The problem with that is many of the cassinos are there because of those people that are hired to manage the cassinos are not tribal members and even if they were they don't understand what's really happening to them. The tribes have little to do with the daily activities of the cassinos and therefore have no real understanding of where the money goes. I'd say that less than 10 percent actually gets back into the tribes hands as that money is passed through many companies that are with those who set up the cassinos to begin with. Today, even with cassinos, the alcoholism and poverty rates at over 80 percent of the tribes is well above 60 percent. Not much actually gets down to those who need it. Only 5 percent of the reservations have cassinos BTW.
actually this is almost completely untrue. i used to live about a mile away from an indian reservation that had a casino built on it. it was managed and run by tribal leaders in conjunction with the private company that built it according to a really strictly defined set of rules as laid out by a contract that had been negotiated by some really hard nosed native american lawyers. i think that you show a lot of nerve in attempting to portray these people as basically ignorant tribesman waiting for a handout from some fat cat white man. theyve come a long way from the people that sold manhattan for 24$ worth of beads. they live in our modern world, not in the stone age, and they are capable of adaptation just like us. and i'd also love to see you back up those statistics of yours with any kind of measureable fact. first of all there is a reservation out in northern california where the tribe has total control of it and all its profits and through mutual agreement has decided to divide the profits equally among the reservations' people each year. in 2004 this dividend yeilded roughly 300,000$ per family living on the reservation. these people went from run down shacks to just shy of beverly hills in less than a decade. similar things took place on the reservation near where i used to live. the tribe was larger so the improvement was not as drastic but it was definitely a step up from what basically amounted to a run down native american ghetto of complete squalor to a thriving upper middle class community, because of the money they made from the casino. there may have been some tribal leaders that were foolish enough to get taken by gaming entreperneurs early on in the "indian casino movement" that has swept our country, but trust me, it was a long time ago that they learned how truly beneficial these enterprises could be to their communities and they have gotten progressively smarter and smarter about how they design such an undertaking.
heres a couple of exceprts from an article about indian casinos in california. it seems theyre making so much money that their sovereignty is being threatened due to the state governments want for extra tax dollars:
from the American Enterprise Online
Casinos and Indian Sovereignty
By David Yeagley
California Indian tribes with casinos are bringing in over $5 billion annually (2003), and have become the largest contributors to California political campaigns.
...Casinos have unfortunately made sovereignty an explicitly economic issue. Never mind an Indian tribe's inability to sustain itself through production, trade, and economy; never mind the tribes inability to defend itself with its own military force; never mind the boundaries of the reservations which are passed into and out of freely, without passport. No, the definition of sovereignty today rests wholly on taxation.
...And casino dollars are quickly destroying the Indian status of being sovereign. If Schwarzenegger's Indians are required to pay taxes or to share income, then, however much profit they do make, they have forfeited sovereignty. They have bought federal recognition for the price of paying state taxes. The IRS is waiting like a vulture over Indian country.
and theres this from
http://www.kstrom.net/isk/games/gaming.html
Gambling is big biz -- close to $400 billion a year and growing. Americans outspend all their other forms of entertainment and self-education put together on gambling.
There are some 557 federally recognized reservations. About 33% do have some form of commercial gaming now, and 29% more hope to. But many -- on reservations far from population centers and with nothing in particular to attract tourists -- are not successful. For those who are, though, it is just about the only business success story that Indian reservations have ever had.
But for monetary benefits to average tribal members, casinos are most beneficial to very small tribes, fairly close to major urban areas or areas already well-developed for extensive tourism. A very successful casino whose revenues are looked to by a tribe with 33,000 members to make up a deficit of centuries of poverty is not going to go anywhere near so far as the same type of casino will to satisfy a tribe with only 300 members. And that -- the small remnant tribe fairly near major urban areas -- is the type whose casinos tend to be scoring the biggest. The larger tribes were put into remote outback concentration camps -- far from land the white settlers wanted for anything. Hard to get there, and nothing very attractive is around for tourists anyway.
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so while it is not true that every indian tribe with a casino makes a ton of money from the enterprise, they do seem to do a halfway decent job at retaining the money they earn in an attempt to drag themselves out of a century or more of poverty through one of the only (and im sure unintended) advantages that the whites ever gave them.
if the state of california is looking to tax the tribes themselves because they make so much money from the casino business, id say theyre not losing the shirt off their backs from predatory white casino owners looking to cut the tribes out.
