American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION Because of news coverage and television publicity, visitors and other observers might think that Indian Country in Southern California is synonymous with “Casino Country.” To be sure, nearly two dozen tribal casinos currently operate here or are being considered for construction in the near future. California ranks first in the nation for the number of Indian casinos; however, the largest single Indian casino complex is in Connecticut! But the casino phenomenon is a unique change on the trust landscape. When I was researching Mission Indian land tenure in the 1960s, nothing suggested that local bands and tribes would come to possess the option to run casinos. Today only a small Indian population identifies with gaming and, by rough computation, a very small amount of tribal acreage is so utilized. Putting it into perspective, trust lands represent about 350,000 acres—mostly in the three counties of Riverside, San Bernardino, and San Diego—of an aggregate regional acreage around 22.6 million. These lands are within an enlarged Southern California region that extends from the Pacific coast, east to the Colorado River, south to parts of northern Baja California, and north into the Mohave Desert, Owens Valley, and Death Valley. That works out to be less than 2 percent of the land in Southern California. In aggregate, casinos exist on less than two hundred acres.