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Skooter McCoy, general manager of the nonprofit Cherokee Boys Club, knows all too well the impact per-capita payments from the Eastern Band of Cherokee’s Harrah’s casino in North Carolina has had on tribal children, including his son, Spencer.

“If you’ve lived in a small, rural community and never saw anybody leave, never saw anyone with a white-collar job or leading any organization, you always kind of keep your mindset right here,” McCoy told Wired magazine.

“Our kids today—the kids at the high school—they believe the sky’s the limit. It’s really changed the entire mindset of the community these past 20 years.”

Tribal government gaming exploded into a $32.4 billion industry with passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) of 1988, enabling American Indian tribes to grow and strengthen their governments and diversify their economies.

But a somewhat controversial aspect of IGRA remains the direct disbursement of casino revenue to tribal citizens, referred to as per-capita payments. Some Cherokee children call it “big money.”

Payment Processing

Of the approximately 370 tribes in the lower 48 states, 242 tribes operate government casinos, according to the National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC), generating revenue largely used to provide community infrastructure, health care, housing, education and other services.

About 130 of those gambling tribes also issue per-capita payments to their citizens, according to the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Per-capita is a non-issue for large tribes on primarily rural reservations in the Midwest and Great Plains and the massive Navajo Nation, which spans parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Those tribal casinos are primarily marginal operations intended to generate jobs rather than revenue. Tribal enrollments are too large to justify per-capita payments.

But annual per-capita payments can easily run into five, six and even seven figures for the more lucrative, small-enrollment tribes in urban areas such as the Mashantucket Pequots in Connecticut, the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux of Minnesota and the Pechanga, Santa Ynez and San Manuel Indian bands in Southern California.

Modest per-capita payments of $1,000 to $2,000 a year have provided marginal and low-income families with subsidies to make rent, mortgage and car payments and obtain other household necessities. Larger payments from the more lucrative casinos have enabled tribal citizens to launch businesses, create investment portfolios and engage in entrepreneurialism.

“It’s not only helped us with economic stipends each month, but it has given us cause to hope and dream and plan,” a tribal elder for the Dry Creek Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians told a Harvard University research team.

Negative Reaction

But critics regard per-capita as a form of welfare, sapping the initiative of indigenous citizens to complete their education and seek out jobs and economic opportunity. Some blame per-capita payments for drug and alcoholic abuse.

Many tribal leaders criticize the payments for depleting gambling revenue that would otherwise be used for government programs and tribal business enterprises.

And per-capita payments have been blamed for negatively impacting community politics and creating an epidemic of tribal disenrollment.

A number of respected tribal leaders have been ousted for decisions impacting per-capita payments to tribal citizens. As many as 81 tribes have purged membership rolls, presumably to increase casino payments, although some contend determining citizenship is a function of a maturing tribal government.

“Per-capita is the most formidable political force in Indian Country right now,” says tribal attorney Gabriel Galanda, a citizen of the Round Valley Tribe of California. “There are examples of tribes unable to get a quorum of the membership to vote in an election without offering a per-cap payment at the door.

“It is a massive influence in Indian Country,” Galanda says, “and not in a good way.”

“Tribal economies and lifestyles built on per-capita payments have almost no chance of long-term sustainability,” Lance Morgan, CEO of Ho-Chunk Inc., a subsidiary of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, told Harvard researchers. “This new form of welfare is just the latest in a cycle of dependency that Indian Country has been trying to break out of for over 100 years.”

By any measure, per-capita payments are a highly complex issue. Assumptions cannot be easily made.

It will be a topic of discussion at the annual conference of the Native American Finance Officers Association (NAFOA) meeting April 14-16 in Portland, Oregon.

“Do per-capita payments provide needed support and help build a local economy or do they undermine culture and tradition by servicing individuals over the community and providing cash payments in lieu of jobs?” the conference agenda states. “With the benefit a few decades of experience and hindsight, our panelists will explore the often-contentious issue of distributing revenue to members/citizens.”

NAFOA Executive Director Dante Desiderio, a Sappony citizen, said the per-capita discussion “should be brought out in the open for leadership to discuss and work together toward a balanced stewardship of a healthy and sustained government while meeting citizen interests.”

But the session will be closed to the press.

“That’s how sensitive this is,” says a tribal official who requested anonymity. “Tribal leaders know they need to talk about it. They’re happy NAFOA is taking it up. It’s an issue we need to address. But it needs to be discussed in private.”

“It’s a very complicated issue,” says Rosebud Sioux Joe Valandra, managing director of VAdvisors and former NIGC chief of staff. “And it becomes very emotional.”

Per-capita Politics and Policy

The emergence of tribal gambling has provided Indian communities with discretionary income, many for the first time in their history. It also has created the need to make major government and public policy decisions.

For example, should casino revenue be used for the welfare of the entire community, building governmental infrastructure, launching business enterprises and providing health care, housing and social services?

Or should the funds go to individual families who are most in need? About 40 percent of indigenous Americans live on economically depressed reservations where poverty is rampant and unemployment can range from 40 percent to 60 percent or higher.

“Per-capita payments help citizens meet urgent needs. Many reservation populations are poor, and individuals and families are chronically short of cash,” wrote the Native Nations Institute and the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development in a 2007 policy paper.

But “channeling all tribal revenues into tribal government encourages the idea that it is the government’s job to provide for all the needs of its citizens—a form of dependency,” the report goes on to say. “Tribal citizens are shareholders in the tribal estate. This is their money. It should be given to them.”

Others argue that jobs, housing, education and health care are items most aptly provided by well-funded and administered tribal government programs.

“Per-capita payments draw away resources that should be invested in such services, making it harder to provide them to citizens,” Harvard researchers say.

The per-capita inequality is glaring. Although most tribes keep their financial information a closely guarded secret, the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux per-capita is believed to be approaching $1 million a year.

Meanwhile, the Blackfeet Nation in Montana sets aside a $75 per-capita payment at Christmas for its 17,000 members to buy presents without going into debt.

The roughly 16,000 members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee receive about $12,000 a year. The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, with about 11,000 members, limit per-capita in their tribal-state compact to $1,000 per year.

Disbursements To Minors

Per-capita payments to minors are generally held in trust until the child reaches the age of 18. Depending on the tribe and amount of per-capita, the person could at that age collect a sizable sum.

Fears young adults receiving large disbursements would lapse into idleness and drug abuse apparently have not materialized to a great degree. Studies show dropout rates for students with the Eastern Band of Cherokee improved when their families began receiving income subsidies.

But there is anecdotal evidence of increasing high school dropout rates tied to large per-capita payments.

“After we started per-capita payments (of $2,000 per month) it seemed everybody lost motivation,” a Southern California tribal leader told Harvard researchers. “We had a high dropout rate, around 85 percent.”

According to studies—most notably a 2010 report by Duke University Medical School for the National Institute of Health—young Native American adult recipients of income subsidies encounter few psychiatric disorders. But there have been incidents of violence linked to drugs and gangs on a handful of California reservations with lucrative casinos.

Modest per-capita payments normally are used to pay off debts and nominal household expenses. Research suggests that mental health issues and socially damaging behavior for school-age children increase with the excessive accumulation of wealth.

The First Nations Development Institute encourages crafting per-capita distribution programs to promote education, savings and investment programs. Some tribes require the recipient to undergo financial training. Others require incremental payments over a period of time.

“Considering the potential for negative consequences of children coming into one-time moderate-to-large amounts of capital as young adults, ages 18 to 25 years, it is a profound responsibility to assist youth to better understand the economic choices they have gained through accounts established by tribes for their futures,” Karen Edwards and Sarah Dewees write in “Developing Innovations,” a study for the Native Assets Research Center.

“Many children in tribes today do not remember historical ‘hard times’ and do not have a point of reference as to what life was like when their parents, grandparents and ancestors had to sacrifice just so their children would survive shortages of food, shelter and other basic necessities,” Edwards and Dewees write.

An Alternative To RAPs

IGRA requires that tribes seeking to make per-capita payments submit a revenue allocation plan (RAP) to the Department of the Interior for approval. The RAP must ensure the tribe has adequate funding for its tribal government, tribal economic development and donations to charitable organizations and local governments.

In addition, the RAP must include information and criteria for accounting of disbursements as well as dispute resolution and utilization or creation of a tribal court system.

The primary criticism of per-capita is its divisive impact on politics and the fact it diverts revenue from government, social services and economic development programs.

Per-capita payments to individuals are subject to taxation. But the Tribal Welfare Exclusion Act of 2014 states that tribal government payments to citizens for certain benefits—such as health coverage, housing, elder care, education and cultural programs—are exempt from taxation.

“Tribes are currently weighing a recent alternative,” Desiderio says of the Welfare Exclusion Act. The legislation, Desiderio says, “offers a way to provide programs and services that are exempt from income taxes, making them attractive alternatives to individual distributions for both the government and the individual.”

The demand RAPs place on the funding of tribal government programs can also impact bank underwriting of tribal debt.

“The decision to continue or increase per-capita payments is not without consequences,” Desiderio says. “Banks and rating agencies may weigh the per-capita obligations when underwriting loans or assigning credit scores. So the decisions may impact future growth.

“With the benefit of a few decades of experience and hindsight, our panelists will relate their experiences, lessons learned, and what issues may be in store for the future,” Desiderio says. “For example, with slowing revenue from a mature gaming industry and an exploding youth population, how do tribes meet future expectations? We will also look to the academic community to weigh community impacts.”

A Critical Review

The architects of IGRA regret the negative impact per-capita payments have had on tribal politics and enrollment. Individual disbursements were not a controversy when the act was passed because tribal government gambling was not expected to become a billion-dollar industry.

“There was no argument for or against it (per-capita payments),” says Alex Skibine, an Oklahoma Osage and University of Utah law professor who served as deputy counsel for the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs when IGRA was drafted. “There was no real debate. We wanted to include some kind of limits to control the tribes’ spending. We wanted to make sure the needs of the tribe were met.”

“I put the provision in there,” says Frank Ducheneaux, an Oglala Lakota and legal counsel to Interior and Insular Affairs. “The concern at the time was the taxability of the payments.

“I never imagined a tribe would disenroll people solely on the grounds they didn’t want them to have per-capita distributions. Disenrollment wasn’t a big issue back then.

“I’m opposed to disenrollment, particularly when it’s related to per-capita. I don’t like it. Tribal membership can be a valuable right,” Ducheneaux says. “But I don’t think the federal government can tell a tribe it can’t make per-capita payments out of its gaming revenue.”

“Frankly, we did not forecast how successful some of those casinos would become and how fast it would occur,” Skibine says. “We didn’t know the economics of gaming, the way it was going to develop.

“If you look at some of the big tribes in the Midwest and Great Plains, they may never meet the needs of their tribal members,” Skibine says, a Department of Interior requirement before a tribe can issue per-capita payments. “We didn’t realize a lot of the more successful tribes would be the very, very small enrollment tribes in urban areas. We didn’t think in those terms.

“Those are the ones who became the most successful the quickest. They are able to meet the needs of the tribal members very quickly,” largely because government and social services are provided by non-Indian communities.

“We didn’t think issuing a per-capita was going to be that easy,” Skibine says.

Looking to the Future

“I am not a fan of per-capita payments. But I would also defend the right of tribal governments and tribes and their communities to make those decisions for themselves,” says Bryan Newland, chairman of the Bay Mills Indian Community of Michigan and a former counsel with the Department of the Interior.

“I would never want the federal government as a matter of federal policy to say, ‘Hey, you can’t spend your gaming revenues that way.’

“But I think it leads to a lot of complex political problems in a lot of tribal communities. It can create all kinds of problems for tribal governments and tribal communities.

“But if you have all of your nation-building done along with your operating infrastructure and government, and you’re meeting the needs of your community, what else are you going to do with the revenue?

“If you are a seasonable employee or you’re disabled or retired or you’re a minimum-wage worker, even $1,000 a year makes a big difference. When you ask me about how I feel about per-caps, I say they are a double-edged sword.”

Many tribal leaders pursuing economic and governmental expansion and diversification may rue the day they approved a per-capita payment plan. Amending a RAP can be a politically volatile endeavor.

“The political issue for most tribal leaders is once you start a RAP you can never stop,” Valandra says. “Yet, what if economic circumstances change and as a tribe you don’t have the revenue you once had? What do you do?

“When you get into guaranteed income, people depend on it. If something happens and the tribe can no longer maintain the payments, not only is it a political death knell for the current administration, but it has a lot of ramification for the tribal economy.”

“The thing about a per-capita is once you put them out there, they can only increase, politically,” Skibine says. “Anybody wants to freeze them, they’ll get voted out of office.”

“A lot of tribes throughout the country have built successful businesses, particularly those that haven’t chosen to allocate most of their gaming revenue to per-capita distributions, but have instead chosen to build tribal assets,” says Kristi Jackson, chairman of TFA Capital Partners, an investment banking firm servicing tribal and commercial gambling and leisure industry clients.

“Those tribes that do say that if you can, politically, don’t initiate a per-cap. It’s interesting to hear that perspective.”

When the state of Arkansas expressed an interest in legalized casino gambling, it came as no surprise that the Quapaw and Cherokee Indian Nations of neighboring Oklahoma would finance the ballot initiative that got the industry up and going.

When MGM Resorts International built a $1 billion hotel casino in Springfield, Massachusetts, near the border with Connecticut, it made perfect sense for the Mohegan and Mashantucket Pequot tribes to pursue a competing project in East Windsor.

And when the Poarch Band of Creek Indians sought an investment opportunity to capitalize on its casino resort and entertainment interests in Alabama, the tribe’s Wind Creek Hospitality invested $1.3 billion in Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem in Pennsylvania.

“We’ve proven ourselves when it comes to gaming and hospitality,” says Robert McGhee, vice chairman of the Poarch Band, which operates three hotel casinos in Alabama and more than a dozen non-gambling hotels in the Southeast and Caribbean Islands.

American Indian tribes are parlaying skills and experience gained through 30 years of operating tribal government casinos on Indian lands with a growing list of commercial casino ventures in the United States and overseas.

Rather than operating casinos under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) of 1988, which exempts tribes from state taxes and allows them primacy in regulating their gambling operations, tribes are wading into the commercial gaming sector.

The move off the reservations is to be expected. With the growth of the $32.4 billion tribal casino industry to some 500 gambling operations in 29 states, opportunities on Indian lands have dissipated.

“With some exceptions, the Indian gaming market is fully developed,” says Bryan Newland, chairman of the Bay Mills Indian Community of Michigan and a former counsel with the Department of the Interior. “There are tribes seeking to become new entrants into the gaming market. But by and large, most federally recognized tribes that want to engage in gaming are already doing it.”

Opportunity Knocks

About 250 of 370 tribes in the lower 48 states operate reservation casinos. Another 80 or so receive funds from tribal casinos or lease machines. Others are too remote or lack land upon which to build casinos.

“Most of the opportunities in Indian Country have already been developed,” agrees Kristi Jackson, chairman of TFA Capital Partners, an investment banking firm servicing tribal and commercial gambling and leisure industry clients. “It’s more difficult to get land into trust, the regional markets may already be saturated and the spread of commercial gaming is making things less advantageous. There are fewer opportunities.”

The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma purchased commercial racetracks in Oklahoma and Texas.

Mohegan Gaming & Entertainment, an enterprise of the Mohegan Tribe of Connecticut, owns and/or operates Resorts International in Atlantic City, Mohegan Sun Pocono Race Track and Casino in Pennsylvania and tribal hotel casinos in Washington state and Louisiana. It also is partners in the development of Project Inspire, a gambling resort in South Korea.

Tribes are also outsourcing management expertise and investing in partnerships with other tribes seeking the remaining opportunities in Indian Country.

The Seminole Tribe of Florida, owners of the multibillion-dollar Hard Rock International, operates the former Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City and is in partnership with the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin, Enterprise Rancheria of California and others.

The Chickasaw Nation is financing the 42,000-square-foot Golden Mesa Casino being built by the Loyal Shawnee in the Oklahoma Panhandle near Guymon.

Expanding their gambling interests beyond Indian lands is also part of efforts by tribes to diversify their economies.

“I think there’s going to be more tribes buying gaming assets,” Jackson says. “I also think there’s going to be more tribes buying real estate and businesses related to what they’ve been successful doing. There is a need in most cases to look beyond the boundaries of the reservation and do things that will diversify their economy.

“Tribes may go far afield from what they’ve been doing, from gravel operations to construction management to other kinds of businesses that are not related to hospitality or entertainment,” she says. “We’re working with several tribes, actively. And the common thread is the realization that they have grown as far as they can with gaming on the reservation.

“I will say an absolute trend is the diversification away from home-based gaming.”

Confronting Competition

Tribal commercial casino efforts in Arkansas, Connecticut and elsewhere are partly intended to confront or prevent potential competition.

Such is the case with the Quapaw and Cherokee Nation efforts in Arkansas, which last year passed a ballot initiative to legalize four commercial casinos, two at existing racetracks and two others in Pope and Jefferson counties.

Quapaw’s Downstream Casino Resort enterprise and the Cherokee Nation’s Cherokee Nation Businesses (CNB) operate tribal government casinos along the East Oklahoma border with Arkansas.

“Their goal and part of my goal was to protect the western side of the state of Arkansas from expanded gambling, which would encroach on the market of Downstream Casino Resort and the Cherokee Nation,” Quapaw Chairman John Berrey says.

Berrey says the Quapaw also wanted to invest in the tribe’s ancestral lands in Jefferson County.

“Our strategy is to try and get back to where we’re from,” Berrey says. “It’s a mandate from the tribe to get back home.”

The Cherokee Nation, forced out of its ancestral lands in the Carolinas in the 1800s, hopes to expand its market.

“Arkansas, being an adjacent state, would be a logical extension of our operations here in Oklahoma,” says Chuck Garrett, vice president of CNB, the economic arm of the tribal government with gambling, health care, aerospace, technology and other enterprises.

The two tribes contributed more than $6 million to the initiative campaign. Arkansas citizens in November voted 54 percent to 46 percent to adopt Ballot Issue 4, a constitutional amendment allowing four casinos in the state.

Quapaw’s Downstream Development Corporation is looking to open a casino and 12-story hotel in Pine Bluff, in Jefferson County, as early as 2020.

The Quapaw casino would offer all gambling options, including a sports book, but Berrey says sports wagering is not a major focus of casino operation because it has a low profit margin.

The Cherokee Nation, meanwhile, has aspirations of building a casino resort near Russellville in Pope County, not far from where the tribe operates nine casinos in northeast Oklahoma. The tribe failed in attempts to get an initiative on the 2016 ballot.

Developing a casino in Pope County may be problematic.

Pope County voters approved an ordinance requiring county officials to hold a referendum before issuing letters of support for a casino. The ordinance is likely to be challenged in the courts.

The tribe also faces competition. Gulfside Casino Partnership, operator of a hotel-casino in Gulfport, Mississippi, is seeking state approval of a $250 million resort in Russellville.

“We are excited to make a significant economic investment in the Arkansas River Valley with this first-class resort,” Terry Green, co-owner of Gulfside, said in a press release.

“This project will create more than 1,500 new jobs and generate millions of dollars in taxes, improving the county’s infrastructure and its overall quality of life.”

Cherokee leaders fear a commercial operation would seriously impact business.

“A significant portion of our market originates in northwest Arkansas, and if an operator other than Cherokee Nation was to gain a foothold, that would threaten jobs at Cherokee casinos,” CNB CEO Shawn Slaton told the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper.

“It could also decrease, for the first time ever, revenue that ultimately funds health care, housing, education and other tribal services,” Slaton says. “CNB will always go to whatever lengths necessary to protect Cherokee jobs and not only preserve, but continue to increase the dividend paid to the Cherokee Nation, which funds critical services for Cherokee Nation citizens.”

Tribal War with MGM

The Mohegan and Mashantucket Pequot tribes of Connecticut have similar concerns about MGM Grand’s $1 billion facility in Springfield, Massachusetts.

The casino entertainment company has lobbied heavily against the tribes’ efforts to develop a commercial casino in East Windsor to prevent the state from losing jobs and revenue to the Springfield resort.

Tribes have assured state officials the East Windsor project would not impact tribal-state casino regulatory compacts that pay the state 25 percent of their slot revenues, or more than $270 million for the last two years.

But MGM has lobbied the Department of the Interior and the Trump White House, stalling the East Windsor project. MGM officials contend the East Windsor project, along with a proposal to establish another casino in Bridgeport, should be open to public bidding.

Now that former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has resigned, tribal leaders expect the approvals could be finalized.

State Senator Cathy Osten has submitted a bill, co-sponsored by other legislators, that would eliminate the need for federal approval of the East Windsor project, newly titled “Tribal Winds.”

The tribes say the casino—estimated to cost $250 million to $300 million—would open 18 to 24 months after construction begins and generate $75 million annually in state revenue.

“We’re ready to go when you are,” Mohegan tribal Chairman Kevin Brown told a legislative committee in January. Brown stepped down from his position in February, but remains on the tribal council.

A Problematic Process

As a concession to states, the commercial casino industry and anti-gambling interests, authors of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) largely limited casinos to tribal lands in existence when the act was passed by Congress in 1988.

But the federal law did allow Section 20 exemptions for newly recognized and restored tribes and property acquired in a federal lands claim. The exemptions were intended to provide “equal footing” for tribes not eligible for gambling when the act was passed.

IGRA also allows tribes to develop casinos on trust land off existing reservations, a process referred to as “two-part determinations” because it requires approval from the governor and proof a casino is in the best interest of the tribe and not harmful to nearby Indian and non-Indian communities.

But getting approval from Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs under any Section 20 exemption is a long and expensive endeavor, often fraught with politics and likely to result in years of litigation.

“It’s a high bar to clear,” says Newland. “You have to incur millions of dollars of expense to compile the material needed to get through the bureaucratic process. Then if you get a favorable decision, there’s the legal cost to defend the decision in court.

“The process has become very difficult.”

The process grew more complex with the 2009 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Carcieri v. Salazar, which limited Interior’s authority to place land in trust for tribes.

Justices in Carcieri ruled that Interior could not place land in trust for tribes not “under federal jurisdiction” with enactment of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.

Justices, however, did not define “under federal jurisdiction,” giving anti-gambling groups and tribes opposed to new competition legal ammunition to contest Section 20 petitions.

Carcieri caused a lengthy and expensive bureaucratic process to drag on even longer and become even more costly.

“The opposition from existing tribal casinos was not anticipated, nor was Carcieri,” says attorney Alex Skibine, who served as deputy counsel for the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs when IGRA was drafted.

The Supreme Court ruling in Carcieri allows opponents to question whether Interior has the authority to place land in trust for gambling.

Congress has rebuffed efforts to enact a legislative “fix” to the Supreme Court ruling in Carcieri.

“The problem is not with IGRA,” tribal attorney Judith Shapiro says of the difficulty in acquiring land for casinos. “The problem is with Carcieri.”

“The easy ones have already been done,” Shapiro says of the trust land casino development in the early years of IGRA. “There hasn’t been a lot of growth. That’s been true for a long time.”

Pamunkey tribal Chief Robert Gray says he would consider operating a casino in Norfolk, Virginia under commercial law rather than struggle through IGRA’s long, complicated and expensive process.

“As a federally recognized tribe with both the right to engage in gaming activities and the financial backing to make it happen, we believe that if the commonwealth is ready to authorize gaming, our project should be part of it,” Gray said in a statement.

“To consider other projects without taking into consideration the Pamunkey casino in Norfolk and the potential of additional Pamunkey casinos in Virginia would fail to take a much-needed comprehensive approach to gaming.”

Jackson says gambling under IGRA may be problematic, but it still provides opportunity for indigenous Americans, particularly newly recognized, restored and landless tribes.

“There are plenty of examples around the country where the revenues from gaming are providing services tribal members would otherwise not have access to,” Jackson says.

Section 20 projects are becoming a rarity.

“Instead of 20 a year,” she says, “there may be one or two.”

A More United Industry

The nationwide campaign to legalize sports betting aligned the lobby and trade organizations for the commercial and tribal segments of the legal gambling industry, the American Gaming Association (AGA) and the National Indian Gaming Association (NIGA).

Eleven of the larger casino tribes eventually joined the AGA.

While there are significant differences between commercial and tribal government gambling, there are many policy issues that unite the two segments of the casino industry.

“We made a very consequential decision, and we’re not uniting for the sake of uniting,” says NIGA Chairman Ernie Stevens. “We’re uniting because it’s important to our future.”