American Indians are reaping riches from reservation casinos and bingo halls, but a Utah researcher warns gambling may be the "new buffalo" that breeds overdependence.
Most reservations are isolated, tribes face more competition from non-Indian gambling and some states won't sign gaming compacts with tribes, said James A. Davis, an assistant professor of geography at Brigham Young University."The success and viability of Indian gaming on reservations may have a limited future" despite its explosive growth, Davis said in a presentation Friday at the Association of American Geographers' annual meeting in Chicago.
"Indians are referring to gaming as the new buffalo," Davis said.
"They look at it just like the buffalo of old. It sustains life for the Indians. They can make a living off it. But they're also worried the new buffalo, like the old buffalo, may be taken away from them."
Davis said while Indian gambling "will continue to grow . . . you're going to see it level off quite soon because of geographical factors and legal issues."
Indian tribes once depended for food and clothing on buffalo herds that thundered over the plains between the Rockies and the Appalachians. But white hunters decimated the herds, and numbers dwindled from 20 million in 1850 to 551 in 1889, depriving tribes of their main food source.
Gay Kingman, public-relations director for the National Indian Gaming Association in Washington, D.C., agreed that Indians view gaming as the new buffalo, but said they won't make the same mistakes as their ancestors.
"The tribes have always said gaming will level off, that the window of opportunity is here now and we don't know how many years we will have it," Kingman said. "Some say 10 years, some say seven, but nobody really knows for sure."
Kingman said the tribes "are diversifying as quickly as they can to go into economic ventures that will carry them through when the opportunity is no longer there for gaming."
Gaming on Indian reservations accounted for $29 billion - or 7.4 percent - of the $394.3 billion wagered in legal U.S. casinos, racetracks, sports books and lotteries in 1993, a booming 73 percent increase over the Indian share a year earlier, according to Gaming & Wagering Business Magazine.
Davis, a cultural urban geographer, estimated the number of Indian gaming establishments grew from at least 10 in 1980 to more than 200 last year.
The expansion was particularly fueled by a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court decision that prevented states from regulating gambling on reservations. The ruling meant that if a state allowed gambling, the same forms of betting also must be allowed on reservations within its borders.
Only Utah and Hawaii ban all gambling, Davis said.
The following year, Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, letting tribes enter compacts with states to allow reservations to offer forms of gambling not permitted on non-Indian lands.
That allowed a tribe in Connecticut, for example, to open Fox-woods, the nation's most profitable casino, in exchange for paying the state more than $100 million, Davis said.
But some states aren't playing, said Davis, who said the fact that he works for Mormon Church-owned BYU plays no role in his views. The church opposes gambling in all forms and two years ago played a key role in defeating a referendum that would have allowed parimutuel betting in Utah.
California Gov. Pete Wilson, for example, has refused to negotiate a compact that would allow tribes to offer gambling not available elsewhere in the state.
Most tribes are in the West, far from the densely populated East Coast. Davis analyzed 1990 Census figures and found tribes are located a median of 72 miles from the nearest city of more than 50,000 population, with larger tribes a more distant median of 140 miles.
The 1,600-member Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation scheduled a grand opening this weekend for its new $7.5 million Wildhorse Gaming Resort on Interstate 84 outside Pendleton, Ore. It is the tribes' biggest economic development.
The casino has 210 new employees and hopes to draw customers an hour away in Pasco-Kennewick-Richland, Wash., and even three hours away in Portland, Ore., and Boise, Idaho, said tribal spokeswoman Debra Croswell.