Alaska Native Gaming Faces a Jurisdiction Cloud After ANCSA Reversal

Alaska Native gaming has reached an unusual juncture: casinos are open and operating, yet the federal legal opinion that cleared the way for them has been withdrawn. The result is a jurisdictional cloud that hangs over every gaming project in the state, even as machines run and revenue flows. The question at the center of the dispute is deceptively simple—does the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) leave Alaska tribes with the territorial jurisdiction that the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act requires?—but the answer carries enormous stakes.

The flashpoint is the early-June soft opening of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes' Two Coppers Casino on Douglas Island near Juneau, the first tribal gaming hall of its kind in the area. The facility launched with roughly 100 slot-style electronic machines and a target of a fuller grand opening around July 1. But its authorization rests on a federal interpretation that no longer formally stands. (For background on the property itself, see our coverage of the Douglas Island casino.)

How the legal footing shifted

The chain of events runs through the U.S. Department of the Interior. A November 2022 Interior legal opinion concluded that ANCSA did not necessarily bar the federal government from taking land into trust for Alaska Natives—an interpretation that, in turn, allowed the National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC) to treat certain Alaska Native lands as eligible for gaming and to approve amended gaming ordinances, including the one Tlingit & Haida adopted in October 2024.

In September 2025, the Interior Department reversed course. The withdrawal directed federal agencies to revert to an earlier opinion holding that ANCSA largely extinguished tribal territorial jurisdiction over most Alaska lands. According to the withdrawal memo, approvals premised on the 2022 opinion—including Tlingit & Haida's—would need to be reevaluated. As of the casino's opening, the NIGC had not completed that reevaluation, leaving the tribe to proceed under an approval whose legal underpinning is now contested.

The casinos are not operating in defiance of a court order. They are operating in the gap between a withdrawn opinion and a reevaluation that has not yet happened.

Eklutna as the test case

Alaska's gaming dispute did not begin in Juneau. The Native Village of Eklutna opened a gaming facility in January 2025, and the State of Alaska sued the following month seeking to shut it down. That facility has continued to operate while its legal status remains unsettled, and it was the Eklutna opening that helped prompt the broader federal reversal. The litigation around Eklutna is therefore the most likely vehicle through which courts will eventually clarify whether ANCSA forecloses gaming on these lands—or whether the 2022 reading was correct after all.

The dispute turns on the core "Indian lands" question that governs all of tribal gaming. Under IGRA, gaming is permitted only on lands over which a tribe exercises governmental jurisdiction. In the Lower 48, eligibility usually flows through reservation status or land taken into trust; in Alaska, ANCSA's unique settlement structure—conveying land to Native corporations rather than to tribes in the conventional reservation sense—complicates that analysis. Readers who want the underlying framework can consult our Legal Guide to IGRA and Indian lands and our explainer on land-into-trust and gaming eligibility.

What is actually at stake

For the tribes, the calculus is both economic and sovereign. Tlingit & Haida leaders have framed Two Coppers as an engine for jobs and revenue that funds tribal programs, and as an assertion of self-government in a state where Native communities have long contended that ANCSA shortchanged their governmental authority. A ruling that ANCSA bars gaming would not merely close a casino; it would reaffirm a narrow reading of tribal jurisdiction that Alaska Native governments have spent decades contesting.

For operators and lenders elsewhere, the episode is a reminder that the "Indian lands" determination is the foundation beneath every project, and that the foundation can move when administrations change federal legal interpretations. The Alaska cases also illustrate how much discretion rests with Interior and the NIGC: an opinion issued by one administration and withdrawn by the next can flip a project from authorized to imperiled without a single change in statute.

Operating under uncertainty

The practical question for the tribes is how to run a business whose legal foundation could shift again. Opening now, before the NIGC completes its reevaluation, is itself a strategic choice: an operating casino generating jobs and revenue creates facts on the ground and demonstrates the community benefit that tribal leaders argue should weigh in any reassessment. It also gives the tribes standing and momentum should the dispute reach a courtroom, where an established, lawfully approved operation is a stronger position to defend than a paper proposal.

The risk, of course, is real. If the courts ultimately side with the narrow reading of ANCSA, tribes could face orders to wind down operations after having invested in facilities, hired staff and built community expectations around the revenue. Lenders and vendors weigh that contingency too, which can raise the cost of financing for Alaska projects relative to comparable builds in the Lower 48 where the Indian-lands status is settled. The uncertainty, in short, carries a price even while the doors stay open.

For now, the casinos stay open, the state presses its case, and the NIGC's promised reevaluation looms. The likeliest path to resolution runs through the courts, where the Eklutna litigation may finally force a definitive answer to a question ANCSA left ambiguous more than half a century ago. Until then, Alaska Native gaming will keep running on contested ground.