Assistant Secretary (Indian Affairs) Echo Hawk on Wednesday announced a change in the so-called “Commutability Rule” issued by the previous administration. Stated simply, the rule prevented Indian tribes from acquiring land too far from their reservations and using the land for gaming projects. The obvious purpose of the rule was to prevent the proliferation of Indian casinos which under an IGRA exception could have been built in former aboriginal areas of a Indian tribe. Of course, BIA didn’t say that was the purpose of the rule. Instead, BIA publicly justified the rule on the basis of promoting tribal employment. The reasoning was thus: if casinos are built too far from a tribe’s reservation, then it will be difficult for tribal members to seek employment there. Hence the name “commutability.” The forces of paternalism and anti-gaming thus met to effectively create a moratorium on new casinos that were not on or near Indian reservations.
What is the effect in Oklahoma? The “Commutability” rule specifically halted the building of a St. Regis Mohawk casino in New York, the BIA thought the proposed casino was too far from the Mohawk reservation to provide employment opportunities to tribal members. In Oklahoma, there are no reservations per se, and Indian Country in this state is a patchwork of trust and allotted fee land rather than a reservation. And my original thoughts ended there. However, all 39 federally recognized Indian tribes in Oklahoma came from outside of this state (and many were even moved around within the state), therefore most of these tribes have opportunities to obtain land, place into into trust, and building gaming projects in their original aboriginal areas. That’s right, the Ft. Sill Apache may return to New Mexico, and even the Cherokee Nation could conceivably purchase land in Georgia to expand their gaming enterprise. With the expansion of gaming in Oklahoma as a result of the 2005 State Compact, many tribes have the resources to expand. And with the abolition of the “Commutability Rule” it will not matter that a tribe's trust land in Oklahoma is not within commuting distance of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
