MHA Nation is staking out a serious presence on the Las Vegas Strip, saying it will build a casino and hotel on roughly 23 acres it has assembled across from the Luxor. Early filings with Clark County describe a sprawling project that would combine a casino-hotel, an entertainment theater, a convention center and a 15,000 to 20,000 seat event arena. Tribal leaders are talking up as much as $2 billion in outside equity and have even floated the idea of landing a professional sports tenant.
The plan on paper
Preliminary "pre-review" documents submitted to Clark County in February 2025 outline a resort complex with a casino, theater, convention space and an event center that could seat between 15,000 and 20,000 people. The county pre-review process is meant to confirm that an application is complete before a formal filing, and architecture firm Steelman Partners is listed as working on designs for the site. Clark County Commissioner Jim Gibson said he was "expecting to see something pretty significant," as reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
How the tribe assembled the site
The MHA Nation pieced the land together between 2020 and 2023, starting with an 8.7-acre foreclosure lot acquired early in the pandemic, followed by a roughly 13-acre parcel formerly owned by MGM Resorts, and the long-shuttered White Sands Motel site. In total, the roughly 23 acres have been reported to cost about $115 million in acquisitions. These transactions were first reported by local and regional outlets, including Tribal Business News.
Funding and fights back home
Chairman Mark Fox has told Nevada outlets the project would be backed by about $2 billion in outside funding, but the tribe's finances and priorities have set off fierce debate back on the Fort Berthold Reservation. In August 2024 the Tribal Business Council authorized a $250 million repositioning of the People's Fund into private investments, a move Fox defended as a strategy to increase long-term returns and that he says is "not being spent on a casino" in a statement to the MHA Times. Citizens pushed petitions and filed suit to block or reverse the transfer; plaintiffs issued a release saying the MHA Nation Supreme Court affirmed the dismissal of their case after the council invoked sovereign immunity, according to reporting by Buffalo’s Fire.
Local reaction and next steps
The site sits in a sensitive stretch of the Strip that includes the former Route 91 parcel and a small lot set aside for a memorial, so any large resort will have to survive county land-use reviews and permitting. Clark County's pre-review is not an approval, and officials say the tribe still has to submit a full project application and clear public-notice requirements and technical reviews. The MHA Nation already drew scrutiny in Las Vegas when it demolished the boarded-up White Sands Motel; county inspectors raised questions about permits at the time, according to reporting by FOX5 Las Vegas.
For now, the Strip resort remains more concept than concrete: pre-review paperwork and public comments have pulled the curtain back on the idea, but investors, design details and a construction timeline are still unconfirmed. If the tribe moves ahead, the project would add a different kind of resort footprint to the south Strip, and reopen thorny questions at home about how tribal leaders balance off-reservation investments with local priorities.
