The map on the wall of Keith Summers’ tucked-away office hangs as both a reminder of how much his Oneida Indian tribe has lost and a plan to get it back.
For years, the loamy flatland had slipped, parcel-by-parcel, from the tribe for whom it was established by federal treaty in 1838.
“It was unscrupulous. It wasn’t fair,” said Summers, a development manager for the tribe, describing speculators from years past who took advantage of impoverished tribal members.
But with $100 million in gambling revenue flowing in annually, the Wisconsin Oneidas, with a sister tribe by the same name in New York State, are buying back parcels on the map lost to them over the decades.
With that and other initiatives, the tribe is also changing the political landscape that has prevailed for decades in this northeastern region of the state.
In just the last five years, the Oneidas have become the largest employer in Brown County, the fourth most populous county in the state and home to Green Bay.
With that has come political tensions with local officials and issues that are making the story of the Oneidas a case study in the power and responsibility that casinos, if well managed, can thrust on a tribe.
As they grow in influence and wealth, the Oneidas are being courted by local governments who see the casino as a tourist attraction that pumps money into the area’s economy.
At the same time, the tribe is encountering political and legal resistance from these same municipalities, which see the enhancement of tribal power as an erosion of their own.
When Congress passed an act in 1988 authorizing gambling on American Indian lands, the idea was that new harvests of cash would be used to raise the quality of life on reservations, where unemployment is high and social pathologies abound.
Tribes such as the Mashantucket Pequots in Connecticut have doled out benefits made possible by gambling profits to their small membership.
But the Oneidas, while also making large-scale social investments, are reaching beyond the reservation and into the life of Green Bay and the surrounding area in ways that would have been unthinkable two decades ago.
Not only are the Oneidas their county’s biggest employer with 3,600 jobs–55 percent of which are filled by tribal members–the tribe also is diversifying beyond the gambling business, with investments in finance and manufacturing, printing and retail.
The new investments are prompted by concern that a compact with the state allowing casino gambling might not be renewed when it expires next year.
“I never thought we’d be in the telecommunications field, in the electronics field,” said Kathy Hughes, tribal treasurer. “We are having a significant effect on the local economy.”
The power of this fact is not lost on politicians or residents.
“They’ve done a good job here. But it goes back to the Golden Rule–he who has all the gold makes all the rules,” said Roger Boettcher, a supervisor in the Town of Hobart, a municipality entirely within Oneida reservation borders.
The fear in Hobart, as it is in the half-dozen other non-tribal counties and municipalities that overlap the reservation, is that they will lose vital property taxes as the Oneidas put their newly acquired land in tax-free trust.
Brown County Executive Nancy Nusbaum deals with this contentious issue in a way that displays the new realities of life with the Oneida tribe.
“Three thousand jobs–that’s nothing to sneeze at,” said Nusbaum, who has taken hot criticism from some quarters for her support of the Oneidas.
Last month, she successfully lobbied against a resolution before the Brown County Board of Supervisors to sue the federal government over the placement of parcels on the 65,000-acre reservation into tax-exempt federal trust.
Nusbaum credited the effectiveness of her arm-twisting efforts to the fact that the Oneidas run a 301-room hotel that contributes about one-fifth of the tax revenues for a pet project of local politicians, a downtown convention center.
That the Oneidas would attract such political attention or be in such a position of economic strength, she said, is a far cry from the days when tribal members were seen as a politically insignificant nub of the community.
“It’s like night and day,” said Nusbaum, who grew up in the Green Bay area. “Indians were just generally looked at as 2nd-class citizens here, as problematic.”
As recently as the 1970s, unemployment on the reservation was 65 percent, and the welfare caseload was among the highest per capita in the state.
Now, the problems come not from poverty but from a process set in motion when a bingo hall staffed by Oneida volunteers opened its doors in 1976.
“I would never have dreamed it would become like this. Never,” said Louise Cornelius, who worked at the bingo hall in its first years.
Rising through the ranks, today she is 2nd-in-charge of the massive Oneida Bingo Hall & Casino–a sprawling compound of wood and concrete just outside the Green Bay regional airport–which attracts an estimated 2 million gamblers annually.
According to tribal leaders, gambling at the casino and a handful of reservation gas stations with slot machines accounts for about 85 percent of revenues, with the balance netted by smaller concerns and federal money.
Across the reservation, where 2,500 of the tribe’s 13,000 members live, there are new Chevrolet Blazers and snowmobiles, improvements to houses and just-purchased trailer homes.
Construction is set to begin on a new health center, and a state-of-the-art elementary school opened in recent years. The federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children caseload in Outagamie and Brown Counties–within which the reservation is located–has gone down 28 percent since 1991, a drop attributed to new jobs at the casino.
“There’s a self-sufficiency that we’re able to demonstrate now. There are more (gambling) revenues than there are federal dollars. The budget used to be (funded) 100 percent by federal and state (money),” Hughes said.
It is this new capital that tribal leaders say they are trying to protect when they flex their growing political muscle in the face of perceived threats to what euphemistically is called “gaming.”
Last year, the Green Bay City Council adopted a resolution decrying the Oneida practice of removing their newly acquired lands from tax rolls by placing it in federal trust. No substantive action has been taken at the federal level.
And now, there is a lawsuit by a variety of local governments against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over granting the Oneidas rights to regulate the water that flows through the reservation, principally the waters of the choked Duck Creek.
With the Oneidas given these rights as a state, they could make regulatory demands of local governments and landowners upstream.
If the Oneidas prevail in all of the hostile suits and legislative efforts it will be in no small part because of the federal government.
The tribe’s one-time foe, blamed for allowing the treaties of the late 19th Century and early 20th Century that paved the way for the near dissolution of the reservation, now has weighed in on the side of the Oneidas.
But perhaps the most powerful argument the Oneidas have used to protect their gambling operations is the effect it has had on the social lot of the tribe.
If Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson “had 2,000 people knocking on his door tomorrow for welfare, I don’t think he’d be too happy,” Oneida chairwoman Deborah Doxtator said.
