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Special Report

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The Chemeheuvies seem to have stronger historic ties to Barstow. Deron Marquez, chairman of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians near San Bernardino, favored the Chemeheuvies over the Los Coyotes because the former had ancestral lands nearby. The latter, in contrast, he complained, would effectively be taking his tribe's ancestral land.

"If anybody is going to take land into trust in this area, it should be us and not some foreign tribe," he added. Although Marquez's approval was not required, the Interior Secretary is to consider the interest of nearby tribes when deciding whether or not to approve putting off-reservation land in trust. Radar simply says: "We in the city don't get into claims of ancestral rights."

Sharing more geographic roots seems likely to encourage greater cooperation: In September Chemeheuvi tribal Chairman Edward "Tito" Smith made the case that tribal members and Barstow residents had the same vision of prosperity and self-reliance.

THE ARGUMENT FOR granting Native Americans a gambling monopoly grows ever thinner when tribes essentially become fronts for distant commercial interests seeking to locate in urban areas with no Indian presence. Some states have allowed tribes to establish casinos by claiming origination or ancestral rights to a wide area over which they allegedly once roamed.

But not California so far. Indeed, proposals for similar facilities in Oakland, Oxnard, Richmond, Vallejo, and West Sacramento remain stalled, lacking the necessary gubernatorial approval. Tribal attorney Howard Dickstein notes: "In California, the problem with those approvals is that they would create a precedent for scores of other tribes that are stuck in uncompetitive or commercially unusable locations."

The issue of native American gambling monopolies raises a host of critical state and federal issues that won't be resolved in one election or one court case. But the problems in California and elsewhere suggest that a good starting point might be to more strictly limit Indian gaming to reservations or ancestral land.

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Law, NATO