When you walk into an Indian-owned casino in California, you won’t hear balls dropping onto roulette wheels or fast-paced whoops and groans at the craps tables. Rather, you’ll see a roulette-style wheel filled with cards and a far slower-paced crowd at the craps table.

Ball and dice games are not currently legal in California’s Indian casinos, so the tribes have found workarounds to offer games similar to those found in neighboring Nevada. In order to offer gambling at all, tribes in many states, including California and Oklahoma, are required to compact with their state governments.

The process is time-consuming and nuanced. It’s also different in nearly every tribal gaming state in the nation.

During the Western Indian Gaming Conference panel “California and Oklahoma are Very Different States … But Tribes in Both States Face Similar Issues,” held this week at the Pechanga Casino Resort in suburban Los Angeles, tribal leaders shared some of the challenges and differences in compacting state to state. California and Oklahoma are the two U.S. states with the most Indian tribes, but their situations are very different.

California is home to 100-plus tribes who own and operate about 70 casinos. The population of the state is approaching 40 million. Oklahoma is home to 39 tribes that own and operate about 130 casinos. The population of that state is about one-tenth the size of California.

“It’s a case of build it and they will come,”  said Justin Barrett, treasurer of Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and chairman and co-founder of the Tribal Leadership Council. “We are totally oversaturated in the slot market, and people just keep going. There are more slots in Oklahoma than in California.”

Oklahoma tribes required to have ‘model compact’

Sports betting isn’t legal in either California or Oklahoma, and the path to legal wagering has proven challenging.

To expand gambling in California, tribes must take their proposal to voters. If successful at the ballot box, they then would be required to compact with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office.

A first ballot initiative attempt failed, as the tribes decided instead to pool their funds and efforts to kill an effort by commercial operators in 2022 to legalize online sports betting. With that effort in the rearview mirror, California’s tribes will try again, possibly as soon as the 2026 ballot.

These are the same compacts the Oklahoma Supreme Court found invalid because they included provisions not found in the statutory model gaming compact, which could be cured by the committee's approval.

— Shawn Ashley (@QuorumCallShawn) September 19, 2023

In Oklahoma, an expansion of gaming can happen without voter approval. Instead, it can occur through a “model compact” signed by the tribes and the governor’s office. The model compact means that every tribe in the state has the same compact, and that tribes that do not re-compact may be left in poorer situations than those who do.

Oklahoma’s tribes have long stood together through the Oklahoma Indian Gaming Association (OIGA), negotiating as a group. In 2020, two tribes attempted to re-compact with Gov. Kevin Stitt to add sports betting. The compacts altered the fees that tribes agreed to pay to the state, but were ultimately deemed invalid by the courts and the two tribes were cast out of OIGA.

“There is no model compact in California,” California Indian Nations Association chairman James Siva said during the panel. “They would love it, but the tribes won’t allow it.”

Under California law, every tribe has the right to negotiate its own terms directly with the governor, but “there are still issues,” said Siva, who is member of the Morongo Band of Mission Indians, which operates a casino and resort near Palm Springs.

Personalities and politics

Regardless of the kind of compact that a tribe must craft, tribes in all states are required to work with the governor’s office. Who the governor is can determine how easy or difficult it is to find a compromise.

Siva said Newsom’s office has been the best to work with in recent memory, while Oklahoma’s Gov. Kevin Stitt has been among the worst in the eyes of the state’s tribes.

Over the last four years, Stitt has tried to find ways to infringe on Indian Country’s gaming exclusivity through deals with small tribes, opinions from the attorney general, and legal cases. Oklahoma tribal leaders say that not only has Stitt failed, but that they may wait until his term expires in 2027 to make any real effort to move forward.

“The relationship that Gov. Stitt has with tribes is one that no one wants to follow,” Jamie Hummingbird, chairman of the National Tribal Gaming Commissioners and Regulators, said. “Our compacts auto-renew for 20 years, but he doesn’t believe that. He won’t stop. We have exclusivity and he says, ‘No, we want to offer [sports betting] to commercial operators,’ and that has created more friction with the governor’s office.”

Hummingbird and Barrett  said the state legislature has been “more favorable” to deal with. That said, a bill was filed on Stitt’s behalf that would have sports betting run through the lottery. The tribes would retain exclusivity for in-person betting, but the lottery would have an undisclosed number of licenses to issue, and the bill does not require that online operators be tethered to tribal casinos.

That structure, from a tribal perspective, not only gives the state too much power, but it also would encroach on the tribes’ exclusivity.

News 9 sat down with Stitt to discuss a new proposal that he’s laid out, that would bring in-person and mobile sports betting to Oklahoma.  https://t.co/JDzNunpJDr

— News 9 (@NEWS9) February 9, 2024

“We still have a contentious relationship,” Hummingbird said, “and that’s definitely a model you don’t want.”

Said Barrett: “We don’t want to negotiate with the Senate and the House and then leave the governor to veto it.”

Nearly six years after the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act was struck down and sports betting was made a states’ rights issue, the situations in California and Oklahoma continue to percolate. The right for states to make their own decisions in relation to sports betting — and, ultimately, online casino — has shone a light on a complicated process that tribes have been dealing with for decades.

“It’s important looking at these two states,” Siva said. “They drive the collective tribal gaming in the U.S. There are other important operations, but as states, these two are the biggest.”

Photo: Jill R. Dorson