“Federal Recognition Does Not Equate to Casinos”: An Interview With Native American Journalism Scholar Cristina Azocar

This year, Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan is posting and airing a series of episodes focusing on the lives and perspectives of the Indigenous women of North America. The first episode featured an interview with condoled Bear Clan mother for the Mohawk National Council Louise Herne McDonald and Wolf Clan Mohawk council member Jonel Beauvais. The second episode focused on the under- and misrepresentation of Native people in media, with guests IllumiNative founder, president, and CEO Crystal Echo Hawk and award-winning journalist Rebecca Nagle, writer and host of the podcast “This Land.”

The most recent episode in the series, which aired June 12, features an interview with Cristina Azocar, a citizen of the Upper Mattaponi Tribe and a professor of journalism at San Francisco State University. She is the author of the new book News Media and the Indigenous Fight for Federal Recognition (Lexington Books). Azocar’s research focuses on the intersection of race and journalistic practice, particularly in the area of news coverage of Indigenous people. Azocar earned her doctorate in communication studies at the University of Michigan and holds a master’s degree in ethnic studies and a bachelor’s degree in journalism, both from San Francisco State University. She served as a past president of the Native American Journalists Association, directed the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism, was a former editor of American Indian issues for the Media Diversity Forum, and was an inaugural board member of the Women’s Media Center. The following is an edited and condensed excerpt from Morgan’s interview with Azocar.

Robin Morgan: We’re here to talk about your new book, News Media and the Indigenous Fight for Federal Recognition. And, boy, is it a big fight. So, why don’t you talk about how the book came to be, and we’ll take it from there.

Cristina Azocar: I’m a citizen of the Upper Mattaponi Tribe, which is located on the lands currently occupied by the state of Virginia. If you think about Virginia, the destruction of our Indigenous communities really began in the 1600s. The Upper Mattaponi and other tribes in the area were considered part of the Powhatan Confederacy. Listeners may have heard of Pocahontas; Pocahontas was the daughter of Powhatan; [they were] Pamunkey, and the Pamunkey Tribe is very close to us, so our tribe and the tribes of the Powhatan Confederacy were tribes that myths about Indians were founded on, but the United States government did not recognize us as a sovereign nation until 2018.

RM: That late! Wow!

CA: In 1646 we made a treaty with the English colonizers, yet the U.S. government took until 2018 to recognize us. Federal recognition means that the United States government has a trust due to tribes. The federal government promised tribes that it would provide education and help to tribal people, and — and this is a super important part — it would protect us from American settlers. Federal recognition acknowledges that tribes have the right of self-determination. What people say is the government gives federal recognition. No, it doesn’t give federal recognition, it acknowledges the existence of a sovereign relationship with the tribe.

RM: And those treaties have been violated again and again and again and again.

CA: Yes, and there is no treaty that has not been broken.

RM: Yeah.

CA: So my tribe, the Upper Mattaponi, we were recognized by the state of Virginia, but that doesn’t really do much. Sovereignty gives tribes the ability to take care of citizens; it gives us access to health funds, education funds, and, now, COVID funds, to take care of our people, so it’s an important relationship to have with the government. I’m a journalism professor, and I was speaking in 2005 to a group of journalists with my Uncle Kenny, Kenneth Adams, who was chief of the Upper Mattaponi Tribe at the time. The National Museum of the American Indian had just opened in D.C., and we were speaking to a group of journalists along with a member of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (The Bureau of Indian Affairs exists in the Department of the Interior, and the Department of the Interior also has within it the Office of Federal Acknowledgment, which is the office that recognizes tribes.)

RM: God save us from bureaucracy. Although it’s very comforting that Deb Haaland, who of course is Native American, is the very first [Native] cabinet member to ever head the Department of the Interior. That and the appointment of Joy Harjo as poet laureate have made my year.

CA: And I think that they also signal changes, real, substantive changes, and hopefully they signal substantive changes in the bureaucracy, because [there are] three or four different agencies dealing with it. Federal Indian law is super, super complicated. … So my uncle and I were talking to this group of journalists about the federal recognition process, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs was talking about what tribes have to collect in order to receive this federal recognition, in order to qualify. Part of the process is documentation; you have to have lots of documentation.

RM: What if you don’t have a written tradition?

CA: Well, exactly. The government at that time required tribes to go back to 1850 or something. The B.I.A. person had this box of documents to illustrate a good record-keeping collection for tribes. And my uncle is looking at the documents, and he kicked me under the table and said, “Those are our documents.” This was 2005. It was in 2018 that we got acknowledged, and not through the Bureau of Indian Affairs federal acknowledgment process, but through an act of Congress. So, one of the things that tribes have to do is collect all of this information — historical documents, information that shows that the tribes have continued to exist. In 2015 the criteria changed, so tribes only have to show this continuity of existence from 1900. But part of what I go into in the book is this idea of “paper genocide.” In 1924, in Virginia, there was this act called the Racial Integrity Act. This guy named Walter Plecker [an official with the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics] got rid of all Indians through basically a signature. The Racial Integrity Act changed all birth certificates to either “white” or “colored.” So, depending on how dark you were, you were no longer Indian, you were “white” or “colored.” And so tribes have to show continuity of being Indian, but we couldn’t because in 1924 all Indians were gone in Virginia.

RM: Yeah, just waved a want and poof, you disappeared.

CA: So tribes are supposed to go through this process of showing this continuity, but they can’t because of things like the Racial Integrity Act, [and] because of the U.S. Census, which didn’t count Indians until 1850. So my tribe ended up going through an act of Congress. We had to get senators and representatives to go to bat for us and push for federal recognition. And every two years, there’s a new Congress that gets seated; you start and then you have to start it all over again. People just don’t understand how expensive the process is. It takes tribes money to collect information, to hire anthropologists, historians.

RM: Oh, this is a huge research project; of course it costs money.

CA: I have some examples in the book of the costs of the process, and just about how long it takes things to get moving in the process.

RM: I have a theory, Cristina, about why Virginia has been such a problem for the Mattaponi, because of course it was the stamping ground of so many of the framers. We have Jefferson there. We have Washington there. We have Madison there. We have Patrick Henry, the bastard, there. And they had their plantations there, and they had their enslaved people there, all on Mattaponi land, so they would have been less willing to give the land right under their feet out than somewhere else in the colonies, perhaps. Maybe that’s just paranoid of me, but that’s a theory.

CA: That is a theory. I am pretty impressed that we survived it. We are still there; we were never removed. I think that in particular, in 1924, when Walter Plecker, said, “Oh, there aren’t any more Indians,” they said, “Oh, great, we don’t have to deal with them anymore.”

RM: That’s right.

CA: So [we were] having to go through an act of Congress instead of the federal acknowledgement process, because the federal acknowledgement process requires tribes to have all of this documentation, but if you cannot [produce] the documentation, then the other process is through an act of Congress. I went with my uncle to a hearing with the [Senate Committee on] Indian Affairs, and at that time it was headed by John McCain, and this was part of the asking Congress for federal recognition. At that meeting, John McCain asked my uncle, “Well, if you get federal recognition, are you going to open a casino?” And I thought that was the strangest thing because nobody had ever mentioned a casino. We are pretty strong Southern Baptists in Virginia, and so at that time there was no consideration of having a casino, and I thought, why would John McCain ask this question? So fast-forward to about 2016. The traction was gaining momentum for federal recognition for our tribe, and I was doing some research project and I decided to look at the news media coverage of the federal recognition process — take the body of stories that I can find on federal recognition, and see what these stories say. So I looked at every available story in three or four databases, every story that I could find. The earliest was in the ’80s, and of course the latest was now, and there were fewer than 4,000 stories. We had 40 years of possible stories, and yet there were fewer than 4,000. And there were only 21 broadcast stories — NPR mostly. There were a couple of really, really racist ones on 60 Minutes — “Wampum Wonderland.” And I thought, well, this is really interesting, that the federal recognition process is invisible — until we hit Cabazon. In 1987 the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians opened a high-stakes bingo parlor near Palm Springs, and this is when more coverage about tribes started happening. And there was a narrative shift from what sovereignty is to “If these tribes get federal recognition, then they’re going to open a casino, and then all this crime and destruction is going to come into your communities.”

RM: That’s amazing. Until they could find something which they could spin as having negative impact — their spin entirely — you were invisible, and then suddenly you became visible again.

CA: I really wanted to examine this idea; I wanted to say, wait a minute, how true is this? Because since all the coverage was pointing this way, I wanted to look at why and how. I decided that in order to understand this I needed to talk to some people. So I called my uncle, Kenny Adams, who was no longer the chief, but he was the chief for 15 years; he was lobbying, and it cost an enormous amount of money, and so I opened the book with a story from him about how my grandmother was the person who gave the first $20 to pay lobbyists for federal recognition. I think many people don’t realize just how crazy expensive it is. If I could just read one paragraph about this, from Chapter 10 of the book, “Perspectives from Native Journalists and Legal Experts,” about the Little Shell Tribe:

By 2007 the Native American Rights Fund had spent 29 years and more than 3,400 attorney hours on the federal recognition of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians of Montana. The cost at that time was already in excess of $1 million, including attorney time and the experts hired to do the technical work. It was finally recognized as part of the National Defense Authorization Act in 2020, but only after 12 years of Montana Senator John Tester introducing the bill each year beginning in 2007.

So that’s a million dollars over 29 years that this tribe had to spend. Casinos have made it take longer. One of the people that I interviewed for the book, [Native American attorney] Arlinda Locklear, is Lumbee, and she knows the federal recognition process in and out. The chapter based on my interview with her is called “Federal Recognition Does Not Equate to Casinos.” And in it she runs through how difficult it is to actually get a casino, and so I’ll read one more paragraph:

Locklear succinctly described the complicated years-long process. First you have to get the land, then you have to get the environmental impact statement, then you’ve got to get it placed into trust, and then you’ve got to get the Secretary of the Interior to determine if that land is gaming eligible, if it was acquired in trust after 1988. [The Cabazon year, remember.] A tribe will then need to hire gaming lawyers if it wants a casino. For Class 3 gaming it needs a compact with the state. Class 2 gaming, which consists of bingo and related games, including electronic versions of those games, can take place without a compact. But other laws and regulations need to be followed. Either way it takes at least another year, and inevitably someone will sue to stop the gaming; often this is someone in Las Vegas.

RM: There’s something absolutely surreal about this in its hilarity — I mean that very grimly — in a context where graveyards are being uncovered with Indigenous infants buried in them; in the history of what was done to Native peoples in the Americas, to reduce this to gaming. To make that the central piece in Native businesses, communities, existence, is bizarre.

CA: One thing that happened during COVID is that a lot of casinos shut down, so the realization was that tribes that have casinos have more resources. Take Donald Trump’s casinos — Donald Trump doesn’t share the money from his casinos with his community, right?

RM: Oh, no.

CA: [With] the tribes, the money stays within the community. And so it has the ability to take care of its people when it has this income. A lot of tribes that have casinos don’t make a lot of money from them, and most of the tribes aren’t multibillion-dollar industries, but it affords a sense of economic development. Other cultures and other people, other communities who have economic ventures don’t get slighted because they decided to open these potentially “amoralistic” [businesses], right? So there’s this moral standard put on Native peoples; people are no longer happy with us because we’re not in our place.

RM: Yeah, clearly. And this was the one way in which you could even approximate, however vaguely, economic power. Why did it go in this direction?

CA: Games have always been part of a lot of Indian cultures — bingo, and just games in general — and it was sort of a natural evolution for people say, “OK, well, we already do these types of things, culturally, let’s just expand them into something that we can use to shore up our economic [well-being].” There is actually a little bit in the book about where gaming came from, a little bit of a history — so it’s sort of a weird mix of academics, journalism, and stories.

RM: Stories are always a great thing. If media then emphasize this, and only this, that has shaped the image of the Indigenous community and the Indigenous individual ever since.

CA: Right. Part of what I wanted to do with the book is also give journalists some sort of guide, to just say, “It doesn’t have to be like this.” If you think about it, journalists aren’t supposed to be reporting on communities, they’re supposed to be reporting for communities.

RM: Precisely.

CA: And if you report for a community, then the worldview of your journalistic premise should be different. Like instead of starting at the point of already wanting to know why a tribe is going to get a casino, or how a tribe is going to get a casino — unless the tribe brings it up, then it shouldn’t even be part of the conversation. I found a lot of reporting where all of a sudden there’s something in there about a casino, when the tribe has specifically not ever mentioned a casino, or has specifically said, “We’re not interested in gaming. We’re not close enough to a major hub or a freeway so that people could even come out here.” What I want journalists to know is that the news media really doesn’t have a historical perspective on federal recognition, they don’t understand why non-federally recognized tribes exist, and they don’t understand anything about gaming. And so I want this book — it’s not a long book — I want this book to be a primer. If you’re a journalist, you can pick it up, and you can say, “How am I supposed to do this? I’m going to be covering a tribe seeking federal recognition.” And I just give some pointers, and I think that these are also pointers for anybody who is reading journalism, or any kind of audience.

RM: Anybody who understands history, or cares about history, or cares about Indigenous peoples, or cares about the state of the world. This seems a natural for the Women’s Media Center, because it is so rooted in righteous journalism. There’s nothing about this subject that couldn’t be remedied by lots more Native American journalists in newsrooms, because if they were there they would be de facto educating about their communities. All of this should be of interest to anybody in mass communication, and to scholars of journalism or Indigenous studies or media studies. So this is amazing what you’ve done, this is really just super. I always knew you were a good journalist, but this is something else. Congratulations, Cristina.

CA: Well, thank you. I do want to just briefly give the honor to my great-grandmother. The book cover is a picture of a turkey feather mantle, basically a cape, and it was made by my great-grandmother, Mollie Colmes Adams. When I was looking for an image for the book cover, I wanted to honor the many women in my past who got me to the point where I could write this book, and the women whose voices are in this book, and the voices that came through to me while I was writing this book. The book is dedicated to all the women who made me who I am. We are all products of the women who were resilient, and fought, and often fought with their lives to make sure that we could tell our stories.

RM: You are so right. And those stories, we live in those stories, and those stories live in us. So you have added greatly to the story cabinet, my dear, and again I congratulate you. Thank you so much, Cristina. Thank you for writing this book.