I first started at the Bemidji (Minn.) Pioneer as an intern in the summer of 1996. That would begin six years as a news reporter, sports reporter and copy editor for a small, six-day-per-week daily newspaper in northern Minnesota. I wrote a large range of stories from multiple beats, to features to sports, my favorite being the coverage of the Red Lake Reservation High School basketball team named the Warriors. Here is a collection of my stories from my time at the Pioneer.
Aug. 29, 1999
By Devlyn Brooks
Traveling home to Mahnomen during the years it took her to earn her first two college degrees, Kate Spilde couldn't help but think there was an important study in what casino gaming had done for the White Earth Reservation in the early 1990s.
She had a bachelor's and master's in anthropology, and she couldn't help but see the human side to the gaming explosion.
"I would come home to Mahnomen and I was kind of watching as the (Shooting Star) casino was being built," she said in a telephone interview Thursday. "By that time, I was trained as an anthropologist, and I was thinking this is a study -- a dissertation -- waiting to be done."
Those observations and some further research eventually earned Spilde a doctorate in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a 1998 dissertation regarding the gamine experience at White Earth.
She now spends her time defending American Indian gaming as the recently hired director of research at the National Indian Gaming Association -- a trade group association that lobbies on behalf of Indian gaming in Washington, D.C.
She started her job in August.
Spilde says her main responsibilities will include researching the social and economic impacts of gaming on tribes, developing an Indian gaming research and library center in Washington and mobilizing that information to defend Indian gaming.
"We're trying to establish ourselves as the premier resource on Indian gaming in the country," she said, adding she hopes tribal leaders and scholars will come to NIGA when studying Indian gaming in the future.
Prior to working for NIGA, Spilde worked as a policy analyst/writer for the National Gaming Impact Study Commission and helped write segments of the final "Gambling in America" document -- a major report that documented many aspects of gambling nationwide.
Spilde, although not an Indian, knows a lot about Indian gaming from growing up in Mahnomen, home to the White Earth Reservation's Shooting Star Casino. In the early 1990s, the Shooting Star almost instantly became famous and was the first top-of-the-line casino in northern Minnesota. With that success came not only tragedies, such as the indictment of tribal leaders -- including former Tribal Chairman Darryll "Chip" Wadena -- on fraud charges stemming from the building of the casino, but triumphs as well.
She says people will ask her whether her dissertation found that gaming had a negative or positive impact on White Earth.
"There's no clear answer," she said. "White Earth, like many tribes, is using its gaming income to pick up the slack where the federal government failed them. Now, they have a casino, and they're providing that for themselves."
For instance, she said prior to White Earth developing their gaming operation, the reservation nearly had 80 percent unemployment.
"People that had jobs (at the casino), they were excited to talk about the other side of gaming, the good side," she said, "because it seems the press statewide was interested more in the Wadena trial."
Spilde says people wonder why Indians would choose such a potentially dangerous industry as gambling to save their reservations because it is damaging their culture or because they think Indians are prone to develop pathological gambling problems.
"Why gambling? Of course, that is a very complicated answer," Spidle said. "First, it's the only thing that has worked ... for many reasons.
"Nobody worried about poverty hurting their culture, diabetes running rampant," she continued. "Only now that there's something kind of sexy, and really worth a lot of money, that people are interested in impacts."
Now, working at NIGA, Spilde said she hopes to publish parts of her dissertation that are pertinent to current debates concerning gaming.
She said she also wants to help protect gaming as a valuable resource for Indians because it is a valuable means to an economic end for many tribes.
"In the nation picture, tribes have done very well expanding into convention centers and golf courses," she said, mostly because they had the resources available from gaming to help diversify.
"The attacks against Indian gaming are nonstop. Because Congress is the ultimate authority, there is a constant struggle," she said. "(The tribes) know they are very vulnerable for a number of reasons. They're all pretty much planning for the future."
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