front cover of The Bingo Queens of Oneida
The Bingo Queens of Oneida
How Two Moms Started Tribal Gaming in Wisconsin
Mike Hoeft
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2014
Before Indian casinos sprouted up around the country, a few enterprising tribes got their start in gambling by opening bingo parlors. A group of women on the Oneida Indian Reservation just outside Green Bay, Wisconsin, introduced bingo in 1976 simply to pay a few bills. Bingo not only paid the light bill at the struggling civic center but was soon financing vital health and housing services for tribal elderly and poor.
While militant Indian activists often dominated national headlines in the 1970s, these church-going Oneida women were the unsung catalysts behind bingo’s rising prominence as a sovereignty issue in the Oneida Nation. The bingo moms were just trying to take care of the kids in the community.
The Bingo Queens of Oneida: How Two Moms Started Tribal Gaming tells the story through the eyes of Sandra Ninham and Alma Webster, the Oneida women who had the idea for a bingo operation run by the tribe to benefit the entire tribe. Bingo became the tribe’s first moneymaker on a reservation where about half the population was living in poverty.
Author Mike Hoeft traces the historical struggles of the Oneida—one of six nations of the Iroquois, or Haudenosaunee, confederacy—from their alliance with America during the Revolutionary War to their journey to Wisconsin. He also details the lives of inspirational tribal members who worked alongside Ninham and Webster, and also those who were positively affected by their efforts.
The women-run bingo hall helped revitalize an indigenous culture on the brink of being lost. The Bingo Queens of Oneida is the story of not only how one game helped revive the Oneida economy but also how one game strengthened the Oneida community.
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Building a Nation
Chickasaw Museums and the Construction of History and Heritage
Joshua M. Gorman
University of Alabama Press, 2011
Using museum and heritage sites as places to define itself as a coherent and legitimate contemporary Indian nation, the Chickasaw Nation struggles to remain accurate and yet apace with the evolving nature of museums

The Chickasaw Nation, an American Indian nation headquartered in southeastern Oklahoma, entered into a period of substantial growth in the late 1980s. Following its successful reorganization and expansion, which was enabled by federal policies for tribal self-determination, the Nation pursued gaming and other industries to affect economic growth. From 1987 to 2009 the Nation’s budget increased exponentially as tribal investments produced increasingly large revenues for a growing Chickasaw population. Coincident to this growth, the Chickasaw Nation began acquiring and creating museums and heritage properties to interpret their own history, heritage, and culture through diverse exhibitionary representations. By 2009, the Chickasaw Nation directed representation of itself at five museum and heritage properties throughout its historic boundaries.

Josh Gorman examines the history of these sites and argues that the Chickasaw Nation is using museums and heritage sites as places to define itself as a coherent and legitimate contemporary Indian nation. In doing so, they are necessarily engaging with the shifting historiographical paradigms as well as changing articulations of how museums function and what they represent. The roles of the Chickasaw Nation’s museums and heritage sites in defining and creating discursive representations of sovereignty are examined within their historicized local contexts. The work describes the museum exhibitions’ dialogue with the historiography of the Chickasaw Nation, the literature of new museum studies, and the indigenous exhibitionary grammars emerging from indigenous museums throughout the United States and the world.

 
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front cover of Cahuilla Nation Activism and the Tribal Casino Movement
Cahuilla Nation Activism and the Tribal Casino Movement
Theodor P. Gordon
University of Nevada Press, 2018
In 1980, when the Cabazon Band first opened a small poker club on their Indian reservation in the isolated desert of California, they knew local authorities would challenge them. Cabazon persisted and ultimately won, defeating the State of California in a landmark case before the Supreme Court. By fighting for their right to operate a poker club, Cabazon opened up the possibility for native nations across the United States to open casinos on their own reservations, spurring the growth of what is now a $30 billion industry.

Cahuilla Nation Activism and the Tribal Casino Movement tells the bigger story of how the Cahuilla nations—including the Cabazon—have used self-reliance and determination to maintain their culture and independence against threats past and present. From California’s first governor’s “war of extermination” against native peoples through today’s legal and political challenges, Gordon shows that successful responses have depended on the Cahuilla’s ability to challenge non-natives’ assumptions and misconceptions.
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front cover of Casino and Museum
Casino and Museum
Representing Mashantucket Pequot Identity
John J. Bodinger de Uriarte
University of Arizona Press, 2007
The past twenty-five years have seen enormous changes in Native America. One of the most profound expressions of change has been within the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. The Nation has overcome significant hurdles to establish itself as a potent cultural and economic force highlighted by the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center and Foxwoods, the largest casino in the Western Hemisphere. In Casino and Museum, John J. Bodinger de Uriarte sees these two main commercial structures of the reservation as mutually supporting industries generating both material and symbolic capital.

To some degree, both institutions offer Native representations yet create different strategies for attracting and engaging visitors. While the casino is crucial as an economic generator, the museum has an important role as the space for authentic Mashantucket Pequot images and narratives. The book’s focus is on how the casino and the museum successfully deploy different strategies to take control of the tribe’s identity, image, and cultural agency.

Photographs in the book provide a view of Mashantucket, allowing the reader to study the spaces of the book’s central arguments. They are a key methodology of the project and offer a non-textual opportunity to navigate the sites as well as one finely focused way to work through the representation and formation of the Native American photographic subject—the powerful popular imagining of Native Americans. Casino and Museum presents a unique understanding of the prodigious role that representation plays in the contemporary poetics and politics of Native America. It is essential reading for scholars of Native American studies, museum studies, cultural studies, and photography.
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front cover of First Nations Gaming in Canada
First Nations Gaming in Canada
Yale D. Belanger
University of Manitoba Press, 2011
While games of chance have been part of the Aboriginal cultural landscape since before European contact, large-scale commercial gaming facilities within First Nations communities are a relatively new phenomenon in Canada. First Nations Gaming in Canada is the first multidisciplinary study of the role of gaming in indigenous communities north of the 49th parallel. Bringing together some of Canada’s leading gambling researchers, the book examines the history of Aboriginal gaming and its role in indigenous political economy, the rise of large-scale casinos and cybergaming, the socio-ecological impact of problem gambling, and the challenges of labour unions and financial management. The authors also call attention to the dearth of socio-economic impact studies of gambling in First Nations communities while providing models to address this growing issue of concern.
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front cover of Gambling and Survival in Native North America
Gambling and Survival in Native North America
Paul Pasquaretta
University of Arizona Press, 2003
The cards are turned, the chips are raked. In casinos all over the country, Native Americans are making money and reclaiming power. But the games are by no means confined to the tables, as the Mashantucket Pequots can attest. Although Anglo-Americans have attempted to undermine Pequot sovereignty for centuries, these Native Americans have developed a strategy of survival in order to maintain their sense of peoplehood—a resiliency that has vexed outsiders, from English settlers to Donald Trump.

The Pequots have found success at their southeastern Connecticut casino in spite of the odds. But in considering their story, Paul Pasquaretta shifts the focus from casinos to the political struggles that have marked the long history of indigenous-colonial relations. Viewing the survival of Native communities in the face of genocide and forced assimilation as a high-stakes game of chance, he examines gambling metaphors in historical and literary contexts to reveal strategies employed by several tribes as they participate in various "games" with white society--whether land re-acquisition, political positioning, or resistance to outside dominance.

Through a comparative analysis of texts spanning four centuries—colonial war narratives, nineteenth-century romance fiction, tribal memorials, Native American novels—Pasquaretta provides a framework for understanding Indian-white relations and the role of "chance" in the realm of colonialism. He explores two intertwining themes: the survival of indigenous peoples in the face of the European invasion of North America and the ongoing contest of Natives and newcomers that has transpired in the marketplace, on the battlefield, and in the courts. In so doing, he considers the impact of reservation gambling on the development of contemporary tribal communities and the role of traditional Indian gambling practices and stories in the survival of indigenous cultural traditions.

Gambling and Survival in Native North America is a wide-ranging book that shows how Native Americans have become active participants in their own survival despite the popular belief that Indian tribes, as "conquered peoples," have been rendered helpless for over a century. Working within a system devised to confine and even destroy them, they have found ways to remain in the game—and, against all odds, have learned to play it well.
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front cover of Gambling on Authenticity
Gambling on Authenticity
Gaming, the Noble Savage, and the Not-So-New Indian
Becca Gercken
Michigan State University Press, 2017
In the decades since the passing of the  Pamajewon ruling in Canada and the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in the United States, gaming has come to play a crucial role in how Indigenous peoples are represented and read by both Indians and non-Indians alike. This collection presents a transnational examination of North American gaming and considers the role Indigenous artists and scholars play in producing depictions of Indigenous gambling. In an effort to offer a more complete and nuanced picture of Indigenous gaming in terms of sign and strategy than currently exists in academia or the general public, Gambling on Authenticity crosses both disciplinary and geographic boundaries. The case studies presented offer a historically and politically nuanced analysis of gaming that collectively creates an interdisciplinary reading of gaming informed by both the social sciences and the humanities. A great tool for the classroom, Gambling on Authenticity works to illuminate the not-so-new Indian being formed in the public's consciousness by and through gaming.
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front cover of High Stakes
High Stakes
Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty
Jessica R. Cattelino
Duke University Press, 2008
In 1979, Florida Seminoles opened the first tribally operated high-stakes bingo hall in North America. At the time, their annual budget stood at less than $2 million. By 2006, net income from gaming had surpassed $600 million. This dramatic shift from poverty to relative economic security has created tangible benefits for tribal citizens, including employment, universal health insurance, and social services. Renewed political self-governance and economic strength have reversed decades of U.S. settler-state control. At the same time, gaming has brought new dilemmas to reservation communities and triggered outside accusations that Seminoles are sacrificing their culture by embracing capitalism. In High Stakes, Jessica R. Cattelino tells the story of Seminoles’ complex efforts to maintain politically and culturally distinct values in a time of new prosperity.

Cattelino presents a vivid ethnographic account of the history and consequences of Seminole gaming. Drawing on research conducted with tribal permission, she describes casino operations, chronicles the everyday life and history of the Seminole Tribe, and shares the insights of individual Seminoles. At the same time, she unravels the complex connections among cultural difference, economic power, and political rights. Through analyses of Seminole housing, museum and language programs, legal disputes, and everyday activities, she shows how Seminoles use gaming revenue to enact their sovereignty. They do so in part, she argues, through relations of interdependency with others. High Stakes compels rethinking of the conditions of indigeneity, the power of money, and the meaning of sovereignty.

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front cover of Native Pathways
Native Pathways
American Indian Culture and Economic Development in the Twentieth Century
Brian Hosmer
University Press of Colorado, 2004
How has American Indians' participation in the broader market - as managers of casinos, negotiators of oil leases, or commercial fishermen - challenged the U.S. paradigm of economic development? Have American Indians paid a cultural price for the chance at a paycheck? How have gender and race shaped their experiences in the marketplace? Contributors to Native Pathways ponder these and other questions, highlighting how indigenous peoples have simultaneously adopted capitalist strategies and altered them to suit their own distinct cultural beliefs and practices. Including contributions from historians, anthropologists, and sociologists, Native Pathways offers fresh viewpoints on economic change and cultural identity in twentieth-century Native American communities. Foreword by Donald L. Fixico.
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front cover of The New Politics of Indian Gaming
The New Politics of Indian Gaming
The Rise of Reservation Interest Groups
Kenneth N. Hansen
University of Nevada Press, 2015
The advent of gaming on Indian reservations has created a new kind of tribal politics over the past three decades. Now armed with often substantial financial resources, Indigenous peoples have adjusted their political strategies from a focus on the judicial system and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to one that directly lobbies state and federal governments and non-Indigenous voters. These tactics allow tribes to play an influential role in shaping state and national policies that affect their particular interests. Using case studies of major Indian gaming states, the contributing authors analyze the interplay of tribal governance, state politics, and federalism, and illustrate the emergence of reservation governments as political power brokers.
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front cover of Public Native America
Public Native America
Tribal Self-Representations in Museums, Powwows, and Casinos
Lawlor, Mary
Rutgers University Press, 2006

The Native American casino and gaming industry has attracted unprecedented American public attention to life on reservations. Other tribal public venues, such as museums and powwows, have also gained in popularity among non-Native audiences and become sites of education and performance.

In PublicNative America, Mary Lawlor explores the process of tribal self-definition that the communities in her study make available to off-reservation audiences. Focusing on architectural and interior designs as well as performance styles, she reveals how a complex and often surprising cultural dynamic is created when Native Americans create lavish displays for the public’s participation and consumption.

 Drawing on postcolonial and cultural studies, Lawlor argues that these venues serve as a stage where indigenous communities play out delicate negotiations—on the one hand retaining traditional beliefs and rituals, while on the other, using what they have learned about U.S. politics, corporate culture, tourism, and public relations to advance their economic positions.

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front cover of Warriors Without War
Warriors Without War
Seminole Leadership in the Late Twentieth Century
Patricia Riles Wickman
University of Alabama Press, 2012

Warriors Without War
takes readers beneath the placid waters of the Seminole’s public image and into the fascinating depths of Seminole society and politics.

For the entire last quarter of the twentieth century, the Seminole Tribe of Florida, a federally recognized American Indian Tribe, struggled as it transitioned from a tiny group of warriors into one of the best-known tribes on the world’s economic stage through their gaming enterprises. 

Caught between a desperate desire for continued cultural survival and the mounting pressures of the non-Indian world—especially, the increasing requirements of the United States government— the Seminoles took a warriorlike approach to financial risk management.  Their leader was the sometimes charming, sometimes crass and explosive, always warriorlike James Billie, who twice led the tribe in fights with the State of Florida that led all the way to the US Supreme Court.

Patricia Riles Wickman, who lived and worked for fifteen years with the Seminole people, chronicles the near-meteoric rise of the tribe and its leader to the pinnacle of international fame, and Billie’s ultimate fall after twenty-four years in power.  Based partly on her own personal experiences working with the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Wickman has produced an in-depth study of the rise of one of the largest Indian gaming operations in the United States that reads almost like a Capote nonfiction novel.
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