President Joe Biden plans to nominate Patrice H. Kunesh (Standing Rock Lakota) to be the next chairperson of the National Indian Gaming Commission.
Kunesh currently serves as the commissioner of the Administration for Native Americans, a federal agency that promotes self-sufficiency for Native Americans with grant funding for community-based projects, as well as training and technical assistance for tribes and Native-serving organizations.
If her appointment to the NIGC is successful, Kunesh would take over for acting chair Sharon M. Avery (Saginaw Chippewa).
The appointment would also fill out a space in the NIGC — typically a three person commission — that has sat empty since the exit of prior chair E. Sequoyah Simermeyer (Coharie). Simermeyer left the position in February to join private online betting company FanDuel, as previously reported by Tribal Business News. In the wake of Simermeyer’s departure, the commission has been run by Avery and vice chair Jeanine Hovland (Flandreau Santee Sioux).
In addition to her work at HHS, Kunesh has worked with the Native American Rights Fund and served as the in-house counsel to the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation.
She has also served as the under secretary for rural development at the Department of Agriculture, deputy solicitor for Indian Affairs at Interior, and a member of the Treasury Community Development Advisory Board. In addition, she established the Center for Indian Country Development, an economic policy research initiative, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
Kunesh holds a J.D. from the University of Colorado School of Law and an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Kunesh’s nomination was announced alongside a fleet of other planned nominations by the White House. Those included David Samuel Johnson for the inspector general for tax administration at the US Treasury; Gabriel Escobar for the ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to the Republic of Paraguay; Lisa T. Ballance, as the chair and a member of the Marine Mammal Commission; and Matthew James Marzano, as a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
