Chugging Along

Had I been thinking, the smart thing to do would have been to take note of the odometer on my 2006 Tacoma pick-up. Last week I am pretty sure it read nearly 1200 miles less. But throw in a round trip to Yakima, then Hood River four days later, and then Vancouver, Washington, and those miles will quickly add up. Next week features a short drive or two. Oh well. While the road can wear a person down, so too can the office.
Friday in Vancouver we met with a number of Clark County officials, from county commissioners to city councilors to staff for one of their state senators. I must admit that overall it feels kind of odd to be in another state explaining how Grand Ronde has some historical connection. It seems odd until I think of other tribes who were coerced onto reservations several states away, like the Cherokee of Oklahoma. Then, this history of displacement doesn't seem so strange.
What does seem strange is to think that the United States has always had Indians, some of them nomadic living off of different sized game from buffalo to grouse, while others had mastered agriculture and in the Pacific Northwest especially, fishing. And where these Indians happened to base themselves, or maybe camp for a season, over a century later forms the historic and legal argument for why the descendants of those people should be allowed to build an ultra-modern casino/resort. Did those brave people back then have any notion of that where they were setting out salmon to dry or maybe built a campfire would be the historical seed that would blossom into a sports bar or steakhouse? Yes, Indian gaming has had an interesting narrative.
Several years ago, if I am not mistaken May 2005, we passed a resolution to move some major money as part of an overall strategy to thwart the casino at Cascade Locks. That resolution was just the start, and boy did I hear from constituents and supporters about that one. What I remember that day was the Warm Springs gaming compact ended up being disapproved, meaning the money we were pouring into a media campaign was suddenly moot, at least to me it was. Since then I have been very skeptical of our off-reservation gaming strategy.
Back in March, the U.S. Supreme Court made a ruling on Carcieri, which I will not go into because providing an explanation right now is slightly less important than that what I can say the decision does do is provide a monstrous stumbling block to the Cowlitz Tribe. Their grand casino in La Center now is less likely to happen, and in the event there is still life in the project, another few years have been added to the timeline. Everybody we spoke to yesterday was well aware of it too.
Cowlitz of course is the second prong in Grand Ronde's off-reservation offensive, a strategy that has probably cost us at the very least $6 million. Yet like Cascade Locks, the decision isn't really in our hands, and ultimately we have no way of knowing how effective our moves have been. Some might way we've made the difference, and there are certainly co-workers of mine who believe so. But what the Carcieri decision proves is that there are events beyond our control which will produce the exact almost the same result we've been paying for.
That is what I thought anyway, yesterday at the lunch table. Nonetheless, I still do my part.