Michelle Seaton
07/01/2007
Until the mid-1970s, native tribes encountered great difficulty building viable business ventures. That changed in 1975, when Seminole Marcellus Osceola asked the tribal council for permission to sell cigarettes on reservation lands—a move that puzzled council members who knew the challenges of trying to sell products on remote lands with few roads and fewer buildings. Osceola explained that if the reservation were truly a sovereign government, then federal and state taxes on cigarettes would not apply. In theory, he could buy cigarettes wholesale, and then sell them at a slightly discounted cost to the consumer, while pocketing larger margins for himself. The tribe agreed, and Osceola arranged to give the tribe 10 percent of his profits. Business boomed until Broward County sheriff Bob Butterworth (who eventually was elected Florida state attorney general) slapped an injunction on the tribe. The tribe countersued and won.
That decision was the thin edge of the wedge. Until that moment, sovereignty on tribal lands centered around preserving cultural distinctiveness and managing government handouts. The Seminoles had found a more assertive interpretation of sovereignty. Perhaps true sovereignty meant that state-imposed taxes and other restrictions on legal activities might be ignored—with astonishing financial results. According to historian Henry Kersey in his book, An Assumption of Sovereignty, smoke shops built on various Seminole lands had paid $1.6 million to the tribe by 1980.
By then, the Seminoles had found another restriction to disregard. At that time, bingo was the only legal form of gambling in the state of Florida, and it carried a restriction of $50 in winnings per game. Once each night, the local church hall or Rotary club could offer a single grand prize of up to $200. In the fall of 1979, the Seminoles opened their own bingo hall. On the very first night, a single game could net a winner $10,000, while the grand prize totaled $50,000. The bingo hall proved alarmingly popular. Florida’s demographics, swollen with new retirees, their offspring and the middle-age empty nesters who visit them, is perfect for gambling of any sort, and an especially good location for high-stakes bingo. The Seminoles set up bus lines to bring in players from nearby towns and packed the halls.
Butterworth wasted no time in getting an injunction against
what he viewed as anarchy. This time, the Seminole’s legal challenge made it all
the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court refused to issue a ruling, but
sided with a lower court that gave the Seminole tribe free rein in regulating
gaming on its own lands. At that point, sovereignty stopped being a concept and
became a legal precedent. With that decision, the $23 billion industry that is
Native American gaming, a sector that makes more money annually than the
combined gambling income of Nevada, New Jersey and Mississippi, became
inevitable.
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