While Canada moves toward reconciliation with First Nations peoples, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that would break yet one more promise to yet one more American Indian tribe.

Sen. John McCain and Rep. Trent Franks, both Arizona Republicans, have introduced Keep the Promises Act of 2015, that would invalidate the terms of a decades-old federal land agreement with the Tohono O’odham Nation.

The settlement – which was passed by Congress and became law in 1986 – compensated the tribe after the Painted Rock Dam, built by the Army Corps of Engineers on the Gila River, caused flooding in the 1970s and early 1980s, ruining 10,000 acres of the tribe’s agricultural land and forcing residents to relocate to a 40-acre village.

The Gila Bend Indian Reservation Lands Replacement Act awarded the tribe $30 million and guaranteed it the right to acquire new lands in Maricopa County, Ariz., which the government promised to treat as reservation land. Then the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 specifically allowed tribes to build gaming facilities on land acquired as part of a land settlement act.

The Tohono O’odham Nation did indeed opt to build a casino-resort on the new land, as it had done on other reservation land. The Nation got the go-ahead for gaming from the Indian Gaming Regulatory Commission and signed Class III gaming compacts with the state of Arizona in 1993. The tribe opened its first Desert Diamond Casino that same year. The terms of the 1993 compacts were virtually unaltered when the compacts were renegotiated in 2003.

And then things got tough. Opposition to the tribe’s casino-resort project in Phoenix’s West Valley has been the subject of local and state lawsuits, lobbying efforts and media campaigns ever since. Neighboring tribes that have casinos in the area, including the Gila River Indian Community, the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation and the Salt River Pima Maricopa Indian Community, have opposed the project.

On June 11, the Navajo Nation passed legislation supporting the federal effort to stop the casino project. Navajo Nation Tribal Council Speaker LoRenzo Bates was quoted in a press release as saying, “The Keep the Promise Act will help to protect Navajo’s investment in the Twin Arrows Navajo Casino Resort and protect the integrity of Arizona’s compact by limiting casino development in Pima and Maricopa Counties as was agreed to.”

Recently-elected Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and state Attorney General Mark Brnovich have taken up their predecessors’ standard and the state remains firmly hostile to the tribe’s project, as do some local communities. The city of Glendale was opposed at first but has reversed its position and now supports the project. The tribe estimates the new casino-resort will bring 3,000 permanent jobs to the area.

Those who do not want the Tohono O’odham Nation to build this resort-casino cite a 2002 referendum that was part of the basis for renegotiating the state-tribal gaming compacts in 2003. The voters agreed to allow the compacts with 16 Arizona tribes, including the Tohono O’odham, with the proviso that the Phoenix metropolitan area would host no more than the seven casinos already in operation.

According to proponents of the casino project, however, the West Valley project is not subject to the terms of that referendum because the tribe was guaranteed the right to build the casino by IGRA when that law specified that casinos could be built on lands acquired as a result of a land settlement act and by the land settlement act of 1986.

So far the tribe has prevailed in all legal and federal agency challenges to the project.