It wasn’t a place that I felt safe in.”Ī tribal official said that the tribal government had essentially shut down at the time, driven by internal discord and concerns over tribal identity and disenrollment. Someone had called me up to discuss the situation, and there were armed people at the casino,” he said. “I was actually there, at the casino at that time. Bush administration, personally recalls some of those bleak days all too well. Joe Valandra, former chief of staff of the National Indian Gaming Commission during part of the George W. Another widely reported reputational hit came in 2014, when the National Indian Gaming Commission forced the tribe to close its casino after determining it was “operating the gaming facility in a manner that threatened public health and safety,” and hadn’t shared required financial information from 20 with the federal gaming oversight body.Īll the dirty details made local, state and even national headlines. The tribe has earned an enduring negative reputation stemming from internal, highly publicized, leadership disputes earlier in the 2000s, as well as from tribal citizen disenrollment issues involving divisions of gaming per capita payments. Want more news like this? Get the free weekly newsletter. Then COVID-19 forced the tribe to close the doors of its main moneymaker, the Chukchansi Gold Resort & Casino, for a portion of the year.

As well, the tribe was concurrently battling another casino-related management case for $21 million. Long before the pandemic - for much of the past decade, in fact - the Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians in California has been in serious financial trouble.īy September 2020, less than nine months ago, the tribe owed $350 million on a loan, and a major bank was aggressively suing to get its money back.

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