Monday, Jan. 5, 2004 | 9:09 a.m.
RED CLIFF, Wis. -- A decade of tribal gambling has spread the wealth unevenly among Wisconsin's Indian reservations, bringing phenomenal increases in living standards for two but leaving the other nine still struggling with poverty and lagging incomes, an Associated Press review found.
The review of U.S. Census Bureau figures found that the Potawatomi reservation in northern Wisconsin and the Oneida reservation in northeast Wisconsin saw their incomes skyrocket and their poverty rates plummet between 1990 and 2000.
However, despite sometimes significant improvements in living standards, eight of the state's 11 tribal reservations still had higher poverty rates in 2000 than the state average. Nine remained below the state's median household income level in the 2000 census.
On the bustling Oneida reservation, where the wealth is reflected in a gleaming new health center, a new school and scores of other projects, the poverty rate of families dropped to 4 percent in 2000 from 22.6 percent in 1990, the AP found.
Meanwhile, the median, or midpoint, household income adjusted for inflation rose nearly 145 percent, to $60,404 during the decade.
After years of working off-reservation in dangerous, depressing jobs such as in a steel factory, Oneida member Dennison Danforth, 59, now works the land in the fresh air at an organic garden on an Oneida farm.
"There's more opportunity for the tribal members than when I was growing up," Danforth said. "It's changed. There's definitely less poverty."
The other tribe to hit it big, the Potawatomi in Forest County, saw median household income on its reservation climb more than 300 percent in the decade to $62,250 in 2000. The family poverty rate dropped to just 5 percent, from 46.2 percent in 1990.
However, at the far northern tip of Wisconsin, on a 15,000-acre reservation littered with trashed vehicles and trailers in need of repair, gambling has done little to improve the lives of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.
With little traffic, the casino struggles in a converted bowling alley, barely a break-even operation. Compacts with the state require the tribes to make annual payments of gambling revenue. But the Red Cliff casino has made so little that the tribe made no such payments under their old five-year compact. The tribe even received a $52,000 monthly donation from the wealthy Potawatomi to help out, its chairman said.
Census figures show a quarter of the reservation's families lived in poverty in 2000, barely better than in 1990.
The median household income was $24,412 in 2000, up only $1,000 from 1990.
Tribal chairman Ray DePerry says the tribe can't afford to offer much needed services such as dental care and home repair.
"We have no revenue. We have no money," DePerry said. "I can't believe in this day and age we just don't have these things."
Off to the west, another tribe, the Ho-Chunk Nation, has three relatively large casinos raking in millions a year. But the reservation, spread across parts of 13 counties, struggled with a family poverty rate of 18.6 percent in 2000, down just 4.5 percentage points from 1990.
Spokesman Ed Littlejohn said although progress has been slower there, facilities are improving on the reservation, and tribal members over 18 now receive a monthly payout of $1,000 from gambling. More and more are dropping off the welfare rolls, he said.
"It's a godsend. We've ended up getting our people out of the tar-paper shacks in the backwoods and getting them into decent housing," he said.
Before Wisconsin signed its first Indian gaming compact in 1991, the tribes argued that gaming money would allow them to improve the quality of life for Indians by building better housing, schools and infrastructure.
Patricia Loew, a member of the Bad River tribe and an assistant professor of Indian relations at the University of Wisconsin, said driving onto a Wisconsin reservation before 1989, "you would have seen virtually no economic infrastructure."
"Now I see better cars, better housing, small little cafes, convenience stores, art shops," she said.
Loew said the Oneida are a textbook example of what to do with gaming money.
On their 20,000-acre reservation near Green Bay, the Oneida have a new $16 million health facility with access to doctors, dentists, an optometrist and a pharmacy, all in a gleaming wood-and-stone center. Nearby, a day-care center offers a range of childhood programs, and a modern elementary school teaches children their Oneida history.
"We offer our community so many services now, when prior to gaming we were relying on welfare and social services to provide for us," tribal spokeswoman Bobbi Webster said.
Seven round-the-clock casinos with more than 3,200 slot and video poker machines, a massive bingo hall and investments in banks and hotels pay for it. The tribe's $3 million annual budget even includes sponsoring a gate entrance at Lambeau Field, home to the NFL's Green Bay Packers.
A legislative audit bureau report said Wisconsin's 11 Indian tribes made more than $400 million in profit in 2002 at their 23 casinos around the state, up nearly 60 percent in five years.
The Potawatomi collected a large portion of that with their flashy off-reservation casino in Milwaukee's Menomonee Valley, packed with restaurants and attractions. The tribe also operates a casino near Carter in Forest County, about 200 miles north. The tribe has aggressive plans to double its casino space and add a hotel as part of its new compact with the state.
It's a sharp turnaround in fortunes for the Potawatomi. Census figures show they had the lowest median income of all Wisconsin reservations in 1990, but they now have the highest.
Federal law requires that the tribes spend gaming revenue on governmental or charitable programs such as housing, schools, economic development and health care.
The United Tribes of Wisconsin estimates that more than 7,800 people work in the state's Indian gambling operations, and thousands more work at related restaurants, hotels, and for tribal governments. Two-thirds of the nearly 15,000 tribal workers statewide are not Indian, the United Tribes said.
Red Cliff Chairman DePerry is banking on a new state deal to bring some of those jobs up north. A never-ending time limit means the tribe can secure financing for a hotel-casino-marina destination he envisions on the Lake Superior shore.
"If we have the revenue, we could fix these roads, we could fix up these homes," said DePerry, surveying the reservation. "There's just so much to do up here, so much."
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