Gabe Galanda is featured in Indian Gaming magazine’s “Ask the Expert” column titled, “Spotlight on 2020 and Beyond.” Gabe discusses the origins and perils of gaming per capita checks, and the resurgence of power-crazed and greed-addled disenrollments over the last year.
Here’s his full commentary:
In 2020, Indian gaming gross revenues should eclipse $34 billion. Those dollars will continue to bring economic vitality to 241 governmental gaming tribes. But far too often, more gaming monies means more problems.
As the late, great Dave Palermo reported, 130 – or 53% – of those 241 tribes allot and distribute large chunks of those dollars to tribal citizens as per capita payments. At a correct amount, those payments supplement citizens’ earned income and allow their families to achieve middle class status or greater. But at an incorrect amount, those payments can create disincentive for employment, higher education, or vocational training.
Gaming per capita distributions also impact, and impair, tribal governmental operations and growth. By Congressional design in 1907, the first statutorily authorized tribal “pro rata” distributions to “competent” Indians weakened tribes, by draining their communal wealth. As millions of ancestral land acres were allotted and lost in the Dawes era, so too were tribal dollars.
Today’s gaming per capita distributions, which Congress authorized in 1988, divert billions of dollars away from tribal governmental operations and infrastructure. Rather than pooling those monies to build a new diabetes clinic or wellness center or to make capital investments, those monies get divvied up and spent. Yet, as tribal citizens clamor for more and more “per cap” from their elected leaders, too few appreciate the assimilationist origins and insidious nature of those monies.
There is not yet any empirical research on the impacts that gaming or other per capita payments have on tribes and their citizens, but perhaps tribal economists and political scientists can commence such critical research in 2020. Meanwhile, disenrollment is again on the rise. Although disenrollment waned between 2016 and 2018 as Indian Country got reeducated about the practice’s colonial origins and self-terminationist effects, wayward politicians in several communities decimated their own kin in the last year.At least six tribes, hailing from northern, central, and southern California, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Michigan, pursued the disenrollment of as many as 600 tribal citizens during that span. That increases the total of known disenrolling tribes to approximately 85 – a confounding 15% of all federally recognized tribes – and the total of known disenrollees to about ten thousand – an equally confounding statistic.
In their eye-opening book, Dismembered, Dr. David and Shelly Wilkins’ correlate modern mass disenrollment to gaming per capita greed. Gaming per capita regimes “promote membership decisions that culminate in disenrollments of otherwise qualified members because tribal officials want to limit the number of people who receive a portion of the money and thereby increase the size of each portion.” By ensuring that a smaller number of people get more gaming money, those politicians buy themselves long, lavish careers in power. That's not at all what IGRA intends.
Let’s hope for less per capita problems – and no disenrollment – in 2020.
Gabriel S. Galanda is the managing lawyer of Galanda Broadman, PLLC, in Seattle. Gabe is a descendant of the Nomlaki and Concow Tribes, belonging to the Round Valley Indian Tribes of Northern California.
