Gabe Galanda is quoted in The New York Times regarding what he dubs an off-reservation gaming “arms race” between Tribal nations in the Pacific Northwest.
“We’re now seeing an arms race,” said Gabriel S. Galanda, an Indigenous rights lawyer representing the Cow Creek Umpqua tribe, whose Seven Feathers casino, just an hour north of Medford on Interstate 5, would be faced with new competition. “You can literally look at the dominoes falling in every direction, from Washington to Oregon, and Oregon to California.”
Earlier this year, Gabe was quoted by the Los Angeles Times on the same subject. He is concerned about how the inter-Tribal arms race us causing time-honored kinship bonds between Tribal nations to fissure and fracture. As Gabe explains in his recent scholarly essay that the LA Times featured:
Tribal gaming politicians seek to develop casinos in other ways that are antithetical to inter-Tribal kinship. They are emboldened by the United States, which is “allowing Tribes to acquire land for casinos in areas to which they have no historical connection, and are in many instances, the ancestral homelands of other Indigenous peoples.”
On Secretary Deb Haaland’s watch, as The New York Times explains, the Interior Department recently “made it much easier for the federal government to take other lands into trust for the benefit of tribes” and “widened the possibilities for using those new lands for gambling projects.”
Gabe expresses concern that now “Interior will ‘presume’ an off-reservation gaming trust acquisition is in a Tribal applicant’s best interest, without regard for other Tribal nations’ ancestral, historical, or Treaty interests.” He criticizes that policy as an “over-correction” that is antithetical to age-old inter-Tribal kinship systems:
The Biden administration’s policy fosters an every-Tribe-for-itself mentality, encourages Tribal politicians to dishonor ancestry and manipulate anthropology, and threatens the extended kinship proposition….With Indigenous kinship responsibilities impinged and ancestral relations desecrated for economic gain, the inter-Tribal conflicts are quite personal and prone to spilling over into other arenas where solidarity is needed to protect Tribal nationhood or Indigenous humanity.
The Coquille Tribe’s off-reservation gaming project in Medford exemplifies these concerns. Coquille has falsely claimed an ancestral connection tot he Rogue Valley, which caused three northern California Tribal Chairman to publish a column in The Oregonian titled “History Matters”:
There are no Indigenous teachings or other historical evidence of ancestral ties between the Coquille People and the Rogue River Valley. It is most telling that there is no linguistic connection between the Coquille and the Takelman and Shastan speakers of the Rogue River Valley. Historically speaking, the Coquille simply did not exist in Medford.
Unless there is a federal and inter-Tribal course correction, Tribal false histories and gaming greed will overthrow Indigenous kinship traditions and places. Where would that leave us as Indigenous peoples?
Gabe Galanda is an Indigenous rights attorney and the managing lawyer at Galanda Broadman. He has been named to Best Lawyers in America in the fields of Native American Law and Gaming Law from 2007 to 2024, and dubbed a Super Lawyer by his peers from 2013 to 2024.
