Along California’s rugged northwest coast, a freshly paved highway exit
marked “Bald Hills Road” is for most nothing more than the entrance to Lady
Bird Johnson Grove and Redwood National Park. For the Yurok, the state’s
largest and perhaps poorest American Indian tribe, it’s where the road home,
and the Yuroks’ struggles, begin. Past the park, Bald Hills quickly narrows
to a deadly, one-lane logging path and snakes high into the Pacific coastal
range. Around blind corners and frequent cliffs, charred remains of Jeeps
and rusted cars litter the ditches of a 40-mile-long washboard welcome mat.
It is a clan the state, if not time itself, has left behind. For years, the
Yurok have asked California lawmakers for permission to operate slot
machines to begin making the money they say could help pull the poorest of
their 5,000 out of grinding poverty. Their casino would be so remote it
would seem few might visit, but the tribe estimates it could bring in more
than $1 million a year, as much as doubling its discretionary budget in bad
years and allowing the tribe to begin saving money to pave, or at least
regularly grade, roads such as Bald Hills. Here, surrounded by steep hills
and stripped redwood forests, hundreds of Yuroks survive dug into the
remote, muddy banks of the Klamath River. Most live without electricity or
clean running water in clusters of dilapidated trailers supplied after a
flood when Lyndon B. Johnson was president.
Children still learn in one-room schools. Wood fires warm homes. And a tribe
that once thrived off salmon grapples with a river with few fish. The
tribe’s only jobs come from federal grants, or in helping timber companies
take the very trees Yuroks believe to be their own. The way the Yuroks’
gambling efforts have been thwarted for years, both through bureaucratic
slip-ups and in the crossfire of larger political feuds in the state
Capitol, is the story of a tribe beset by misfortunes as confounding as any
in the state. Whether the Yurok can begin to escape their troubled past
remains entirely unclear, but the issue is likely to come up again when the
Legislature reconvenes Jan. 3. In the short decade since voters approved
gambling on Indian land, the Yurok tribe has morphed from a poster child for
needy tribes to an anomaly. Many tribes have become so rich from
mega-casinos erected from Palm Springs to the Sacramento suburbs that the
disparity between them and those such as the Yurok is now staggering. Nearly
50 tribes raked in a combined $13 billion from gambling in 2004, according
to the California Attorney General’s office, and their casino profits
continue to rise.
By comparison, counting every cent of its federal grants, timber sales and
$1.1 million from a state fund that shares casino revenues between rich
tribes and poor ones, the Yurok spent $12 million last year. That’s less
than what one of the richest, the Agua Caliente Band of Mission Indians near
Palm Springs, is spending to appoint rooms in its new resort hotel with
granite counter tops, whirlpool baths, plasma-screen TVs and other luxuries.
Widening the economic gap between the tribes, rich ones also spend tens of
millions on political contributions in the state capital supporting laws
limiting competition and increasing their profits. Sometimes that means
big-game tribes work to subvert small tribes’ efforts to get into the
business.
At the same time, antigambling forces and labor unions have stepped up
efforts in Sacramento to block expansion of Indian casinos they say have
already far outstripped – even perverted – what voters intended, and left
thousands of workers in the state without protections commonly afforded in
casinos from Las Vegas to Atlantic City.
Caught in the middle are tribes such as the Yurok.
“Gaming can do a lot of good for tribes, and for the Yurok it could be a
small part of a larger solution needed to help them,” said former state Sen.
Wesley Chesbro, D-Arcata, who unsuccessfully lobbied for years for the Yurok
compact until he was termed out in the fall. “Compounding their trouble,
however, has been the increased efforts of big-game tribes to squash those
who are not yet gaming. Yurok stands out as the most disturbing example of
that.”
The Yuroks’ most recent attempt to win rights to a modest 99 slot machines
was cut short in the fall when a compact they signed with Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger was held hostage in a political showdown between labor and
large gaming tribes over 20,000 new slot machines and bigger casinos, mostly
to be built in Southern California.
In the delicate words of the Yuroks’ deputy executive director, Reweti Wiki,
the tribe’s journey is analogous to the childhood misadventure story of
‘Lemony Snicket.’ “It’s been a series of unfortunate events,” he said,
forcing a smile through clenched teeth.
Others have a harder time hiding their disgust.
After four hours trekking through a remote swath of the reservation, Frankie
Myers, the tribe’s planning director and budding cultural leader, blurts out
his true feelings.
“We got screwed, and we continue getting screwed. I think that’s the
underlying issue in everyone’s psyche,” said Myers.
Other problems facing the tribe, such as a diabetes epidemic, rampant
methamphetamine abuse and a lack of higher education, also are rooted in
years of poverty and neglect and won’t be easily solved, even if the tribe
is allowed to offer gaming.
