Brenda Mead
Mead is chairman of the Coquille Indian Tribe.
For any Native American tribe, confronting history means confronting pain, greed, and misinformation. Lies about our humanity enabled policies to erase our culture. Lies about our existence led to the erasure and dispossession of our homelands and way of life.
These painful memories were even more poignant last week as the Coquille Indian Tribe celebrated its 35th anniversary of reunification. and Decades of struggle for dignity and recognition. Though things have improved, ignorance continues to perpetuate attacks on our rights and sovereignty.
Unfortunately, such attacks can come from other tribes as well.
Recently, a few tribes in California and Oregon who are opposed to the Coquille Indian Tribe’s plans to build a new casino in Medford have alleged that we are “reservation shopping” and seeking to add land without justification. This is an unjust and inaccurate accusation. These tribes claim that our proposed casino would: It would break up gambling monopolies in the region.
But with this accusation, they are setting a precedent for reckless and baseless political attacks against hundreds of tribes like ours who have worked hard to legally rebuild on reservations, carefully following multiple layers of laws and regulations, and using gambling to impede our ability to fund essential services like health care and education.
For many Americans, the word “reservation” conjures up images of a large, contiguous geographic area with boundaries where all the land is under tribal jurisdiction. But this is often not the case. For the Coquille, and most tribes in Oregon, restoration of federal recognition did not involve setting aside land for reservations. Instead, Congress held land in trust and identified specific areas that could become part of the reservation.
In 1989, Congress passed the Coquille Restoration Act, ending the shameful demise of my tribe. The five-county service area for our settlement includes Coos, Curry, Douglas, Jackson and Lane counties and was not chosen arbitrarily. Congress studied where our people had lived, traded and worked historically and in our final days. Congress learned that its own policies had scattered us from place to place. While much of our development has taken place in the 6,512 acres already held in trust for Coos County, by Congressional direction we have owned and operated businesses, supported residents and funded community organizations in all five counties. This has continued ever since we were reinstated.
In 2012, we followed this council’s roadmap by placing land in Medford, which is part of our service area, into trust and applying to build a new reservation casino. Medford was the second largest concentration of Coquille residents during our recovery, and in the decades since, we’ve worked with community leaders to attract new businesses to our city and support organizations that provide health care, housing and other services. The new casino, while small in scale, will allow us to expand these services and meet the growing needs of not only our residents, but their families, neighbors and the community.
But Medford is located along Oregon’s I-5 corridor, and gambling in the area has been monopolized by wealthy California and Oregon tribes, who for the past decade have made it the centerpiece of an extensive lobbying campaign, arguing that our proposal would set a new precedent for “off-reservation” gambling and capitalizing on widespread ignorance about tribal lands.
Of course, this is nonsense to anyone familiar with Native American affairs or who has read the Coquille Restoration Act, but this misinformation, backed by millions of dollars in lobbying and advertising, has spread and fueled calls for Congress to ban so-called “reservation shopping.”
I would like to ask my fellow tribal leaders, and all who support tribal rights, is it worth maintaining a gambling monopoly at the expense of tribal sovereignty? When a sister tribe wanted to open a casino just three miles from our tribe in Coos Bay, we too were concerned about competition, but we knew supporting tribal rights was more important and more consistent with what our ancestors taught and believed. Since then, we have both thrived. I would be happy to discuss with any tribal leader how to balance competitive concerns in a way that uplifts us all while protecting Oregon’s economy and environment.
“No tribe should exploit public ignorance about reservations to gain political victory. We see a future where tribal restoration will involve years of litigation and millions of dollars wasted on lobbying. That’s not good for tribes or Oregon.”
