More than 300 years after white settlers erected a wall in downtown Manhattan to keep Indians out — the very partition that gave Wall Street its famous name — Native Americans are finally busting through.
NativeOne Institutional Trading LLC, a financial-services firm, has applied to the New York Stock Exchange and expects to become the very first Native American-owned company to become a member.
“I got out of the teepee business,” joked principal owner Don Lyons, a member of the Morongo Band of Mission Indians in California.
Lyons said they want to help Native Americans — many of whom went from very poor to very rich thanks to an influx of casino cash — manage their wealth.
His tribe operates a $250 million casino that employs 3,000 people. He said he was inspired to get bullish after interviewing a parade of sleek Gordon Gekko wannabes desperate to manage his tribe’s casino riches.
“I trusted very few,” he said. “I thought, why not us?”
A Vietnam vet, Lyons grew up on his tribe’s 35,000-acre reservation, surrounded by what he said was little more than “rocks, lizards and coyotes.”
“There were no jobs around here when I was growing up. It was a very poor reservation,” he said.
In the early ’80s, the tribe opened a modest bingo hall, which eventually grew into the hugely successful Morongo Casino, Resort & Spa in Cabazon, Calif., one of the biggest tribal gaming facilities in the United States.
Suddenly, the once-poor tribe of a thousand members had money to burn.
Its casino spurred other investments — including a golf course, restaurants, one of the country’s largest Shell gas stations and a $26 million spring water-bottling plant.
So Lyons is setting his sights on Wall Street.
NativeOne aims to “level the playing field for all Native American tribes and offer the very best service to our international customers,” Lyons said.
NativeOne applied to become a NYSE member last month. To make it official, it must wait for approval from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.