By FOX BUTTERFIELD, The New York Times
DENVER (April 8) -- The Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians have not had land in Colorado since many of their women and children were massacred in their sleep by soldiers at Sand Creek in 1864. Driven out of the state, they live today in poor rural areas scattered around Oklahoma
But the tribes are now offering Colorado a gift of $1 billion and are willing to give up their ancestral claims to nearly half of the state, all in exchange for a 500-acre piece of land near Denver on which they hope to build one of the world's largest casinos, complete with a five-star hotel, a golf course, a mall and an Indian cultural center.
"This would be more than a casino for us," said Clara Bushyhead, a spokeswoman for the tribes. "It is the dream of our elders to complete our life cycle, to come back to our homeland in Colorado from which we were driven. Oklahoma was never our home."
Their campaign for a casino in Denver reflects the latest trend in the explosive growth of Indian gambling: tribes in remote areas, some of them without reservations, trying to acquire land near cities for lucrative casinos. It is a practice known as off-reservation gambling. Its critics use a harsher phrase, reservation shopping.
Currently there are efforts by several tiny landless bands of Indians in California to build casinos in three cities on San Francisco Bay. There are also proposals by three tribes, now in Oklahoma, to construct casinos in Ohio, where they once lived. And there are tribes in Wisconsin and Oklahoma, originally from New York, that have proposed exchanging their land claims for the right to build casinos in the Catskills.
Revenues for tribal casinos reached $18.5 billion last year, double the take of all the casinos in Nevada, according to the National Indian Gaming Association. That is up from $5.4 billion in 1995. With that kind of money in Indian gambling, the drive for permission to build casinos far from reservations is drawing protests from more established Indian gambling operations that do not want more local competition, as well as from tribes that built casinos on their own remote lands, limiting the kinds of profits they can make.
The trend has also come under scrutiny in Congress, where the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, headed by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, is examining such proposals and where lawmakers in both houses are considering more stringent rules, like banning tribes from moving across state borders and giving greater say to other tribes that would be affected.
Certainly, the push for off-reservation gambling is not what Congress had in mind when in 1988 it passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act legalizing Indian casinos. Congress envisioned that the law would help impoverished tribes on remote and already existing reservations in states like South Dakota or New Mexico open small casinos as a way to create jobs and, perhaps, foster long-needed economic development.
In many ways, the law has been successful. There are now 411 tribes operating casinos that employ 553,000 people, the National Indian Gaming Association calculates.
The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act is the only Indian act that ever worked," said Keller George, the president of the United South and Eastern Tribes, a confederation of 24 tribes ranging from Maine to Florida and South Carolina to Texas.
But Mr. George opposes off-reservation gambling. "When you have tribes that want to cross state lines and travel thousands of miles to build casinos, then we object," he told a meeting of state officials and Indian leaders at a conference of the Western Governors' Association.
The reason is largely economic. If the tribes from Oklahoma and Wisconsin succeed in exchanging their land claims for casinos in the Catskills, for example, they would directly compete with a similar plan by the Oneida tribe, to which Mr. George belongs.
The proposal for the casino near Denver grew out of an effort to help the Cheyenne and Arapaho in Oklahoma by Steve Hillard, a venture capitalist from Golden, just outside Denver, who has specialized in making investments to benefit Native American groups, particularly those in Alaska.
In 2001, Mr. Hillard and his company, Council Tree Communications, which had a minority stake in Telemundo, the Spanish-language television network, made money for Native Alaskan corporations that were his investors when Telemundo was sold to NBC for $2.7 billion.
Mr. Hillard, who grew up in Colorado, said he had long wanted to find a deal that would help the Cheyenne and Arapaho, and so two years ago he called their tribal leaders proposing to acquire a chain of radio stations for them.
But after a visit to Oklahoma, Mr. Hillard changed his plans.
"What I saw was 11,500 people locked in a generational cycle of poverty, with 70 percent unemployment," he said.
"It was clear that no set of radio stations were going to make a difference for these tribes," Mr. Hillard said.
The tribal leaders offered a different idea. They wanted to return to Colorado and they wanted to open a casino.
"A casino offers us both a way to break out of years of poverty and a way to return to our land, which is the most important thing to Native Americans," said Bill Blind, the vice chairman of the two tribes' business committee. "We believe land takes care of us."
The Cheyenne and Arapaho already operate two casinos in Oklahoma, but they are small and in rural areas more than 10 miles from a major highway, so their profits come to only $7 million a year, tribal leaders say.
Under federal law, if a tribe wants to open a casino on land it does not already control as part of a reservation, it must get permission both from the governor and the secretary of the interior. So Mr. Hillard decided on a bold two-pronged strategy, a stick and a carrot.
The stick was to file claims with the Department of the Interior in April last year for 27 million acres in Colorado that the Cheyenne and Arapaho said were theirs under an 1851 treaty.
As the carrot, Mr. Hillard proposed that the tribes would pay Colorado $1 billion up front, or about 10 years worth of the projected profits from the casino, which the Indians have envisioned as one of the largest in the world, with up to 5,000 slot machines. The $400 million project would also generate about $100 million annually in profits for the tribes, according to Mr. Hillard's projection.
The tribes would also give up their broader claims for land in Colorado.
But Gov. Bill Owens rejected the plan, leaving the project at an impasse. In an interview, Mr. Owens, a Republican, said his opposition was not a moral "Christian right kind of thing." But he said he worried about the social and economic consequences of gambling, and under the state's Constitution, he insisted, before a gambling proposal can be approved, it must be put to a popular vote.
Mr. Hillard says the tribes can wait out the governor. Mr. Owens's term expires next year, and he cannot run again because of a term limit.
"We have also gotten very heartening overtures from three or four communities around Denver who want our project in their towns for economic development," Mr. Hillard said. "And we think the people of Colorado will get interested in that $1 billion."
The tribes are also stepping up the pressure on the state, saying they are preparing to file a lawsuit in federal court on the broad land claims, which cover all of Denver and could endanger the property rights of many Coloradans.
Governor Owens dismisses that threat, noting that in 1965 tribal leaders agreed to a $15 million settlement.
But Mr. Blind, the vice chairman of the business committee, said there was evidence that the tribal leaders at the time did not understand what they were doing.
"Would you sell Colorado to us for 2.75 cents an acre?" he said.
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