Case: 3:25-cv-00698-wmc Document #: 56-1 Filed: 01/06/26 Page 7 of 13
recognized this authority. See NIGC Office of General Counsel, Legal Opinion re: Sales of Washington State Lottery tickets & games on Tribal Trust lands at 7 (Oct. 16, 2017), available at https://www.nigc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/WashStateLottery.pdf (“Indian gaming remains an expression of tribal sovereignty, and Indian tribes may remain the primary regulators of gaming activities on Indian lands. As such, within IGRA’s regulatory structure, tribes may license and regulate gaming operations on Indian lands owned by non-tribal entities and individuals.”); see also NIGC Office of General Counsel, Legal Opinion re: Tribal jurisdiction over gaming on fee land at White Earth Reservation at 7 (Mar. 14, 2005), available at https://www.nigc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/56_whiteearthbandofchippewaindns.pdf (“Lacking compacts, neither the tribes nor, more to the point, the State could conduct a lottery on the reservations, the court concluded.” (citing Coeur d’Alene , 842 F. Supp. at 1282)). Moreover, the congressional purpose and structure of IGRA support the Nation’s authority to bring actions against illegal third-party gaming operations. First, IGRA is intended to “promot[e] tribal economic development, self-sufficiency, and strong tribal governments; … to shield [Indian lands gaming] from organized crime … [, and] to ensure that the Indian tribe is the primary beneficiary of the gaming operation ….” 25 U.S.C. § 2702(1)–(2). These purposes (particularly Congress’s intent to ensure that tribes are the primary beneficiaries of gaming on Indian Nation v. Locke , 176 F.3d 467 (9th Cir. 1999). However, that court primarily disagreed with the Coeur d’Alene decision on the basis that IGRA did not support the tribe’s attempt to regulate a state-operated gaming activity, not the lack of a compact, and even observed that IGRA’s policy and provisions seem to provide greater support for tribes asserting jurisdiction over “gaming activity conducted by non-tribal entities, other than states.” Id. at 536; see also id. (IGRA’s “policy concerns are not implicated by State-operated gaming activity to the same extent as by gaming activity conducted by other non-tribal entities …. Presumably, the state lottery, unlike gaming activity conducted by other non-tribal entities, is much less susceptible to the corrupting influence of organized crime which Congress especially feared in regard to Indian gaming activity.”).
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