The Fort Sill Apache Tribe is ready for the grand opening of its Warm Springs Casino near Anadarko, Oklahoma. But the event will have to wait, as a lawsuit filed by the Comanche and Kiowa nations works its way through federal court. Those tribes each have two casinos within a 30-mile radius of Warm Springs.
On May 24, the Comanche and Kiowa tribes filed Kiowa Tribe et al v. United States Department of the Interior et al in the federal court for the Western District of Oklahoma. The suit asked for a temporary restraining order against the casino opening, alleging the land on which the Fort Sill Apache built Warm Springs Casino, its second in Oklahoma, does not rightfully belong to that tribe, according to a 19th-century treaty.
However, on June 10, U.S. District Judge Charles B. Goodwin denied the plaintiffs’ request. His ruling didn’t fault the plaintiffs’ claims to the land the casino sits on. But he wrote, “Plaintiffs cannot satisfy their legal burden to show that they are substantially likely to succeed on the merits of any of their legal claims” in a full trial. He added, “The lawsuit presents difficult and intertwined questions of fact and law that have yet to be addressed in depth.”
That’s a small victory for the Fort Sill Apaches, as the plaintiffs now are asking for a preliminary injunction against the opening of the casino. That would have the same effect as a temporary restraining order: effectively preventing Warm Springs from opening as the case works its way through the litigation. The plaintiffs will have to prove that the Interior Department was wrong to grant federal recognition to the Fort Sill tribe in 1976 and take the casino land into trust in 2001.
