The Inconvenient Indian (22 page)

A deal you can’t refuse.

In the United States, under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, there were three classes of gambling possible on Native reservations: Class I, Class II, and Class III.

Class I gaming was defined as traditional gaming or social gaming with minimal prizes. Authority for this form of gaming was vested with the tribe itself and was not subject to the regulations of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.

Class II gaming was generally understood to cover bingo and other games similar to bingo. Class II gaming was regulated by tribal governments, with oversight of the National Indian Gaming Commission.

Class III gaming dealt with all other types of gaming not
covered by Class I and Class II, and was generally concerned with casino-style gaming. It differed little from the kind of gambling that went on in places such as Atlantic City and Las Vegas, and it was here that the matter of Indian gaming got … entertaining. If a tribe wished to engage in Class III gaming, Class III gaming had to be allowed in that state. The tribe also had to negotiate a compact with the state, to be approved by the Secretary of the Interior. Finally, the tribe had to put together a gaming ordinance, to be approved by the National Indian Gaming Commission.

I’m not particularly happy about gambling as a fiscal base for Native people. That kind of money generally brings out the worst in folks, Native as well as non-Native. But after several centuries of economic oppression, and given the lack of alternatives, professional gaming, for many tribes, holds the most potential for the least effort. Still, apart from raw cash and jobs, industrial-strength gambling contributes little of value to the world.

But then, the same thing could be said about land mines and reality television.

To date, there are about 15 Native-run casinos in Canada and over 350 casinos and bingo halls in 30 states, which bring in over $25 billion a year. And these numbers keep growing. In Manitoba, a consortium of Native bands in the province and the Red Lake Chippewa from northern Minnesota have joined forces to build the Spirit Sands Casino near Spruce Woods Provincial Park. The casino will be one of the first Native-to-Native gaming enterprises and may be a model for further development.

The new buffalo
. That’s what someone called Indian Gaming.
The new buffalo
.

In the fall of 2010, my brother and I went on a car trip that took us through Oklahoma. As we travelled Highway 40 to Oklahoma City and Highway 44 to Tulsa, we ran into a series of small, roadside casinos that the Cherokee have built. They were clean and slick. Bigger than a fast-food restaurant, smaller than the MGM Grand in Vegas. Chris called them “drive-by casinos.”

I’m not a gambling enthusiast, but in the spirit of curiosity and tribal solidarity, Chris and I stopped and fed the buffalo. Fifteen dollars each. All things considered, I would have rather put the money into a hospital or a clean-water system on a reserve.

Over one-third of the federally recognized tribes in North America have moved into some form of gaming, with more tribes coming on board all the time. Even the Navajo, who had twice voted against allowing gambling on the reservation, finally succumbed to the promise of easy money and jobs. The tribe’s first venture into Class III gaming, the Fire Rock Casino a little east of Gallup, is expected to generate close to $32 million a year.

It’s hard to argue with money like that and the jobs that such an industry creates.

No one knows what long-term effects on-reserve gaming will have on Native people. I would hope that we’re smart enough to make use of gaming as an enabling industry, hope that, as we create and improve tribal infrastructures, we will also direct some of the profits to more diversified and sustainable businesses.

But make no mistake. When states and provinces and municipalities look at Native gaming, all they see is a deep-dish pie. Since 2003, Arizona tribes have given about $430 million to that state. Connecticut, with the large Native casinos at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, gets about $200 million annually. In 2003, California
Governor Gray Davis “called on” tribes to donate $1.5 billion, about one-third of their gaming profits, to help a mismanaged state out of its deficit.

Ironically, California is the same state that in the mid-nineteenth century actively encouraged the slaughter of Native people, offering bounties for Indian bodies and scalps with no regard for gender or age. Twenty-five dollars for adults. Five bucks for a child. It is the same state that sold over four thousand Native children into slavery at prices ranging from sixty dollars for a boy to two hundred for a girl.

Thank goodness that the past is the past, and today is today. We’d much rather be appreciated than hunted, though we do need to understand that each time our new political friends drop by, they will want another and larger piece of our pie, and that they will keep coming back until there is little left but crumbs on a plate.

After all, it’s Indian pie and we don’t need that much.

But the post-1985 period isn’t just about legislation and government and politicians with their hands in the Indian till. The present, like the past, also has its fair share of bad behaviour, racism, and murder.

There are people who are genuinely disturbed by what they erroneously perceive to be preferential treatment for Native people. Many of these voices have banded into small groups and local organizations such as Protect Americans’ Rights and Resources, or Stop Treaty Abuse, which were formed in 1987 and 1988 respectively to protest Ojibway spear-fishing treaty rights in Wisconsin. Other organizations, such as the Citizens Equal Rights Alliance (CERA), with chapters in over a dozen states, are larger and better funded, with access to state and federal lawmakers. CERA’s mission
statement is succinct and straightforward. “Federal Indian Policy is unaccountable, destructive, racist and unconstitutional. It is therefore CERA’s mission to ensure the equal protection of the law as guaranteed to all citizens by the Constitution of the United States of America.”

You might have mistakenly thought that CERA is talking about the harm that federal Indian policy is doing to Native people. Not so. The “injured” group that CERA is sworn to protect is Whites.

Bigotry and misinformation feed many of these organizations. Other groups don’t even try to pretend. In 1999, a flyer was distributed in South Dakota and Nebraska. It was worked up to look like an official notice from the South Dakota State Fish and Game Department announcing a special season on local Lakota reserves during which White hunters could hunt Native people, or as the flyer called them, “Worthless Red Bastards, Gut Eaters, Prairie Niggers.” The hunt, according to the notice, was intended to “thin out the fucking Indians.”

The flyer set a limit on the number of Indians you could kill—ten Indians a day—and restricted hunting parties to no more than 150 persons and thirty-five “bloodthirsty, rabid hunting dogs.” Other rules forbade shooting at an Indian in a public tavern as the “bullet might ricochet and hit civilized white people.” You could not set traps within fifteen feet of a liquor store, you couldn’t shoot an Indian sleeping on the sidewalk, and you couldn’t shoot length-wise in a welfare line.

Damn. These people are witty.

Benjamin Nighthorse Campbell, a U.S. senator from Colorado, the third Native American to be elected to Congress and the first to chair the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, took the matter
of the flyer up with the Department of Justice, but by then, with the dim light of judicial interest flickering in their general direction, the framers of the document scurried back to their hidey-holes and disappeared.

I’d like to be able to say, as a matter of Canadian pride if nothing else, that such behaviour is an exclusively American pastime, but I’d be lying.

In 1988, Helen and I were living in Lethbridge, Alberta. We had one of those newer, suburban, split-level tract homes, with stucco walls and a faux-tile roof. The yard consisted of grass and a Russian Olive tree, which was about the only kind of tree able to survive on the high prairies. Its thin, grey leaves made it look as though it were on the verge of dying, thereby fooling the elements and the bad weather into thinking that they didn’t have to bother with something so spindly and bent, something so obviously on its last legs.

One Saturday, I was roaming around, going to open houses. I wasn’t looking to buy. I was just curious. And, in Lethbridge, in 1988, dropping in at open houses was pretty much the most excitement one could find on a Saturday afternoon.

So, I was looking, and I happened to stumble across a small bungalow on Seventh Avenue, just a short walk from the Woodward’s Mall, the Lethbridge Lodge, and the coulees overlooking the river bottom. It was a lovely bungalow on a corner, surrounded by a tall hedge. Inside, it had three bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room on the main floor. The basement was undeveloped, but you could see where you could put in a full bath, two bedrooms, and a family room without much difficulty.

I hurried home, told Helen about the place. She looked at it, and before the month was out, we had sold our house and bought the bungalow.

Lethbridge sits on the edge of the Blackfoot reserve, and it contains, as Walt Whitman might have said, all of the accommodations and prejudices that one might expect from such a social geography: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Not that these multitudes always got along, but at that time, there was an uneasy peace between the cowboys and Indians. Racism was audible but muted, visible but filtered.

We had been living in our new bungalow for a few months when I arrived home one evening to find a flyer in the mailbox. It was from one of the city’s prominent realtors. I won’t mention his name because I have no wish to open old wounds and because, at this point, there is nothing to be gained or lost.

The flyer was a single sheet of paper, yellow in colour, and it alerted folks to the fact that a Treaty Seven family had moved into the neighbourhood. I’m reasonably sure we weren’t the family in question. Treaty Seven didn’t deal with the Cherokee. It was the treaty struck with the Blackfoot in September of 1877. In the case of the flyer, however, “Treaty Seven” was simply code for “Indians,” so perhaps the realtor was thinking of me as well.

You don’t need Alan Turing to break this code. Indians have moved in. Your property values are about to fall. To save your investment and yourself, call me and I’ll sell your home and help you move to a safer—economically and socially speaking—part of town.

At first, I was amused. Then I was angry, as were a number of people in Lethbridge and on the reserve. And why not? This
fool had broken the first rule of racism. Think it, but do not speak it out loud.

So the flyer hit the fan. As it were. The agent took one step backwards (it was a fair-sized fan) and then leaned into the wind, explaining, as he lumbered forward, that it was all a misunderstanding. His flyer wasn’t racist, it was an opportunity. If one Treaty Seven family had liked this particular neighbourhood well enough to move there, then other Treaty Seven families might also want to buy in the area. House prices might well go up. Supply and demand. It wasn’t racism that we had heard, he argued, it was the engine of capitalism as it chugged down Main Street.

The engine of capitalism. That must have been what I’d heard years before in Salt Lake City when I tried to buy a house there. After I had spent several weeks looking at dozens of homes and frustrating the real estate agent with my indecision, he finally turned to me and asked, “What do you want to do? Spend the rest of your life in a tipi?”

Somebody once told me that racism hurts everyone. Perhaps in the broader sense of community, this is true. All I know is that it seems to hurt some much more than others.

A number of us complained about the Treaty Seven flyer. I don’t know what I expected, but I was surprised when I was told by a city official that “you people should calm down.” Live and let live, he told me. No harm, no foul. Everybody makes mistakes. Go with the flow. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Judge not lest ye be judged.

That’s the problem with the Bible, isn’t it? While the Old Testament is filled with angry gods and bad business, and the New Testament is awash in gospels and epistles, there just aren’t
many good quotations that deal with confronting hate. “Vengeance is mine, I will repay” (Romans 12:20) might seem to suggest a possible course of action, but the verse is really an admonishment
not
to indulge in revenge. It is a reminder that the settling of injustices is the realm of God himself, and no one else. We (humankind) are supposed to forgive our tormentors, turn the other cheek and all that, though the Good Book does not explain the nobility in being despised. Or the profit in being hit.

Oh, sure, the Beatitudes make all sorts of promises for passivity and faith: the poor in spirit and the persecuted will inherit heaven, the merciful will receive mercy, the pure in heart will see God, mourners will be comforted, and the meek will inherit the earth. If you take Matthew at his word, you have most of your bases covered. And Romans 12:20-21 allows that if you feed your enemy, you heap coals of fire on his head, but, like the Beatitudes, this is just a general metaphor with no real contractual obligations.

I had expected that the real estate agent would be censured by the real estate board, but he wasn’t even admonished. I don’t think anyone believed his explanation, but then again, his flyer wasn’t a lynching in Mississippi or a massacre at Sand Creek. It was just another of those sharp shards of bigotry you find when you run your fingers across the Canadian mosaic.

And then there was the sad sign that a young woman working at a Tim Hortons in Lethbridge, Alberta, taped to the drive-through window in 2007. It read, “No Drunk Natives.” Accusations of racism erupted, Tim Hortons assured everyone that their coffee shops were not centres for bigotry, but what was most interesting was the public response. For as many people who called in to radio shows or wrote letters to the
Lethbridge Herald
to voice their
outrage over the sign, there were almost as many who expressed their support for the sentiment. The young woman who posted the sign said it had just been a joke.