After the casino | A conversation with former Penobscot Indian Nation Chief Barry Dana about tribal economic development in the aftermath of last year's failed casino proposal

It was a compelling story: A Maine tribe wants to grow financially so it comes up with what it considers a great idea ˆ— a casino, off-reservation, which it says could make the state and its community tons of money. The Maine tribe dedicates five hard months to campaigning for its casino, during which the Maine tribal chief spends so much time touting his tribe's plan in front of television cameras, over radio airwaves and on the printed page that he becomes a sort of rock star for tribal awareness. The polls are close but then, unpredictably, the Maine tribe's plan crashes to the ground as soundly as an oak split by lightning. The casino is denied. The tribe is back to square one, having lost five months to a failed economic plan and gained itself one righteously indignant tribal chief.

Former Penobscot Indian Nation Chief Barry Dana knows that tale well. He lived it. And now, 10 months after releasing a statement in the wake of the November casino referendum in which he accused some Mainers of believing the Penobscots "are best served if we stay quietly on our reservation weaving baskets," Dana says there are plenty of Penobscot and state-sponsored plans for economic development that begin to look beyond the casino. But Dana won't be the one implementing them: On Sept. 11, Dana lost his bid for re-election to a third term in a 276 to 245 vote. James Sappier, a former tribal governor, was elected chief.

Mainebiz sat down with Dana on the eve of the recent election to talk about the Penobscot Nation's business development plans after the casino defeat. Though Dana did not respond to repeated requests for a follow-up conversation after the election, he told the Bangor Daily News he plans to "cut firewood and heat my house and keep an open mind to whatever opportunities knock on my door." Sappier reportedly plans to make the tribe's economic development his focus by pursuing Dana's projects more aggressively and capitalizing on the vocational talents of various tribal members.

The following is an edited transcript of a Sept. 10 discussion with Dana.

Mainebiz: How did you modify your economic policies following the defeat of the casino?
Dana: Well, I felt that we moved a great percentage of Maine thinkers at least to the middle, where they considered it. But in the end, they were swayed to the negative side. Anytime you undertake [a big project] like that, you're going to learn. Just the experience alone has taught me there are other ways to do business. And to maintain your integrity you have to stand firm with your values. I'm very proud of this tribe for doing that. We didn't really get into the mud-slinging. But we lost.

Are you modeling your economic plan after any other tribes?
Yes. All other tribes.

All other tribes?
Yes. Anybody who's ever done anything good, we are talking to them right now. There's one major correlation, and that is any tribe that has been successful, with or without a casino, has done so by creating a separate arm in tribal government ˆ— creating a corporation. The corporation, with its board of directors, decides what that tribe ought to be doing for businesses and then they let tribal government take care of [the logistics], like the tribal law and those other kinds of things.

The Mississippi band of the Choctaw ˆ— they were a tribe that developed partnerships with area businesses. So, you don't have a gas station but you want to partner with an oil company [for the station], then the tribe would become 51% owner of the company. That new form of partnership gets 10 times the revenue. One of the tribes [the Choctaw] did that, so they were already rolling. And then they got a casino. We have neither at this point, so we're working on the corporate policy.

What's on the table right now? I read that one of your primary projects involves building wind turbines on tribal land. Is that project still happening?
Our wind turbine project predates the governor; we've been working on that for a long time. That is still on the table for us.

Can you give me other examples of projects you're working on?
There are a lot. A lot. And a lot of them haven't been finalized yet and I don't want to screw them up by saying something premature.

We are now knee-deep in meetings with Poland Spring to create, on tribal land, a bottling plant [which will draw] tribal waters into the plant and bottle them under the name of Poland Spring. We are taking a hard look at this whole issue of pharmaceuticals ˆ— the selling of imported pharmaceuticals from Canada and other countries as well as looking at a mail-order business [to sell medications]. We can use an empty warehouse here. The Pequot Nation [in Connecticut], they do this already, and they have graciously extended their technical assistance. Basically, once we're in the driver's seat, overnight we will be able to establish the mechanism right here on the reservation to get this done. Sen. Olympia Snowe's bill [the Dorgan-Snowe bill, which would allow wholesalers to import drugs from Canada] is what we're waiting on. Whenever that is passed in Congress I think we're up and running.

You also plan to sponsor a tribal credit union, correct?
We don't have it yet, but we're working on it. A fellow from New Hampshire read about it and he called me. He is a credit union officer of some kind and his large firm ˆ— he works in Boston ˆ— has a quota that they want to fill where they give out free services. You know, the tribe here has been kind of in the news lately and we put ourselves out there to allow relationships to build. Word spread and he liked what he read and he wants to help us. I guess [establishing a credit union] is not that hard once you've got somebody guiding the way.

Once we're there, though, then we can offer housing mortgages and deal with small businesses. We're going to hold our own money now, in our own accounts, and reap the benefits, like the interest and the dividends. We'll make money off our own money while we're working with our money. It's kind of a smart idea. The Four Directions Development Corporation, which is the [community development] composite of the four tribes [the Maliseets, Micmacs, Penobscots and Passamaquoddies], is going to host this credit union to all four tribes. We want all four tribes to benefit with this model. If it's a good idea for one, then it's a great idea for all. However, I think all four tribes will have a branch on their own reservation.

What I want is to be able to drive down the road, on my reservation, and look out and see "Penobscot Nation Credit Union." We'd get our pay checks here [on Indian Island] Thursday or Friday and go right across the street. People could do their business here instead of going into Old Town.

Are there any new projects that have been nailed down?
We have not signed on the dotted line with anyone yet.

How closely do your coordinate your business plan with the other Maine tribes?
Well, we do our own thing. We respect each other. We coordinated with the Passamaquoddies on the casino. The Four Directions Development Corporation is with all four tribes. When I go to Four Directions meetings, I'm thinking about all four tribes. But when I'm in this office, I'm thinking primarily about Penobscots because we want tribal members to work right here on the reservation so they don't have to travel across the state or further.

You mentioned another tribe, the Choctaw, that has a casino and is doing very well, in your mind. Do you think a casino is necessary for your tribe's development?
If you [look at] what tribal revenue can do for all of its members, then absolutely a casino is critical because we have tribal members living all over the world and our available services to our people are probably 90 some-odd percent on this reservation.

Off this reservation, the amount of services you can receive diminishes quickly. That's only because we don't have money. On the reservation, we take care of the roads and garbage removal and water and things of that nature. We will not charge taxes. That is a concept that we will not subscribe to. A casino would give us significant revenue; it would cover housing and health [for members living off the reservation]. If a tribal member living in California wants a house, money would be there.

When was the tribe's economic development team created?
Nov. 4, we lost the [casino] vote. Nov. 5, I got on the phone and started calling around to people that I trusted. I said, I am very upset about this and I think we need to be upset with ourselves for putting all of our eggs in one basket in terms of economic development. Obviously, if we're going to do a casino, a statewide referendum is going to take up a lot of time. And it did, it took five months of effort.

So I wanted that same amount of energy [to be] put it into a different strategy. We've made a lot of friends along the way that we wanted to pull out of the drawer and call. So we made an economic development team right here in the tribe and it was within a week that we got a meeting with someone from a bank who serves on the board of directors for Four Directions and started talking about the credit union. So, we've been rolling.

How was the tribe structured before the casino vote? Was there an economic development team before?
Yes. On paper they were half economic development, half community development. But in reality, it was 90% community development, meaning we wanted to fix people's houses so we'd go after monies to do that. We were very successful in that [housing] effort. But we failed miserably in economic development. We've had a couple of projects here that failed. Schiavi Mobile Homes failed. Olamon Industries made cassette tapes for 16 years; I came into office and pulled the plug on it. You're supposed to make a decision on the success of the business in five years. We let this one go for 16 years and had not made a penny. Now, I'm not a business major but I told the people running the business, if you make money, great. If you don't, don't come across the street asking to be subsidized. And when they knocked on that door, I said no.

How do you define financial success for the Penobscot Nation?
My grandmother always said "If they ask, say no." It's your job as a parent to provide for one's needs. If they're asking for it, that's one of their wants. Tribal leadership, I think, sometimes parallels parenting. We want to meet people's basic needs. For the most part we're doing that. Right now, we're meeting about 70% of the needs of our population.

With more revenue, then we get into wants. We would like to have a cultural center. Do we need one? Well, yeah, you need to preserve things but we have shelves here [in my office] we can put things on. But if we had a cultural center, then we could bring home all of the bones and artifacts of our ancestors that are currently in museums all over New England. So, the things that you can do with more revenue are amazing. But we're working toward it without a casino. A casino just makes it happen that much quicker.

Is there one project you are really excited about?
Currently, we do not have a tribal business that is making sums of money, nothing much more than what we put into it. We have high-stakes bingo, which is meeting our needs to the penny. It's really tough, because everything we provide for services is generated out of revenue from only seven games a year. That's all the market can hold.

We have a license for 26, but if we ran 26 games we'd lose money because you're not going to fill the hall that many times. [The players] come in by bus from as far as Canada and Rhode Island, and they'll only do that seven times a year. We hover around $200,000 a year in revenue [from bingo]. We also have income that we draw off our woods for harvesting, [but] it's less than that. Total cash in hand [from both] is less than half a million.

Does your "wish list" have a dollar amount?
It certainly did with the casino. We were looking at making gobs of money. But, you know, one night I was driving home with the kids. It was a quiet time and I said, "Aw, you know, I'm glad we didn't win." Of course my daughter, who's in college, said, "What?" And I said, "Well, we'd have too much money."

We're a tribe that has survived 10,000 years ˆ— we would lose that quest for survival because life would be too easy. Even if your needs are met, even if your wants are met, I want you to strive for something important in life. Maybe you want to climb Everest, maybe you want to do the Olympics. That's drive. People who don't have drive aren't going to do anything.

We certainly have drive here because we need to figure out how to live. But our drive, our energy, is taken up by that component that we need to make ends meet. Beyond that, we can't become Olympians because we can't financially support our kids to become full-time athletes.

So what's enough money but not too much?
Oh, I don't know. Even if you were to double what we have now, we could only probably start taking a deeper breath. I would say tribal revenue in the amount of $10 million a year would be a good base. Plus further funding drives, like raising additional money for the cultural center.

After the casino vote, you released a statement in which you said, "There are some very ugly realities in Maine state government." How important is mending your relationship with the state to move forward with tribal business plans?
I think it's extremely important. But I don't think it's bad to explain how you feel. Immediately after the defeat, I released a statement that was quite heartfelt.

Though relations have been soured on some fronts, they have been very good on others. I like this relationship philosophy [partnering with the state and federal governments and non-native businesses]. We are very close [to financial success]; the pendulum is going to swing in our favor in the very near future because of the work we've done since Nov. 4 of last year. We've developed relationships, gone after good ideas, discarded the ones that don't fit with our values, and stuck with the ones that work for us. In order to live you need water, you need food, medicine and housing. So you go to your core values and try to meet that need. I think that is a step in the right direction.