Tribal Troubles
What a tough year for Indian Country. In addition to the two key leaders who left us in 2025, IGA Chairman Ernie Stevens Jr. and former Sycuan Chairman Danny Tucker, we also lost former U.S. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a true warrior for tribal nations. All three made tribal sovereignty the foundation for their life’s work in Indian Country. And now that core value is being threatened.
Everyone in Indian Country understands that tribal sovereignty is the key to the future as well as the survival of Indian nations. Native American nations are not like states. They are individual nations that deserve to be treated as such. The U.S. government recognized their importance in many ways, including the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, passed in 1988. Government-to-government relations must be respected and maintained. But the emergence of prediction markets has rocked that relationship to the core.
States and tribal nations have reached agreements on gaming—state compacts—that define how gaming is presented within the states and on tribal lands. These compacts were negotiated in good faith. They are the essence of government-to-government relations. But now the federal government and the prediction markets have come between that relationship.
Let’s step back for a moment and examine what prediction market companies have to offer. They’re not new. Investors have been using them since 1988 to trade contracts on the popular vote of the presidential election. They’ve evolved since then while becoming more widely known when correctly predicting the 2024 election of President Donald Trump.
Licensed sportsbooks are prohibited from taking bets on elections. That opened the door for companies like Kalshi, the leading market-maker and the most belligerent of its cousins. Soon after the 2024 election, Kalshi began taking “trades” on sporting events. Since then, it has been joined by dozens of other companies that rushed into this space.
But let’s be clear. The “trades” that power prediction markets are simply wagers. It’s the very definition of gambling: “the practice or activity of betting; the practice of risking money or other stakes in a game or bet.”
Now, defenders of prediction markets will use lots of word salad to say otherwise. But trades are bets, and there’s no way around it.
Kalshi and its ilk are currently taking bets in states where sports betting is illegal or where you need a license to conduct sports betting. These companies are conducting illegal gambling in all those states by violating state laws.
And regulations? The markets are supposedly “regulated” by something called the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a quasi-governmental organization that is supposed to have five members. It currently has only one, the chairman. Most of its staff members have quit, so the companies offering sports betting are effectively unregulated.
But even if the CFTC were fully staffed, it has no expertise in regulating sports betting or licensing operators, unlike state and tribal gaming commissions, which are regulatory experts.
This is a straight-on attack not only on tribal sovereignty but also state sovereignty. The federal government is proposing that the ineffective regulations of the CFTC trump any state laws and regulations. And we don’t use the word “trump” lightly, because the current administration is behind this attack. Not only has this administration installed a CFTC chairman who is clearly a cheerleader rather than a regulator, but the son of the president is a paid adviser to and investor in several of the prediction market companies, including Kalshi.
If the administration’s views prevail, tribal sovereignty will be significantly eroded, and what comes next? At a time when three significant leaders of tribal gaming and Native American rights have exited the stage, we need some heroes to emerge. One of the positive things is that this doesn’t rest only on the shoulders of Native Americans. This is an attack on all Americans who value the rule of law and the right to decide what happens in their communities.
It’s time to step up and oppose prediction markets and all they stand for. It’s time to defend our nations and states to ensure that the federal government follows the Constitution, which never mentions gaming. Therefore, as it has during the entire existence of the United States, it’s a states’—and tribal—rights issue.
