The Cabazon Decision: A Bingo Hall That Changed America

There is a casino near this stretch of highway, and then another one, and then another. This corridor of tribal gaming did not happen by accident. It happened because of a legal dispute over a bingo hall in the desert, and a Supreme Court decision that most Americans have never heard of.

In the nineteen-eighties, the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians and the Morongo Band of Mission Indians were operating small bingo and card-game operations on their reservations in the Coachella Valley. California wanted to shut them down, citing state gambling laws. The tribes argued that California's own gambling policy was already permissive: the state ran a lottery, it licensed card clubs, it allowed various forms of wagering. It was not, in legal terms, a state that prohibited gambling. It was a state that regulated it.

In nineteen eighty-seven, the United States Supreme Court agreed with the tribes, six votes to three. The decision in California versus Cabazon Band of Mission Indians held that a state which allows gambling cannot selectively prohibit it on tribal lands. The ruling was not narrow. It was a structural statement about the relationship between state authority and tribal sovereignty.

Congress responded with the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of nineteen eighty-eight, which created the legal framework for tribal casinos across the country. The economic consequences were enormous. More than five hundred tribal gaming operations now exist in the United States. The total revenue from tribal gaming exceeds thirty billion dollars annually.

It started here. It started with a bingo hall, and two small bands of Mission Indians who understood that the legal principle they were defending was larger than the game they were playing.