It has become a ritual in every part of the nation: A group of people, claiming American Indian heritage and eyeing potential gambling profits, band together and seek federal recognition as a tribe.
But in their quest, these groups have created another tribe in search of wealth: the troop of genealogists, historians, treaty experts, lobbyists and lawyers they hire to guide them through the process. And the crucial players in this brigade are the casino investors who can pay for it all.
There are now 291 groups seeking federal recognition as tribes, and many have already signed with investors seeking a piece of the nation's US$15 billion-a-year Indian gambling industry. Among the dozen or so groups awaiting final determinations from the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, two-thirds have casino investors bankrolling them, said Eric Eberhard, a lawyer specializing in Indian law.
If their risk is huge -- most would-be tribes have been turned down for recognition -- so is their potential payoff. And yet there are increasing complaints, from casino investors as well as government officials and opponents of gambling, that the big money and high expenses are turning the tribal recognition process into a costly boondoggle.
"You have all these experts and they're like an army -- genealogists, historians; it's like a never-ending battle," said Tom Wilmot, a shopping mall developer in Rochester, New York, who estimates that he has invested "well in excess of US$10 million" since 1995 to support the application and reapplication of a group called the Golden Hill Paugussett, a group in Trumbull, Connecticut, near Bridgeport. "It's easy to spend millions, and then when you get turned down you're basically back to submitting more briefs again."
Eberhard, a former staff member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee who is in a Seattle law firm with many tribal clients, said costs had been driven up by the sheer number of groups seeking to become tribes, and the scarcity of experts to back their claims.
"It has never been inexpensive, but prior to the advent of gaming it was reasonable to say it cost between US$100,000 and US$200,000," he said. "Now it runs in the millions of dollars because there is a finite pool of experts available to assist them, and so they go to tribes who have developers who can pay them."
But in Connecticut and elsewhere, state officials and citizens' groups that are trying to slow the spread of Indian casinos say the investors have no one to blame but themselves. The deluge of gambling dollars has corrupted the process, they say, so that rulings on tribal status are based less and less on merit.
"Money is driving the federal tribal recognition process," said Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut's attorney general, who is leading an effort to overturn the recent recognition of three tribes in his state. "Each of these tribes has wealthy, powerful investors who have made a very big debt on gaining recognition, because the financial payback is potentially unending and immeasurable. We're not talking about hundreds of millions here. We're talking about billions."
Blumenthal also criticizes what he and other foes of gambling see as the casino-friendly management of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Interior Department office that rules on all applications for tribal recognition. He argues that senior bureau officials, many of whom are American Indians, have conflicts of interest because of past associations with casino developers, or because they know they can become gambling consultants when they leave office.
The bureau was the focus of a 2001 General Accounting Office investigation after it was disclosed that a bureau official in the Clinton administration, Michael Anderson, had signed the final approval documents for a Massachusetts tribe three days after he left office. That approval was rescinded by the Bush administration, but the investigation found that the bureau's standards for recognition were so imprecise that they left the door open to undue influence by casino investors.
"The end result could be that the resolution of tribal recognition cases will have less to do with the attributes and qualities of a group as an independent political entity deserving of a government-to-government relationship with the United States," the General Accounting Office report concluded, "and more to do with the resources that petitioners and third parties can marshal to develop a successful political and legal strategy."
Undue influence is also the subject of a federal investigation begun in Sacramento, California, last month into evidence that local Indian Affairs officials were instrumental in persuading a local tribe, the Ione Band of Miwok Indians, to drop its resistance to casino gambling and to begin developing a casino in the California wine country.
All these issues involving money and influence are elements in Connecticut's effort to appeal the agency's recognition of the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation in January.
Dan DuBray, an Interior Department spokesman, rejected Blumenthal's criticism. "Federal acknowledgment of an Indian tribe is a very serious and very deliberative process," he said, "and in that process all affected parties have a voice, and they have due process."
Federal recognition grants not only the right to build casinos. Indian tribes also receive sovereign, tax-free status and federal help with housing, education and health care for members.
In Brooklyn, Chief Sitting Sun of the Ohatchee Cherokee tribe of New York and Alabama said getting federal help for his 130 members in New York City was his only motive for applying. "I was born in Anniston, Alabama, and my mother sent me up here when I was four," he said. "Now I'm 71, and I'm looking to establish a reservation here to get some of the benefits of it."
Trump signed a casino development deal with the Eastern Pequot of Connecticut before the tribe was officially recognized, and the tribe dropped him after recognition was won. He is suing the tribe.
"It's a very complicated experience, and you have to be trusting," Trump said. "In my case, I was trusting and they were not forthright."
States can also add years of delays to an eventual casino payout by appealing the Bureau of Indian Affairs' decisions, as Connecticut has done.
"It can be very tricky," Wilmot said. "I guess what I learned is that it's a lot more complicated than we thought when we started."
Under the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, investors' share of a casino may not exceed 30 percent of all profits under contracts that must expire -- but may be renewed -- after seven years. Lyle Berman, whose companies developed four Indian casinos around the country under contracts that have now expired, says this arrangement favors the Indians.
"I call that a small percentage for all the risks we take and the work we do," Berman said. "Find me another business where a company puts up all the money, takes all the risks and has all the expertise and has an agreement to take about 30 percent of the profits for seven years and then go away."
All but a handful of the nearly 300 groups now seeking tribal recognition have come forward since Indian gambling was legalized by Congress in 1988. Although 53 are in California, most of the rest are east of the Mississippi, where long histories of white settlement and intermarriage have blurred tribal lineages that are still fresh in the West. There are seven in New York, three in New Jersey and 12 in Connecticut, while Virginia has 13, North Carolina has 12 and South Carolina, 10.
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