WYPR: Maryland's Delegation to the GOP Conventions Visits The Prairie Island Indian Community (2008-09-04)

With time on their hands before the vote to nominate John McCain their candidate for president, Maryland's delegation to the Republican National Convention visited nearby Prairie Island Indian Community. For most it was a lesson in a different culture, but for one member it was like coming home. WYPR's Joel McCord reports.

John Tahsuda is a Kiowa Cherokee from Oklahoma who lives in Bowie, where there's hardly anyone who looks like he does.

That may be part of the reason he helped arrange yesterday's trip for his fellow delegation members.

It's very sort of energizing, it's very just sort of, like a refreshing drink to be around a lot of Indian folks. It's almost like being homesick and then coming back home for a while.

Tahsuda, a graduate of Cornell University Law School, came to Washington to work for the National Indian Gaming Commission and was staff director of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee when Republican nominee John McCain was chairman.

Senator McCain has been like a hero, a champion in the Indian country for years and years, so the chance to work for him was itself thrilling on that front, and then the fact that here's a man who might talk about wanting to run for President again, it's even more fun to work for.

He's known members of the Prairie Island Community since the mid 1990s when they were building the sprawling Treasure Island Casino about an hour's drive from St. Paul. It has twenty five hundred slot machines, black-jack tables, a huge new event center where they stage dancing and drumming demonstrations and a 480-room hotel.

These guys here are doing really well for themselves. Now, it was a long struggle to get here, but in that last 20 years, they've made up a lot of ground.

They started in 1984 with a bingo hall. And Phil Mahowalt, general counsel for the tribe, says they have become the largest employer in Goodhue County.

The tribe employs approximately fifteen hundred, well I guess it's spiking up a little bit to almost sixteen hundred employees with the recent expansion.

Mahowalt won't reveal the tribe's income from the casino operation, but the National Indian Gaming Commission reported in June that Indian casinos nationwide earned $26 billion in 2007. Annual revenues for individual casinos ranged from $3 million to more than $250 million.

The casino has allowed the tribe to be self-sufficient, said Ron Johnson, the tribal council president. And the income has helped create the Edwin Buck Junior Memorial Buffalo Project.

He was a veteran in Vietnam, came back wounded, lost both his legs, he soon passed on to the spirit world and we named the Buffalo project after him.

Now, the herd of 42 a calf was born Tuesday provides meat for the whole tribe.

We take down buffalo, we slaughter on average two to three buffalo every quarter and that meat is processed at a local plant, it's brought back to the community and we disperse it to community members.

But while this community is doing well, Tahsuda said, there are others that are not.

By any objective measure, if you look aggregate across the country Indian communities are at the lowest economic scale. Their communities tend to have the least infrastructure, I mean we're talking everything from roads to water, sewer even electricity.

Yet the massive infusion of money some tribes have gained from casino operations brings with it the problem gamblers sucked in by the flashing lights and lure of quick cash. Tahsuda says the tribes have poured money into addiction prevention programs and training for employees to spot addictive gamblers.

They have really been at the forefront of trying to address that group of folks that will be their patrons who will come in and may have a problem, and they try to very frankly acknowledge that that's going to happen and to look out for them I guess is the best way to put it.

And he sees legalized slot machines in Maryland as a way to keep gamblers from going to West Virginia and Delaware. It's just a question of whether it should be a constitutional amendment or not.

I'm Joel McCord, reporting from the Prairie Island Indian Community in Minnesota for 88.1, WYPR.