This is especially true regarding conflicts among local communities, states and Native American tribes regarding gaming. Native Americans assert that because of their sovereignty, federally recognized tribes have the right to engage in gaming. In 1988 IGRA affirmed those rights, while at the same time, requiring tribes to negotiate a compact with states. For the most part, Native Americans have been a historically oppressed and disenfranchised minority. They have lost their lands, as Governor Thomas pointed out, and have been relegated to the bottom of American society.
Many reservations are among the poorest and least developed parts of the United States.
Native Americans have seen government services cut, and live with diminished opportunities to equally participate in the American dream. Over the five or six generations of the reservation culture hopelessness and dependence has bred numerous maladies symptomatic of unequal educational opportunities, high unemployment, low incomes, poor health care and social disintegration. Tribes in Arizona are, in many ways, a cross-section of the Native American experience and typify the situations found in other parts of the country. Native Americans in Arizona may have fared better economically and culturally than other tribes, but for the last ten years, however, Arizona tribes have been in conflict with the state over issues of taxation and equity in the provision of services. Since 1992, there have been 17 reservation casinos established in Arizona.