For tribes, disparity lives on

This is a tale of two Indian tribes.

Both are tiny and poor. Both signed the same treaty 153 years ago, giving away the land where Seattle and King County now sit.

And both, this month, have built something new for the first time in generations.

I went out to the first the other night and was stopped by a line of stretch Hummer limos. Women in cocktail dresses stepped from the limos, joking about "catching a whale." Men trailed behind, smoking fat cigars.

After 150 years in a legal and financial wilderness, the Snoqualmie Indians have opened a 170,000-square-foot casino.

It has strained the tribe and put it into massive debt. Yet it is a remarkable achievement that it exists at all. Follow signs to "Snoqualmie Indian Reservation," and when you get there you realize nobody lives there. The entire reservation is the casino.

That's because the Snoqualmies never got their promised reservation — not until 2006. Only in 1999 did the federal government give the Snoqualmies official tribe status.

So now they can have a casino. I bet it transforms them as they hope it will. I used to doubt gambling would be any salvation to tribes. But in 15 years, it has catapulted many of them out of a century or more of grinding poverty, aimlessness and welfare.

Inside, at the People of the Moon's craps table, I put down $40 in bets. The place was jammed with twitchy 20-somethings and chain-smoking older folks, nearly all white. No Indians were in sight.

There's some karmic justice at work here. We bamboozled the Indians out of their land. Now they are suckering us out of our money.

Sure enough, after a few rolls of the dice, I crapped out. Poof went my $40 — a contribution, I guess, to Indian reparations.

When I left at 1 a.m., there was still a line of cars idling in the rain, waiting for a chance.

The next day, I dropped by the other tribe. Seattle's first people, the Duwamish, will open a cedar longhouse Nov. 22 next to a pallet yard south of downtown.

It's a post-and-beam meeting place and museum on a half-acre — the only land they've owned since they gave up 54,700 acres in the 1855 treaty. They never got the promised reservation. The government now won't recognize they are a tribe at all.

The reasons for this are galling. One time the feds ruled the Duwamish aren't a tribe, in part because they had no land. Which was true. It was all taken from them.

In 2001, the feds agreed the Duwamish are a tribe. Only to renege 48 hours later because a bureaucrat hadn't signed the forms on time.

So they go maddeningly on, in an identity limbo. The longhouse, now about done on West Marginal Way, seems as much about proving they exist as it is a celebration of culture. As beautiful as it is, it won't bring jobs.

What's happened to the Duwamish is a disgrace. There's no difference between the Duwamish and the Snoqualmies. Except the Snoqualmies got the right signature on the right piece of paper. So only they get to enter this curious Indian lottery.

Our city is named after a Duwamish chief. Yet we pretend they're not a tribe, too?

Looking out from the new longhouse, trucks rumbling by scrap yards with downtown skyscrapers a few miles away, to me it seems as obvious as it overdue:

This is a fine spot for a casino.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.