MASHANTUCKET, Conn. — When the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut for three months in 2020, its owners, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, had to reckon with decades of relying heavily on gambling as the tribe’s main source of revenue.
“The fact that the casino revenues went from millions to zero overnight just fully reiterated the need for diverse revenue streams,” said Tribal Chairman Rodney Butler.
The 1,000-member tribe has since expanded its efforts to get into the federal government contracting business, making it one of several tribal nations to look beyond the casino business more seriously after the coronavirus crisis. Tribal leaders and tribal business experts say the global pandemic has been the latest and clearest sign that tribal governments with casinos can’t depend solely on slot machines and poker rooms to support future generations.
In Michigan, the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians, or Gun Lake Tribe, recently announced a 25-year plan to develop hundreds of acres near its casino into a corridor with housing, retail, manufacturing and a new 15-story hotel. A non-gambling entity owned by the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, also in Michigan, is now selling “NativeWahl” burger franchises to other tribes after forming a 2021 partnership with Wahlburgers, the national burger chain created by the celebrity brothers Paul, Mark and Donnie Wahlberg.
Some tribes, with and without casinos, have gotten involved in a wide range of non-gambling businesses, such as trucking, construction, consulting, health care, real estate, cannabis and marketing over the past decade or longer while others have been branching out more recently.
“While enterprise diversification can come with costs, its necessity became clear during the early phases of the pandemic, when tribally owned casinos were shut down to mitigate COVID-19 transmission and gaming-dependent tribes were left with little incoming revenue,” according to a new report from the Center for Indian Country Development at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
The report found that many tribes are increasingly doing business with the federal government, especially the U.S. Department of Defense.
The Mashantucket Pequots’ non-gambling entity, Command Holdings, last year made its largest acquisition to date: WWC Global, a Florida-based management consulting firm that predominantly works with federal agencies, including the defense and state departments. WWC announced in December t