California’s Tiniest Tribe Eyes Jackpot

Yakima Dixie has spent much of his adult life in and out of jail. He lives month-to-month on a disability check in a 600-square-foot house heated by wood-burning stoves. The nearest store is seven miles away and he doesn’t own a car.

But Dixie could get an annual $1-million check for up to 20 years if voters in March approve a deal reached earlier this month between the governor and dozens of Indian tribes with gambling operations.

That agreement allows all tribes that forgo casinos, regardless of tribe size, to share gambling revenues. After his relatives either left the reservation or died, the resident population of Dixie’s branch of the Sierra Miwok dwindled to just him.

The tribe grew to five when Dixie provisionally added four more members to qualify for federal funds last year, so he might have to share the money, but his remains the tiniest of the state’s handful of small tribes.

Negotiation of the governor’s agreement strayed briefly into discussion about a tribe size requirement for the revenue sharing, participants say. But the idea was rejected for reasons practical and political: It would provide incentives for tribes to discover long lost relatives and would dredge up an unsavory debate.

“Then you start talking about why are they so small,” said Joshua Pane, a longtime lobbyist for Indians. “That’s because these each are the remnants of 300,000 tribal peoples in the 1800s, and you know what took place. It would be sort of like saying, ‘I’m sorry, there just aren’t many Jews left in Poland.’ ”

Besides, Pane said, the public may be surprised at how few nongambling tribes sign up.

“You may be thinking, ‘Oh, it’s a million dollars; why not do it?’ ” Pane said. “But that’s not the Indian way.”

And indeed, right now the money holds little allure, says Dixie, 59. It’s welfare of the worst kind, he says: charity from gambling tribes that should have helped their fellow Indians all along, not just when forced to do so. Look at the nearby Jackson Rancheria, where several dozen Miwoks have become very wealthy off their casino, he said.

“They’ve got mansions up there; they drive big, fancy cars,” he said. “I’ll be walking to the store and, when they see me, they slow down a little bit and maybe they smile or wave, then they step on the gas.”

At his most suspicious, Dixie figures bigger casinos agreed to the governor’s compact to try to ward off potential competition from other tribes, which must promise not to open a casino in the year they take the revenue check. And Dixie has ideas about maybe getting a casino of his own.

The Years Have Taken Their Toll

Dixie is a contrast of old and young. His eyes are weary, face weathered. He has no teeth. But his body remains lithe from long hikes to shop and fish and from daily workouts with weights.

When he was 7, his mother left his father and moved him and three brothers from nearby Angel’s Camp to join about 90 other Indians--relatives and friends--in Sheep Ranch. The rancheria had been set aside for California Indians without land in 1916, but the house on it was run-down, lacking water, plumbing and electricity.

After Dixie’s mother complained, the federal government in 1966 built the tiny house where he now lives. Soon after, Dixie went to jail for a residential burglary, which was followed by other offenses, including second-degree murder committed during a fight, which sent him to prison. By the time he got out, both his mother and father were dead and, in 1994, his last aunt died when she was almost 100.

Even if Dixie were to get a windfall, he has no cravings for a big house, a hot car or a trip around the world. His dreams are different: to buy the ranch next door, build a cultural center, sweat lodge and office, expand the tribe to a size where children will gather acorns and dance the bear dance again as he did when he was young.

“When I leave this Earth,” he said, “I don’t want to leave [that] all forgotten.”

That’s why Dixie was so responsive several years back when a Miwok woman he’d known as a child drove up. In California, fewer than a fifth of the estimated 320,000 Native Americans are official members of the state’s 100 federally recognized tribes. The woman had been searching for a tribe that would accept her so she could get an Indian scholarship for herself and her daughter.

The idea fit Dixie’s plan to expand and form a tribal council, which he had learned he would need to tap into the approximately $160,000 set aside annually for each small tribe by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. He enrolled her, her two daughters and one daughter’s baby.

(He also hopes to include his only son, who is not automatically a member because legally tribes are more like nations than families, charged with setting their own membership rules. In Dixie’s case, he is still working on his tribe’s bylaws, and the addition of new members is under review by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.)

Visions of Wealth Just Disappear

Last year, the childhood acqaintance heard about an investor from South Dakota who described himself as a multimillionaire. The man came to Dixie’s house and sat in his sacred circle--a canopy of prune plum trees shading five worn chairs and a coffee can of burned sage.

Here’s my proposal, the man said: Because Sheep Ranch Rancheria is too small and isolated, I’ll buy 1,000 acres at a major crossroads and deed it to the tribe. Then I’ll build a casino, a hotel, maybe a golf course. It would mean “at least, at least” $5 million a year for the tribe, Dixie says he was told.

Just last month that deal disintegrated without warning, but Dixie believes that if he has patience, other investors will come courting.

Those who have closely watched the frenzy to get a piece of California’s gaming action are skeptical about such schemes. No such land swap has ever occurred in California, and it would require approval from both the governor and the U.S. Department of the Interior.

“Every tribe in the state has had so-called millionaires approaching them with naive plans on how they could strike it rich in gaming,” said tribal attorney Howard Dickstein. “I personally have been approached on an almost daily basis for five years; 99% of them are either crackpots or uninformed.”

Dixie shrugs. It’s not as though a pile of money could solve all his problems, anyway.

It could remove the minor irritations. Right now, every interaction with the modern world is slowed by his poverty: no fax, no computer, not even a typewriter, and he’s had a telephone only since 1988.

But there’s much more.

Dixie not only spent more than half of his adult life in jail, but since his 1984 parole from prison he has continued to have brushes with the law for such alleged crimes as vandalism, public drunkenness and brandishing a weapon.

He has suffered severe epileptic seizures since his early 20s, leading him to be officially declared unable to work in the early 1990s, after six years of working on a pig farm.

His wife is long-estranged. His younger brother was crushed by a train. His son is in jail.

It goes on and on.

The dream of a casino was the best thing that had happened to Dixie in a long time, maybe ever. Such dreams die hard.

“I had it all planned out,” he said. “But now, I don’t know.”