Memoir Preview: Chapter One Draft

I came back to the reservation in 1988 because someone told me there was work.

That was all it took then. Not a vision statement. Not a promise of advancement. Just a phone call—plain, unceremonious, and urgent.

Can you come home? We need people we trust.

At the time, the place I was returning to would become a casino.

It was a bingo hall. It was a large metal building filled with folding chairs and long tables. There was a constant haze of cigarette smoke. The coffee was always burnt. The lights never quite reached the corners. But beneath the smoke and the noise, there was something else moving, something unfinished, something trying to take shape.

That same year, Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. I didn’t know its name then. Most of us didn’t. We only knew that for the first time in a long while, the future didn’t feel entirely closed. Our people were tired of asking for help. Tired of waiting. Tired of being told what we couldn’t do. Gaming felt like a way to build something of our own—on our land, by our rules, for our people.

So, I came home.

In those early days, no one asked about titles. There were no job descriptions, no organizational charts, no consultants arriving with binders and credentials. There were only problems, and whoever was willing to take responsibility for them. I worked wherever I was needed—housing, compliance, governance, gaming operations. Sometimes all at once. Everyone wore multiple hats because there were not enough heads to go around.

We were poor. We were overworked. And we were proud.

We believed Indian Gaming would stabilize housing, create jobs, and give tribal members real control over our future. For a while, it did. Payroll began to steady. Programs expanded. People who had spent their lives scraping by could finally imagine something different for their children. We weren’t naive—we knew money changed things—but we believed the hardest part was getting started.

We were wrong.

The hardest part came later.

It came after the buildings went up. After the bingo hall gave way to something larger. After the revenue stabilized and the professionals arrived—armed with résumés, credentials, policies, and quiet authority. That was when the work began to change. And so did the rules about who was allowed to do it.

This book is not an argument against Indian Gaming.

It is a record of what happened after it succeeded.

Indian Gaming brought real money into the Hannahville Indian Community. It funded housing, healthcare, infrastructure, and tribal government operations. On paper, it worked. But over time, the benefits of that success stopped flowing evenly back to tribal members. Governance hardened. Employment standards have shifted. Decision‑making authority moved further away from the tribal members the system was meant to serve.

What emerged was an agency problem—though I didn’t have a name for it at the time. Those entrusted to manage resources began serving institutional interests rather than the community itself. Control over gaming revenues, employment pathways, and long‑term planning drifted toward administrative, corporate, and often non‑tribal actors. The system didn’t collapse. It functioned.

Just not for all tribal members and the tribal government employees.

I wasn’t watching this from outside. I was inside it.

I worked to revive a dormant housing authority. I restored federal compliance that had been ignored for decades. I reopened access to millions of dollars in housing and infrastructure funding. I chaired boards, negotiated with state and federal agencies, and helped build systems that still exist today. I also learned slowly. It was painful to learn about the fate of tribal leaders. They insist that policy serves its stated purpose instead of institutional and corporate convenience.

This is not a grievance file.

It is institutional memory.

Tribal governments are often described as sovereign and self‑determining. In practice, they operate inside layered systems of federal law, state oversight, corporate governance, and professional/contracted management. When those systems lose accountability to tribal membership, the harm does not usually look dramatic. More often, it looks procedural. Clean. Defensible. Bureaucratic.

It looks like reclassification instead of removal.
Like “fit” instead of exclusion.
Like compliance replacing care.

It leaves damage that rarely appears in reports. This includes housing insecurity, job loss, displacement, addiction, and family fracture. There is also long‑term harm to the quality of life. These are not accidents, but predictable outcomes of structural decisions.

I did not come home to fight my own government.

I came home to build something that worked.

What follows is the story of how it did—and what it cost to say so.

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