Commentary –

 Even If Pequots Are A Fraud,

What’s The Alternative To The Casino

By Chris Powell

Sam Gejdenson, eastern Connecticut representative for two decades, is caught in the middle of the feud between the Mashantucket Pequot tribe and officials and residents of towns near the tribe’s Foxwoods casino.

Emboldened by the new book by Jeff Benedict, Without Reservation, which suggests that the Pequots contrived their ancestry and misled Congress about the land they sought, those who resent the tribe’s encroachments have asked Gejdenson to seek a congressional investigation that could lead to repeal of the legislation he co-sponsored in 1983 conferring federal recognition on the tribe outside the usual administrative channels. The town officials and residents are upset that Gejdenson has only perfunctorily passed along their request to Congress and isn’t throwing himself into the issue. Instead he is urging the tribe to be more forthcoming with its genealogical records and the towns to negotiate their differences with the tribe directly.

In effect, Gejdenson has signified that he is not going to try to bring down the tribe he helped raise up – helped create, really, since no one had any interest in being a Pequot until federal recognition raised the prospect of a casino monopoly. So the tribe’s encroachments may become an issue in Gejdenson’s campaign for reelection.

But while they don’t seem to realize it, the people clamoring against the tribe have a couple of serious problems.

The first is that, while Benedict’s book has given them a great boost and has not yet been effectively rebutted by the tribe, they well may not represent anything close to a majority in the 2nd Congressional District.

Quite apart from the tribe’s great wealth and its campaign contributions, its casino is the largest private employer in eastern Connecticut, with 11,500 people earning good livings there. These people have friends and family who vote and who presumably would be pro-casino. Then there are the tribe’s innumerable charitable contributions; some recipients might be grateful. Gamblers make up another constituency that probably would be pro-casino too.

By contrast, most people in the 2nd District do not live close enough to Foxwoods to have been inconvenienced by its traffic or to have seen their property values fall because of it. Indeed, by raising employment so much, Foxwoods and its cousin across the Thames River, the Mohegan Sun casino, have strengthened property values in eastern Connecticut in general.

The second problem of the opponents of the reconstituted Pequots is the lack of a plausible alternative to the status quo.

That is, supposing Congress found that the reconstituted Pequots are a fraud and obtained federal recognition under false pretenses, and supposing that Congress repealed the recognition law, what would become of the casino and its related properties?

Is Foxwoods to be abandoned or torn down and its 11,500 employees dismissed abruptly? Is it to become state government property and continued in operation under state ownership, or perhaps turned over to the Mohegans for continued operation? What sort of compensation would have to be paid to the Pequots and their bondholders for such condemnation of property? How would such action get around years and years of litigation?

Unless Foxwoods is to be put out of business entirely and not used for much of anything, just left towering over Ledyard as a white elephant, its encroachments would not be undone and future encroachments would not be prevented. They would just continue under different ownership.

And even if the federal Indian Gaming Act was repealed, as it should be, since it confers privileges on the basis of ethnicity and is unnecessary to the maintenance of any ethnic group, even as it is the only reason people in Connecticut have had for seeking recognition as Indian tribes, what about state government’s casino revenue? How would those tens of millions of dollars be made up each year? For government in Connecticut is simply addicted to gambling.

Unmasking the reconstituted Pequots and taking away their casino would be politically satisfying to their neighbors and to small-d democrats, but it can’t be done without settling those other issues. And people who themselves are unprepared to settle them shouldn’t be so angry that their congressman isn’t ready to take to the warpath against the status quo, a warpath whose destination is unknown.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester. )