Wildhorse: The Tribes Reclaim the Economy

Five miles east of Pendleton on the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Wildhorse Resort and Casino opened in temporary buildings on November fifth of nineteen ninety-four. What followed was one of the most dramatic economic reversals in Pacific Northwest tribal history.

The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation are made up of three peoples: the Umatilla, the Cayuse, and the Walla Walla. In eighteen fifty-five, the leaders of those three tribes signed a treaty with the United States and ceded six point four million acres of homeland in what is now northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington. What remained was a reservation of about one hundred seventy-two thousand acres and a relationship with the federal government that had spent more than a century undermining tribal autonomy, land base, and economy.

The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of nineteen eighty-eight changed the legal landscape. It gave federally recognized tribes the authority to operate gaming enterprises on reservation land, and the CTUIR moved quickly. In the early nineteen nineties, the tribal operating budget was less than ten million dollars per year. By two thousand and seven, Wildhorse had helped push that figure to one hundred forty-five million. By twenty ten, it reached one hundred ninety million.

But Wildhorse is not only a casino. On the resort grounds stands the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute, the only Native American museum situated along the Oregon Trail. Its permanent exhibit tells the story of the three tribes in three parts: We Were, We Are, and We Will Be. Those words are a declaration of continuity from peoples whose elimination was once federal policy.

The Oregon Trail passed directly through Umatilla homeland, carrying emigrants west in covered wagons through the eighteen forties and fifties. Today the descendants of the people who watched those wagon trains roll through their territory have built a destination that those emigrants could not have imagined.