Copyright Portland Newspapers Nov 8, 2007

The day after the Passamaquoddys lost their second bid in four years to build a gambling operation, a fellow tribe member caught up with Gov. Rick Doyle in the parking lot for tribal offices.

"Well, the cowboys beat the Indians again," the man said.

Doyle, who just 12 hours earlier had been talking about how a harness racing track with slot machines would deliver his tribe from poverty, said the man's comment summed up the feelings on the reservation Wednesday.

"Every time we propose something, we get put down," Doyle said. "It feels to me that we continue to be oppressed by the dominant culture."

There are plans to build a liquefied natural gas terminal in Passamaquoddy Bay, and strong interest in harnessing tidal waters and the wind for energy production ventures. But the tribe has focused for nearly 15 years on getting a gambling facility, and the latest setback only reinforced nagging suspicions that voters were discriminating against the tribe and Washington County, where the racino would have been built.

For leaders, the defeat was even more disappointing because the tribe had poured more than $700,000 into the ballot campaign and convinced neighboring communities that opposed past efforts to see the racino as a potential economic engine that would generate jobs and encourage tourism.

"We thought we put together a pretty good package," said Lt. Gov. Joseph Socobasin of the Passamaquoddy council in Indian Township.

Tribe members said anti-casino forces proved too formidable. Political action committees fought their proposal; Gov. John Baldacci vetoed a bill to allow a racino, setting the stage for the referendum; and voters in more urban and populated parts of the state, with their numbers, helped defeat the measure 52 percent to 48 percent.

As elders played cards in the senior center at the edge of the bay, Bonnie Sockabasin said she has the impression that many people in southern Maine are transplants who want to keep gambling facilities out of their new home.

Sockabasin, a cook at the center, said they have no regard for the harsh economic reality facing the tribe and Washington County, which has the state's highest unemployment rate because of job losses in the manufacturing and fishing industries.

"If we just had the numbers that southern Maine has, then we would have had a good shot at getting the racino," she said.

Clayton Cleaves, executive director of the reservation's housing authority, noted the narrowness of the defeat, and said that had racists not voted, the measure surely would have passed.

"I know, in the voting equation, there are people who hate Native Americans," Cleaves said.

Those who ran the campaign against the racino said racism did not decide the vote.

Dennis Bailey of Casinos No! said the political action group actually had to overcome a lot of sympathy for the tribe and Washington County.

"There were many people and voters who under normal circumstances would never vote for the casino, but they were willing to say, 'Let them do it if that's what they want to do,'" Bailey said.

Bailey attributed the tribe's loss more to the fact that a racino already exists in Maine. In 2003, when voters rejected a proposal by the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot tribes to build a casino in southern Maine, they authorized limited slot-machine gambling at existing harness racing tracks.

That led the gaming corporation Penn National to open Hollywood Slots in Bangor.

"I think there is the perception of voters that they were fooled" in 2003, Bailey said. "Racinos are a harder sell now."

Bailey said the Passamaquoddys and the anti-casino movement do share one belief - that it is unfair for Penn National to have a racino monopoly.

On Wednesday, the group invited Maine's Indian tribes to join the fight to ban all slot machines in the state "in the interest of eradicating this blatant unfairness."

Tribal leaders, though, are not ready to abandon the idea of another racino proposal.

It may just take a while to get over the loss, according to Doyle, who said the tribe was mourning the death of a community member at the same time as the defeat of the ballot question.

"To be people who have survived this long means we do have some fortitude, and we will find some way to survive," Doyle said.

Mike Chadwick, the principal of Pleasant Point's school, who lives in Calais, said he personally has never heard people say they would not support a racino because Indian tribes were behind it.

But Chadwick, who is not a tribe member, said the defeat of the Passamaquoddy proposal doesn't look good.

"You have the poorest county in the state, with people who have historically struggled in life, and they're being denied opportunity," Chadwick said.

Staff Writer Josie Huang can be contacted at 791-6364 or at:

jhuang@pressherald.com