GAMING AMERICA | TRIBAL GAMING
TRIBAL GAMING PAST AND FUTURE Gaming America’s Cameron Saunders takes a look at the journey tribes took to become one of the most significant pillars in American gaming... and where they are going next. It was in 1832 when the US Supreme Court granted Native American tribes the right to self-rule within the boundaries of their reservations. Control over mineral rights, hunting and fishing were the overriding concerns of the day, but in this ruling came the germ of what was to become a multi-billion-dollar industry: tribal gaming, a sterling success story for native peoples in what has otherwise been a catalogue of dislocation, horror, 32 | GAMINGAMERICA
sorrow and poverty. It was to escape this last affliction – the persistent poverty ubiquitous within reservation communities – that tribes began developing gambling. With this source of revenue, the reasoning went, the money could be reinvested, could benefit the people, and the cycle of poverty could be broken. Florida’s Seminole Tribe was the first to get into the game when it began
operating a bingo hall in the 1970s. But it was the landmark 1987 Supreme Court case, California vs. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, that really laid the groundwork for rapid growth of tribal casinos across the country. The Supreme Court, ruling in favor of the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, harkened back to 1832: they established that, for whatever forms of gambling are allowed within a given state, a reservation
