It was simpler in the Old West. When white men wanted to steal something
from the Indians, they simply did so. When the Indians objected, the army
would ride in, shoot a few and move the rest off to someplace else.
Now, it's a bit more complicated since there aren't too many places left to
move them to and you don't have the army hanging around to do the dirty
work. Instead, you have to get politicians to do it.
So far, though, that isn't a problem in California, where there are more
than enough elected officials willing to do whatever it takes to cut the
Indians down to size.
The gaming contract between the state and the Pala band of Mission Indians
that Gov. Pete Wilson negotiated last month is as big an assault on Indian
rights as anything the cavalry did last century at Wounded Knee or Sand
Creek. Instead of killing them physically, the compact would kill a lot of
Indians economically -- particularly in San Diego County, where the Barona,
Sycuan and Viejas bands operate casinos that provide about 5,000 jobs and,
each year, buy $100 million in local goods, produce another $100 million in
revenue for tribal governments and bring the county and local charities
more than $10 million.
There is a lot to question in Wilson's compact with Pala:
It sets arbitrary caps on the number of video gambling machines to be
allowed statewide and for any individual tribe. Such compacts in other
states have dealt only with what form of gambling is permitted, not how
many machines were acceptable.
It was negotiated with a single tribe that has no gambling, yet is being
applied to every tribe in the state. That's prohibited by the federal
Indian Gaming Regulation Act, which mandates that such compacts "shall be
specific to the tribe so making the election, and shall not be construed to
extend to other tribes." It's like negotiating how many cartons of milk can
be sold by a mom-and-pop grocery, then applying that limit to Ralphs, Lucky
and Vons.
Instead of simply negotiating a switch from video machines to parimutuel
machines, such as those used in the state lottery, the compact goes far
beyond gambling limitations, opening reservations to local and state
regulations that previously could not be applied. Surely, this question
should have been negotiated with all tribes.
At a Monday meeting with U.S. Interior Department officials in Sacramento,
a majority of some 200 tribal leaders protested the compact. Interior
Secretary Bruce Babbitt is expected to reach a decision on whether to
approve it by April 26. But that avenue may be as much a dead-end street
for today's Indians as appeals to the federal government were last century.
No one in the Interior Department can recall a single instance of such an
agreement being rejected.
Anticipating that business-as-usual attitude, the tribes have launched a
petition drive for a ballot measure to bypass the compact. They have
pledged to spend up to $30 million, an amount that likely will be exceeded
by their opponents, including card-club operators, the horse-racing
industry and Nevada casinos.
That's a lot of money to be expended on a ballot measure that really
shouldn't be necessary. The only reason it is necessary is that where
Indian rights are concerned, the American government simply cannot be
trusted to do the right thing.