Mashantucket — His office walls are bare, but not because Rion Ramirez has nothing to hang on them.

He’s been a little busy — for decades, his resume suggests.

Recently installed as the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe’s general counsel, the 46-year-old Ramirez has accumulated his share of photographs, citations, memorabilia and assorted hardware, not to mention a framed letter from Barack Obama.

The former president wrote Ramirez in 2016 to thank him for his service as a member of the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships, a program that places promising, highly motivated individuals in jobs working alongside top-ranking government officials. Commissioners interview final applicants for the fellowships and make recommendations to the president.

“I was very fortunate to have that opportunity,” Ramirez said Friday during an interview in his new Mashantucket Community Center digs. “It was eye-opening to be able to sit next to Wesley Clark (the retired four-star Army general) and watch him as he interviewed people.”

One of the fellows during the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump administration, Sharice Davids, a member of the Ho-Chunk Tribe of Wisconsin, was elected to a Kansas congressional seat in November.

For some 15 years, Ramirez served as general counsel for Port Madison Enterprises, the economic development arm of the Suquamish Tribe of Washington state. He led 27 tribes in the renegotiation of their gaming compacts and negotiated the first-ever tribal-state marijuana compact.

An enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a North Dakota tribe, he also chairs the Democratic National Committee’s Native American Caucus and is a member of the DNC’s Executive and National Finance committees.

“We are thrilled to bring Rion’s twenty-plus years of outstanding Indian Country legal experience to Mashantucket,” Rodney Butler, the Mashantucket chairman, said when the southeastern Connecticut tribe hired Ramirez in December. “In his new role, Rion will set a new strategy and direction for our legal team and leverage his extensive expertise to achieve public policy and legislative initiatives.”

Arriving in Mashantucket, Ramirez barely had time to prepare for a state legislative session that could have a lasting impact on the tribe’s fortunes. In addition to bills that bear on the tribe’s involvement in an East Windsor casino project and the prospect of more casino competition in the state, the potential legalization of recreational marijuana use also is on the table.

As states legalize marijuana, tribes can consider whether cultivating it would provide them with a business opportunity.

“We will continue to monitor it (legislation),” Ramirez said.

Of more immediate concern to the tribe is the state’s potential legalization of sports betting. The Mashantuckets and the Mohegans, respective owners of Foxwoods Resort Casino and Mohegan Sun, believe their gaming agreements with the state grant them the exclusive right to provide sports betting, which the tribes maintain is a “casino game.”

Ramirez said there’s “no question” about that interpretation, though some lawmakers and the state’s former attorney general have disagreed.

Having witnessed much of this week’s daylong hearing on gaming bills before the legislature’s Public Safety and Security Committee, Ramirez said he was “taken aback” by the level of opposition to the tribes’ stance.

“I had hoped that more folks would see the value in what the tribes are doing,” he said. “In Washington (state), where they’re talking about sports betting in tribal casinos only, tribes have had a much more receptive audience.”

Ramirez, the third general counsel in Mashantucket history, succeeded Betsy Conway, who retired after 25 years of service to the tribe’s Office of Legal Counsel. She became general counsel in 2016 following the death of Jackson King, who served the tribe for more than 30 years.

“I’m very humbled to be here,” Ramirez said. “The Mashantucket Tribe has always been a leader in protecting tribal sovereignty. ... As Native Americans, we’ve got to keep telling our story over and over again. Nobody granted us anything. We fought long and hard for it.”

b.hallenbeck@theday.com