WEEKLY FEATURE: BIA Decision Shocks Indian Country

The worst blow yet to the hopes of the Mashpee Wampanoag’s to build the First Light Casino (l.) in Taunton, Massachusetts, happened when the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs sent a 28-page letter saying that it can no longer hold 321 acres in trust for the tribe. The BIA agreed with a federal court decision that the Mashpees were not a federally controlled tribe in 1934 as required by the infamous Supreme Court casino, Carcieri v. Salazar, preventing tribes outside of that definition from taking land into trust.