Playing to win

ALBUQUERQUE — A modern sound is set to ring through an ancient land in New Mexico come October. The ratcheting and chiming of hundreds of slot machines will echo throughout the Navajo Nation’s "dineteh," their traditional homeland, as the Firerock Casino in Churchrock marks the Navajo’s foray into the realm of Indian gaming.

“This is the beginning of our journey, the road to success," said Joe Shirley, Navajo Nation president, in an April press release.

With the casino, the Navajo Nation, the nation’s largest Indian tribe, is joining a several-decade-old movement among Native Americans of turning toward gambling to address chronic unemployment and to inject much-needed money into the reservation economy.

Although the gaming venture is expected to bring a windfall of capital, the ghosts of promised economic quick fixes through coal and uranium mining efforts on the Navajo Nation still linger in recent memory.

The casino will become the 26th in New Mexico, which has the largest per capita Native population of any state due to over 20 different tribal affiliations.

To reach this point, the Navajos had to overcome cultural taboos against gambling as well as political in-fighting, but the payoff may be substantial, Navajo leaders say. The 65,000-square-foot casino will house 300 slot machines and supporters claim will bring in $32 million dollars its first year. The tribe is planning a second casino near Flagstaff which it projects to bring in $46 million in its first year.

Gaming officials within the Navajo Nation say internal funding puts the effort immediately in a positive position.

"The unique thing about this effort is that it’s 100 percent Navajo," says Raymond Etcitty, general counsel for The Navajo Nation Gaming Enterprise. "We secured the loan internally. Other tribes typically sign high-interest management contracts to get the casino going; we’ll be starting off in full control."

Navajo voters approved a gaming measure for the first time in their history in November 2004. Two previous attempts to implement gaming in the Navajo Nation were voted down in nationwide referendums. It took four years of negotiating and courting outside funders for the approved project until financing was recently securedfrom within the Nation. After turning down a $100 million line of credit from JP Morgan Chase, the Navajo Nation has secured $35 million in startup funds from its own Land Acquisition Trust Fund.

To gamble or not

The casino opening represents a major victory for supporters. It comes after more than 10 years of the Navajos internally debating the pros and cons of enacting organized gambling within their culture. Initially some in the community pointed to their traditional stories to warn against gambling. Some of the reluctance to gambling was captured in a 1997 Seattle Times article that quoted a traditional Navajo healer. The article reports:

"People in our tradition are usually told you have to be very cautious to be a gambler," explained Johnson Dennison, a traditional healer who is dean of instruction at Dine College in Tsalie, Ariz.

"You have to understand it involves losing, power, desire, winning. And you have to understand that at the end you’ll be a loser and you’ll develop a habit from gambling . . . you gamble for every bit of property you have, and in the end you lose everything.

…Some medicine men say The Gambler will return, not as a person, but that the gambling will return some day," Dennison said. "That might be what the casino (proposal) is all about. I don’t know."

Etcitty acknowledges that there is somewhat of a cultural taboo within Navajo culture concerning gambling, yet he says the cultural fear wasn’t what held up the casino’s approval. It was politics. "For years there’s been separate chapters that wanted their own casinos without any central regulation," Etcitty said. "The problem is that New Mexico and Arizona want to deal with a centralized body."

That newly created centralized body is the Navajo Nation Gaming Enterprise, the financial arm of the tribal government formed in 2006 to regulate gambling and collect the money made from it. According to Etcitty: "We’ll be collecting the money, but the tribal government will decide how the money is redistributed."

While some tout the casino as much-needed economic development, others worry that it will do further harm to a population already rife with unemployment and alcoholism by introducing gambling and the societal problems that often accompany it.

Etcitty tries to deflect that worry, saying "We’re not going to be marketing this to our own people — we’ll be focusing on tourists and people passing through."

Not everyone is buying that assertion.

"They can say they’re not going to target their population, but I was just reading a report that stated 80 percent of the money spent in casinos comes from locals," says Guy Clarke, the chairman of the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling.

He adds: "It’s a cash cow with a steady stream of income, yet people need to realize that a very substantial amount of that money will be coming from pathological and addicted gamblers, and study after study shows that along with gambling addiction comes higher rates of alcoholism and domestic violence."

To make his point, Clarke can point to a 2006 report by Gemini Research to the Responsible Gaming Association of New Mexico on gambling and problem gambling in New Mexico states that: "The prevalence of at-risk, problem and pathological gambling is significantly higher among Native Americans in New Mexico than among non-Native Americans."

Etcitty acknowledges that there are risks for some people but adds that the Gaming Enterprise will setup well-funded programs to help problem and pathological gamblers.

That information doesn’t quell Clarke’s fears.

"I never thought I’d see the day when the Navajo Nation would enter into the world of gaming," says Clarke. "The Navajo Nation is a very strong and proud people, and they’ve always stood up against gambling … unfortunately, gambling brings out the worst in people, including politicians."

Economic Development

Supporters of the casino contend that the Nation not only has a right but an obligation to exercise its self-determination to create the casino to lift their people out of a dire state of poverty and lack of opportunity.

"There are no jobs for the people of the Navajo Nation, and people are desperate," says George Hardeen, the Navajo Nation communication director. "More and more Navajos are leaving, and when they leave, part of the Navajo culture dies. It’s up to the Navajo Nation to stop the exodus."

A recent job fair for the Navajo Firerock Casino speaks to the hunger for jobs. Nearly 2,000 people attended to apply for 300 vacancies.

Etcitty says,"We’re aiming for a 90 percent Navajo hire rate." That would put it well above the usual hiring ratio. According to the National Indian Gaming Association, the national percentage of Indian to non-Indian employees is 75 percent non-Indian, 25 percent Indian.

Morgan Spurlock’s recent experience living on the Navajo nation seems to provide an example of what Navajos are up against, Hardeen says. The star of the FX network television show "30 Days" was supposed to find a job, but "the only thing he could find was in a tire shop and the owner had to hire him on as a contract worker because he couldn’t afford to pay him minimum wage."

Spurlock, for his part, said in a Farmington Daily Times article: "It’s like America’s dirty little secret. There’s a lot of things people don’t know about, and the reservation is like a Third World country."

Although the Navajo Nation has a large labor pool (nearly 300,000) known for hard work and skilled craftsmanship, there is virtually no industry, manufacturing or widespread organized entreprenurial efforts within the Nation.

"The underlying factor for this is lack of industry on the Navajo Nation, and that stems from a lack of infrastructure," Hardeen said. "We need accessible water. We need power lines. The majority of our roads are unpaved. You can drive around for hours and there’s not even a rest stop."

Due to a lack of industry, in recent times the Navajos have relied on their natural resources to bring jobs and cash flow. Uranium mining on the Navajo Nation from the 1940s through the 1980s provided some with consistent jobs, but it left a lingering blight of sickness and contamination. The Navajos banned uranium mining in 2005.

2005 also marked the suspension of the Black Mesa coal mine which saw the loss of 200 jobs.

Both mining efforts promised jobs and economic prosperity yet did little to curb the unemployment and poverty rate on the Navajo Nation that has been above 40 percent for decades.

Recently, there’s been some headway in the realm of green industry on the reservation. The Navajo Nation announced in March a partnership with Boston-based Citizen’s Energy Corp. to produce a large-scale wind farm. The Dine Wind Project would be the only commercial wind farm in the state and one of the largest in the nation. According to an Associated Press report in the Albuquerque Journal: "Early estimates show the wind project could bring in between $60 million and $100 million in revenue for the Navajo Nation over the lifetime of the project," which would most likely be from 20-25 years.

In contrast, in 2006 alone, New Mexico Indian gaming efforts brought in over $755 million.

While strides are being made, the historic lack of economic infrastructure has led to an exodus of people and cash off the reservation, says Hardeen. "Two and a half billion dollars leave the Navajo Nation every year because there is nowhere to spend money inside the Nation …it’s estimated that border towns like Gallup and Farmington generate hundreds of thousands (of dollars) of tax revenue in a single weekend from Navajos, and the Nation does not see a penny of it."

Federal regulations and systematic obstacles have contributed to a lack of business on the reservation. Hardeen explains: "What complicates attracting and starting businesses is you basically can’t own land on the reservation. There’s also a lot of bureaucratic red tape. John McCain is on record stating that a business license that takes three years to get on the reservation takes three days in Phoenix."

For that reason, Hardeen says, the casino and efforts like the Desert Rock power plant, would act as immediate efforts that will generate some internal economic stimulus.

Billy Luther, a Navajo filmmaker, agrees that gambling provides an historic opportunity for Navajos."The fact is that gambling is no more nor less than a distillation of consumerism," he wrote in a recent e-mail to the New Mexico Independent. "I don’t personally believe that we become tainted by dealing with that; we live in the world of the dominant culture and I believe a way for us to maintain and promulgate our identity is by engaging with the world around us and, rather than shrinking from it, being smart enough to use it to our advantage."

It’s yet to be seen how the stream of cash will be applied to the obstacles facing the Navajo Nation in terms of infrastructure and local business empowerment. Etcitty states "the tribal government has not decided yet how it will be redistributed."