The federal discrimination trial against the Grand Gateway Hotel nears completion this week. In the courtroom Thursday, alleged discrimination victims and an Ivy League professor gave their testimony on the witness stand.
The trial is connected to the alleged 2022 effort by members of the hotel’s owning family, the Uhre’s, to ban native peoples from the property.
Among the witnesses Thursday was Nick Cottier, who is the security manager with NDN Collective, the plaintiffs in the case.
During Cottier’s emotional testimony, the former chief of the Flandreau Police Department recounted his experience being asked to vacate the property when members of the organization attempted to book a room at the hotel.
Cottier said the group members knew of the comments made by Uhre family members and wanted to see if the policy was being meaningfully enforced.
During cross-examination, the defense acknowledged the written social media comments made by Connie Uhre were racist but ultimately holds that the policy was never enacted beyond a Facebook post. However, cross-examination was a challenging situation, with several tense interactions between Cottier and the defense attorney and several objections from the plaintiff’s legal team.
David Sherwyn is a professor at the Cornell University school of hotel management. During his expert testimony, he contended that in 2025 discrimination is rarely an explicit, written policy.
Further, he cites room bookings from the months following the posts and emails coming from addresses located on a reservation. Ultimately, he estimated about an 85 percent drop in such bookings following those comments.
With that in mind, Sherwyn said he believes the actions of hotel management was an effective attempt at getting Native peoples to stop booking at the hotel.
Defense attorneys questioned Sherwyn’s credentials, how much of witness dispositions he read, and his payment as an expert witness. Sherwyn himself has never owned or operated a hotel, though he has been on an ownership group of another service industry business.
The trial is expected to close Friday, and the decision will be in the hands of jurors.
