What is reservation shopping?

In recent years, tribes around the country have been trying to locate optimum sites for casinos and then working to have them taken into trust. Whether the tribe has a connection to the land seems to matter less than whether the site has easy access to an interstate and a metropolitan area—large numbers of potential gamblers.

As CARS chairman Edward Lynch says, “Reservation shopping redefines the term ‘sacred ground’ to mean ‘any land near an interstate highway with an interchange close to a metropolitan center.’”

Tribes have been able to obtain these properties despite a law that prohibits gaming on land taken into trust after Oct. 17, 1988. That law, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), makes specific exceptions. The most frequently granted exceptions preclude local governments from having any say over the process.

An Example

In southwest Washington, the Cowlitz Tribe has been attempting to get land taken into trust for a casino at the Interstate 5-La Center interchange under two exceptions to IGRA: the initial reservation and restored lands.

The Cowlitz Tribe’s situation is somewhat unusual as it is considered landless: In the 1800s it resisted being transferred to a federally established reservation.

But in 1969 and 1971, after years of study, the Indian Claims Commission identified and designated 1.7 million acres as the Cowlitz Tribe’s aboriginal homeland, with the southernmost point at the mouth of the Kalama River in Cowlitz County. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) later affirmed the decision stating in 2002 that “Cowlitz Indian Tribe villages ranged a distance of 60 miles from the source to the mouth of the Cowlitz River with an important center at the well-known landmark of the Cowlitz Indian Mission.”

The tribe, however, is seeking trust land outside those areas, at the Interstate 5 La Center junction. It first applied for an initial reservation in March 2004 - surprising Clark County, which had just signed an intergovernmental agreement with the Tribe - and then quietly applied for restored lands in March 2005.

According to July 2005 testimony before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, to qualify for either the initial reservation or restored lands exception, a tribe must show that it has strong geographic and historic ties to the land. Beyond a few tribal members, the Cowlitz Tribe has never had a homeland in Clark County, according to the BIA and the Indian Claims Commission.

Despite that, on November 23, 2005, the National Indian Gaming Commission broke with precedent and issued an opinion stating that the land in which the Cowlitz casino developers are interested is their restored land. The Department of the Interior (DOI) later took the unusual step of initiating a separate review of that opinion. The final decision rests with DOI.

For more details about the Cowlitz Tribe's questionable acquisition of a restored lands opinion, see the Restored Lands Opinion fact sheet.