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Legalized gambling on Indian Reservations is bad for Native Americans.
I have driven through the Shawnee Reservation. It is sad and small and cramped and depressing. We have rewarded the Indians for our past transgressions, by allowing them to have gambling casinos. I feel that this does little more than ostracize them even further and create more hostility between Indians and others.

This country has failed the Indians by not doing more to integrate them into society. And society has failed other minorities by forcing them to.
We as a people need to realize that the way to treat all people as equals is simply to treat all people as equals.
Special privileges like quotas and legalized gambling Casinos drive wedges between people.
For every person who walks out of a Casino with an extra 50.00 dollars in his pocket thinking 'I had a great time, and what a wonderful culture our Native Americans have'. There are 100 people who walk out of the Casino thinking 'Well, the Indians took my money again.'
As I read in the paper of the millions of dollars that the Indians received from Casinos, I still see abandoned cars and derelict trailer houses. I still see empty booze bottles and fat half naked brown babies wondering the streets.
It's common knowledge that Meth is the reservations biggest export, and the new grocery store, (where they can't afford to shop) and the new recreation center (where they don't go) are nothing more than band aids on the gangrenous stump of a people that have tried to hang on to a past and a way of life that doesn't exist anymore.
The only way to help any minority group is to make sure that they have the same opportunities that everyone else does. The try to set them apart or above the average working American amounts to the same thing as insisting that the colored sit in the back of the bus or refusing to sell firewater to Indians.

Learn more about this author, J. Swaney.
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