Gambling at the tribal fair? It almost happened
By Bill Donovan
Special to the Times
Sept. 9, 2010
Casteel, who came to work for Chairman Peter MacDonald Sr. from a radio station in Gallup, was hired to publicize the Navajo position in the long-standing Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute.
But he also took up the job of promoting the fair and attracting more non-Navajos to the event. It was Casteel who came up with the idea of bringing in B-list screen stars such as Broderick Crawford, Jill St. John and Jock Mahoney to give the fair a little Hollywood glamour.
But his biggest idea was convert a tent on the fairgrounds into a miniature casino, complete with slot machines and other gaming devices.
He had made arrangements with a Las Vegas casino owner to bring the machines down and set them up at the fair and hoped that if there was enough interest shown, the Navajo Nation could take the lead in Indian gaming and maybe open its own casino within a few years.
Other tribes, mostly in Florida and California, had just begun looking into gaming as a serious possibility and a couple, including the Seminoles of Florida, had started bingo operations.
In 1979 the U.S Supreme Court ruled that if a state permitted some form of gaming, such as a lottery, then tribes within its borders also had the right to run a gaming operation. In 1988, Congress passed laws that formalized the whole process.
Casteel had hoped he would be able to set up the gaming tent quietly but about a week before the fair, officials leaked the information to the media and it not only made headlines in papers in New Mexico and Arizona but throughout the U.S.
It attracted a lot of attention to that year's fair, but it also alerted federal authorities that the Navajos were up to something that at the time was illegal.
Well, a little illegal.
At about the same time, law enforcement officials from off the reservation raided a bazaar in St. Michaels, Ariz., where some minor gaming was going on to raise money for the St. Michael Indian Mission.
The operation was shut down but the only persons arrested were non-Navajos, including an attorney for the tribe, Michael Stuhff. It seems that while it was legal for Navajos to gamble, it was illegal for non-Navajos.
This may have been what triggered the idea in Casteel's mind. He had no problem convincing folks in Las Vegas to cooperate because they were already looking for ways to spread their operations beyond Nevada and were very interested in establishing partnerships with Indian tribes.
But once news of Casteel's plan became public, the feds stepped in. There was talk of a possible conflict with Washington over the Navajos' sovereign rights but it never got that far because federal authorities took another approach - making it known that they would not allow gaming devices to be transported over state lines without their approval.
That ended any talk of gaming at the 1976 fair, but one can only speculate on what might have happened if things had gone the other way. If the Navajo Nation had indeed decided to take the lead in developing a gaming industry on its land back in the late '70s or early 1980s, life here might have been very different in the decades since then.
The continued reliance on coal, oil and gas - non-renewable resources whose extraction primarily enriches non-Navajo corporate interests - would be broken. The jobs generated for Navajos would bring money and enhanced self-respect to communities up to 50 miles from each casino location.
By now, casinos would have been up and running on the reservation for almost 30 years and instead of just now launching its gaming industry, the Navajo Nation would be deciding what to do with the millions in annual revenues generated for the tribe's operating budget.
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