“There is no formula in Indian Country other than charitable gifts for successful tribes to share the wealth,” he said.

Simmons, whose district encompasses the two largest casinos in the world ––Foxwoods Resort Casino and Mohegan Sun –– said there is a great inequity between tribes that are strategically located for casinos and those with reservations in out-of-the-way places. More than half of the federally recognized tribes fail to benefit from gaming, he said, and when there are other “glaring inequities” in the United States, wealth is redistributed by the government.

“What I try to look at with regard to public policy and Indian gaming is, ‘Who benefits and who pays?' ” Simmons said.

Mark C. Van Norman, executive director of the National Indian Gaming Association, a lobbying group for 184 gaming tribes, said Indian gaming is a tribal government program operated by individual tribes, not a federal government program.

“This is not a federal program where we're seeking equalization,” he said.

Even when the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was enacted, U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, D-Hawaii, a proponent, admitted that not all tribes would benefit because of their remoteness. Forty Indian gaming operations generate 65 percent of the revenue, according to Van Norman, who said the gaming tribes grossed $14.5 billion last year. He said tribes are using gaming profits to pay for schools, health clinics, police, water and sewer systems and other projects.

Some states are in fact attempting to “redistribute” wealth from Indian gaming. In California, non-gaming tribes or tribes with small enterprises received $80 million from gaming tribes over the past three years. But in Connecticut, where tribes pay the state 25 percent of their slot machine revenue in exchange for the exclusive rights to operate slots, revenue-sharing payments go into state coffers, with a portion redistributed to each of the state's 169 towns.

The Mashantucket Pequots and Mohegans regularly make charitable contributions to less fortunate tribes, though they are not compelled to do so.

The discussion Friday during the National Conference of Editorial Writers highlighted the continuing friction between pro- and anti-Indian gaming interests in Connecticut and elsewhere. Simmons and Jeff Benedict, president of the Connecticut Alliance on Casino Expansion, dwelled on legal and social problems associated with gaming.

Simmons was a state representative for Stonington and North Stonington before being elected to Congress, and was involved in some town-tribe issues, including a contentious lawsuit over a Mashantucket Pequot land-into-trust application. The tribe has since withdrawn the trust request, and Simmons said Friday that he thinks tribe-town relations have improved in the past year, but that tension still exists.

“As long as there is an opportunity for these very large commercial operations to plop down in a residential neighborhood, we're going to continue to have friction,” Simmons said.

On the theme of “who benefits?” Benedict spoke of the non-Indian, non-American investors who financed Foxwoods Resort Casino and Mohegan Sun at what he said were usurious rates. Van Norman retorted that nobody would lend the tribes money at the time. In the case of the Seneca tribe's recent financing of its Niagara Falls Casino with the same Malaysian group that backed the Connecticut casinos, Van Norman said the Senecas turned to the Malaysians because they could not get a bank loan as quick as they needed.

“Whose casino is this?” Benedict said. “Is this an Indian casino or a Malaysian casino?”

Benedict said gaming was foisted on the people of Connecticut by the federal government, citing a federal judge's order that former Gov. Lowell Weicker negotiate a compact with the Mashantucket Pequots and a second federal decision that the state's charity gambling nights was a form of gambling that paved the way for casinos. In an attempt to stop more casinos, the alliance successfully lobbied last year to have the Las Vegas Nights law repealed.

“In each of the cases where the state or its government has been presented with the option, it has said no,” Benedict said. “The state never wanted casinos.”

Van Norman, who was the sole gaming advocate because another panelist's flight was cancelled because of Tropical Storm Isabel, kept returning to the benefits of Indian gaming, including the 300,000 jobs it has created. A member of the Cheyenne River Sioux of South Dakota and an attorney, he began his remarks with a history of the country's aboriginal people, pointing out that tribal governments existed before there was a U.S. Constitution. He talked of the genocide of Indians after their contact with Europeans and their legacy of poverty, poor health, alcohol addiction and premature death. He said gaming, sometimes called “the new Buffalo,” has made a huge difference.

“From our point of view, Indian gaming is the American success story,” he said.