Winning Big Without Casinos

The renaissance of the Cheyenne River Sioux began with a drunk in a dumpster. One day, 11 years ago, a man passed out while foraging for food in Gregg Bourland’s garbage. Bourland was minding his own business — a video store in Eagle Butte, S.D. — when he found the guy. “Why do people drink like that?” Bourland asked himself, but he knew the reasons: unemployment and despair. Bourland went to the tribal chairman to ask what he was doing about all of the above. Answer: nothing. “He was interested in government handouts, not development,” says Bourland. Later that year, 1990, Bourland, whose Native American name is Eagles Watch Over Him, ran for tribal chairman. “I wanted to make a statement,” he says. “I didn’t expect to win.”

But win he did — with a message of tribal self-sufficiency that made the pugnacious Eagles Watch Over Him, then 33, the youngest chairman in the tribe’s history. Under his management, unemployment dropped from 75% to 25%, and welfare roles were cut from 500 families to 150. What is remarkable is that Bourland, now 44, did it without opening a single casino.

It has been a wild ride. As chairman, Bourland, who has a business degree from Black Hills State University, took stock of his tribe’s assets. “We had no timber to sell,” he says. “We had no coal to mine. But the Internet is something anyone can do anywhere.” Dragging his tribe into the 21st century, he turned the Cheyenne River Telephone Authority into a satellite-TV, cell-phone and Internet-service provider — and then spun off a new data-processing corporation called Lakota Technologies Inc. LTI employs 20 people, but Bourland dreams of 1,000 workers scattered across the 2.8-million-acre reservation. To train them, Bourland persuaded Cisco Systems to open one of its networking academies on the reservation. Students at Cheyenne Eagle Butte High School now learn to design, build and maintain computer networks.

Bourland has helped his tribe open a buffalo ranch, a hospital, a college and a wellness center to treat alcoholism. But it is high tech that fires his imagination. “The future Little Big Horn,” he says, “may be in cyberspace.”