11. Herald and Radin, The Big Wheel, pp. 124–25.
12. I. Nelson Rose, “Trends,” Indian Gaming, June 1998, p. 6.
13. Michael M. Phillips, “As Economy Thrives, So Do Many Workers Accustomed to Poverty,” WSJ, March 4, 1998, 1. See also NYT, December 13, 1997, 1.
14. On the “cruise to nowhere,” see Kirk Johnson, “For Gamblers, Shortest Route to High Seas,” NYT, December 14, 1996, 27; and Jonathan Rabinowitz, “Partners Plan Night Cruises for Gamblers,” NYT, November 13, 1997, B1.
15. New York City, for instance, had only a little over 60,000 rooms in 1998 (source: PKF Consulting, Inc., hotel and real estate consulting firm, New York City). See also promotional material, Bellagio, courtesy of Jennifer D. Michaels, director of public relations, July 10, 1998; “Las Vegas: Are There No Limits?,” Washington Post National Weekly Edition, February 10, 1997, p. 30; and “Las Vegas Sees Its Growth Bubble Burst,” WSJ, September 26, 1995, p. A2.
16. The phrase “islands of Indianness” appears in Charles F. Wilkinson, American Indians, Time, and the Law (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 101; see also Frederick E. Hoxie, “From Prison to Homeland: The Cheyenne River Indian Reservation Before World War I,” South Dakota History 10 (winter 1979), 1–24.
17. On big growth before 1990, see Bruce Johansen, Life and Death in Mohawk Country (Golden, Col.: North American Press, 1993), pp. xxviii–xxix: “by early 1985, approx. 80 of the nearly 300 recognized American Indian tribes in the US were conducting some sort of game of chance. By the fall of 1988, more than 100 tribes participated in some form of gambling, which grossed as much as $255 million yearly.”
18. Indian Country Today, January 20–27, 1997, B2; on the Kotenai, Indian Country Today, Jan. 27–Feb. 3, 1997, B1; on the Grande Ronde, Indian Country Today, Jan. 27–Feb. 3, 1997, A1; on the Puyallup, Indian Gaming, May 5, 1997, 8–9, and August 1997, 20; on Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, Indian Gaming Business (supplement to International Gaming and Wagering Business, spring 1998, 1–10.
19. Author’s visit, May 1996.
20. Quoted in International and Wagering Gaming Business, September 1, 1995, 16:9, 12.
21. See David Melmar’s columns in Indian Country Today, May 4, 1995, and October 5, 1995.
22. Author’s visit to Spearfish Canyon, May 19–21, 1996; interview with Craig Lundsdorf, Forest Service ranger, Spearfish Canyon, U.S. Park Service headquarters, South Dakota, May 20, 1996; interview with David Melmar, columnist for Indian Country Today, Rapid City, South Dakota, May 21, 1996; U.S. Forest Service, “Environmental Assessment, the Dunbar/U.S. Forest Service Proposed Land Exchange,” Black Hills National Forest, Lawrence County, South Dakota; and “Decision Notice and Findings of No Significant Impact, the Dunbar, Inc., Land Exchange,” September 28, 1995, USDA Forest Service (courtesy of C. Lundsdorf). Tourism was often on the minds of Forest Service officials, which explains why the Service saw much merit in Costner’s dreams. Not only did they believe that the “current non-federal tract in Spearfish would contribute to sightseeing and dispersed recreation in the Canyon,” but they also were certain that the Dunbar would aid even more in reinforcing and expanding “the tourism/recreation industry in Lawrence County.”
23. “The Dunbar,” brochure (courtesy, office of the Dunbar, Deadwood, South Dakota), p. 1.
24. Ibid., p. 4; phone interview with Dunbar management, February 26, 1997; and author’s visit to site, May 21–22, 1996.
25. Phone interview with Larry Weiers, executive editor of The Black Hills Pioneer (Deadwood, South Dakota), September 1, 1998, March 6, 1997.
26. Phone interview with Paul Biederman, March 1, 1996.
27. For data on commercial airline growth, see Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Transportation in Statistics Annual Report 1997 (Washington, D.C.: 1997), pp. 176–77; and Steven A. Morrison and Clifford Winston, The Evolution of the Airline Industry (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995), p. 7.
28. Between 1990 and 1995, according to government studies, there was a 17.7 percent rise in the number of people employed in this industry, while manufacturing declined by 4.5 percent, construction by 6.3 percent, and mining by 15.7 percent. See “Industry Facts,” media kit, October 30–31, 1995, distributed by the USTTA, Washington, D.C.
29. South Dakota Labor Department, quoted in “Environmental Assessment. The Dunbar/U.S. Forest Service Proposed Land Exchange,” Black Hills National Forest, July–Aug. 1995; January 31, 1996; and Craig Johnson (secretary of labor) to Elizabeth Estill (regional manager, U.S. Forest Service), June 13, 1995, correspondence. “Dunbar,” wrote Johnson to Estill, “will … attract more year-round visitors,” with the “net effect of reducing the seasonality of our visitor industry” (U.S. Forest Service Records, Spearfish Canyon).
30. The term “measured separatism” comes from Charles Wilkinson, American Indians, Time, and the Law (New Haven: Yale University, 1987), pp. 120–22. The whole movement toward renewed tribalism has been documented by Wilkinson, as well as by Edward Lazarus, Black Hills Justice (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); and Fergus M. Bordewich, Killing the White Man’s Indian (New York: Doubleday, 1996).
31. Richard White, “The Return of the Native,” New Republic, July 8, 1996, 37.
32. Bordewich, Killing the White Man’s Indian, p. 12. This order was followed by a remarkable body of state and federal laws, most noteworthy of which were: Nixon’s 1972 restaffing of the Bureau of Indian Affairs entirely with Indians; Nixon’s 1973 signing of the Menominee Restoration Act, which formally ended the termination policy of the government; the passage by Congress in 1975 of the Indian Self-Determination Act, which handed over many federal programs to the control of the tribes; and the 1978 Supreme Court decision U.S. v. Wheeler, which insisted that the “inherent sovereignty” of the tribes, forged hundreds of years ago, was an outcome of tribal history and never dependent on the states or on “grants from the U.S.” In its own right, the Wheeler decision, by reviving the concept of the inherent sovereignty of the tribes, liberated a whole series of other court decisions that recognized, among other matters, tribal civil jurisdiction over non-Indians; the right of tribes to make their own laws and to be ruled by them; the right to tax, as sovereigns, anyone on their reservations; and the right not to be taxed or regulated by the states or federal government. See Wilkinson, American Indians, pp. 61–63; Bordewich, Killing the White Man’s Indian, pp. 56–57; Nabokov, Native American Testimony, p. 75; and Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry, eds., The Pequots of Southern New England (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993).
33. Wilkinson, American Indians, p. 75.
34. For instance, Congress reestablished the “Cherokee Nation” in 1971; in 1983, Connecticut recognized the Pequots; and in March 1994, the California Legislature “acknowledged” all California’s Indian nations as sovereign entities. On the Californian “nations,” see Judy Zelio, “The Fat New Buffalo,” State Legislatures, June 1994, 38; on the Cherokees, see Bordewich, 56; on the Pequots, see Hauptman and Wherry, 222.
35. Lazarus puts this well in Black Hills Justice: Beginning in the period 1967–70, “millions of Americans (mostly liberal) reindicted themselves for the nation’s old imperialism, its often brutal conquest of the Indians. They read of the poetry and beauty of the old Indian ways, reproached themselves for what their ancestors had destroyed, and warmly embraced the new Indians, the Indian of Alcatraz, who defiantly promised a rebirth of native heritages that many whites had feared extinct” (p. 293). This romance lived in New Age cults, in white obsessions with sweat lodges and Indian spirituality, and in white acceptance of practices by Indians, from race-based citizenship to extreme forms of body-piercing, which most whites refused to tolerate in their own behavior (at least up until very recently).
36. Nabokov, Native American Testimony, p. 383.
37. This discussion draws on Bordewich’s excellent analysis (Killing the White Man’s Indian, pp. 170–71).
38. “Collectively, these actions,” Borde
wich has argued, “along with similar legislation in many states, some of them requiring reburial of any Indian remains in museum collections, represented the clearest extension yet of the principle of tribal sovereignty into the realm of American culture” (Ibid., p. 171).
39. Johansen, Life and Death in Mohawk Country, p. xxiii.
40. On water and fishing rights, see Timothy Egan, “Indians of Puget Sound Get Rights to Shellfish,” NYT, January 1, 1995, A12.
41. National Indian Policy, “Reservation-Based Gambling,” pp. 35–38; and Lynn Montante, “An Imposition on Tribal Sovereignty: The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act,” Daybreak Magazine (winter, 1994), 18–22.
42. IGRA, however, may have been unnecessary as a spur to economic sovereignty, although many today argue that it was; as Charles Wilkinson has indicated, long before 1986 “the tribes” had “begun to take back their reservations.” See his essay “Paradise Revised,” in William E. Riebsame, general editor, Atlas of the New West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 33. Today a huge advocacy system exists to plead for all “the Indian nations” as one voice. This system has a national magazine called Indian Gaming; it boasts full-time Washington lawyers; and it has lobbyists and organizations such as the National Indian Gaming Organization.
43. “A Battle Topped With Felt, Casino Mogul Helps Mohegans Renew an Old Rivalry,” NYT, August 5, 1996, B1; “Not the Last of This Tribe,” NYT, March 24, 1994, B4; “Place Your Bets: A New Casino,” NYT, December 11, 1996, B1; International Gaming and Wagering News, December 5, 1994, 53. On Lyle Berman, see “You Gotta Know When to Hold ’Em,” Business Week, September 9, 1996, 69; “Roller-Coaster Ride of Stratosphere Corporation Is a Tale of Las Vegas,” WSJ, October 29, 1996, 1, A10.
44. An essay could be written comparing the South African approach to tribal homelands with the American approach. Obviously the biggest difference was that Pretoria used tribalism to weaken the tribes and to strengthen the government, while in America, the government sought to revitalize tribalism as a way of strengthening the tribes. But there were obvious similarities. Both governments exploited or manipulated or bought into phony ideas about place—about culture, inheritance, the past—to achieve their ends, thus opening up opportunities, of course, for unscrupulous developers and other place-exploiters.
45. On the South African government’s approach to the “tribal homelands,” see Brian Lapping, Apartheid: A History (London: Grafton, 1986), pp. 106–8, 128–47; and George Fredrickson, White Supremacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 240–46.
46. For an account of this history, see “Report of the Division of Gaming Enforcement to Casino Control Commission in the Matter of the Application of Sun International Hotels Limited For Plenary Qualification as a Holding Company of Casino Licensee Resorts International Hotel, Inc.” (Trenton: New Jersey Casino Control Commission, September 2, 1997), 123–76. This document provides much information on Kerzner’s casino dealings in South Africa.
47. “Let the Games Begin,” International Gaming and Wagering Business, June 1998, S6. This restriction, however, did not mean that the new South Africa had turned away from gambling; on the contrary, by 1998 the country was awash in it, with the government granting licenses for forty new large casinos in that year alone. This country of 60 million people already had many casinos, plus a national lottery, slot operations, and many horse racing tracks.
48. NYT, March 24, 1994, B4; and NYT, August 5, 1996, B1–2, and December 11, 1996, B1.
49. “Report of the Division of Gaming Enforcement …,” 25–26, 45–46.
50. Quoted in Jonathan Rabinowitz, “South African Gets Approval for a Casino in New Jersey,” NYT, October 23, 1997, B7.
51. Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Vintage, 1987), pp. 91–93.
52. Lee Lescaze, “Strangers in Strange Lands” (book review), WSJ, March 27, 1996, A20.
53. Wallace Stegner, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 81.
54. “Preserving A Heritage Via Beds and Barns,” NYT, August 13, 1998, D1.
55. Indeed, most residents began to move out after 1970, when Las Vegas growth hit new levels; they sought to insulate themselves within a “culture of privacy”; and even as they depended on Las Vegas for their livelihoods, they turned their backs on it as a “community” worthy of their respect or care, looked with contempt on those who remained, and refused to pay taxes to maintain the schools, the roads, or the city infrastructure. See John Findlay, People of Chance, pp. 173–208.
56. Geoff Schumacher, “Urban Decay,” Las Vegas Sun, May 24, 1997, p. 143.
57. Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (New York: Popular Library Edition, 1971).
58. Author’s visit, May 23–24, 1997.
59. Author’s visit, May 1997; and “Steve Wynn’s Big Gamble,” The American Way, November 15, 1997.
60. Author’s visit, May 1997; and on the casinos’ change in strategies (once they became publicly traded corporations), see Johnston, Temples of Chance, pp. 9–22; and John Mohawk, Review of Temples of Chance, Daybreak (spring 1993), 22.
61. Author’s visit, November 24, 1995.
62. “Viejas Casino and Turf Club,” Indian Gaming, September 1996, 4; “Economics Brings Rebirth for Native Americans,” Indian Gaming, April 1997, 4; and BusinessWeek, September 9, 1996, 47.
63. Herbert Muschamp, “A Primal Phantasmogoria,” NYT, October 21, 1996, C13, C15.
64. John Mohawk, “Last Words,” Akwe-kon’s Journal of Indigenous Issues (summer 1995), 64.
65. Tim Giago, “Notes from Indian Country,” Indian Country Today, December 2–9, 1996, A4.
66. Letter to editor, Indian Country Today, August 10, 1995, A4. Doug George-Kenatiio, Mohawk leader and journalist, has repeatedly argued in his columns in the Syracuse Herald American that “commercial gambling runs contrary to the ancestral Iroquois laws,” and its spread has “eclipsed [our] cultural survival and the effort to retain language and our indigenous spiritual rituals. Some [Indians] no longer cite our longstanding relationship with the earth or the valiant fight for religious freedom.… Our Iroquoian ‘seventh generation’ commandment has been swept aside by an entirely American attitude of ‘get while the getting is good.’ We never were a material people [and] we must return to the circle of our clans and families” (Syracuse Herald American, February 19, 1995, and May 14, 1995).
67. Transcript of interview, quoted in Robert W. Venables, ed., The Six Nations of New York: The 1892 United States Extra Census Bulletin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. xix.
68. For an excellent account of this recent development and of the problems resulting from it, see “Sprawling Toward the Millennium,” a six-part series published by The New Day (a newspaper serving the southeastern Connecticut towns of North Stonington, New London, and Norwich), May 18–23, 1997.
69. Phone interview with Charles Elias, selectman from North Stonington, August 18, 1997.
70. “Trains Proposed to Link to Foxwoods,” The New Day, June 12, 1997, A1, A7.
71. Phone interview with Charles Elias.
72. See Wilkinson (American Indians, pp. 186–87), on the role anthropology has played in arming these kinds of “Indians” with philosophical material to justify these positions. “We shouldn’t reject everything,” said William Belvado, a Sioux leader who urged his tribe to embrace tourism as well new technologies, scientific advances, and new business methods (Bordewich), Killing the White Man’s Indian, pp. 237–38. Men like Belvado might have agreed with Terry L. Anderson, free-market thinker and journalist, who insisted in an influential essay in Reason Magazine that Indians, far from being communalists and nature “mystics,” have historically been more capitalist than most Americans. Indians, Anderson said, have always defended “private property rights” against government intervention; and they have “encouraged investment and production in personal property as well.” In the context of these arguments, t
hen, gambling and tourism did not stand against but emerged out of Indian life, just as they did in the case of non-Indians (Anderson, “Dances with Myths,” Reason Magazine, February 1997, 48–50).
73. Mark Marvel, “Gambling on the Reservations: What’s Really at Stake,” Interview, May 1994, 114; Minnesota Gaming Directory, 1994 edition; and David Segal, “Dances with Sharks,” Daybreak (winter 1993), 21.
74. Julie Nicklin, “Casinos Bring Riches to Some Tribal Colleges, but Windfalls Are Rare,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 8, 1995, A54; and Angie Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), p. 373.
Jo Ann Jones, president of the Ho-Chunk Indians in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, echoed these themes in her testimony in defense of Indian gambling before the U.S. Senate. Thanks to gambling, she argued, we “have increased employment by 2,000 people in three years, and it is able to pay a good living wage” (see Segal, “Dances with Sharks,” 21).
Such leaders, in fact, were confident that they could separate the cultural life of the tribes from economic life; in the classic American manner, they believed that the private spiritual world could flourish in a public setting that threatened to destroy it. Their aim, as Christopher Jocks, professor of Native American culture at Dartmouth, argues, has been to “put tourist and gambling operations somewhere on the margins and not at the heart of things” (phone interview, April 2, 1996). “We have made an attempt not to mix tribal culture with the business,” insisted Keller George, spokesman for the Oneidas in upstate New York. (Keller George quoted in Melissa Gedachian, “Oneida Nation: Keeping an Eye on the Sparrow,” Indian Gaming, February 1996, 28.)
75. Quoted in Tim Johnson, “The Dealer’s Edge,” Akwe-kon’s Journal of Indigenous Issues (summer 1995), 20.
76. Kathryn Harrison, chairperson of the Grand Ronde Indian tribe near Portland, Oregon, on the tribe’s Spiritual Mountain casino, which has the distinction of having introduced high-stakes gambling to Oregon (quoted in Indian Country Today, Jan. 27–Feb. 3, 1997, B2).
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