, their land held in trust by the United States, so long as the form of gambling they're conducting is legal in the state where the reservation is located, the state cannot regulate it.

Congress soon followed with the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act which established the National Indian Gaming Commission. That act mandates that tribes confer with state government before engaging in high-stakes gambling operations. That's confer, not comply. Should the state refuse to negotiate with the tribe, the Secretary of the Interior can authorize the operation, working with the state. Many such deals have been made, nearly always resulting in state government allowing the gaming operations. The justification has been that the Indians must be allowed the opportunity for economic development, to the benefit of their tribal members.

Two things happened, perhaps predictably.

First, the amount of money involved proved irresistible to Mafia members and associates who were adept at loan-sharking. For them it seemed a simple matter of putting up the investment money, running the operation and giving the tribe a percentage of the profit, determined by the managers, of course.

Second, groups who may or may not have been Indians were recognized as tribes by a Congress ignorant of the consequences, or by BIA administrative action, allowing those tribes to open casinos on their reservations.