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THE NEW BUFFALO:
Today's Tribal Casino Culture



The aforementioned Emerald Queen casino is a technically and comparatively successful casino in the world of Indian gambling, but about 15 minutes down the road, there’s a different type of success. Located well away from any major freeway, the Muckleshoot tribe runs a more attractive, and clearly more lucrative enterprise than the Queen, which, unlike the Puyallup, is openly billed as an “Indian Casino.” Entering the reservation feels like an event, with cartoon-colored signs and the Muckleshoot Smoke Shop and bingo parlor welcoming clientele into what is literally a different nation. The mall-sized casino’s emblem is actually a dream catcher, which is souvenirized and on sale in the gift shop – along with native art, native-looking plates and lighters. Half the cars in the parking lot have these dreamcatchers dangling from rearview mirrors.

Its not as if the casino is a museum for all native culture, but the Muckleshoot have a certain public pride that doesn’t allow dice throwers to forget what kind of ground they’re standing on. On the casino’s website, they describe all the time and money they’ve put toward preserving Wuhlshootseed, their native language. Tribal council meetings are openly held on the casino’s second floor.

This whole Muckleshoot vs. Emerald Queen comparison begs the question: Do tribes not feel comfortable advertising their culture until they feel financially respected? Or, to put it in a more practical way: Does tribal pride hurt business?

When the Pechanga Indians were still a casino-free, they received around 15 membership applications a year. People didn’t want to associate themselves with a culture of widespread poverty. However, after their $184 million-a-year casino opened, the applicant numbers shot up to 450-plus. All sorts of people started “rediscovering their lineage.” Natives refer to the “half-breed” opportunists who are trying to get in on the fortune. As a result, a lot of these tribes have to freeze their enrollment lists, just to avoid stowaways.

For other reasons as well, the too good, too fast success has served as a shock. Starting around 1999, the government’s ideal of Indians staying neatly tucked away on their reservation casinos began to dissolve when a trend called “reservation shopping” emerged, in which out-of-state tribes attempted to set up a casino far from their designated, usually isolated reservations (i.e. the next state,) and most likely near a big city with lots of prospective clients). This approach hasn’t been too successful, and Congress is making sure it won’t happen. Certain Indian tribes aren’t interested in the move either, seeing it as a regression toward old-fashioned tribal rivalry, where multiple tribes would start competing for land.

There are also outside naysayers. Donald Trump, with his array of Atlantic City casinos, gave a testimony he called “Indian Gaming Will Hurt the Economy,” in which he said “an Indian casino operation in northern New Jersey would be the economic death knell to Atlantic City.” He also intimates certain Mafioso-Indian gambling connections, something that a lot of people fear/believe, based on the seemingly above-the-law aspects of reservations.

Bluntly put, these are the sorts of conflicts that annihilate entire civilizations. While Congress had ostensibly altruistic intentions, it looks like the IGRA could be an inadvertent continuation of the white man’s eradication of the Indian, which isn’t to say the end of the actual flesh-and-blood people but, rather, the end of a culture. It’s another reason why the “new buffalo” metaphor is apt: The modern Indian way of life might be too reliant on an exterminable resource.

An essay called “Indian gaming could destroy Native American culture,” written by the Saugeen Ojibay tribe’s Clay Akiwenzie, accuses tribes of ignoring the drastic consequences of bringing gobs of money into a traditional culture and then describes gambling as the “most destructive element introduced to Native American culture since Christopher Columbus brought the smallpox.”

A handful of tribes in the country feel similarly, and have declined offers from Vegas casinos eager to manage reservation-based casinos. The Hopi and Navajo, each with massive casino-ready chunks of land in Arizona, have rejected the option. They don’t want to get trapped into a contract with the state, and even more so, they don’t want all their time and money to get funneled into a morally questionably pastime.

It seems that most tribes are recognizing this. “We’d rather do something besides gambling,” says Ray Halbritter, the Harvard-schooled head of the Oneida tribe. Tribes have started expanding away from the casinos and into new ventures: A slew of Indian-owned malls have popped up recently; in addition, there’s the new Mescalero Apache telecommunications company and the Pascua Yaqui tribe’s amphitheater, which has already hosted the likes of Don Henley and Tony Bennett. If all goes as planned, by 2012, the tribal council meetings will be held next to the Sbarro, across from the Starbucks, at that new shopping center bearing a tomahawk as its logo.

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