A TOUR OF THE ALABAMA-COUSHATTA’S LIVINGSTON GAMBLING TANGLES 
Adam Doster pens an update on the fate of the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas’s 24-hour Naskila Gaming gambling center a few miles east of Livingston: The tribe, which reopened the rebranded gambling space in June after its 2002 closure by the state, is currently awaiting a trial date related to its array of not-quite-slot-machines. Texas attorney general Ken Paxton filed a federal motion in August to shut the machines down, citing the language of a 1987 act that law gave federal tribal recognition back to the Alabama-Coushatta (a status originally lost in 1954 as part of the broader mid-century federal status termination push). That 1987 law subjected both the Alabama-Coushatta and the Tigua Pueblo to Texas’s gambling restrictions, though the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act passed the following year, allowing certain types of gambling on reservation land with no state approval required. Both tribe’s first attempts to open gaming centers after that were shut down in 2002; the Kickapoo tribe’s  Lucky Eagle Casino Hotel has been open in Eagle Pass since 1996, however, and the Tigua Pueblo have opened some new “entertainment centers” that have also come under recent scrutiny from Paxton’s office. [Houstonia] Photo of Naskila Gaming: Jim O.
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