When Dino Beltran scans a 68-acre vineyard in the heart of Sonoma County, he sees land where his ancestors traded goods with other tribes, long before tourists flocked to the storied California wine region.

But Beltran also sees a historic opportunity: It’s the site of the Koi Nation’s proposed $600 million casino and resort, about an hour north of San Francisco. It would create a steady revenue stream and what Beltran sees as a long-overdue form of redress.

In the mid-1800s, the tribe was forced from its land in neighboring Lake County, only to be granted uninhabitable land decades later. The U.S. government then stripped the tribe’s federal status, leaving it without any reservation to call home. “It is our time to control our own destiny, our own land and our rights as a federally recognized tribe,” said Beltran, the Koi’s vice chair.

But as the Koi waits for federal approval, its casino bid has been mired in controversy. Leaders of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, another tribe that claims the area as its ancestral land, call the Koi’s connection to the land tenuous and its proposal an “illegal land grab.”

The fight is one of several taking place across the country, as nearly two dozen tribes try to take advantage of new rules under the Biden administration making it easier to acquire land for gambling operations.

The Interior Department rules allow tribes to petition for land and gambling operations farther from their established ancestral regions – an attempt to compensate for past policies that harmed tribes’ economic opportunities. But that has begun to pit tribes against one another, leading to competing claims of sovereignty, accusations of greed and questions of who’s entitled to tap the ballooning $42 billion tribal gambling market.

It also highlights a long-standing predicament: How does the government remediate past harm for some groups while remaining fair to all?

“They have no business in our area,” said Greg Sarris, chairman of the Graton Rancheria, whose Graton Resort & Casino is a 20-minute drive south of the proposed Koi site. “You can’t start having tribes move into other tribes’ territories.”

Sarris said he fears an approval of the Koi’s project – as well as another tribe’s proposal in nearby Vallejo – would spell the beginning of the end of his tribe’s sovereignty in the region and a loss of control over any discovered cultural artifacts or ancestral remains.

He also cited basic economics: The other tribes’ casinos, if approved, would cut into the revenue of his tribe’s casino – one of the largest in California. The Koi Nation, he said, should instead build in neighboring Lake County, about 70 miles northeast, where the Koi’s historical connections are much stronger.

“There’s a general consensus that every tribe does deserve an equal opportunity to pursue economic self-sufficiency – but not deliberately at the expense of other tribes,” said George Forman, a longtime tribal attorney and a critic of the Biden administration’s interpretation of Native gambling laws.

At the same time, opportunity to generate revenue from casino operations is inherently unequal, said Kathryn Rand, senior distinguished fellow of tribal gaming policy at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. More than half of the roughly 527 tribal casino operations nationwide generate less than 10 percent of the $42 billion in total revenue, she said.

“Most tribal casinos are not the destination casino resorts that earn hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars each year,” Rand said.

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Off-reservation ‘avalanche’

U.S. Interior Department officials have indicated they’re trying to level the playing field. Tribal gambling experts say President Joe Biden’s Interior Department has been more open to evaluating off-reservation casino applications, especially for tribes whose reservations are not near major markets.

In December 2023, the department eased the process for tribes to acquire land for economic development, including gambling operations. It has also taken a relatively broad interpretation of where tribes can acquire land for gambling under federal law, critics say.

At the heart of the disputes are provisions in the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which regulates gambling on Native lands. The law prohibits casinos on land acquired after October 1988, when the law was enacted, but grants a few exceptions.

The Koi and several other tribes are applying under the “restored lands” exception, in which a tribe must prove historical and modern connections to the land. The Koi says the site of its proposed casino sits on routes its people long used for trade. It also points to the fact that tribe members have lived in the area since the early 1900s, when they objected to living on a reserved tract that even an Interior Department official referred to as an uninhabitable “rock pile without any water for domestic use.” Many Koi members have lived in the Sonoma area ever since, the tribe says, and it’s currently headquartered there.

“These exceptions ensure that Tribes lacking reservations … are not disadvantaged relative to more established ones,” Bryan Newland, assistant secretary of Indian Affairs at the Interior Department, wrote in an Aug. 13 letter to the House Committee on Natural Resources.

But the Biden administration’s broad reading of the exceptions has led to an uptick in applications for gambling projects farther from their established tribes, critics say. As of July, there were 18 applications under the restored lands exception and under another exception that requires no proof of connection to the land, according to the Interior Department. And that has led to an increasing number of claims that tribes with casino plans are moving onto other tribes’ territory.

In Oregon, there has been heated opposition to the Coquille tribe’s bid to build its second casino about 170 miles from its headquarters. In Idaho, the Shoshone-Bannock tribe is proposing its fourth casino, and its first off-reservation site, sparking opposition from the state’s only tribe without a casino, which says the casino would sit on its land. In Wisconsin, the Menomini tribe’s bid to open its second casino some 200 miles from its reservation is also facing opposition from tribes and local officials.

Forman, the attorney, is representing the Karuk tribe as it fights the Coquille’s casino effort in Oregon. He called the number of off-reservation bids an “avalanche.”

But the Koi, which has no casinos, says even one will be an important step toward self-determination, allowing it to generate much-needed revenue to improve living conditions for the tribe’s 96 members.

“We’d like to provide our tribe with education, employment, health care and financial independence,” Beltran said. “That’s a right that every other tribe that was in this position once had, so we just want the same opportunities.”

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‘Equity train’

But where Beltran sees equal opportunity, Sarris sees a slippery slope.

Approval of the Koi Nation’s project, along with another tribe’s proposal for a $700 million casino in Vallejo, would set a dangerous precedent that could lead to the disintegration of tribal sovereignty, Sarris said – especially in California, where there are roughly 110 federally recognized tribes.

“It would allow any other tribe in this country to start moving around wherever they wanted with these very loose definitions of historical connections to land,” he added. “In California, you could theoretically have a casino on every street corner.”

He acknowledged that some tribes were luckier than others in having sovereign territory closer to cities and better gambling markets – and he agreed “in principle” that the situation should be made more equitable.

But with so many tribes in California, “where would the equity train stop?” he asked.

A better solution, Sarris contends, is what his tribe is already doing: sharing large chunks of its casino’s revenue with more remote tribes. He said the Graton Rancheria shares revenue with two tribes, giving them $3 million each annually. His tribe also pays $3 million to a local health care provider for Native Americans. Not enough tribes, he said, agree to such agreements, so the pot is too small.

But Beltran, the Koi’s vice chair, says Graton’s opposition is also driven by a desire to keep a tight grip on the local gambling market. He pointed to the Graton Rancheria’s $1 billion expansion of its existing casino and resort, which broke ground last summer.

“That’s going to make them want to try to eliminate competition,” Beltran said.

Sarris acknowledged that the Koi Nation’s project and the Vallejo proposal by the Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians “without a doubt would impact our revenue.” But they would also affect his tribe’s ability to share that revenue with tribes without casinos, he warned.

The Koi Nation counters that payments from Graton or any other tribe would not solve their problems.

“The heart of self-determination for Indian tribes is to … develop their own economic capacity, and not to rely on the generosity of other tribes,” said Michael Anderson, an attorney representing the Koi. “There’s no binding effect of that. There’s no longevity in that.”

The decision about whether to approve the Koi’s request to build its casino now lies with U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary. And a raft of tribes and state officials have piled support behind both sides to try to sway her decision.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office opposes the Koi’s project, arguing that unilateral approval by Haaland would sidestep state officials and overrule the concerns of other tribes and the area’s residents, who fear the casino would bring noise and traffic congestion.

The Democratic governor’s office charged the Interior Department’s interpretation of where tribes can reclaim land is stretched “beyond its legal limits – while failing to adequately consider whether there might be a better way,” according to an Aug. 16 letter to Interior Department officials.

The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, along with five Sonoma Country tribes, has also opposed the project, voicing similar concerns.

Standing behind the Koi Nation are 79 federally recognized tribes, including the Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians, which has proposed a 24-hour, eight-story casino in Vallejo.

“For generations, our people have endured hardships, including the loss of our ancestral lands and the challenges of being one of the few landless Indian tribes in the United States,” Scotts Valley Band board chairman Shawn Davis said during a meeting this year, according to the Vallejo Sun. “This project represents a significant opportunity to reverse that history.”