History
Gambling is a part of many traditional Indian cultures (as well as the larger US society.) Tribal games include dice and shell activities, archery competitions, races, and so on. When Native Americans moved to Indian Reservations in the mid- to late 1800s, most were left with limited economic opportunity. Today, most of these reservations “are located in remote areas with little indigenous economic activity… have some of the highest rates of poverty, unemployment, welfare dependency, school dropout, alcoholism, and other indicators of poverty and social distress of any communities in the U.S.”
The use of gaming to generate profit did not begin until the late 1970s and early 1980s within Indian communities. Several tribes, especially in California and Florida, opened bingo parlors as a way to earn revenue. Their actions were related to the search for new sources of revenue, given the emphasis the Ronald Reagan administration placed on economic self-sufficiency for the tribes.
While bingo was legal in California and Florida, those states had stringent regulations. Operating on the history of tribal sovereignty, some tribes did not comply with these laws. High-stakes Indian bingo operations soon arose in California, Florida, New York and Wisconsin. The industry grew rapidly. State governments began contending that revenues from their own gaming operations dropped as Native American operations increased the potential stakes.
Several laws influenced the creation of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA). Many of these influential laws came from U.S. Supreme Court rulings regarding tribal sovereignty. While a number of court rulings played a significant role in the development of legislation regarding reservation gambling rights, two landmark cases, Bryan v. Itasca County and California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, provided major legal breakthroughs.
Read more about this topic: Indian Gaming Regulatory Act
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“No one can understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)