Ojibwe in Minnesota

Indian Gaming

54  pe Ople Of minnes Ot a miner’s canary,the Indian marks the shifts from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities , reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith.” The Constitution says that treaties are “the supreme law of the land.” It is high time all Americans honor Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black’s statement on tribal sovereignty:“Great nations like great men,must keep their word.”39 Indian Gaming Inadditiontotreatyrights,tribeshavediscoveredandtested other critical areas of the law to their benefit. In Bryan v. Relocation While the ojibwe struggled to establish sovereignty and treaty rights on reservations in the twentieth century, they also faced pressure to leave their homes. Relocation was a policy designed to get indians off reservations and permanently moved to urban areas. The idea was that native people could then enjoy economic opportunity and better assimilate into americansociety.vi a piecemeal experiment began in 1948. Then, from 1953 to 1960, the commissioner ofindianaffairsissuedamandate,supported bycongressionalfundingin1956.Relocation provided one-way transportation for indian families to urban areas and rental assistance forthefirstmonthofrelocation.Thepolicyhad dramatic effects on the ojibwe in Minnesota. Under the program, thousands of ojibwe relocated to Minneapolis, st. Paul, and Duluth. even today, 35 percent of Minnesota’s total nativepopulationislocatedinthosethreecitiesasadirectresultofthispolicy .vii Relocation succeeded in moving indians , but it failed to provide jobs, housing, and other economic opportunities. indian unemployment rates in urban areas during relocation were as high as 50 percent. Relocation was abandoned in 1960 for being too expensive, but the damage had been done. as of the year 2000, unemployment had declined to 22 percent for the urban indian population, but that was still higher than the unemployment rates for indians on reservations and much higher than the overall state unemployment rate of 4 percent. During the Great Depression the unemployment rate rose more than 15 percent, but for the ojibwepeopleinMinnesotaithasneverbeen below 20 percent since the creation of the first reservation in the state. for the Minnesota ojibwe, a great depression began with thefirstreservation.ithasneverended.viii it is important to note that for urban ojibwe connection to their home communities is vitally important. almost all urban ojibwe travel back and forth frequently, vote in tribal elections, and have their funerals on their home reservations. Most of the tribes have established urban tribal offices for outreachtothoseconstituents . the Ojib we  55 Itasca County (1976), Ojibwe Indians Helen and Russell Bryan successfully proved that they should not be subject to state or county tax on their mobile home.The mobile home was on land held in federal trust for the Leech Lake Reservation , and the Bryans were enrolled members of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. This was a critical case because it solidifi d earlier court decisions limiting state regulation of reservation affairs,even in the face of federal legislation that granted greater authority to states on tribal land.40 Shorty after and in part because of Bryan, the Florida Seminole Indians began developing tribal gaming and TheU.s.governmentcirculated brochureslikethis onetoMinnesota indianstoentice themtomoveto urbanareasas partofrelocation initiativesinthe 1950s. 56  pe Ople Of minnes Ot a gambling enterprises. Gaming and gambling are not governed by federal laws. Some states, like Nevada and South Dakota, have legalized many forms of gambling, while others, like Minnesota, have not. The Seminole Indians of Florida simply paid no attention to the state’s gaming laws, which allowed church bingo but nothing more. They developed a high-stakes bingo operation on tribal land. The local sheriff tried to shut it down, but the tribe filed for an injunction,which was appealed all the way to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The 1981decision in Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Robert Butterworth upheld the right of the Seminole to develop gaming operations without regard to state laws. It was another sovereignty victory for tribal governments and a huge eye-opener for tribes in states that had not legalized casino gambling.Legal challenges to tribal gaming continued after Seminole v. Butterworth. However, in 1987 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians that California could not regulate gaming on Indian land when it allowed gaming elsewhere in the state.After Cabazon,tribal gaming proliferated.Within two years, every Ojibwe reservation in Minnesota developed some type of high-stakes bingo or casino-style gaming operation.41 The U.S. government, under the...