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Chapter 2: Within Boundaries: Indian Gaming in North Dakota and Beyond
- University of Nevada Press
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35 2 Within Boundaries Indian Gaming in North Dakota and Beyond s t e v e n a n d r e w l i g h t a n d k at h r y n r . l . r a n d americans, it seems, love to gamble. as the congressionally mandated National Gambling Impact study Commission noted in its 1999 final report, “Once exotic, gambling has quickly taken its place in mainstream culture.”1 all but two of the fifty states, Utah and Hawaii, permit some form of legalized gambling, including gaming in riverboat or land-based casinos , racetrack pari-mutuel wagering, charitable gaming, and state-run lotteries . In 2007, the legalized gambling industry generated $92 billion in gross revenue, continuing its stunning increase throughout the early part of the decade.2 although accounting for only about a quarter of total revenue, the rapid growth of “Indian gaming”3 is both a reflection of, and a key contributor to, the continued expansion of legalized gambling throughout the United states. Nearly tripling between 1999 and 2009, tribal gaming review increased at a rate that far outpaced the total legalized gambling industry and remained flat during the recent recession, in contrast to the commercial industry.4 Indian gaming in many ways is unique. The legal and regulatory context , public policy goals and outcomes, geographic locale, economics, and politics of Indian gaming are quite different from those for other forms of gaming. Moreover, Indian gaming is uniquely situated in the troubled history of federal Indian law and policy and the contested relationship between federal, state, and local governments and tribes, whose sovereignty has been recognized, protected, and reinforced as well as ignored, diminished, and abrogated .5 Indian gaming is shaped and constrained by legal, political, and economic boundaries as well as location, all of which have shifted over time. as defined by federal law, “Indian gaming” is gaming conducted by an Indian tribe on Indian lands—that is, by a federally recognized tribe on its federal reservation or trust lands. Tribal governments’ right to conduct gaming on reservations stems from their political authority as preconstitutional and extraconstitutional sovereign nations, a status that has been contested by states—at times with the assistance of the federal government—for more 36 | G A M B L I N G , S PA C E , A N D T I M E than two hundred years. In 1988, Congress enacted the Indian Gaming Regulatory act (IGRa), a complex and comprehensive federal regulatory scheme governing the regulation of tribal gaming at three levels of government: tribal, state, and federal.6 IGRa grew out of a federally mandated political compromise between state and non-Indian gaming interests to control the spread of gambling, on the one hand, and tribal and federal interests in promoting reservation economic development, on the other. Where tribal lands are located near major metropolitan centers and state law operates to provide tribes with a de facto casino gambling monopoly, Indian gaming is phenomenally profitable. In other parts of the United states, where tribal reservations are located in remote and impoverished areas, Indian gaming’s success is much more limited and cannot be measured solely against a casino’s financial bottom line. The story of a few phenomenally successful tribal casinos, such as the Mashantucket Pequots’ Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, has been told and retold, predominantly in journalistic accounts and occasionally in the scholarly literature.7 although largely atypical, such narratives set the terms of public discourse on Indian gaming. The vast majority of tribal casinos, however, are much less profitable. Indeed, more than half of Indian casinos grossed less than 10 percent of the industry’s total revenue in 2009.8 The stories of tribes whose gaming operations are less lucrative than they are transformational, in the sense that they create jobs and reduce reservation poverty, are much more generalizable yet are rarely recited. as depicted in figure 2.1, there are more than 560 federally recognized tribes in thirty-four states, predominantly in the Midwest and West of the United states. In 2008, 237 tribes conducted gaming in twenty-eight states. For each tribe, Indian gaming operates within both uniform and unique boundaries. In this chapter, we detail the story of Indian gaming in North Dakota as a case study of the legal and political boundaries that circumscribe Indian gaming generally, dictating how, where, and under what circumstances a tribe may conduct gaming. Our examination of tribal gaming in North Dakota...