The Snoqualmie Tribe's Big Gamble

Can the once-proud Snoqualmie Tribe regain its heritage and future by following the casino path?

According to a Snoqualmie legend, Moon the creator, on his way upstream in search of the people from whom he was snatched as a baby, came upon a place in the river where a large weir obstructed fish passage. He turned this spot into a lofty cataract—present-day Snoqualmie Falls—and ordained: “Birds flying over…will fall, and people shall gather them up and eat them. Deer coming down the stream will perish, and the people shall have them for food. Game of every kind shall be found by the people for their subsistence.”

Many, many years later, the modern-day Snoqualmie Tribe is once again turning to game—but of an entirely different sort—for its subsistence, and much more, it hopes. Like so many tribes in Washington and across the country, the 650-member Snoqualmie Tribe—whose people live primarily in the Snoqualmie Valley, but also around Marysville and south Seattle—decided to bet on a casino to change its fortune. Snoqualmie Casino—whose opening last November drew upward of 30,000 area residents, with a line of cars stretching for some four miles along the breakdown lane of Interstate 90—was the culmination of years of dreaming, hard work and perseverance in the face of sometimes overwhelming obstacles.

Unlike other tribes who have opened casinos in the state, the Snoqualmies—who once dominated western Washington, controlling the all-important trade route through the Cascades to the sea—at one time weren’t even recognized by the federal government and had no reservation or land of their own. Their quest for government recognition took decades—years in which they pieced together enough evidence of cohesion to convince the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to recognize them as a “domestic sovereign nation” under federal law—a designation they had lost in 1952 (see page 117). When they were finally granted this status in 1999, the tribe embarked on a quest to make its dreams—a reservation that tribal members could call home, world-class health care for Snoqualmies and other Northwest natives, and access to as much education as any individual tribal member would want to pursue—come true.

As a recognized tribe, the Snoqualmies were free to buy land and, pending approval from the BIA, convert it into their sovereign territory not subject to the laws or taxes of the surrounding county, state or nation. While establishing a reservation and opening a casino seemed a likely path for the tribe, there was initial resistance. “The tribe didn’t like the idea,” says Ray Mullen, the tribe’s “drum bearer” and one of nine members of the democratically elected Tribal Council, which essentially runs the tribe. Some tribal members were opposed to gambling in and of itself, let alone profiting from it, Mullen relates, while others, like himself, thought it just seemed too overtly commercial and unrelated to the tribe’s history.

As drum bearer, Mullen is responsible for learning traditional Snoqualmie songs and sharing them at tribal ceremonies whenever he is called to serve. With long, flowing salt-and-pepper locks offset by an elegantly groomed mustache and goatee, Mullen, 48, looks the part. He grew up learning dribs and drabs of Lushootseed—the common language of the Northwest coast before white settlement—from his grandmothers, both full-blooded Snoqualmies. One of his brothers, Joseph, currently chairs the Tribal Council, while another, John, is employed as the tribe’s master carver.

“The options really were unlimited at the time,” says Mullen of those heady days a decade ago following the tribe’s 1999 reacknowledgment. He was pushing the tribal leadership to consider building and running a recycling processing center for the region, which could employ lots of tribal members and generate revenue for the tribe’s priorities, all the while helping the wider community and the planet. Other ideas, from starting a construction company to selling arts and crafts to providing financing to tribal entrepreneurs, were floated as well.

“But in economics, when you lay the numbers out in front of you, what makes sense is the largest numbers,” says Mullen. Potential profits from a casino penciled out thousands of times higher than from any of the other ventures the tribe was considering. And if the tribe was successful in finding land to purchase on the Eastside, close to their ancestral homeland, their casino would be near many Microsoft-enriched Eastside enclaves, as well as being the closest casino to the city of Seattle.

No doubt gaming had proven lucrative for other tribes in Washington. Tribal casinos around the state generated some $1.34 billion in combined revenue in 2007, more than an eightfold increase in just a decade. Tribes were using this influx of cash to build state-of-the-art health-care facilities, fund college tuition and even put money directly into the pockets of their members.

After suffering through decades of dispossession and abject poverty, the Snoqualmies weren’t interested in struggling to just make ends meet any longer (in 2001, a demographic survey revealed unemployment at 42 percent; it dropped to 31 percent in 2006). To tribal administrator Matt Mattson, casino gambling was the only option that offered “the opportunity to restore the tribe to its rightful position of prominence in the land that’s named after it.”

Mattson, a white guy from upstate New York with short-cropped brown hair, boyish good looks and an impish smile, was initially hired as an attorney—the tribe’s first non-native employee—in 2000, just after reacknowledgement.

“We interviewed quite a few people,” recounts 77-year-old Snoqualmie elder Katherine Barker, the only lifetime appointee to the otherwise elected Tribal Council. “He was fresh out of law school, and we figured we could train him to learn our ways, and that’s why we took him on.”

Assigned to write a code of laws for the newly sovereign tribe, the 24-year-old Mattson hit the ground running, demonstrating not only a deep understanding of the legal issues facing the tribe but also an affinity for politics and business. And perhaps more importantly, he was a good listener.

“When I got here, I started listening to Tribal Council members about projects they wanted to do,” he relates. The top priorities were clear from day one: start health and housing programs to benefit tribal members. “They were asking if I could help get these programs off the ground, and I was there, so I said, ‘OK, sure.’”