For many Native American tribes, gaming has proven to be the “White Buffalo.” Now some tribes are looking at buffalos of a different color.
In California’s Capay Valley, near Sacramento the 100-member Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, which operates Cache Creek Casino, have in the last few years been growing olives whose oils have ended up in some of the most exclusive restaurants in the region.
The olive groves, which have operated for five years, got their seed money from gaming profits. But they are generating profits of their own now at the Yocha Dehe’s olive mill, which processes oil from forty area growers using equipment imported from Florence, Italy.
The tribe’s enterprise was sparked when a former tribal chairman, Marshall McKay visited an olive center at the University of California, Davis and was inspired by their reports of the potential for a growing market for the product.
Today the tribe grows, mills and sells extra-virgin oil that 200 restaurants use. The top of the line oil under the brand Seka Hills is sold at boutique stores and farmers markets.
About 800 miles away in Washington state, the Suquamish Tribe and the Squaxin Island Tribe are looking at a different crop, marijuana. Washington voters recently changed the state law to decriminalize the use of pot.
Tribes are allowed by federal law to grow the plant as long as it is legal in the state. Federal law continues to ban pot use. Federal law enforcement officials continue to work to prevent minors from using the plant, to prevent interstate commerce in marijuana and involvement of organized crime in its sale.
Growing pot seems inevitable, according to Suquamish Chairman Leonard Foreman, who reservation is about 16 miles from the state capital of Olympia. “The state legalized this. It was brought to our doorstep by a neighboring government,” he told Indian Country Today. “The fact is, it’s here.”
The Suquamish Tribe and Squaxin Island Tribes signed 10 year compacts with the state’s Liquor and Cannabis Board that allows them to sell at a retail store, considered to be the first such operation in the United States. The Suquamish Tribe plans to open “Agate Dreams,” earlier this month near its Suquamish Clearwater Casino Resort.
Squaxin Island Tribe Councilman Jim Peters in an interview with the Tacoma News Tribune said that the tribe treats the product like tobacco or alcohol.
“We’re not going to advertise for people to get into it, but if you are into it, we have a product for you,” he said.
Washington State generates an average daily sale of $2.3 million in retail marijuana sales, generating a healthy excise tax. The tribes, not being subject to state taxes, can generate extra income of their own by taxing it on the reservation when they sell to non-Native Americans.
Not all Washington tribes are going the marijuana route. The 10,000-member Yakama Nation has banned pot use on its 1.2 million acre reservation.
