Country of Exiles

by William R. Leach

  Las Vegas reveals, in pristine form, the effects of a gambling-tourism economy, effects so toxic to traditional community life as to compel all who wish to settle down there willingly to do so in gated subdivisions. But wherever cities or towns have turned to tourism or gambling (or similar service-sector work) as their basic source of income, the same outcomes have occurred, if not to the same degree, certainly in kind. They have occurred, as well, on many Indian reservations, indeed in a way that illustrates how high the cost has been when place-rooted peoples turn to placeless activities to save their communities.

  PRIMAL SENSE OF PLACE AND THE WEB OF LIFE

  Most Indian reservations have nothing in common historically with such cities as Las Vegas or Atlantic City: they were not the handiwork of developers but reputed homelands in which half of all Indians lived. Yet, many Indians have done all they could to entice Las Vegas into their communities, from hiring Las Vegas managers to designing their casinos and hotels in the most up-to-date Vegas style.

  Some of the casino-reservations have begun to look and feel like little Las Vegases. They draw the same kind of crowds, the same Balzacian mix of tourists and transients, giving rise to the same cosmopolitanism. They also resemble Las Vegas in their obvious theatricality and in their anything-goes atmospheres (if they did not, they would not be casinos).

  Some tribes have even enlisted their own native culture to stir up the right kind of ambiance. The fanciest restaurant in the Mystic Lake Casino in Minnesota was decorated in 1995 with several Indian murals; one depicted an Indian chief sitting upright in a state of rapt meditation in an open, sunlit field.61“We are very proud,” said Anthony Pico, chairman of the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians, which after 1996 ran a casino (plus theme park and shopping mall) just outside San Diego, open twenty-four hours a day, every day, “that our casino is unique among most others to the degree that we drew upon our very own culture and heritage from the land and incorporated them into the structure’s design.” Even “the walls are the rich earth-tone colors and textures of the soil, trees, and flowers.”62 The Mohegans of Connecticut also dressed their casino in “the Mohegan Spirit,” which, according to tribal historian Melissa Fawcett, “moves and breathes within the very rocks and trees of the Mohegan Homeland.”

  When the Mohegan business opened in 1996, Herbert Muschamp, architectural critic for the New York Times, and champion of Indian casinos, raved about its “primal power of place” with its “dense exhilarating forest of symbols.” “The casino has actually revived the Mohegans’ sense of tribal cohesion,” he said. Muschamp even argued that the Mohegans belonged to a vanguard of moral liberators, which he viewed as a good thing. “The casino signifies the shattering of a moral taboo,” he wrote. “Anyone old enough to be admitted to a casino grew up in a culture that placed gambling, along with cursing, drinking and prostitution, on the list of Bad Things. Indeed, in most parts of the country, gambling remains illegal. That is why the Indians have captured this market. Legally, Indians exist outside the borders of this country. They are exempt from the laws in which America’s moral prejudices have been inscribed.”63

  Money and desire have also begun to pervade every aspect of reservation life, just as they do at Las Vegas and elsewhere. Money and desire, of course, bring on patrons. They also bestow immense economic power on many tribes, but with special meaning for Indians; for as tribal gambling wealth has grown, it has also distorted the economic side of Indian sovereignty (at least for some tribes).

  This distortion, in turn, has had two major outcomes. First, it has jeopardized other forms of Indian sovereignty, which many Indians worked so hard to resurrect, and which helped reawaken an Indian sense of place and autonomy. One kind of place, in other words, has come at the cost of another kind, as money power has tended to pit tribal members against one another, undermining tribal governments, thereby threatening Indian political sovereignty. Even more important, it has led to the degradation of Indian cultural-spiritual traditions, at the heart of which has not been money and desire but the condemnation of money and desire, as well as respect for ancestors, devotion to “the sacred in nature,” and a need to protect “the interlocking web of life,” in the words of writer and teacher John Mohawk.64 “Money was never that important before,” Tim Giago, Sioux editor of the newspaper Indian Country Today, wrote in 1996, “because there was little of it, and when it was available, it was shared by all. [Now] tribes are abandoning their culture, traditions, and laws (written and unwritten). The money is just too strong a temptation. Would Crazy Horse, Chief Seattle, Chief Joseph or Geronimo be comfortable with the new direction? We know the answer to that.”65 “In our tribal society,” observed Sioux Indian Thomas Pretends Eagle, “no one was hungry. Things were given freely, not hoarded. When you have enough, why more? Answer, why do I need more? There was nothing in Native society that could not be taken back into the earth.”66

  But Indian economic sovereignty has not only contravened other kinds of Indian sovereignty (or essential elements of place), it has also challenged the cultural sovereignty of those people who live outside the reservations, non-Indians who must suffer the wider fallout from an economy built on tourism and gambling. Many Indian casinos have begun to have economic predominance in their regions; numerous counties in Connecticut, upstate New York, Minnesota, and California have grown increasingly dependent on them for revenues and employment. These economies, in turn, have attracted a new group of real estate developers and investors determined to erect hotels, restaurants, and an “hospitality industry” in areas near the casinos. The casinos have also brought traffic, the widening of older highways, and new roads.

  Years ago, Indians were afraid of roads, especially those laid by white men; the Indians saw in roads the doom of their cultures. When asked by a U.S. Census taker in 1897 why he feared the “white” institution of private property, a Tuscarora Indian replied that it was because there “will have to be outlets to it, and there will be roads all over it; it will be all roads.”67 Ironically, one hundred years later, Indians themselves were opening up the roads, not only into the reservations but into non-Indian neighborhoods as well. And where new roads did not exist, old ones were choked with gamblers, adding to the congestion caused by recent suburbanization.68 Rural southeastern Connecticut, for instance, has one major north-south highway, Route 2, and for years it saw only light traffic. By 1996, however, 30,000 cars were delivering 50,000 customers to Foxwoods every day of the year.69 In fall 1997 the tribe introduced a high-speed ferry, which carried gamblers directly from Manhattan to Foxwoods in Ledyard. The Pequots, moreover, aspired to the creation of an intermodal transport system, connecting airplanes, trains, and ferries into a “seamless whole,” that would allow millions of people to visit their reservation “from all over the world.”70

  These roads, then, old and new, have aroused anxiety in many local non-Indians in North Stonington and Norwich, the towns nearest Foxwoods. Many local residents, unlike those in Las Vegas, have yet to make their peace with so much gambling-tourism; and they resent the federal government for having “imposed” the casino on them, through the IGRA, and without permitting a local referendum as to its merits.71 In the past these people sympathized with efforts to reestablish Indian sovereignty (out of respect for Indian cultures), but by the 1990s they were beginning to feel otherwise.

  Many Indian leaders themselves saw none of these dangers, or refused to give them any credence: they did not believe (or refused to believe) that their homelands had evolved into little Las Vegases or that they endangered anybody’s culture. Some argued that the tribes had a right to change, the same as non-Indians, and that change and innovation were intrinsic to all cultures, at all times.72 Other leaders were so desperate to end tribal poverty that they could not tolerate any attacks on gambling and tourism. Margo Anderson, chief of the Mille Lacs Band of the Ojibwa tribe that owns Grand Casino Minneapolis, defended her casino aggressively, arguing that it “saved the tribe” and “returne
d my people to dignity.”73 “I don’t have any qualms about gaming,” S. Verna Fowler, tribal leader of the Menominee tribe of Wisconsin, said, “because the need is so great. We just have so many needs to address.”74 Carol Cornelius, Oneida leader in Wisconsin, glowed in 1995: “When I walk into that casino, I’m overwhelmed. I think, ‘My people did all this.’ We’ve had five years to acquire all this business sense.”75

  Several Indians were less concerned with ending poverty than with getting rich, and had no trouble reconciling Las Vegas with Indian traditions, some viewing their casinos as “extension[s] of the strength and spirituality of [our] ancestors,” others just making it up as they went along.76 Nearly everything about both the Mohegan and Pequot tribes and their enterprises in southeastern Connecticut, for instance, was as fictional as anything the white-controlled government of South Africa ever imagined for the black homelands in the 1980s. The one bankrolled by Malaysian investors (Foxwoods), the other by a South African casino mogul (Mohegan Sun), they were the Madison Avenue fruit of the new global economy. The very ethnicity of the Pequot tribe, moreover, had to be re-remembered by a small army of anthropologists and non-Indian historians hired by the management for the many “Pequots” who, like their South African tribal counterparts, knew little about their ancestral ways (interestingly, one tradition that was found showed that the early Pequots detested gambling and drinking.)

  Despite these affirming voices, however, there were others who condemned gambling as anathema to their culture. Doug George, a Mohawk leader and journalist, has repeatedly argued that “commercial gambling runs contrary to the ancestral Iroquois laws, and its spread has eclipsed [our] cultural survival and the effort to retain our language and our indigenous spiritual rituals.”77 Many tribes have voted down casinos in tribal referenda, including the Navajo in Arizona and New Mexico, the largest Indian community in the United States; the Alabama-Coushatta Indians of southern Texas, a very poor tribe with a high unemployment rate who nevertheless refused, by a large majority, to allow gambling on their reservation; and, for many years, the Senecas of upstate New York (although in May 1998 a majority did finally approve a gambling referendum).78 Throughout South Dakota, moreover, when actor Kevin Costner swapped land with the Forest Service in his successful attempt to begin building Dunbar in the Black Hills, hundreds of Sioux denounced the deal. In letters to the Forest Service, not one Indian supported it. “The Greed of no man should over rule!” wrote James Testerman. Jesse Taken Alive, council chairman for the Standing Rock tribe, said that “everything is interconnected in nature, and the Sioux do not approve of any land ownership within the Black Hills.” “Paha Sapa [Lakota for “the hills that are black hills”] is not for sale or trade,” observed Burdell Blue Arm.79

  Many Indians have clearly seen dangers for Indian culture in the presence of so much gambling-tourism on the reservations. But why should it have mattered to non-Indians? Why should other Americans have cared? For one thing, the renewed power of Indian sovereignty has returned in such force for so many tribes as to injure the stability of the non-Indian areas in which the casinos operate. In our time, modern tribes, governed for the most part by themselves, have been beyond the reach of non-Indian laws. In itself such sovereignty was not inherently such a bad thing; but after Congress passed IGRA, which permitted untaxable gambling to flourish on the reservations, historic sovereignty became deformed sovereignty, one too big for Indians or non-Indians to manage effectively.

  Another reason why these new circumstances should have mattered to non-Indians relates to the integrity of place. For many Americans, Indian reservations long exemplified place-integrity; rooted cultures, they refused to break the link between selves and places. In the 1840s Thoreau expressed admiration for Indians because they were, he believed, nearer the “strength and marrow of Nature.” Many years later, John Collier, the first director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (in the 1930s), idealized the Indian way as an antidote to modernity. “They have what the world has lost,” he wrote, “the ancient, lost reverence and passion for human personality, joined with the ancient, lost reverence and passion for the web of life.” In our time, essayist Wendell Berry has said, respectfully, that for Indians “land was their homeland,” and even though they “experience[d] movements of population,… in general their relation to place was based upon old usage and association, upon inherited memory, tradition, veneration.”80

  During his senatorial career from 1978 to 1996, New Jersey’s Bill Bradley often visited the Sioux in South Dakota, where he witnessed their tribal dances and heard “the constant drumbeat and the high-wailing” that “took me back … to an earlier time, when dance was a part of a living tradition.” In his 1996 autobiography Time Present, Time Past he argued that the Indian “spirit of place” had much to teach Americans, and he expressed awe for the ancient Indian “sense of harmony and balance.” So great was his enthusiasm that it led him, in 1983, to introduce a bill in the Senate that, had it passed, would have returned to the Sioux 1.3 million acres of public land, including the site in the Black Hills where Kevin Costner later planned to put his new Switzerland.81

  Many Indians themselves, of course, have agreed with these aims and ideas. They, too, have argued that Indians, far more than whites, have shown respect for the world around them, valuing it not as temporary landscape but as a permanent and “sacred geography.” N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa Indian and novelist, has said that in the way they “look at the world,” “the Indian and the white man” diverge in almost “genetic” ways, which “I take” as “an obvious fact and a foregone conclusion.” “The American Indian attitude toward the world,” Momaday claimed, “involves a spiritual sense so ancient as to be primordial,” expressing a “deep, ethical regard for the land.” “Indians generally feel a sense of permanence in their land,” insisted Armstrong Wiggins, a Miskito tribal member, “that non-Indians do not share. Non-Indians tend to be very nomadic, to view land as a commodity to buy and sell, and to have ancestral roots on other continents.… The idea of private, individual land is historically unknown in Indian communities.” Onondaga chief Oren Lyons has observed that Indians “have these wellsprings of knowledge about places that only aboriginal people would know because they’ve lived there. They have the long-term thinking required for proper context, context being life as it functions in the great cycles of life.”82 It was in the spirit of these convictions that many Indians, in our time, have fought to repatriate lost Indian artifacts and bones to their homelands, on the grounds that Indians severed from their places, are less than “spiritually whole,” less than human.

  Much of this thinking, on the part of both Indians and non-Indians, was pious and sentimental, and it exaggerated the differences between whites and Indians (“a foregone conclusion”?). But even if such thinking were all fantasy, it revealed in some measure the degree to which many Americans longed for a tradition of place—some sense of why places mattered at all or why they might be seen as worth defending—something their own culture did so little to supply or satisfy.83 It was hard, nearly impossible, for most Americans to invoke a “tradition of tradition” (rather than a tradition of the new) without feeling un-American, “behind the times,” or reactionary. In a book titled Tradition, the late sociologist Edward Shils observed that a language about ancestors and tradition has been largely lacking in this country. There has been no respected vocabulary of pastness in America, no recognized way to describe the costs when a people lack “an image of ancestry,” fail to see “the unity of the past and present states,” when they “lose the sense of being members of a collectivity which transcends themselves and which transcends their contemporaries.”84

  Yet despite the apparent lack of such a tradition, a need for it has always existed. That has explained why so many non-Indians have fantasized for so long about the Indian sense of place. Yet, ironically, many Indians themselves have given up on the past, to the point where they have become as bereft of a sense of place as whites. �
�Where are the Indians who still have an answer and are willing to share their wisdom with those who listen sincerely?” one Indian recently asked. “Probably most Indians will adopt materialism. But an alternative should be available for those who want it.”85

  Reliance on gambling and tourism has caused many problems in Indian country, above all by cutting into the fragile vestiges of a tradition of place. But wherever such service-sector employments as tourism and gambling have superseded other economic activity, the sense of place has been whittled away, compounding the impact of the other recent trends, which have also damaged the dignity of place.

  Four

  Educating for the Road:

  American Universities in a Global Age

  American universities have been as instrumental in forming the new world as have the intermodal highways and ports. The mission of universities may be intellectual, but they have exercised much economic influence as well—not by building read roads but by training people to build them and to think in terms of them, and to look at the world as a web of roads, real and mythical, for escape and opportunity.

  What I have said applies especially to research universities, the interstate highways of America’s educational system and the third in our unusual trio of semi-sovereign entities. Unlike the smaller educational institutions, which resemble the centripetal roads of local communities and neighborhoods, these universities are like the highways in their dispersive effects and in their contributions to mobility (not only geographic but economic and social). They rose to prominence, in fact, in the 1950s, when the interstates themselves were first being paved.