Blast from the Past
After spending a few days at the Indian Gaming Tradeshow in San Diego in early April, my impression of tribal gaming as something very different from commercial gaming has been confirmed.
The basics are very apparent. Commercial gaming exists to benefit the shareholders of the company that owns the casinos/gaming operations. This is true whether it’s a huge corporation or a standalone casino.
Tribal gaming, on the other hand, is conducted for the betterment of the tribe—basically, a large family—and those benefits directly aid the members, sometimes with direct payments, but more frequently with jobs, better health care, better nutrition, improved safety and much more. Gaming can also add cultural and societal benefits that might be harder to quantify, but certainly exist.
While commercial gaming can and usually does benefit the communities where it is located, tribal gaming uplifts the lives of the tribal members, the employees, and often the customers, who gain a greater awareness of their own community and its links to the gaming tribe.
Most people think tribal gaming started with the bingo parlors many tribes began to operate in the 1980s, which then led to the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988. IGRA opened the door to gaming for tribes, allowing them to offer the same kind of gaming that was already legalized in states where reservations were located. A small twist of the IGRA wording meant that if a state offered any kind of gaming—lotteries, bingo, Las Vegas nights or any kind of charitable gaming—tribes would be permitted to offer those same games in a casino setting.
States were not permitted to tax tribal gaming revenue, but could make arrangements that would allow payments to the states in exchange for a greater variety of gaming. For example, Connecticut never legalized slot machines, so the Mashantucket and Mohegan tribes were limited to bingo and table games. But when the late, great Mickey Brown approached the state about legalizing slots for Foxwoods Casino, where he was CEO, the state agreed to allow slots in tribal casinos if the tribes would give them 25 percent of the slot revenue.
That opened the floodgates, and today, many tribes and states have reached similar agreements that benefit both sides.
But did tribal gaming really start in 1988?
A recent study published in the journal American Antiquity reveals that Native Americans had dice and games of probability more than 12,000 years ago. My friend, UNLV Professor David Schwartz, will have to update his seminal tome on the history of gaming, Roll the Bones. He traces the beginnings of gambling to Mesopotamia at least 5,000 years ago, but this new study updates that fact.
The study’s author, Robert Madden, claims that two-sided dice discovered over the course of the last 100 years reveal a society that was fascinated with the concept of gambling.
“We see it right in North America… people starting to engage with some really complex kinds of intellectual concepts that aren’t grappled with in the Old World until many thousands of years later,” Madden told NBC News. “These concepts end up being foundational to our modern scientific understanding, our modern economy.”
Madden found that the recently uncovered dice date back to the Ice Age. That evidence suggests that gambling among groups of indigenous people continued up to the present day in the Southwest section of North America.
In records dating back to the 1600s, Madden says evidence of gambling showed that Native American tribes used it as an economic engine in gatherings of several tribes.
“These tended to be very social affairs, very raucous affairs,” he said. “You tend to have a large crowd be gathered around the game and all kinds of side bets going on during the contest.”
Sounds like a casino to me.
So this discovery makes tribal gaming even more relevant and important to the overall gaming industry in today’s world. The idea that tribes had to “learn” how to run casino operations seems a bit condescending given their history and social connections.
We always knew that tribal gaming was different. But we never realized that its roots extended so far. It really emphasizes the “seven generations” that many tribal leaders talk about when explaining why they are so diligent in maintaining tribal sovereignty. It demands respect and honor.
