Akwesasne, N.Y. — By late afternoon, word of Governor Spitzer’s support for a casino in the Catskills had made it as far as the frozen St. Lawrence River on the Canadian border, where a Mohawk tribesman and his two grandsons were ice fishing for walleyed perch.

In the man’s estimation, the prospect of a new stream of tens of millions of dollars a year for the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, which inhabits this stretch of land in the “North Country,” is still a distant and improbable thing.

Under the proposal approved by Mr. Spitzer this week, the tribe would run the casino with an entertainment company, Empire Resorts, in Sullivan County. The state would take in as much as $100 million a year in the deal and the economically drained Catskills region would be revitalized with tax dollars, jobs, and visitors, tribe officials and the governor said.

“I’m not going to see any of that money,” the fisherman, Dave George, 59, said as he checked the minnow bait on his rod. Trucks and snowmobiles drove over the ice in the background, crossing easily between Canada and America. “They’ve been talking about it for years.”

Mr. George spends most of his time these days on the river fishing or building his white ash sleds. On a good day, he can make as much as $100 by selling the fish to his neighbors, but he said he’s an exception in the area, where people are, for the most part, poor and have limited access to social services.

The town of Akwesasne, where the tribe is headquartered, comes across as a mixture of eras: Downtown there are aging, wood-paneled buildings out of the 1950s and 1960s, but along the outskirts are more modern structures like the Comfort Inn and the Mohawk Casino with its row-upon-row of nickel slot machines and geriatric gamblers. Until the casino and a bingo operation were built in the 1990s, many tribesmen made their living in iron-working, traveling around the state and country to work on major construction projects, including the World Trade Center, and at nearby industrial plants. Electricity first appeared on the reservation in 1947, residents said.

Even with the $14 million the tribe takes in a year from the casino and bingo center, unemployment hovers around 50%, diabetes and substance abuse proliferate, and tribal law enforcement struggle along with federal and state authorities to stop smugglers from bringing drugs, cigarettes, and guns to New York from Canada through their lands. There isn’t enough electricity to power all the houses. Families use oil to heat their homes because there is no natural gas. Many children have early childhood caries (a condition where teeth rot from excessive amounts of sugar from milk), but to get proper treatment they have to travel two and a half hours to Burlington, Vermont, and spend $6,000.

“It takes two months to get a dental appointment,” a former ironworker, Rarahkwisere, 52, said through a mouth with half its teeth.

The community has looked to the construction of a new casino near New York City as the beginning of an answer to these problems, but a series of delays and political complexities have delayed the project for the past decade, giving rise to a sentiment that the St. Regis Mohawk Casino at Monticello will never be built and the money will never come.

One of three chiefs that lead the tribe’s council, Lorraine White, 37, said yesterday that she’s confident that this development won’t unravel like it has in previous years.

“So far, everything that wasn’t supposed to happen has happened,” she said. “Not only is the law on our side, but we have unprecedented political support… I’m not just blowing smoke up their skirts.”

Chief White, a graduate of the Massachusetts prep school Northfield Mount Hermon and of Connecticut College, is the first lawyer and youngest woman to ever be elected to her position. She said she has taken an aggressive approach to getting the casino project on the state’s agenda. On two occasions she said she convinced the six council members to fly to Washington, D.C., unannounced to meet with the associate deputy secretary of the Department of Interior, James Cason.

If everything goes according to plan, the federal approval for the casino could come “in a matter of months,” she said. Construction of the two-story, 160,000-square-foot entertainment complex would take about 18 months if the weather doesn’t slow the work down, she said. Within a year of the casino’s opening, the new revenue would increase the operating budget of the tribe by two times if not three. Not only would this mean that the medical center could acquire a dialysis machine of its own and send more high school students to college, it would allow them to “truly exercise sovereignty,” which Chief White said equated to economic independence from the state and federal government.

“I don’t want to diss the SUNY system, but I want high school students to be able to ask which school they want to attend, not which state school,” she said. “Harvard, Princeton, and SUNY.”

Even among those on the reservation who are optimistic about the project, there is anxiety about what changes could come with the new money.

“I’m not worried about the deal, I’m concerned about what we do with the money,” a woman eating lunch at the senior citizen’s center, Minerva White, 71, said. “We need to ensure it’s used for good purposes: housing, healthcare, education. And we need to make sure we can handle the debt.”

Already the issue of “per capita distribution” has come up at tribe council meetings. Many reservations across the United States distribute part of the revenue generated from casino operations to tribe members. Chief White said a decision about splitting up the money is years away.

“The casino is a good idea if it helps the people,” a local character, Tom Stacey, 56, said. With his bicycle and cart, Mr. Stacey takes bottles and cardboard to a nearby town for money. “We need to take care of ourselves, our community. I want people to come here and see our land and say we’re not savages.”