6.04.07 EDITORIAL
A plan to let two California tribes build off-reservation casinos in Barstow will not improve with a few months' reprieve. The Legislature should still reject the pacts as bad policy and poor precedent.
Gov. Schwarzenegger in 2005 signed compacts with the Big Lagoon Rancheria and the Los Coyotes Band of Cahuilla & Cupeno Indians that would let them open casinos along Interstate 15 in Barstow. But the Big Lagoon tribe is from Humboldt County, 700 miles from Barstow, while the Los Coyotes tribe hails from San Diego County, more than 100 miles from the high desert city.
Californians approved gambling on tribal lands with Prop. 1A in 2000, but that measure never proposed casinos popping up anywhere tribes can find high-traffic sites.
The Legislature has not approved the compacts, which would have expired last week had the governor and the tribes not extended the deadline to September. The U.S. Interior Department, which frowns on off-reservation casinos, would also have to ratify the deals. [Feb 13th DOI letters to tribes: Big Lagoon, Los Coyotes]
The extension does not remove the reasons to reject these compacts, however.
Neither tribe has any rationale for being in Barstow, except to grab a potentially lucrative location along the heavily traveled route to Las Vegas. The governor should be discouraging such reservation shopping, not abetting a bad precedent. How many other tribes will want off-reservation sites if these deals go into effect?
Some California tribes do have remote land unsuitable for casinos. The state will need to address that unfairness, perhaps by arrangements that let tribes share land on existing reservations.
But Indian casinos belong on traditional tribal land. California should not spark a gambling land rush to more lucrative locales.
1 comment:
Ya know if people would just do some research they would see that these two tribes are in fact stepping on the ancestral homeland of another Indian Nation. People need to get off the reservation shopping band wagon and push for these compacts to be rejected because they are infringing on another tribes homeland.
Google "Treaty of Ruby Valley", "Western Shoshone Defense Project" and "Western Shoshone National Council". Read, Learn, Knowledge is power. The land grabbing that most americans believe ended at the turn of the century is still going on today.
Thus Endeth The Sermon
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