The Cowlitz Indians say their $510 million casino resort will employ 1,000 people to start with.
Local residents could use some of those jobs, but big questions remain: Who will get them, and will they attract a lot more Native Americans, from other tribes as well as the Cowlitz, when the casino opens in north Clark County in fall 2017?
Tracie Driver, a board member of Kelso-based Ethnic Support Council and part of the Cherokee and Oneida tribes of Oklahoma, said she has friends from as far away as North Carolina planning to apply for work at the Cowlitz casino. She said she expects a rise in Native Americans living in Cowlitz County, where housing costs are much lower than they are in Vancouver and Clark County.
With Cowlitz County unemployment levels stuck in the 7.5 percent to 8.5 percent range, area residents are in need of job opportunities. And Dave Barnett, a Cowlitz tribal member who launched the casino project, said he hopes almost all of the jobs will go to locals.
“Our goal is to hire within our tribe and within the community,” Barnett said.
The La Center-area casino will give preference to Cowlitz tribal members who are qualified, but Cowlitz Chairman Bill Iyall said he expects most employees will come from the surrounding area. Tribal members may not be positioned to move here for employment, Iyall said. That’s because the tribe underwent a diaspora after white settlement of Southwest Washington in the 19th century.
“We’ve been scattered, so our families have been established in other towns. … To relocate for a job at the casino, if you’re equally employed elsewhere, that would be an issue,” Iyall said.
For Cowlitz members who may be interested in the positions, Barnett said most of them already live within a few hours of the reservation. Iyall said he’s letting tribal members know about the opportunities.
The national unemployment rate for American Indians has consistently been higher than 10 percent, double the national average, and federal law allows tribal enterprises to give preference to hiring Indians without violating equal opportunity employment laws. This is partly because reservations — such as the 152-acre area the federal government created for the Cowlitz in 2015 — are sovereign nations.
Robert Anderson, Oneida Indian Nation visiting professor at Harvard University, said jobs at the casinos can be a big draw for American Indians, especially if there’s a chance to work toward management.
“Experience shows that there’s a wide variety of jobs, that people can come in with menial jobs and through training efforts they have in place, they can sort of work their way up the ladder,” he said.
It’s unclear how much the casino jobs will pay, but Iyall said the service industry jobs will pay living wages and include full benefits.
It’s hard to look elsewhere to predict how casino employment will shape up because each case is different.
The Mohegan Tribe, which is managing and helping finance the Cowlitz casino, offers a case in point. About 2.9 percent of the workers at its huge Connecticut casino are Native American; only 0.2 percent of the workforce is American Indian at the tribe’s casino in more rural eastern Pennsylvania. Nationally, Native Americans make up about 1.2 percent of the U.S. population.
Kathryn Rand, co-director of the Institute for the Study of Tribal Gaming and Policy in North Dakota, said tribal casinos are normally built on established and much larger reservations that already have sizable Native American populations. Typically there’s also housing available on the tribal land, so it’s difficult to predict how the Cowlitz casino might change the surrounding area.
“This is a unique type of situation in many ways,” Rand said.
Washington has 28 tribal casinos owned by 22 tribes, according to the Washington State Gambling Commission. Tribes must get federal recognition to operate their own casinos, and the Cowlitz Tribe received its recognition in 2002 after years of struggle.
Today, the tribe has about 3,900 members, largely centered around the Puget Sound area, which is well outside the tribe’s ancestral area in Cowlitz, Lewis and north Clark counties.
The tribe hasn’t had a central location for more than a century. The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs in a report said the Cowlitz had a “dispersed residential pattern” before the end of the 19th century.
‘Watered down’
Driver, of the Ethnic Support Council, said she’s concerned there would be inadequate support for American Indians who want to move to the area.
“We’re not prepared by any means to handle that,” she said.
She said Native Americans will need support navigating cultural differences and misunderstandings with law enforcement, as well as with finding work and getting help with disabilities.
Numerous tribes in the state don’t have federal recognition and might seek to move closer to a tribe with federal recognition that can provide an American Indian community.
Other natives, such as Driver, live thousands of miles from where their tribe is based.
Driver said she focuses on supporting the Cowlitz Tribe and making it strong again. But she said urban areas often create a larger Indian tribe from a combination of many smaller tribes. Tribal communities are “fractured,” she said, and there’s a “loss of identity” through assimilation.
The Cowlitz Tribe can act as a magnet to bring members of many tribes together, but it’s a double-edged sword; Driver said smaller tribes lose their nuanced tribal traditions when they seek opportunities and community through a larger tribe.
“On a personal level, I really get concerned with people losing their tribal connections. It’s so easy to get absorbed,” she said. “Their traditions kind of get watered down or assimilated with other tribes.”
Growing reservation
A 2002 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that, in general, surrounding counties experience job growth and lower mortality rates within four years of the opening of tribal casinos.
Twenty years after the Spirit Mountain Casino opened in Grand Ronde, Ore., Polk County Commissioner Craig Pope said he has seen the economic growth not only in his community, but in the tribe. Grand Ronde is a rural area near Salem, Ore., and the surrounding Portland area, similar to La Center.
“If it weren’t for the casino operations, the tribal community would not be what it is today,” Pope said. “That has made a monster impact on their quality of life as a community.”
According to the U.S. Census, the Native American population in Polk County grew by more than 400 — or 63 percent — between 1990 and 2000, though Indians were still only 1.9 percent of the total population then. Census data from 2014 show that 2.5 percent of Polk County residents identify as Native American alone, more than double the national average.
Spirit Mountain Casino has much more space to provide a hub for population growth. The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde have more than 11,000 acres to provide housing.
The Cowlitz Tribe’s 152 acres is minuscule by comparison. The Cowlitz casino alone, including 100,000 square feet of gaming space, will cover 368,000 square feet — roughly 8.45 acres.
Iyall said he hopes the reservation buys more land when the tribe can afford it. Three years from now, the tribe’s next step is to open a 250-room hotel on the reservation.
“It is a very bright future for the tribe that was landless,” Iyall said.
