Indian Tribes & Gaming on Reservations

In the 1980s the possibility of legal gambling on Indian reservations emerged as a potential means for many Native American peoples to revitalize their societies and pull themselves out of the dependency and poverty that reservation life had brought them. There were many variations in the process of instituting gambling on the reservations--but the primary differences were in the reactions and the efforts of the many tribes. Two examples of Native American groups who sought to institute gaming on a sufficient scale to revitalize their economies were the Mohawk of northern New York and the numerous tribes of southern California. In New York a terrible "Mohawk civil war," as the popular phrase put it, tore apart the Akwesasne, Kahnawake, and Kanesatake reservations (Johansen xxi). But in California the battle over gambling pitted the administration of Republican governor Pete Wilson (backed by Las Vegas gambling interests) against a well-united Indian front. On the gaming question, as in all interactions with the dominant society, long-colonized Native Americans react and change in ways associated with their traditional social and political arrangements and in accordance with patterns that have emerged during the competitive, hegemonic, and administrative phases of colonization. Differences between the experiences of the Mohawk and the various southern California Indians during colonization are, therefore, the source of the differences between their responses to the arri

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in presenting a unified front than the Iroquois Confederacy. U. S. government agencies persisted in assuming that Indians are "totally unified and cooperative" but in almost any instance where a member of any southern California tribe is perceived by non-Indians as being a representative of the interest of all tribes or even of his/her own tribe, the assumption is mistaken (Shipek 137). Delegates from bands or tribes have no authority to speak for any group without very specific approval and Indians presume that such a representative acts only out of self-interest except in rare, pre-approved instances. Unlike the Mohawk, however, southern California Indians, in part because each rancheria, tribe, or band is relatively small, began in the postwar years to develop "mechanisms and roles for effectively handling and distributing benefits or economic development" (Shipek 149). Shipek predicted that if developments occurred that had the potential of producing broad benefits for each reservation as a whole, the various rancheria leaderships would be capable of authorizing representation and developing whatever organizational structures were needed (149). Thus, even though the southern California tribes had less of a unified cult

Category: Economics - I