I find this letter to the editor of Capitol Weekly to be especially poignant. The writer is from Connecticut, home of the so-called Pequots and the largest casino in the world - Foxwoods. Connecticut is where it all started - where the huge loophole in the law was created for all these 'tribes' to get their own casino - following the blueprint created in Connecticut by the Pequots. An excellent book - Without Reservation by Jeff Benedict - details the convolutions within our government that created the debacle of Indian casinos.
Letter to the editor
By Capitol Readers (published Thursday, January 10, 2008)
Dear Editor,
With all this money being spent by tribes lobbying for a vote outcome, it’s time to revisit this concept of creating these “tribal nations” based on the theory that they are perpetually poor and “in need.” Firstly, we’ve all known many neighbors who were 100 percent U.S. citizens before a tribe was created for them to join, thereby allowing them to claim they were due to be exempt from the laws (they previously followed) because they had been discriminated against.
Give me a break! Many groups try for decades to find one shred of evidence that they are not part of the mainstream. When the BIA (who always wants to increase its authority) ignores reality and grants federal recognition, we hear how we “owe” these folks money, land, tax exemption, you name it, because of … discrimination. Yet the mainstream have always seen them as part of the country and it is the “tribal members” themselves who work so hard to discriminate themselves from the rest — in order to get their hands on our tax dollars.
When people have to prove a racial distinction in order to own and operate certain businesses (tax-exempt casinos), we had better review our founding documents. We had better realize that a government cannot have a treaty with its own citizens.
Betty Perkowski,
North Stonington, Conn
Friday, January 18, 2008
Message from Pequotland
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Betty Perkowski demonstrates incredible tact in describing this scadalous scam that was the "Mashantucket Pequote" tribe. There in Ledyard and Stonington a few Afro-Americans traced a fractional connection to a old Naragansette woman who lived in a shack on an small, old and abandoned Pequote reservation. There were no more Pequote Indian descendants, but their scheme to use the acknowledged Pequote land elligible for gambling, required this subtrefuge. They were then able to parlay this 1/34 fractional descent from this Naragsansette woman, with a little corruption and deceit, into the "Mashantucket Pequote" tribe and with a little more scaming and corruption and a lot of financing provided by an Asian gambling investor, the huge Foxwoods gambling casino was built there. This mega-casino is raking in a billion dollars a year or more from the New England gambling losers coming there to lose their money, largely on the unregulated un-policed and uninspected slot machines. This is what the Indian Gaming Act has done for "Indians". Created phony tribes, many with only one or two members able to team up with non-Indian gambling investors to bring unregulated class III casino gambling into every community whether they want it or not!
You can thank an unconscious Congress for this absurdity, but then, that is nothing new.
And it did not end there - tribe after tribe has used the Pequot blueprint to accomplish the same ends. Congress certainly was/is asleep at the wheel. Either that or utterly complicit.
"When the BIA (who always wants to increase its authority) ignores reality and grants federal recognition, we hear how we “owe” these folks money, land, tax exemption, you name it, because of … discrimination."
Lets not forget those millions tribes get in free healthcare - despite the HUGE payouts they
receive from the casinos. Those healthcare benefits come outta MY pocket.
Post a Comment