Don’t Let Hypocrisy Succeed Cheating As Idaho Policy
Critics who blame Indian casinos for fostering gambling addiction are missing something. Casinos have not only brought a great economic boost to the reservations but have revived the spirit of a people who have been beaten down for generations.
But there is an irony in discussing gaming and lotteries in Idaho without acknowledging that the first great lottery in Idaho took place in 1909, with Coeur d’Alene Indian treaty land offered as lottery prizes to non-Indian gamblers.
On Jan. 22, 1907, The Spokesman-Review ran a full-page map and glowing description of the “Coeur d’Alene Reservation, in Idaho, to be open for settlement.”
By Aug. 9, 1909, over 104,000 land-hungry registered ticketholders and hundreds of speculators overflowed the small town of Coeur d’ Alene City for a lottery drawing on 1,350 homesteads to be taken out of the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation. Only 20 years before, solemn agreements between the tribe and the United States had been signed into law by Congress, guaranteeing that 400,000 acres, a small portion of their original 4 million-acre homeland, would be “reserved” for the tribe in perpetuity.
Against desperate protests from the Coeur d’Alenes, Congress abruptly changed the rules of the game. Suddenly, in 1909, the reservation was split up. One-hundred-four-thousand acres were allotted to Coeur d’ Alene Indians themselves. And then, nearly 220,000 acres of their reservation was awarded in a drawing in Coeur d’Alene City, as prizes in the greatest lottery of Idaho’s history.
Idaho’s politicians had already found ways to obtain thousands of additional acres of Coeur d’Alene Reservation land for the state: for the Harrison town site, for the St. Maries cemetery, for Heyburn State Park, for the University of Idaho and for the state Department of Public Instruction.
Idaho and hundreds of thousands of Inland Empire newcomers continue to benefit from this supposedly legalized expropriation of Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation land, timber and lakefront in the so-called great land lottery of 1909.
Meanwhile, the Indians’ hope of guaranteed treaty land and the chance to maintain their own community gradually disintegrated, leaving the once proud and wealthy Coeur d’Alenes in desperate straits, with less than 20 percent of their reservation - a powerless minority in their own land.
Now that modern federal legislation has allowed the tribe to establish gaming enterprises similar to those allowed by the state of Idaho, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe has suddenly reappeared as a powerful social and economic force in its ancient homeland. The buffalo, indeed, are coming back!
Yet, it has been sad to witness the recent frantic efforts of the Idaho Legislature, the moral condemnations of the comfortably righteous, and the political maneuvering of powerful gambling interests to close down this legal opportunity that has been allowing America’s Indian tribes to come into their own again.
The Coeur d’Alene Indians almost lost everything in Idaho’s first lottery. Now, they are staging a great comeback with the help of gaming and their own planned lottery.
Certainly, gambling can be dangerous, just as buffalo hunting was dangerous. But let’s not try, again, to stop their buffalo from coming back.
xxxx