Chapter 8 of Rebuilding Native Nations deals largely with tribal relationships
with privately owned businesses. I was somewhat surprised at the positive
attitudes the authors had towards private businesses within a group where the
government struggled so much financially and with its own enterprises. I really
liked the point that this reading made that there needs to be a complete
mindset shift within tribes. Tribal governments shouldn’t see private
businesses simply as competitors to their own enterprises; rather, they should
see private businesses as their own people working to the same goal: economic
growth for the tribe.
This sentiment reminded me of tribally
owned casinos. I know there have been many stereotypes & some controversy at
least within the ranks of non-native Americans to emerge from the prevalence of
tribally owned casinos, but I wondered about attitudes within tribes towards
these casinos, specifically whether tribal governments and their citizens shared
positive opinions. I know from Maggie’s presentation that for the Tohono O’odham
specifically, casino owners are among the largest contributors to their community
college (TOCC).
Clearly, tribally owned casinos tend to do
well financially and from the TOCC example, they can positively impact their
communities, but I wonder about how increased opportunities for gambling could
impact the group, and what the economic costs could be for the tribe at large.
Good questions. There is a growing literature on the impacts, positive and negative, of tribal casinos. I recommend starting with the article by Randy Akee,Jonathon Taylor and Katherine Spilde, "The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and Its Effects on American Indian Economic Development", Journal of Economic perspectives. 2015.
ReplyDeleteThe Journal of Economic Perspectives, often called JEP, is a great source in general for broad overviews of particular economic research topics. The articles tend to be less technical, written to be accessible to non economists with minimal econometric jargon.