Recognition and Casinos Are Separate Issues
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The debates over the acknowledgment of the Juanenos--Orange County’s indigenous Acjachemen Nation--by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the possible establishment of a casino within the corporate limits of the city of San Juan Capistrano, focus attention on a troubled controversy of national, not local, proportions. It is most unfortunate that the acknowledgment process has become confused or co-mingled in the minds of many with the issue of gambling on Indian reservations.
Reservation casinos are federally sanctioned under the National Indian Gaming Act as subject to gambling regulations of the states. It is regrettable that the Juanenos, albeit only one faction of the Indian community, have sought to link the acknowledgment process with land through purchase and the establishment of a casino. The focus should appropriately be on land restoration. For the restoring of land--establishing an Indian reservation--whether by transfer of public land or through purchase, and placing it in federal trust, normally follows federal recognition of a tribe.
While federal acknowledgments of tribal status are infrequent and land restorations to American Indians few and far between, these options do not lie outside the realm of the possible. For more than a century a number of tribes and remnants of them have sought recognition by the federal government. They and others also have hoped to regain lost lands and other benefits that acknowledgment normally awards. Unfortunately, the enabling act of the Indian Claims Commission in 1946 restricted that tribunal to awarding money, not land, to tribes that successfully prosecuted claims cases.
The payment of money for lands lost via unconscionable and other means was received with reluctance by some tribes, who became bitter over the permanent severance of any title to lands claimed. The “Indians of California,” a legal entity, gained monetary awards for the loss of approximately 70 million acres in the cases finalized in 1944 and 1964, the latter case being characterized as “47 cents an acre.”
Denied land and often rejecting monetary awards in those cases, more than one Indian community has agitated on public land (e.g., the Pit River Indians of Northern California) or has sought congressional support for restoration. A Piute band did gain acreage in the desert country to the north as did the Jamul in San Diego County.
To date, at the national level, only a small number of bands and tribes successfully have been acknowledged. True, only few already legally recognized tribes have had land restored to them or otherwise been granted money by Congress to purchase additional lands. Yet it does occur even under controversy and legal battle.
Some years ago a Zuni sacred place in Arizona was restored from the public domain, even though the tribe occupies a reservation in New Mexico. The Catawba in South Carolina gained a financial settlement that has made possible their purchase of additional land that would be held in trust. As a rule, the more successful land restorations have resulted from the title transfer of public domain acreage, as from lands held by the U.S. Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management.
Tribes seeking acknowledgment should not have to forswear any interest in the establishment of a casino. On the other hand, local communities also should have the right to assert their political clout and protest that potentiality within their boundaries.
However, the establishment and significant success of Indian casinos has not in the main come about at any sacrifice to the criminal element. We should not so readily link crime and casinos on Indian reservations that we would dismiss the Indians’ right to operate a casino on trust lands even within municipal limits. Contestants in this debate should look around this state before making prejudicial and pejorative statements about Indian casinos.
Still, it is regrettable that the Juanenos have not stopped feuding; instead, they should seek to present a united front in their quest for acknowledgment. It would be more supported in Washington. I suspect, too, that a request for land restoration within their aboriginal territory would also receive more support if they offered to choose some front acreage in the Cleveland National Forest.
Frankly, on the basis of past experiences, Congress is far more likely to enact appropriate legislation following this “path of least resistance,” simply because it has happened before.
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