Alaska’s Second Gaming Hall Gets Federal OK After Tribe’s 25-Year Wait

A proposal by the Native Village of Eklutna, an Alaska Native group, to build an electronic bingo hall on its land 20 miles outside of Anchorage has been signed off by the federal government. That’s more than a quarter of a century after it was first envisioned.

The Interior Department’s National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC) approved the plan last month, six years after the Trump administration turned down the tribe’s application. The decision paves the way for that rarest of things in Alaska – a new gaming venue.

Alaska has no casinos and no state lottery, but it does have one electronic bingo hall and a small handful of charitable bingo establishments.

The problem for the Eklutna, up to this point, has been that Alaskan tribes have a different legal status to their counterparts in “the Lower 48.”

That’s largely thanks to the Nixon-era Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA). The act awarded the tribes land and financial compensation but recharacterized them as private corporations as opposed to sovereign nations with sovereign powers.

Limited Sovereignty

Under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), Native American tribes are free to open class II gaming facilities — such as electronic bingo halls — on their land without the permission of state authorities provided such operations are legal elsewhere in the state.

But a tribe must have governmental authority over its land to have gaming rights there, and the Eklutna didn’t, according to the 2018 Trump administration decision.

That decision was based on the Sansonetti Opinion, a George H.W. Bush-era legal opinion that concluded Native Village sovereignty was severely limited.

The Eklutna sued the Interior Department, unsuccessfully, in 2019. It argued that it had exercised jurisdiction and provided governmental services since it was granted its land in 1906 through land management and environmental protection.

New Rules

But the tribe’s fortunes turned in November 2022 when Interior Department Solicitor Robert Anderson determined that ANCSA did not prohibit the federal government from taking land into trust for Alaska Natives.

Then, in February this year, Anderson essentially reversed the Sansonetti opinion. Anderson opined that tribal authority should apply to land allotted to Alaska Natives provided it was not “geographically removed from the tribal community.”

For the Eklutna, this was a game changer.

“There’s still a few hurdles to clear, but we feel the major hurdles have been cleared,” Eklutna Tribal Council President and Chair Aaron Leggett told The Alaska Beacon this week.

Right now, we’re in dire need of housing,” he added. “We’re trying to raise finance to construct a gathering center/office space for the Tribe. We have our small clinic, but we don’t have much in the way of any infrastructure … so we feel that this will spur development in the village, it’ll spur development in the area, and it’ll spur development for Anchorage too.”

Those hurdles that still need to be cleared include an environmental review and potential lawsuits, not least from the anti-gambling State of Alaska, which has described Anderson’s opinions as “wrong.”

“…[W]ith a stroke of its pen, Interior purportedly changed how Alaska has operated for the last 50 plus years,” lawyers wrote in a February court filing.