represents the most significant piece of case law responsible for establishing the legal foundation for Indian gaming law, which transformed impoverished and scattered tribes into economic powerhouses.
Ultimately, the Indians had discovered what John James, Chairman of the Cabazon tribe in California, called the “new buffalo.” The new buffalo was gaming, and Gordon Graves was The Greatest Hunter. Graves led the pursuit of the new buffalo by first designing a platform to interlink many tribal bingo halls across a wide area network to operate a high-stakes, million-dollar bingo game in real-time. As a result, more and more tribal gaming operations joined the burgeoning network, and attendance at reservation gaming venues soared.
As technology improved, Graves next invented a bingo game called MegaMania.5 This completely electronic bingo game designed to display the results of a bingo game in an entertaining manner had the appearance of playing a slot machine. The US attorney in Tulsa challenged the legality of MegaMania, and Graves and his company, Multimedia Games6, (MGAM) financed the legal battle to prove that the game was lawful and in accord with the language in the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.
Since Multimedia Games was a publicly owned company, many Wall Street analysts, including Jim Cramer, recommended that investors sell Multimedia Games short. As a result, the price of the stock plummeted. Accordingly, there were no Wall Street funds available to fight the legal battle to come. Consequently, Graves pledged all his assets, including his home, and borrowed millions of dollars to pay legal fees and fight the Justice Department. Graves hired a powerful legal team and ultimately won favorable decisions in two Federal Circuit Court jurisdictions (the Ninth and Tenth Circuits), both of which agreed that MegaMania was a legal bingo game. The Justice Department appealed, but the Supreme Court refused to hear the case because two circuit courts had already decided that MegaMania was a Class II7 game.
Some states, such as Minnesota, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, negotiated Class III8 compacts with tribes in their jurisdictions. However, some states refused this negotiating posture and cited that states-rights, and not the federal government, held sway over the matter of negotiating gaming compacts with tribes or not. The Supreme Court addressed the question in the early nineties, and they ruled in favor of the states-rights argument, thus striking the specific language from IGRA requiring states to negotiate tribal gaming compacts in good faith.
While the federal government could not force states to negotiate Class III compacts with tribes, the states eventually relented because the tribes could operate the Class II games in a casino-like environment without a compact or state interference. However, compacting for Class III games put the states in partnership position with the tribes as regulatory overseers for which they receive fees. Consequently, more states agreed to Class III tribal gaming compacts allowing tribal operations to offer a broader range of game types, which improved the entertainment value of tribal casinos and consequently drew more players. The fees collected by the state are applied to offset the states’ cost of regulatory oversight. Still, some states insisted on augmenting their coffers from the payments, which usually went into a general fund or rainy-day type account.
Mr. Graves would be delighted to declare that the challenge to MegaMania signified the end of litigation involving Indian gaming, but a more significant and enterprising story lies ahead. The transformation of bingo played on cards to bingo played with technological aids is at the heart of modern-day Indian gaming. With a nudge, a spark, and the intuition found in only a true entrepreneur’s heart and mind, Gordon Graves, the bravest new buffalo hunter, propelled Indian gaming into an innovative and profitable future.
2 Seminoles v State of Florida, circa 1984
3 A federal law enacted in 1953 allowing local criminal enforcement on tribal land
4 The Cabazon decision is the principle case law that impelled the proliferation of Indian gaming.
5 A bingo game played on an electronic player station linked to a shared server and linked to other players across a broad network.
6 MGAM – Multimedia Games, formerly Travis Enterprises, founded by Gordon Graves. MGAM focused on delivering gaming products to Indian Country gaming venues.
7. Class II is a reference to game types defined in the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (USC 2501) enacted in 1988. The law classified games as Class I: traditional Indian games that have existed in tribal culture over a long period, Class II: bingo games and games similar to bingo, and Class III: everything that is not Class I or Class II.
8 Gaming compacts with tribes in their jurisdiction defined in IGRA as anything not Class I or Class II, and are typically house-banked games where the house (casino-operator) has a stake in the outcome of the game.
Introduction
Manifest Destiny was an unofficial, unwritten doctrine supported by the U.S. government in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century that implied the government would secure and control all land between the two great oceans. This doctrine was likely the impetus for the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848, which pushed Mexican rule from California, Nevada, Utah, part of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to its current borders. The doctrine was also the likely incentive for reining in free-roaming Native American people, who lived their lives and raised their families on Great Plains lands teeming with herds of buffalo. Soon, between buffalo hunters and the U.S. military, the herds were decimated. Plains tribes, because of a lack of a food source, had their possessions declared contraband and confiscated, forcing the Indian people into a new, dependent way of life.
Targeting tribes in the southern and eastern areas of the U.S., the Indian Removal Act in 1830 passed during Andrew Jackson’s term as president. This act precipitated the U.S. military force-marching Indian people from southern and eastern lands to new lands the government dubbed “Indian Territory” known today as Oklahoma. The forced march is known as the “Trail of Tears.”
The U.S. government insisted that each displaced tribe sign a treaty agreeing to the displacement. However, a segment of defiant Seminoles, led by Osceola,9 and many of his followers escaped into the Florida Everglades, where the terrain and cover allowed them to fight off the soldiers pursuing them well into the 1850s. Those Seminoles remain in Florida to this day.
A few Cherokees were able to avoid apprehension by melding into a portion of what is now North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains; these groups survived.
A small portion of the Muscogee Creek Indians, known as the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, was able to keep a fraction of their lands in Alabama as a reward for aiding the U.S. against the Northern Creek “Red Sticks” in the Creek War of 1813–1814.
Many of the western tribes eventually defeated by U.S. troops were sequestered-in-place on reservations and became wholly dependent on the government for food, shelter and clothing. Many of these reservations still exist and have become tribal towns, at times referred to as agency towns.10
In Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, each head of household relocated there received a quarter-section of land or 160 acres, with the presumption that they would farm their land like non-Indian people. That didn’t happen. Small groups of tribal people banded around matriarchs or patriarchs and founded villages, which later became tribal towns, and they only farmed enough land to sustain their needs.
When
