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THE NEW BUFFALO:
Today's Tribal Casino Culture
An online exclusive
The Foxwood Casino in Ledyard, Connecticut
Sunday, July 06, 2008
By Ross Simonini
From the interstate, the Emerald Queen casino looks a little like a church without a cross. It’s run by the Puyallup tribe and is one of the bigger Indian-run casinos in Washington state, but there’s actually nothing to suggest tribal-ness from the visage, including the imperial-sounding name. Inside, it’s the same: There isn’t a splinter of Native American culture to be found, and yet gobs of Cambodian décor cover the walls, with Buddhist statues tucked into corners, signs advertising a weekly “Cambodian Night,” and an “Asian Garden Café,” all of which is geared not toward the owners, but the heavily Chinese clientele.
The only thing that might be confused for Native American decor is a totem-pole-like bird head, crammed into the display case at the foot of the “guest services” desk with a mini-fan. But this, in fact, is an effigy of the logo for the local football team, the Seattle Seahawks.
If prodded, the extremely non-Native-looking people behind the desk will spend a few minutes flipping through a three-ring binder for a page-long history of the tribe, and then waltz over to the photocopier to run off a copy. The pamphlet refers to “our people,” and concludes by revealing that “one of the [culture’s] more exciting events is the tribe’s introduction [sic] into Class III gaming with the Emerald Queen Casino.”
Within two blocks of the casino is the tribal courthouse, the “elder care” center and the police station, all stuffed into some modular homes (i.e., trailers) amid a desolate field and condemned-looking buildings. The casino isn’t the prettiest thing in the world, but it’s clear where the money is going.
People have started calling casinos the “new buffalo” of Native American culture, which is to say that they are the modern symbol, sustenance, and the center around which most Indian economies orbit. Where US federal policy has increasingly failed, the casinos stepped in, 30 years ago, and became tribal treasuries.
At the same time, gambling is the singular public limb of tribal life. To the non-natives of the world (i.e., the people who have little to no contact with tribal lifestyles), bad buffets, gaudy carpeting and craps tables are their only chance to interact with any outlet of modern Native American culture. All of this means that from the outsider’s perspective, tribal culture is being swapped out for casino culture.
To provide a little context: When the Seminole Indians set up a high-stakes bingo parlor in Florida and then won in Seminole Tribe v. Butterworth ,on the grounds of the reservation’s partial sovereignty from state law, it set up a domino effect that ended with California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians. Consequently, Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) in 1988, declaring, if a state allows even the slightest whiff of gambling (e.g., the omnipresent, omni-loved state lotteries), it must also allow reservation-based Indian casinos. Currently, there are about 400 functioning Indian casinos in the country.
The IGRA states that its “principal goal … is to promote tribal economic development, tribal self-sufficiency and strong tribal government” and, for the most part, it has. In 2006, the Indian gaming industry was clocked at $25 billion by the National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC). Likewise, Indian populations have grown, as more Indians want to be more active in tribal activities, and communities are more able to have a decisive presence in state issues.
Take the Mashantucket Pequot tribe, which has been tagged “the richest Indian tribe in history,” with “the world’s most profitable casino,” and “one of the most successful cash-producing enterprises in the world.” An armful of books have been written about how Skip Hayward, the proprietor of a botched clam shack and chief of the Pequot, used some sleight-of-hand legal tactics to found the Foxwoods Casino in 1992. At the time, it was Connecticut's only casino; it brought in about 25,000 gamblers a day and $150 million a year. One book documents a phone call between Hayward and P.O.T.U.S. Clinton, who thanks the Pequot leader for his half-a-million-dollar campaign donation. Publishers Weekly called the book a “climactic revenge narrative.”
The question in obnoxious flashy lights is: Why casinos? Or: Why did 220 tribes (out of 562 federally recognized tribes) choose gambling as their path to success? And, of course, the knee-jerk, cynical response is financial opportunism. The Indians were able to exploit the age-old addiction of gambling, legally, and did so. This, however, is not entirely true.
Where the casino is often seen, right alongside the California Missions, as a big fat monument of assimilation, it is, in fact, a development of an already present aspect of the culture; Indians were gamblers long before the missionaries showed their pasty faces.
For instance, the Coast Salish Indians, an umbrella tribal appellation that includes both Muckleshoot and Puyallup, have a very intimate relationship with a game called Slahal (aka “the bone game”), which is a little like craps, except bones serve as dice, and it includes some very specific musical accompaniment. The game was designed to be nonverbal, which is to say, linguistically unprejudiced, so that it could be played by larger groups of multi-tribal peoples. Before currency, tribes would wager food and blankets. The Vancouver Island people were reputed as unbeatable in the bone game. For a lot of tribes, gambling had a spiritual aspect, which even came into play at mourning ceremonies, which seems rather absurd — picture a funeral coffin being pallbearered through a casino.
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.