“We’d stand in line and wait for the welfare trucks and big brown paper sacks,” Valbuena recalled. The entire annual tribal budget some years was $300. Before the first bingo hall opened in 1986, most houses were made of rock. San Manuel Chairwoman Lynn Valbuena recalled how as late as the 1950s, the 800-acre reservation near Highland did not have electricity or running water.

Until the advent of tribal gaming, reservations on which glimmering casinos stand today were mired in poverty. Sixty-one California tribes now have gaming operations, and they generated $7 billion in revenue – more than the casinos on the Las Vegas Strip – in fiscal 2013, according to the National Indian Gaming Commission, a federal agency. Californians voted twice to allow such casinos on Native American land in the state, first in 1998 and, after that initiative was overturned by the California Supreme Court as a violation of the state constitution, in a constitutional amendment in 2000. The more lucrative “class three” casinos include slot machines and blackjack. That led to the passage the following year of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which allowed states to negotiate compacts with tribes for casinos, subject to federal approval. The court ruled, though, that the federal government can regulate gambling on reservations and give states a role in regulation. The justices said tribes have wide-ranging sovereignty over their lands. Supreme Court issued a decision that quashed attempts by the state and Riverside County to shut down bingo halls on the reservations of the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians and the Morongo Band of Mission Indians, and card games on the Cabazon reservation. For years, their legality remained in question. The first tribal gaming operations were bingo halls that opened more than 40 years ago on reservations in California and other states. Memories of past destitution and a determination to remain self-sufficient no matter what happens to the gambling industry have spurred gaming tribes to economically diversify, adding more and more attractions to casino-based resorts and investing in hotels, office buildings and almond groves. The roots of tribal casinos nationwide lie in Riverside County and the severe poverty that Native American tribes were desperate to escape.

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