Because they really haven’t had opportunities, and so right now we’re around 700 and just short of 600 of all of our employees are Native American. JIM CONRAD: I think the biggest thing is jobs that are available for tribal members and for others, but mostly for the tribal members. The casino’s CEO, Jim Conrad, says the casino has been an emphatic success.

So has the casino accomplished that goal for the Arapahos? ZHOROV: That was the whole point of Indian-run casinos, to create a revenue stream for tribes. But there is a broad set of rules about what casino money can be used for.īALDWIN: The federal statute, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and regulation and tribes own gaming code requires that net gaming revenues be spent to fund tribal government operations or programs or to provide for the general welfare of the tribe or to promote to the tribe’s economic development.

ZHOROV: With no compact in place and business booming, the tribe should have more money to use as it deems necessary. So the Arapaho tribe is not making that payment. Most tribal state compacts have a provision where the tribe is paying the state some percentage of their revenues every year. One of the things that’s different about that is that there is no funding or no payment going from the tribe to the state.

Andrew Baldwin represented the tribe in court:ĪNDREW BALDWIN: The Northern Arapaho tribe is the only tribe to be operating Class III gaming without a tribal state compact. It took ten years, but when they won, they won big. The Northern Arapaho tribe thought different and fought the state in court for the right to build a casino with the full gamut of gaming. The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act – which established a regulatory structure for Native American gaming – was enacted in 1988 but a decade after that Wyoming law makers still thought that gambling had no place in the state. IRINA ZHOROV: The Wind River Casino has been open for almost a decade but it’s still a novelty to walk into whirring slot machines, dimmed lights, card tables, all on the edge of Riverton on a piece of prairie. Wyoming Public Radio’s Irina Zhorov reports that eight years into the venture, the casino is making money but some wonder where it’s going. The Northern Arapaho Tribe opened the doors to its full-scale casino in 2005.

Wind river casino calendar