The chairman of the National Indian Gaming Association took issue Wednesday with racially charged comments President Donald Trump made against four female members of Congress.
In a Wednesday statement, NIGA chairman Ernie Stevens, Jr denounced the comments Trump made last weekend on Twitter, suggesting Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts go back to “the crime-infested places from which they came.”
Stevens’ condemnation of the President’s comments follows the passage of a resolution Tuesday night by the House that likewise censured the president for racist language. He called the four representatives “respected female Members of Congress” and cited the 2018 mid-term elections where two female Native Americans were elected to the Congress.
“Urging certain groups to return to their countries of origin conjures up dark images of this nation’s past injustices and intolerance,” Stevens said. “We should be honoring the strength of this country represented by one of the most diverse Congress in this Nation’s history.”
He called the four members targeted by Trump “American citizens, duly elected by their fellow citizens” and said “they deserve better treatment from the Office of the President.”
“Today’s United States of America is better than our past,” Stevens said. “We are a nation of diverse and multi-racial citizens who seek the common goal of equality and dignity as a united people.”
Trump, who once owned three casinos in Atlantic City that were lost in several bankruptcy reorganizations, has long used harsh rhetoric toward the Indian gaming industry, going back to the 1990s. He believed the expansion of Indian gaming, which reported $37.3 billion in gaming revenues in 2017, was a threat to his casinos.
According to a 2016 article in the Washington Post during the presidential election, Trump was reported as having used “racially tinged remarks and broad-brush characterizations” against Indian tribes for over a decade.
Trump claimed that Indian reservations had fallen under mob control, secretly paid for more than $1 million in ads that portrayed members of a tribe in upstate New York as cocaine traffickers and career criminals, and suggested in testimony and in media appearances that dark-skinned Native Americans in Connecticut were faking their ancestry.
“I think I might have more Indian blood than a lot of the so-called Indians that are trying to open up the reservations,” Trump said during a 1993 radio interview with shock jock Don Imus.
During the campaign, Trump repeatedly mocked Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s claim of Cherokee ancestry by referring to her as “Pocahontas.”
Stevens, the national spokesperson for the National Indian Gaming Association in Washington, D.C., who is currently in his ninth two-year term as the organization’s leader, insinuated that Trump’s comments served as reminders of the poor treatment Indian tribes experienced over the years.
“For Indian Country, the violation of treaties, theft of lands, and devastating genocide against Native peoples left an indelible stain on the nation’s honor,” Stevens said. “The xenophobic federal policies of forced assimilation authorized the government-sanctioned separation of Native children from their families where they were forbidden from speaking their language or practicing their religion.”
He said the “idea of America” wouldn’t have been possible “if it weren’t for the fact that Native nations welcomed the first European settlers fleeing their home countries for a better life. The original sin of slavery and hatred directed at groups of immigrants stunted our growth.”
Stevens is an enrolled member of the Oneida Nation in Wisconsin.
Howard Stutz is the executive editor of CDC Gaming Reports. He can be reached at hstutz@cdcgamingreports.com. Follow @howardstutz on Twitter.
