It’s that time of year and I’m a little hesitant to talk about tribal politics. It needs to be addressed my tribe is being run by money hungry politicians and drug addicts. Tribal councils corruption stems from the corruption of the US government as well as the colonization of our community. I do want to mention that I’m specifically talking about my tribe which is relatively “well off” and I feel we benefit from white washing.
Our casino does well though I’ve heard that there maybe some issues happening within that area and I’m not just talking about about the toxic environment that casinos seem to breed but also they may be having money issues and or issues with the gaming commission.
We are building a new facility for our elders and they are going to have 4x the amount of rooms available so there’s some growing pains there but the manager of the current facility is ousting native employees and lying to everyone to keep a good relationship even though they all find out about it. White employees are disrespecting the residents and refusing to make amends and while some residents stick up for themselves, others are too scared to report what is happening to them. A member of lower management recently stepped down and is going back to working on the floor with the residents and said that the reason she stepped down is because she’s sick of working for her boss and wants to work for the residents. She has spent weeks trying to get trainings in place to talk to the employees about trauma informed care and specifically boarding school trauma. When she did get someone to come in and talk to the employees, the employees and her boss were checking their watches and seemingly not willing to learn about the things these elders have been through.
I typed up a paragraph about my place of work but felt that it was too whiny so I’ve omitted that.
I want to talk in-depth about the casino but I don’t know enough yet to make an assessment about how it’s actually doing beyond what I knew as an employee when I worked there it is concerning to be hearing rumors about it though because I know that if I’m hearing stuff other people are hearing a lot of stuff and I don’t know what that is but from my knowledge we’ve been under an interim general manager for a long time now and I feel that tribal council is just not doing anything about it. I mean they could be I haven’t been able to make it to a tribal council meeting in a very long time but I also feel like that’s not a good excuse I want to be able to participate in our tribal government
