WASHINGTON – When Paula Hart, a member of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, was 13 years old, her father told her he wanted one of his 14 children to become a lawyer and one to work for the BIA.

“He was a tribal chief at the time and he said what was happening was people at the BIA were making decisions for the tribes and the tribes didn’t know about them until after the fact. He said he thought we needed an attorney down here and an Indian who could let the tribes know what was going on. I said, ‘Dad, I’ll become an attorney, I’ll do this for you,’” Hart said.

And she did. After earning a bachelor’s degree in political science from St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. in 1984 and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore in 1990, Hart joined the BIA in 1993.

Last month, after gaining a broad range of experience in gaming issues over the past 17 years, Hart was named the BIA’s director of the Office of Indian Gaming.

It wasn’t a difficult transition, Hart said, since she had been serving as acting director since May 2008, when the former Indian Gaming director, George Skibine, was appointed acting assistant secretary of Indian Affairs.

In announcing Hart’s appointment, which began Feb. 1, Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs Larry EchoHawk said, “I am pleased that Ms. Hart has accepted this opportunity to continue leading the Office of Indian Gaming. Her knowledge and experience in the field of tribal gaming make her a strong member of my team.”

The Office of Indian Gaming develops policies and procedures for review and approval of tribal/state compacts, per capita distributions of gaming revenues, and requests to take land into trust for the purpose of conducting gaming. It also interfaces with the National Indian Gaming Commission and with state, local and tribal governments that may be affected by gaming proposals.

It is the land into trust responsibility that has been the office’s most controversial issue in recent years. States, anti-Indian casino groups, and even some tribal nations objected to what they called “reservation shopping” – tribes seeking casino sites beyond their reservation boundaries.

The issue boiled over in January 2008 when the Interior Department under former Secretary Dirk Kempthorne issued guidelines on “commutability” – a new buzzword that means the distance between a reservation and a proposed gaming site that was to be used as a measuring rod for taking land into trust for gaming.

The guidance memo with its “commutability” test is still in place, but it’s under review along with the entire range of gaming regulations and policies.

“We did not have any input into the guidance memo. Carl Artman (former assistant secretary-Indian Affairs) and his general counsel worked on that. Since July we’ve been educating the assistant secretary on the different policies that have been passed pretty much since 1988 on Indian gaming,” Hart said.

“The assistant secretary anticipated coming out with a new gaming policy by Aug. 1, but once we started getting into all the details and how much has happened, I think he realized the education process was going to take a bit longer than he anticipated.”

No decisions have been made on whether to toss, keep or change the “commutability” memo, Hart said.

“What the assistant secretary said from the very beginning is that he would review the policies that were put in place under the last administration, which is what I think every administration does when they first come in, before they move forward and make any decisions. But I think there’s been a lot of different spins on it – that this is going to change or it’s not going to change, but it’s truly a review process to see what’s in place and there’s been no decision whether they’re going to change it or not. It’s still a review process.”

There are around 34 land into trust applications pending that are moving forward under revised regulations issued in August 2008, but the commutability guidance is still in effect. Eleven applications were denied when the guidance was issued, including an application from Hart’s own St. Regis Mohawk Tribe.

If faced with making a decision concerning her own tribe, Hart said she would discuss the issue with Interior’s ethics office to find out what the policy is in such a case.

She said the most challenging part of the director’s job is accommodating the diverse needs and perspectives of all the tribes.

“Tribes across the country view different issues vastly differently, so what one tribe thinks is very good may not necessarily be good for another tribe. So how do you do regulations and policies that affect all the tribes when individually they’re all so different? I think I have to make sure that I take all the positions into consideration. That’s why I like going to consultations, because when we get out there and talk to all the different tribes. We’re able to take their comments into consideration and come back and really think about why and what it is we’re doing.”

While Hart never specifically planned to develop expertise in the area of gaming, she is right where she hoped to be when she promised her father she would become a lawyer.

“This is what I had intended to do. I could see what he meant as a tribal chief when he would come down here with the other two chiefs and they would sit around the table speaking Mohawk and discussing what was going on. When you first come down here, it’s a large bureaucracy, you don’t know who you’re meeting at first or who does what, or what’s important or not important, what you should or shouldn’t discuss. I could see how he felt. I knew when I came down here it was to work for the bureau and basically to get information out to the tribes.”