Anita Hollow Horn, a bright, attractive member of the Oglala Sioux tribe, is a fairly typical beneficiary of Indian gaming. She lives in Pine Ridge, S.D., on her tribe's reservation, with its overcrowded dwellings, 88% unemployment and a school-dropout rate of almost 50%. Hollow Horn, 37, and her four children share a three-bedroom home, opposite a landfill, with her mother and stepfather--and seven other relatives. Fourteen people live in the one-story house with a single bathroom. Hollow Horn and her daughter, 9, sleep on a bed in a corner of the basement; her other children sleep on the floor upstairs. Her brother Reginald, 35, who has cancer, sleeps in another corner with his two sons, 10 and 15. It's toughest when the basement floods. "Sometimes the sewer backs up," says Hollow Horn, "and it just gets all over down there." Black mold has already consumed one wall underneath the staircase and is eating its way up the other.
So how, exactly, is Hollow Horn prospering from the $12.7 billion Indian gaming industry? Like most Native Americans, not at all. Last year the Oglala's Prairie Wind Casino, housed in a temporary, white, circus-tent-like structure smaller than a basketball court, turned a profit of $2.4 million on total revenue of $9.5 million. Most of the money went to fund general programs, such as services for the elderly and young people, as well as education and economic development. But even if there had been profit sharing instead, the payout would have worked out to a daily stipend of just 16ยข for each of the 41,000 tribe members.
That's not to say that members of a few small tribes near big cities aren't doing very well from gaming. In Minnesota, 300 members of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux community reportedly take home more than $1 million a year. But bands like that are the exception. Only 25% of gaming tribes distribute cash to their members, usually no more than a few thousand dollars each.
So if the overwhelming majority of Native Americans like Hollow Horn aren't benefiting from the Indian casino boom, who is? In many cases, the big winners are non-Indian investors, some of whom pocket more than 40% of an Indian casino's profits. Actually, calling these people investors understates their role. They often serve as master strategists who draw up the plans and then underwrite the total cost of bringing a casino online: ferreting out an amenable tribe, paying a signing bonus, picking up tribal expenses and paying the salaries of the tribe's officials, all of this before a spade of dirt is turned. If an Indian band isn't federally recognized as a tribe and is thus ineligible for a gaming venture, these full-service backers will bankroll genealogists to construct a family tree, then hire lawyers and lobbyists in Washington to help change the band's status. And if a reservation isn't prime real estate for a casino, the investors sometimes purchase a more suitable patch and instruct their lawyers and lobbyists to persuade the government to designate the land as a trust, as reservation property is called. Building the casino is the easiest step.
--THE MONEYMEN