So Gov. Cuomo is “regularizing” long-stressed relations with the Oneida and Seneca Indian tribes in New York, coming to agreements in particular on state revenues from Indian casinos. Meanwhile, he’s making progress in his drive to end the Indian monopoly on the casino industry in New York; his latest plan calls for four new non-Indian casinos upstate.
Maybe it’s time for the tribal leaders (and non-tribal ones, actually) to start thinking about what real economic development looks like.
It’s true that Cuomo promises to leave a buffer zone around the reservations to minimize competition for the Indians. But that will never solve the long-term questions for Native Americans both here and around the country.
Unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, drug use, child neglect, sexual abuse — all run far higher on reservations than in the rest of the country.
Fergus Bordewich, author of “Killing the White Man’s Indian,” notes that reservations include “a huge percentage of dysfunctional families,” high rates of alcoholism and drug addiction, “sometimes as much as 70 or 80 percent.” Public education is also often of low quality, since it can be hard to attract teachers to a reservation.
A few tribes — particularly those with few members, sitting on valuable land near major metropolitan areas — may have dug themselves out of this situation with gaming. But it’s not enough to move those grim Indian-vs.-non-Indian averages.
In fact, casinos also bring problems. A paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research notes that, while Indian casinos tend to generate jobs, the “negative changes” brought by them “include about a 10 percent increase in auto theft, larceny, violent crime and bankruptcy in counties four years after a casino has opened and an increase in bankruptcies within 50 miles of a new casino.”
Anyway, gambling can only expand so far, warns E.J. McMahon at the Empire Center for Public Policy in Albany: “There is a finite market for this. There’s only so much revenue to go around.”
After that, you’re stuck playing politics to keep what you have. In his contribution to the volume “Self-Determination: The Other Path for Native Americans,” economist Ronald Johnson notes, “Now that it has been demonstrated how successful Indian gaming operations can be, there is no reason to suspect that gaming tribes will be spared the political pressures that beset the commercial gaming industry or any other successful industry dependent on governmental support or acquiescence.”
Indeed, tribes have spent millions lobbying to ensure that they keep the corner on certain area markets.
Here in New York, though, Cuomo’s pushing those non-Indian casinos — he’s eager to show, as McMahon puts it, that he’s “Doing Something for upstate New York.”
But, again, the market remains limited, so casinos aren’t going to bring the kind of real economic growth to Buffalo, Syracuse or Binghamton that, say, fracking might. Still, the expansion (for all of Cuomo’s no-competition promises) would probably cut into what gaming nets the Indians.
Bottom line: Casinos will bever become the boon to Indians that many claim. The tribes need to find other ways to prosper.
Which probably means changing. Terry Anderson, the head of the Property and Environmental Research Center in Montana, says that reservations’ economic problems have a lot to do with their lack of property rights.
On the one hand, he says, many tribes can’t legally determine how to use their land (for, say, timber or oil or gas drilling). On the other hand, individual tribe members generally don’t own land, so it’s difficult for them to build much in the way of equity needed for outside investment.
In any case, many tribes lack the kind of transparent legal systems that would give confidence to independent investors.
“If you want tomorrow to be different than yesterday, then do something different,” Cuomo said when he announced his plan for non-Indian casinos back in May.
Without serious legal reform on the reservations, it’s hard to imagine that tomorrow will be different from yesterday.