Bearskin's Gamble

Bearskin's tribe was poorly organized. The Wyandottes had no jobs. An administration building put up in the '70s was empty. He concluded that the two federal agencies charged with overseeing Indian welfare, Indian Health Services and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, were doing a poor job.

Bearskin puttered around his house for a few years, retired and bored, before he decided he could do better.

The tribe elected him chief in 1983.

Under Bearskin's leadership, the tribe revised its constitution for the first time since 1937. It pressed for and received a $5.5 million payment from the United States for land the government took.

The tribe took over five small technical colleges that had been facing bankruptcy, including one in Kansas City, Kansas, and transformed them into the Wyandotte Collegiate Systems. At these schools, about 430 tribe members learn skills such as court reporting and medical recordkeeping. A company owned by the Wyandottes also received an unprecedented $100 million contract from the Department of Interior to supply office and communications equipment. (The tribe serves as a middleman, locating firms that stock what the department needs and taking a small percentage of proceeds from the sales.)

The formerly unused administration building began living up to its purpose, becoming the tribal headquarters. In 1983, the tribe employed five people; now it provides jobs for 92. Over the years, the tribe has erected new buildings, including an award-winning preschool, a community library with more than 10,000 books and a cafeteria for senior citizens. In the many offices are plaques dedicated to Bearskin and the tribe, photographs of Little League teams and an actual bearskin pinned to the wall.

Across the street from the tribal offices, on top of a hill, stands a new wellness center that the Wyandottes built with the nearby Shawnee tribe. The building has a medical lab, X-ray machines and exam rooms as well as a running track and fully loaded rooms for aerobics and weight training. A painting of an impossibly ripped bear flexing its muscles graces one wall of the weight room, which is called "The Bears' Den."

Bearskin's name is everywhere. It's on the Bearskin Health and Education Center. It's on the Bearskin Health and Wellness Center. It's embedded in a stone podium in front of the tribal offices. The local high-school team is the Bears -- though Bearskin says that's just a coincidence.

These days, Bearskin wears a hearing aid, black-and-gray glasses, slacks and black sneakers. With his white hair like neat, smooth strands of silk, he still looks good. Mistaken for being 79, Bearskin admits he's a hearty 81 -- though now that he's into his eighties, he says, his sex life has slowed to only "two or three times a week."

"You say his name is on a lot of things," says Ellis Enyart, who oversees the tribe's stalled gaming operations in Kansas City, Kansas. "That's right. He's done a lot for the community."

"That's what might be pushing [Bearskin's casino effort] -- the legacy thing," says Holly Zane, a member of and lawyer for the Wyandot Nation of Kansas, which descends from the same ancestors as Bearskin's tribe. "He's incredibly driven to improvement of his tribe and leaving a legacy. If they're able to get a major economic development package, they won't be in the same indigent state they were when he took over. He's an extremely proud person.

"Out of the 4,332 Wyandottes nationwide, 400 live in and around the town of Wyandotte, Oklahoma. An additional 800 are scattered across that state; the rest are dispersed nationwide. Annual money that comes in from the Bureau of Indian Affairs can provide only for the 400 Wyandottes who live near the reservation.

Bearskin wants to take care of all of the Wyandottes across the country. In the late '80s, he tried to open a bingo hall in downtown Kansas City, Kansas, but was unable to get city approval. At the time, Indian gaming in Kansas City, Kansas, "was all new," says Hal Walker, the Unified Government's attorney. "Nobody knew what the hell it was all about, and they turned it down."

In 1994, Bearskin decided to pursue opening a casino. Since the 1980s, the federal government has pushed casinos as the major economic development tool for Native American tribes, and with federal funding for tribes decreasing every year since the Carter administration, many tribes have had no choice but to get on board, says Russel Barsh, a law professor at New York University who follows Indian gaming. Figures from the National Indian Gaming Commission in Washington, D.C., show that roughly 320 Indian gaming operations generated $12.7 billion last year. (Two-thirds of that income was generated by just 39 casinos, however.)

Bearskin had no experience in this area, but a friend put him in touch with a Florida businessman named Alan Ginsburg, who came to visit Bearskin in Oklahoma. The two struck up a partnership. Ginsburg would finance a casino project for the Wyandottes in exchange for 30 percent of the casino's revenue.

Ginsburg is a real estate developer who's built thousands of units of affordable housing throughout Florida. He did not return phone calls from the Pitch seeking comment for this story, but according to Florida newspaper articles, Ginsburg's other casino interests include at least one with the Seminole Tribe in Coconut Creek, Florida, near Ft. Lauderdale.