Casino Holds All the Aces, Some Say

A quick drive across the Chumash reservation suggests a long, painful story.

The trip takes all of 90 seconds.

The lands of the people who once settled the 7,000 square miles between Malibu and Morro Bay have dwindled. Now, the Santa Barbara County reservation of the Santa Ynez Chumash is half the size of Dodger Stadium and the parking lots around it.

But as the reservation--known to the Chumash as “the rez”--marks its 100th birthday this year, tribal officials are celebrating a sweet irony: The land--128 acres of steep hillsides and a periodically flooding creek--that was worthless enough to give to the Indians has become one of the most valuable chunks of real estate in the Santa Ynez Valley.

Eight years ago the Santa Ynez Chumash followed the lead of tribes across the United States and opened a casino. With nearly 500 workers, it is now far and away the valley’s largest employer. Slot machines and poker tables have afforded the tribe undreamed-of prosperity--but also have triggered the fears of neighbors who say the casino is growing too big, too fast and too far beyond local control.

A state ballot measure last year spurred growth at dozens of Indian casinos, even allowing a landless tribe to attempt to establish a reservation on the site of a shopping mall in Oxnard, 500 miles from home. With such frenzied activity, conflict between tribes and their neighbors isn’t unusual.

“It’s very common,” says Cheryl Schmit, founder of a gambling watchdog group called Stand Up California. “If tribes are such guardians of the environment, you’d think they’d have more consideration for the environment we all share.”

Tribal officials said they are the targets of cheap shots propelled by jealousy and fear.

“They’re afraid the tribe will be a powerful part of the community,” says Vincent Armenta, chairman of the Santa Ynez Chumash. “Before, we were quiet, pushed aside, taken for granted.”

Inside the casino there is no sign of controversy, and aside from a number of employees, little sign of anything Chumash. When the loudspeaker blares the name of a drawing winner, a man leaps from his table at the snack bar and races up front to claim his booty of $500.

In a cavern without windows or clocks, hundreds of customers--grandmothers from Santa Maria, young couples from Oxnard--sit for hours at slot machines with names like Cash Crop and California Dreamin’, pushing buttons, smoking cigarettes, hoping for the big win.

Guiding a visitor, Armenta glances up at a vast ceiling painted with a turquoise sky. In the clouds, he points to the faint outline of Chumash icons: a dolphin here, a turtle there.

“They’re subtle,” says Armenta, a stocky, affable man who used to work construction in Los Angeles. “Can you see them?”

For years, the reservation itself was not an obvious presence in the Santa Ynez Valley, a tranquil spot where tourists can raise a glass at high-tone wineries or wolf down butter-rich pastries in the faux-Danish village of Solvang.

On the reservation, a few dozen families lived in trailers and rundown wooden or adobe houses. It wasn’t until the 1960s that residents had electricity, telephones or running water, despite the extension of utilities to nearby towns many decades earlier.

“I remember doing my homework by the light of a kerosene lamp,” says Tonie Flores, a retired beautician who, along with about half of the Santa Ynez Chumash, still lives on the reservation.

“We used water from the creek for showering and washing dishes.”

For Flores, the casino has meant a secure retirement and enough cash to help her six grown children.

For some younger Chumash, though, it has transformed the burden of poverty into the stigma of affluence.

“At school, people tease us,” says Krista Armenta, 14, a sandy-haired eighth-grader who is the chairman’s niece. “But it’s not like our parents give us all this cold, hard cash.’

Tribal officials are quick to point out that they contributed more than $1 million to local charities last year and have granted Chumash students $1 million in scholarships since 1998. Unemployment is zero, tribal leaders say, and medical care is dispensed from a clinic built with casino profits.

Times are good and promise to get better. Under Proposition 1A, a ballot measure approved last year, tribal officials in California believed that they had until Tuesday to increase their biggest moneymakers--slot machines--to a maximum of 2,000. By comparison, Caesars Palace in Las Vegas has 1,628 slots.

Rushing to meet the deadline--which the state last week said never really existed but that it nonetheless canceled just the day before--the Chumash casino installed more than 1,100 new machines.

To accommodate the anticipated crowds, the tribe is building a 1,100-space, multilevel parking garage--the tallest building, even if by just one foot, in the Santa Ynez Valley. A larger casino complex looms in the future, though tribal officials say plans have not yet been set.

The boom hasn’t been entirely welcomed by others in the valley, who say casino patrons will clog country roads and strain local police and firefighters.

Gail Marshall, the Santa Barbara County supervisor who represents the area, contends that the tribe uses its status as a sovereign government to skirt environmental laws.

“Any other developer in the county would have to pay substantial fees to mitigate traffic impacts,” she said. “At the reservation they’ll have a four-story parking structure sitting right on a creek; no place [else] in the state of California can you do that legally.”

Gambling on Indian reservations in California is governed by a “compact” struck between tribes and Gov. Gray Davis in 1999. But critics of the agreement say the pact doesn’t require an Indian casino to share its revenue with local governments. The state receives 7% to 13% of slot machine profits, but the cities and counties most directly affected by casinos must ask legislators for a portion of the take.

Santa Ynez Valley residents such as Charles Jackson say they are pleased by the tribe’s success, but enough, they suggest, is enough.

“For 200 years, they’ve gotten the short end of the stick,” said Jackson, who leads a group opposed to the expansion. “No one can begrudge them that. But we’ve got 162 tribal members who have decided to bring a huge traffic problem to the valley, and basically we’ve had no input into it.”

Tribal leaders counter that they are meeting all the requirements of the law and are trying to be thoughtful neighbors. They say their new parking garage will be partly hidden, tucked between a hillside and trees to be planted nearby. They also say they have pledged $300,000 toward county paramedic services, and have promised to lobby the Legislature for a return of some casino revenues to Santa Barbara County.

Still, mistrust runs high on both sides.

Choyi S’lo, a former welder who says he returned to the reservation for spiritual reasons, recites a litany of past abuses: Forced labor at the early missions. The brutal quashing of a Chumash rebellion by Mexican soldiers in 1824. A bounty on Chumash scalps in the 1850s. Degradation of Chumash ways by generations of the people Choyi S’lo calls “the colonials.”

“These are our realities,” he says.

A slender man with flowing gray hair, the 59-year-old Choyi S’lo teaches a few younger people Chumash lore. As he ambles barefoot from his mobile home to the sweat lodge he is building, he apologizes to a sapling oak for a visitor’s misstep. He speaks of parallel universes, the power of dreams, the magic of dolphins, the spirits that fly on the wind.

“They tolerate my oddities here,” he says jokingly. “Somewhere else--I don’t know, maybe they’d throw me in jail.”

On a breezy Saturday morning, Choyi S’lo and half a dozen other Chumash chant and spread sage at the cemetery of Mission Santa Ines, founded by Spanish monks in 1804 and built largely with Chumash labor. Each year they perform this ceremony, paying tribute to ancestors who lie in mostly unmarked graves. Some of the early burial records have disappeared, making identification of the dead impossible.

“They’ve got 2,000 of our ancestors,” says Choyi S’lo in a quavering voice. “It’s so unbelievable that Europeans expect us to forget our relatives, our grandfathers’ faith.”