Poker for Real Money - Indian Gaming

Indian Gaming

Gaming has been a part of the United States from the colonial era up through today. Lotteries were critical to funding the Revolutionary War, and the colonization of America, and even helped fund the beginning of venerable institutions like Harvard University and Princeton.

Today, gaming has replaced the buffalo as the mechanism used by American Indian people for survival. The proceeds from gaming are used by Indian Nations for subsistence, cultural preservation, and to replenish impoverished economies. Gaming is also the only viable source of employment and governmental revenues available to tribes.

Indian gaming, originally part of tribal ceremonies or celebrations, existed long before Europeans came to America. However, as Europeans began settling America, they gradually took away every means of self-suffciency American Indians had: destroying agrarian societies, killing the buffalo and forcing American Indians onto remote, desolate reservations.

Indian gaming has been a major catalyst for community growth and economic development, generating revenues for tribes like no federal stimulus effort ever has before. After decades of poverty and high unemployment on often geographically remote reservations, Indian people now see gaming as an integral part of tribal economies and the means to achieve self-sufficiency.

Source: National Indian Gaming Association