Chapter 1 – The Call Back
A phone call was made to my childhood home in Groveland, Florida. It was 1987.
That was all it took then. Not a vision statement. Not a promise of advancement. Just a phone call, plain, unceremonious, and urgent.
Does Leroy want to come home? We need people we can trust.
At the time, the place I was returning to would become a casino.
It was a bingo hall: a large metal building filled with folding chairs, long tables, and the 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 tribal members didn’t. We only knew that for the first time in a long while, the future didn’t feel entirely closed. Tribal members were tired of asking for help. Tired of waiting. Tired of being told what they couldn’t do. Gaming felt like a way to build something of our own on our terms, by our rules, for the promotion of tribal members.
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 organizational problems, and whoever was willing to take responsibility for them. I worked wherever I was needed to make a difference in housing, compliance, governance, and gaming operations. Sometimes all at once. Everyone wore multiple hats because there were not enough heads to go around.
We were poor. We worked odd hours. And we were proud.
Indian Gaming would stabilize housing, create jobs, and give tribal members real control over their 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 knew money changed things, and we thought 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, the tribal government was required to be 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 had shifted. Decision‑making authority moved further away from the tribal members the system was meant to serve.
What appeared 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 employees.
I wasn’t watching this from outside. I was inside it.
I worked to revive a dormant housing authority, restore federal compliance that had been ignored for decades, and reopen 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 and painfully, what happens to tribal leaders who 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‑deciding. In practice, they run 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.
And it leaves damage that rarely appears in reports. It produces housing insecurity, job loss, displacement, addiction, family fracture, and long‑term harm to quality of life, not as accidents, but as predictable outcomes of 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.
Chapter 2 – No Job Descriptions Yet
In the beginning, nobody asked what my title was.
Titles came later, after money, after lawyers, after organizational charts. Back then, what mattered was whether you showed up and whether you finished what you started. If something needed doing and you didn’t do it, everyone knew. If you did well, everyone knew that, too. There was no place to hide.
I worked wherever I was needed. Housing one day. Compliance is next. Gaming operations when something went wrong. Governance, when a board needed someone who would actually read the paperwork. Sometimes I did all of it in the same week. Sometimes on the same day.
There were no job descriptions yet because there were no jobs as we understand them now. There were only responsibilities. Some of them inherited. Some of them avoided. Some of them dropped into your lap because you happened to be standing there when the question was asked.
The reservation didn’t run on specialization. It ran on familiarity.
You knew who had the keys and signed checks. You knew whose uncle had built the place and those who worked. You knew who would answer the phone after midnight and who wouldn’t. Work moved through relationships, not memos. Decisions were made in hallways, kitchens, parking lots, and meetings that went late because everyone there still had to go to work afterward.
We were building something while living inside it.
The bingo hall was still the center of gravity. Smoke hung in the air, no matter how many fans you ran. Folding chairs scraped the floor. Coffee sat too long on hot plates. Money came in slowly at first, barely enough to keep the lights on, enough to convince people it might work, not enough to feel safe.
Safety wasn’t the point anyway.
What mattered was momentum. Once people believed the doors would stay open, they showed up. Once they showed up, payroll mattered. Once payroll mattered, systems followed. And once systems followed, someone had to make sure they didn’t collapse under their own weight.
That was how I found myself in housing.
The housing authority had been dormant, half‑functional, or broken, depending on who you asked. Files were incomplete, most not even started. Compliance issues stretched back 20 years. Federal rules didn’t care about context. They cared about checkboxes. Miss enough of them, and the money stopped.
When the money stopped before Indian Gaming, everything stopped.
So, we started fixing what we could with what we had. Paperwork first. Meetings next. Board members tracked down after late casino shifts. Signatures were collected wherever people could be found. Nobody was getting paid extra for this. Nobody was getting thanked. But everyone understood what was at stake.
What we didn’t have yet was distance.
There was no separation between decision‑makers and consequences. If a program fails, it fails in front of you. If a policy hurt someone, you saw them at the store, at the clinic, at the school. You couldn’t call it an abstraction. You couldn’t outsource responsibility.
We thought the hardest part would be building something from nothing.
The hardest part would come later as success made distance possible.
For future posts about this manuscript.
