From the Detroit News:
That’s the simple question, with complicated answers, facing the Sault Tribe of Chippewa as it decides what to do about Greektown Casino-Hotel.
The bankrupt Detroit gambling hall that began as a dream of self-sufficiency has turned into a legal nightmare and financial albatross that’s divided 38,000 tribal members, choked the tribe’s finances and forced its leaders to rethink long-term ambitions aimed at improving the lives of one of the state’s most historically oppressed people.
“It wasn’t supposed to end up like this,” said Bernard Bouschor, a former Sault Tribe chairman who now sits on its board of directors. “Not after we spent so much time and money.”
The predicament in which the tribe finds itself is serious: likely losing Greektown, which by revenue is the smallest of Detroit’s three gambling halls, to creditors or a new buyer in a federal bankruptcy court hundreds of miles from home. It deeply contrasts with the bright promise the casino held for the tribe when the fight for a crack at the downstate market first started two decades ago.
Back then, vying for a piece of Detroit’s gaming market had a simple impetus: a desire for self-sufficiency.
For decades, Chippewa leaders sought recognition by the federal government, and when that hurdle was finally cleared in 1975, the tribe won the right to receive federal and state assistance offered to Native American groups.
Those dollars were spent to upgrade a standard of living that for decades had fallen far behind the acceptable norm.
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