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TRIBAL GAMBLE: THE SERIES

Day One, 12/10/00
Casino boom benefits non-Indians

The $800 million deal for outsiders at Mohegan Sun

Day Two, 12/11/00
Few tribes share in casino windfall

Gaming success helps tribe gain community acceptance

California tribes hit the jackpot with gaming vote

Day Three, 12/12/00
It's a war of genealogies

Lineage questions linger as gaming wealth grows

Tribes scramble to get into the game

Day Four, 12/13/00
Tribes make easy criminal targets

Trump plays both sides in casino bids

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By Ellen Barry, Globe Staff, 12/12/2000

n the fourth floor of the Department of the Interior, 11 scholars make up a strange historical tribunal, poring through enormous stacks of documents to winnow out real Indian tribes from fakers and wannabes.

Although many Americans assume that Indian identity is a matter of blood, the seven requirements for federal recognition of a tribe - which transforms a group of people into a potentially powerful sovereign entity - are actually based on murkier cultural attributes.

A tribe must have been identified as an Indian entity since 1900; have functioned as a community since first contact with Europeans; have a true political leader; have requirements for membership; and have descended from a historical tribe. Also, individuals cannot belong to another federally recognized tribe, and the tribe must not have been terminated by the federal government.

It was 22 years ago that Bud Shapard from the Bureau of Indian Affairs designed this process, hiring three scholars and a secretary to deal with the backlog of groups that had never signed treaties with Washington. Shapard - ''naively,'' he says now - envisioned it as a low-budget, do-it-yourself process in which tribes relied on their most educated member to argue their case.

But it hasn't worked out that way in the years since casino gambling applications have engulfed the tiny Bureau of Acknowledgement and Recognition. Squeezed by intense pressure, Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Kevin Gover, who holds the final decision-making authority, this spring asked Congress to take that power away from him.

''We're not set up for that kind of controversy,'' Gover said. ''It has become an adversarial judicial process.... That's not what we do well.''

Gover has come under scrutiny from opponents of petitioning tribes, who say he has intentionally relaxed the requirements. The General Accounting Office may begin an investigation early next year. Meanwhile, 237 tribes are awaiting verdicts, which come at the maddeningly slow pace of one or two a year.

Increasingly, outsiders are claiming that they are stakeholders in the process. In Connecticut, especially, advocates for homeowners are demanding that strict genealogical tests be applied.

''The BIA has been forced to retreat into the notion of tribe,'' said James P. Lynch, who has investigated tribes for homeowners opposing casinos and Indian land claims.

But anthropologists and many Indians chafe at the idea that the public could demand a cut-and-dried genealogy test - similar to the ''blood quantum'' requirement that the government once used.

Outsiders ''have this idea that biology has been such an important factor,'' said Robert Williams, who teaches law and Indian Studies at the University of Arizona. ''Any time a master race starts focusing on blood quantum, the minority race has the right to be defensive, angry, and incredibly frightened.''

The vast majority of America's 558 recognized tribes have not had to prove their case before the Bureau of Indian Affairs because their status was established in 19th-century treaties. Northeastern tribes missed out because their treaties were with the colonies. They - along with the more obscure western tribes - were the first to line up for federal recognition in 1978.

The most contentious have been in Connecticut, which has also become the country's most lucrative casino market. Gover overruled negative preliminary findings by his staff on the Eastern Pequots and Paucatuck Eastern Pequots, and made the unusual move of recommending to reconsider the Golden Hill Paugussetts, a tribe he once represented as an attorney, after they were rejected in 1996.

''I was not among the earliest enthusiasts of these eastern tribes,'' he said. ''But now I see it as a great historical justice unfolding. These tribes were among the first to be victimized by the arriving Europeans. And now they are among the first to show Indian Country what it's like to be prosperous.''

Globe correspondent Adam Piore and Globe Staff writer Sean Murphy contributed to this article.