Northern Tribes at work on capitalist dreams

By Lori Sturdevant

Star Tribune

       Production manager Harold Tverstol beamed with pride as he led visitors around the half-built half-houses being assembled factory-style at Red Lake Industries.

       “This is quality work, wonderful work,” Tverstol boasted as he pointed out the trussed roof and studded walls visible on houses’ open sides. “We can have a house ready for delivery in a day and a half.”

       Four halves of houses-to-be stood in a row in an assembly room bi enough for nine or ten. There could be more, Tverstol said, if Red Lake Indusries had more working capital and financing for expansion. Then he could build the additional facility he wants to house more materials and better manage his inventory. Then he could hire more than the 16 people Red Lake Industries employs now.

       It was the same story up the road at Red Lake Custom Doors, where attractive hardwood garage doors are built by six employees. Manager Jeff Java says he has a good business and ideas for making it bigger, if the Red Lake Band of Chippewa that owns it could come up with the financing.

       Help us build capital for businesses and jobs. That’s the message tribal officials want legislators to hear as they plan a renewed push next session for establishment of a joint state-northern tribes gambling casino somewhere in the Twin Cities.

       Gambling figures to be a prominent issue at the Capitol in 2004, even if the state budget hasn’t sprung a several-hundred-million-dollar leak that gaming taxes could fill. It took a personal last stand by Senate DFL leaders to stop last session’s momentum for an expansion of gambling beyond the Indian tribal limits set in 1988.

       The proposal that stood poised to benefit from that momentum was one favored by House Republicans for a casino-at-the-racetrack, or “racino,” at privately owned Canterbury Park in Shakopee. But not far behind was the idea that, before giving private developers a franchise, the state should make gambling of greater benefit to the 30,000 members of the Red Lake aned White Earth Chippewa Bands, whose reservations and casinos lie too far from the Twin Cities to have benefitted much from the enterprise to date.

       Even with jobs available for tribal members at their casinos in Thief River Falls, Red Lake and Warroad, unemployment on the Red Lake Reservation is hovering around 50%. It has swelled in the last year or two, as upwards of 1,3000 tribal members who had urban addresses felt the double squeeze of recession and the exhaustion of welfare benefits, and moved back to the reservation. As a result, more than 400 families are on a waiting list for housing.

       But rather than pleading for compassion, Red Lake officials prefer to showcase opportunity. Tribal Treasurer Darrell Seki Sr. Argues that if the state decides to go after more revenue via gambling, a joint venture with the Red Lake and White Earth Bands would best serve the larger public interest.

       A racino at Canterbury would enrich a small number of already successful individuals as it fattens the state treasury. The Red Lake/White Earth plan is a two-fer: It promises both proceeds for the state and an end to the perpetual flow of welfare checks to the reservations in the state’s northwestern corner.

       “I don’t want to see any more government handouts,” Seki said. “Our dream is to be self-sufficient, to do our own programs, and help our own people, and not rely on Beltrami County for services.”

       The help tribal leaders have in mind is not annual disbursements of casino proceeds to individual tribal members, added Tribal Council member Jim White. “We think the money should stay with the tribe, for economic development.”

       The tribes may have been politically handicapped last session by their history of funding DFL campaigns. But the case they will take to the 2004 Legislature seems fashioned with Republicans in mind.

       Can true-believing Republican lawmakers scorn a chronically impoverished, government-dependent people whose goal in life is to become capitalist? Stay tuned next spring.

Sturdevant is a Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist.