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No tribe spends more--or more effectively--than Mississippi's Choctaw. Since 1997 the 8,800-member tribe has distributed some $11 million to Washington lobbying firms. Most of the money has gone to one of the capital's premier lobbyists, Jack Abramoff, a top Republican Party fund raiser. It was money well spent. In the 1997 legislative caper, Thad Cochran, Mississippi's five-term Republican Senator, slipped into a 40,000-word appropriations bill a 19-word sentence that exempts the tribe from oversight by the National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC), the regulatory body created by Congress to oversee Indian gambling. The sentence also excuses the Choctaw from paying the fees levied on all other Indian gaming establishments, which are the NIGC's sole source of revenue. The savings for the tribe amount to about $180,000 a year. Cochran's provision argues that the tribe was self-regulating effectively.
Meanwhile, government audit reports show that over the past five years, federal agencies have lavished $245 million in aid on the Choctaw. In 2001 alone--the same year the tribe bought a $4.5 million corporate plane--the Choctaw collected $50.4 million from nearly 70 government programs, including $14.9 million to run their tribal government, $1.3 million for law enforcement and almost $371,000 for food distribution. It adds up to an average of $5,700 for each member. In contrast, federal aid for the Navajo Nation, the poorest tribe in America, averaged $900 for each of its 260,000 members. The Navajo have no casino.
None of this is to begrudge the Mississippi Choctaw their newfound gaming wealth. Unlike tribes that are content to rely on a casino to support themselves without looking to the future, the Choctaw have plowed their profits into new businesses, from a car dealership to an electronics plant. Nor is this to begrudge the Choctaw their ability to extract aid from Washington. What is awry is a political system that consigns the majority of Native Americans to a life of poverty while rewarding the few who have casino riches with full membership in the system.
MONEY TALKS
These days some of the highest-stakes lobbying in the nation goes on about two miles west of Capitol Hill at the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The agency, which oversees Native American affairs, decides, among other things, which tribes qualify for federal recognition--and are thus entitled to build a casino and receive federal benefits. Not surprisingly, as Indian gaming has evolved from bingo halls to a multibillion-dollar industry, the number of tribes clamoring for recognition has soared: there are now 337 tribes in the lower 48 states--up almost 25% since 1979.
But since 1993, while the volume and complexity of the petitions have grown, Congress has slashed the BIA's budget, forcing the agency to shrink its staff for handling petitions 35%, to just 11. The agency's Branch of Acknowledgment and Research (BAR) staff, which evaluates applicants on a complex range of factors, including genealogy, culture and continuous existence, is overwhelmed. The result: a November 2001 report by the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, paints the picture of a process in disarray, calling the BIA understaffed, lacking coherent guidelines and having no clear sense of mission.