Ilana Bar-av for Wisconsin Watch
Playing blackjack at Ho-Chunk Gaming Black River Falls.
Jackpots, left and right. That’s what Brent White Eagle recalls of reopening the Ho-Chunk Gaming Casino in Madison after the pandemic forced a closure of more than two months in 2020.
Verifying each jackpot kept the former slots department supervisor on his toes as his colleagues adapted to pandemic life. Despite fewer gamblers, visitors made larger bets that triggered big prizes.
“There were quite a few nights where it was just off-the-wall jackpots. It was constant running for all of our employees,” White Eagle says.
Patrons didn’t complain, but Ho-Chunk Nation officials anxiously watched their economic engine sputter.
Two years later, casino officials say revenue is eclipsing pre-pandemic levels. But the pain from the temporary shutdown lingers for the tribe, manifested in layoffs and cuts to services. That’s forcing tribal leaders to confront their economy’s outsized reliance on casinos.
“We were hit pretty hard by the pandemic,” says Ho-Chunk President Marlon WhiteEagle, no relation to the casino official. “And that begs the question of what we can do to move beyond gaming.”
Wisconsin’s 11 federally recognized tribes have long weighed how to diversify their economies, and the pandemic illustrated the risk of failing to do so.
The Ho-Chunk Nation has found little success with past diversification efforts, facing turnover in leadership and complacency with gambling earnings since that revenue began transforming life in the 1980s, tribal officials said.
“We’ve become very spoiled,” says Jon Warner, a Ho-Chunk Gaming business development manager. “We are able to survive with what we have, and it has become the status quo.”
Wisconsin Watch interviewed him on the Ciporoke podcast, which tackles Ho-Chunk Nation issues. He spoke as a citizen and not in his official capacity.
Warner and others see promise for the future — whether in development on Ho-Chunk land held in a federal trust, federal contracting opportunities, or boosting entrepreneurship.
Says Warner: “We’ve got to get gaming out of our blood.”
Pandemic shock
Casinos drive Wisconsin’s tribal economies, generating nearly $1.3 billion in annual net winnings before the pandemic. But by 2021, winnings dropped by nearly a third to $893 million.
(Accordingly, the portion of net winnings that Wisconsin receives under compacts with tribes plunged from $29.1 million to $154,000 between the 2019 and 2021 fiscal years.)
Gaming revenue chiefly funds vital infrastructure and government programs like education, social services and tribal courts. Tribes don’t generally tax income, nor do they collect property taxes.
But the pandemic temporarily shocked that system in spring 2020.
The largest three gaming tribes in Wisconsin — the Forest County Potawatomi, Oneida and Ho-Chunk — felt an immediate pinch as COVID-19 shuttered businesses. Potawatomi Hotel and Casino laid off 1,600 workers. And when the Oneida Nation reopened its Green Bay casino following a shutdown, it called back only about half of its workforce of around 900.
WhiteEagle says gaming typically contributes 75 percent of the Ho-Chunk Nation’s revenue, and the pandemic forced layoffs of roughly 2,250 Ho-Chunk employees.
WhiteEagle announced the layoffs in a YouTube address, fueling pushback and efforts to remove him from office. WhiteEagle did not specify how many positions would be restored, but said management had previously been “top heavy,” with “more employees than we had work for them to do.”
Ryan Greendeer, a Ho-Chunk Legislature spokesperson and Army veteran, says he was pained to see the tribal veterans service officer laid off.
Among others who got pink slips: Nelson Smith, a wildlife biologist who focused on bees and elk. He now spends his days tanning deer hides, running errands and looking for work.
Nelson isn’t sure what the future holds. “Who knows, I might be living in my car this summer.”
White Eagle, the former casino worker, lost his job after taking medical leave and missing a deadline to file paperwork, he says.
He’s looking for work in sports betting — now underway at the Oneida Casino in Green Bay and on a mobile app at certain Oneida Nation locations. The Forest County Potawatomi and St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin also recently negotiated gaming compacts with the state to allow on-site sports betting, which remains illegal in Wisconsin outside of tribal operations. President WhiteEagle said sports betting is “on the horizon” for the Ho-Chunk.
That comes as the Ho-Chunk plan to break ground on a $405 million casino complex in Beloit. It may include a multi-use facility that could be used for education or health care should brick-and-mortar casinos become a “thing of the past,” Greendeer says.
Humble beginnings for casinos
The Ho-Chunk Nation owns six casinos. The three largest — in Black River Falls, Madison and Wisconsin Dells — rise off of Wisconsin’s major interstate highways, allowing for easy access.
That geography is no lucky accident. Long before the U.S. government forced the Ho-Chunk from their Wisconsin and Illinois lands — driving them to Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota and later, Nebraska — tribal ancestors walked the paths connecting villages and cultural sites along what today is Interstate 94.
The Ho-Chunk have no reservation in Wisconsin, but parcels of land hold reservation status. Instead 5,550 Ho-Chunk citizens in Wisconsin are scattered across the state on ancestral lands that the tribe repurchased or on privately owned land.
David Greendeer, a Ho-Chunk citizen and former member of the tribal Legislature, recalls the pre-casino years when the Ho-Chunk struggled to maintain basic necessities. Some families lacked running water through the 1980s, he says.
A transformation began in the 1980s after the tribe opened a tobacco shop out of a used trailer near Wisconsin Dells. Then came a bingo hall.
“Money started coming so quickly they didn’t know what to do with it,” Greendeer says.
The next arrival: casinos, thanks to a series of court decisions and Wisconsin’s creation of a state lottery in 1987. By 1993, the Ho-Chunk opened their first casino — in the same spot as the original smoke shop.
The casino operations started small before evolving into a major industry.
But depending so heavily on one industry is a gamble, says Patrice Kunesh, the founder and former director of the Center for Indian Country Development at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
Questions loom about the long-term profitability of casinos as their clientele ages. They face competition from certain online and mobile gambling — including sports betting — and other entertainment.
“Tribes are facing a real serious problem here with the concentration of their businesses,” Kunesh says. “We need a private economy that can continue and hum along and not throw your reservations into such chaos and turmoil.”
Trying to diversify
WhiteEagle points to several past Ho-Chunk diversification efforts that have fizzled.
In 2003, the tribe introduced a since-abandoned bottled water brand that struggled to break into new markets. The same year, the tribe opened a $3 million cinema in Tomah that closed during the pandemic.
Similar episodes have played out elsewhere.
After losing money on out-of-state casino projects, the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa ventured into payday lending, partnering with outside lenders who sought to avoid state and federal consumer protection regulations.
The operation charged interest rates as high as 400 percent, prompting critics to call it predatory and ensnaring the tribe in litigation.
The Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin tried to break into the hemp market after Congress legalized it for research purposes. But in 2015, federal drug agents destroyed 30,000 Menominee cannabis plants — despite shaky evidence that the plants contained illegal levels of THC, the psychoactive component of marijuana.
Still, industrial hemp may hold promise for tribes — as does marijuana should it become legal in Wisconsin. The Oneida Nation is exploring hemp cultivation. Meanwhile, the Menominee are building a new sawmill and adding maple syrup production.
Warner says he envies the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, which shares ancestry with the Wisconsin Ho-Chunk.
It began diversifying in the 1990s, when new Iowa casinos threatened profits of the tribe’s WinnaVegas Casino. The tribe created an economic development arm, Ho-Chunk Inc., which spurred enterprises, including construction, real estate development, and home manufacturing. The corporation also secures IT and administrative contracts with the federal government — aided by a federal law that gives preference to tribes during bidding.
In 1994, its first year of operation, Ho-Chunk Inc. raised $400,000 in revenue. This year, it will clear $370 million in non-gaming revenue, says Lance Morgan, president and CEO of Ho-Chunk Inc.
Ilana Bar-av for Wisconsin Watch
The Ho-Chunk Nation owns six casinos, with the three largest in Madison, the Wisconsin Dells and Black River Falls, above.
Spirit-driven barbecue
In Wisconsin, Warner says the Ho-Chunk should encourage citizens’ entrepreneurial spirit.
Darren Price has that spirit. Over 22 years, Price and his Ho-Chunk family built and expanded BP Smokehouse in Tomah — aided by a $10,000 small business grant from the Ho-Chunk Legislature around 2000.
Price, a former State Patrol trooper, thrived on the competitive barbecue circuit. The business grew as patrons kept returning.
“It can be lonely at times,” he says, recalling waking before dawn to prepare meat. “But you’ve got to have that dream and that vision, you have to nurture that. Because it’s yours.”
BP Smokehouse takes its name from the combined initials of Price and Blackdeer, the maiden name of his wife, Myra Jo. The couple just opened a second location, a kiosk in the Ho-Chunk Casino in Nekoosa.
The Ho-Chunk government has since abandoned the loan program that gave BP Smokehouse its start, but WhiteEagle says the tribe aims to restart a similar program.
Looking to the future
Tribes should use federal pandemic relief for long-term economic or education investments, Kunesh says. But some — including the Ho Chunk — have instead sent citizens direct payments, which she called “more of a political calculation.”
Meanwhile, Kunesh says, tribes are underutilizing their greatest asset: land. A federal Bureau of Indian Affairs trust holds more than 60 million acres.
The bureau has historically governed the land’s uses, requiring sign offs for activities like oil drilling, agriculture or real estate. But a 2012 federal law allows tribes to develop their own leasing regulations.
With 6,633 acres of trust land, Wisconsin’s Ho-Chunk Nation became an early case study for efficiently governing trust land — by creating an office to manage leasing agreements.
WhiteEagle says that could pay off in coming years.
Warner says the tribal citizens need to “build each other up” and invest in the future.
“We are a really powerful, strong tribe,” he says, “and we’ve forgotten it.”
Frank Vaisvilas, Native American affairs reporter for the Green Bay Press-Gazette, contributed to this report.
This story is part of a collaborative series, “At the Crossroads,” from the Institute for Nonprofit News, Indian Country Today, Wisconsin Watch, and eight other news partners, examining the state of the economy in Indian Country. This reporting was made possible with support from the Walton Family Foundation.
