In a cruel twist of fate, less than a year after opening the highly successful Firekeepers casino in Battle Creek, Michigan, Laura Spurr, the tribal chairwoman of the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi Indians, died of a heart attack while attending a conference in California.

The 64-year-old Spurr was instrumental in the process that required the tribe to petition the government to take land into trust for the casino, one of only four times that has occurred. Then, she directed the construction and financing of the casino, especially difficult during an economic downturn.

But after the casino opened last August, it was immediately successful and contributed hundreds of jobs for the tribe and the surrounding communities. But she wanted to see the tribe's economy diversify even more.

"Hopefully we will have communities that want to work jointly with the tribe, and potentially there are things we could do together down the road-possibly small manufacturing for people who can't get into the gaming industry because of past history," she told the Western Michigan Business Review in 2008.

Spurr's accomplishments, however, went far beyond the casino. She graduated from the University of Michigan in 1967 with a BS in nursing and for ore than 40 years, she worked as a nurse in different practice settings in the cities of New York, Washington, D.C, Chicago, and Grosse Pointe. In these hospitals she practiced at different levels of administration with the responsibility for supervision and directing patient care. She also taught nursing at different times in her career, and while working in Chicago she completed the course work for a master's degree from DePaul University with a double major in nursing administration and education. While living in Washington, she served as chairwoman of the Personnel Committee for Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, was on the D.C. Government Committee of the League of Women Voters, and was active in the Metropolitan Hospital Organization.

She believed, however, that the casino was the key to the tribe's future.

"We're going to use this casino as the source of funds to get involved in other kinds of economic development," she told the Business Review. "We wouldn't like to open another casino, because it's just limited. We would want to get involved in other things that would provide long-term jobs and opportunity for tribal members.

"There's all kinds of things-working in hospitals, doing research, becoming bankers if they want to do that. We're hoping to get them involved in those things, to expand horizons."

By Staff

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