High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty 9780822342090, 9780822342274

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Seminole Gaming in the Sunshine State
1. Casino Roots
2. Cultural Currencies
3. Fungibility: The Politics of Casino Money
Interlude: Mateo Romero’s Indian Gaming
4. Rebuilding Sovereignty
5. Sovereign Interdependencies
Conclusion: Betting on the House
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

High Stakes

High Stakes

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Jessica R. Cattelino

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© 2008 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾ Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. All royalties in excess of book-production expenses will be directed to the Seminole Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum.

For my many teachers

​Contents

Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: Seminole Gaming in the Sunshine State

1

1. Casino Roots

29

2. Cultural Currencies

59

3. Fungibility: The Politics of Casino Money

95

Interlude: Mateo Romero’s Indian Gaming

125

4. Rebuilding Sovereignty

127

5. Sovereign Interdependencies

161

Conclusion: Betting on the House

193

Notes

207

References

253

Index

281

Illustrations

Map 1

Seminole Reservations  18

Figure 1

Hollywood Seminole Bingo, soon after opening  2

Figure 2

Indian gaming revenues  4

Figure 3

Seminole Hard Rock, Hollywood  5

Figure 4

Seminole Hard Rock, Tampa  6

Figure 5

Seminole cowboy cartoon (1959)  33

Figure 6

Working Paul Bowers’s cattle  35

Figure 7

“Grandma” (Mary Tiger)  39

Figure 8

A clothing contest at the 2001 Brighton Field



Days  43

Figure 9

Making “old-style” split palmetto baskets  44

Figure 10

Wrestling at the Jungle Queen  45

Figure 11

Working the tomato fields  48

Figure 12

Smoke shop  55

Figure 13

Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum  75

Figure 14

Seminole students tour the Green Corn Dance



exhibit  76

Figure 15

My Honda Civic  86



Figure 16

Traditions (1992) by Noah Billie  90

Figure 17

The Council Oak  98

Figure 18

The tribal jet  110

Figure 19

Pepper production at Seminole Farms  113

Figure 20

Billie Swamp Safari  115

Figure 21

Indian Gaming (1992) by Mateo Romero  124

Figure 22

Seminole flag  128

Figure 23

Tribal headquarters, with statue of Sam Jones (or Abiaka)  135

Figure 24

Happy Jones teaches Brighton children  139

Figure 25

John Jumper’s camp  141

Figure 26

An early CBS home  144

Figure 27

Housing development  149

Figure 28

Mary Parker Bowers learns how to operate her oven  151

Figure 29

Mary Parker Bowers in 2002  152

Figure 30

Hybrid housing structure  156

Figure 31

Chickee employee break room at Seminole Farms  157

Figure 32

Joe Dan Osceola’s chickee-building business  159

Figure 33

Advertisement in the Seminole Tribune  170

Figure 34

Presentation of $50,000 from the Seminole Tribe to the Indian



River Community College  173

Figure 35

Standing atop the Times Square Hard Rock Café  196

Figure 36

National Airlines postcard  203

Figure 37

Hard Rock signing beneath the Council Oak  204

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

​F

or their patience with my inquisitive presence, and for their immeasurable insights and assistance, I thank the citizens and employees of the Seminole Tribe of Florida. This book began as a dissertation at New York University, advised primarily by Karen Blu, Fred Myers, and Faye Ginsburg. Their imprint on this book is evident, and each offered guidance and kindness throughout. Karen was a wonderful chair. Excellent dissertation feedback also came from committee members Andrew Ross, William Sturtevant, and Thomas Abercrombie, and I thank other faculty who contributed to this project, including Lila Abu-Lughod, Owen Lynch, Jeff Himpele, and T. O. Beidelman. Graduate school colleagues made this possible and even fun, especially Ayse Parla, Nicole Rudolph, Elizabeth Smith, Omri Elisha, Winifred Tate, Jessica Winegar, Julie Chu, Jong Bum Kwon, and Kristin Dowell. I am grateful to Elizabeth Weatherford for a post at the Film and Video Center of the National Museum of the American Indian. William Sturtevant and JoAllyn Archambault sponsored my Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship. Sturtevant shared his remarkable knowledge and field notes, and I can only hope that this book does some justice to his legacy. Thanks, too, to Sally McLendon. While conducting archival research in Washington and Florida, I relied on the skilled assistance of staff members

xii

at the University of Florida Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, the University of Florida Archives, the National Anthropological Archives, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the National Indian Gaming Association Library and Resource Center. The School of American Research (now the School for Advanced Research) is an extraordinary environment for writing. Special thanks to those who offered sustained engagement in Santa Fe: Lawrence Cohen, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Bruce Knauft, Circe Sturm, Jason Yaeger, Rebecca Allahyari, Randolph Lewis, Catherine Cocks, James Brooks, Richard Leventhal, and Nancy Owen-Lewis. At the University of Chicago I found a community that offered not only intellectual stimulation but also care. I am enormously grateful to my intrepid and inspired writing group coconspirators, Jennifer Cole, Judith Farquhar, Kesha Fikes, and Danilyn Rutherford. Shannon Dawdy commented on the entire manuscript, and I also received astute readings from Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, and Michael Silverstein. Raymond Fogelson has contributed many insights. Thanks to E. Summerson Carr. Laura-Zoe Humphreys and Simon May provided research assistance, and graduate students taught me much in seminars on the Conditions of Indigeneity; Money and Value; and Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Nation. Other helpful comments and readings came from Lauren Berlant, Erin Debenport, Tim Duane, Loretta Fowler, Alexandra Harmon, Willie Johns, C. Miranda Johnson, LaVonne Kippenberger, Valerie Lambert, Sally Merry, Robert Moore, Elizabeth Povinelli, Audra Simpson, Patsy West, and Noah Zatz. Jim Shore, Jason Jackson, and Jacob Osceola were generous with their time and expertise throughout, each leaving a mark on this book, and James Billie and Mitchell Cypress extended their support. I could not have pursued this research without the efforts of Katherine Spilde Contreras. Audiences engaged with my work during lectures and workshops at Cornell University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin, Ball State University, Scripps College, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Chicago, the University of New Mexico, UCLA, the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, and the Newberry Library. Coauthors and editors of Native Pathways and Beyond Red Power opened new conversations. I am grateful to Ken Wissoker, Christine Dahlin, Courtney Berger, Molly Balikov, Heather Hensley, reviewers, and everyone at Duke

Ac k n o w l e d g m e n t s

University Press for their confidence and expertise. Nancy Zibman prepared the index, and Julian Dibbell proofread the manuscript. Needless to say, the book’s shortcomings and errors remain my responsibility. This research was generously funded by grants and fellowships, including a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, American Association of University Women American Dissertation Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Grant in Women’s Studies, Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellowship, American Philosophical Society Phillips Fund Grant for Native American Research, School of American Research Weatherhead Fellowship, and New York University fellowships including the Kriser Fellowship in Urban Anthropology, the NYU Alumnae Club Scholarship, and various departmental and university scholarships. The University of Chicago Department of Anthropology Lichtstern Fund supported additional research. I was honored to be the first recipient of NYU’s Annette B. Weiner Graduate Fellowship in Cultural Anthropology. I came to academia by an unlikely path. Thanks to the people of Saxon, Hurley, and Ironwood for offering benefit concerts, car washes, and institutional and individual contributions that sent me to school; Telluriders for opening up the world of academia; and the many teachers at Interlochen and Cornell who built my strengths and chipped away at my deficiencies. Special thanks to my parents, Joe and Pat Cattelino, and to my aunts and uncles, siblings, nieces and nephews, and the Zatz family. Noah Zatz is a remarkable thinker, reader, and partner who has stuck with this project for its duration, and with me for even longer.

Ac k n o w l e d g m e n t s

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Introduction

Seminole Gaming in the Sunshine State

​A

t 5 p.m. on December 14, 1979, the Seminole Tribe of Florida ​opened Hollywood Seminole Bingo on the Hollywood reservation, which is located just a few sprawling suburban miles west of Interstate 95 between Miami and Fort Lauderdale (figure 1). The modest operation was the first tribally operated high-stakes gaming venture in North America. Hollywood Seminole Bingo launched a gaming revolution that spread throughout Indian Country,1 building American Indian tribes’ political and economic power even as it exposed them to new scrutiny in American law, politics, and popular culture. Tribal gaming merits analysis on its own terms, as a large-scale economic and political process that has changed the lives of both American Indians and other Americans, and as the issue that dominates contemporary public perceptions of Indian life. But tribal gaming also offers insight into more general questions about the natures of money and sovereignty in the everyday lives of individuals, families, and peoples. This book tells the story of Seminole gaming. It asks: What does it mean that Florida Seminoles, often considered by themselves and outside observers to be among the most “traditional” American Indians, were the first to start tribal gaming and to experience its dramatic economic effects?2 What can this tell us about how economic action relates to cultural and political dis-



Figure 1. Hollywood Seminole Bingo, soon after opening. Courtesy of the Seminole Tribe of Florida.

tinctiveness, for indigenous peoples and others? The spectacular financial success of their casinos (numbering seven in 2006) has altered the lives of the approximately 3,300 Seminoles who live on or near six reservations scattered across the swamps and the suburbs of South Florida. Besides altering household economies, gaming has enabled Seminoles to reproduce valued forms of cultural and political distinctiveness, and in turn to reinforce their tribal sovereignty. They do so by exploiting the fungibility of money—its substitutability and exchangeability for itself—to selectively convert casino revenues into other forms of value. Even so, Seminoles in the casino era face difficult dilemmas as they strive to sustain social ties and intergenerational obligation under radically altered material conditions. While analyzing these processes through ethnographic and archival research, I aim neither to defend nor to criticize tribal gaming as a social fact or an economic form, since its effects and lived experiences have varied dramatically across Indian Country.3 With this book I hope to accomplish three goals. First, High Stakes tells the story of Seminole gaming ethnographically.4 By focusing less on federal law and policy or on aggregate statistics than on how tribal gaming affects and emerges from the lives of American Indian people, I attend to the everyday significance of gaming, and I thereby offer ethnographic

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specificity to popular and scholarly understandings of this important and widespread phenomenon. This book complements the growing scholarship on tribal gaming law and policy.5 Second, I analyze Seminoles’ uses and discourses of casino money to make the broader argument that popular and scholarly theories of money’s abstracting and deculturalizing force blind us to the ways that people undertake political acts of valuation in the course of exploiting money’s fungibility. By valuation, I mean the ways that people determine, enact, represent, and evaluate that which matters to them.6 I aim to reorient social scientific theories of money’s social force and nature by taking seriously the distinctive ways that Seminoles revalue casino money in the service of social reproduction. Put another way, this book accounts for the currency of culture in the casino era. Beyond attending to money as a form, I also show how indigeneity—which I take to be the conditions, theories, and values of being indigenous—is conditioned by economic relations in contemporary settler societies like the United States. My third goal is to contribute to policies and theories of sovereignty, both indigenous sovereignty and other forms, by considering the enactment of sovereignty in tribal administration and in Seminoles’ relationships of interdependency with other peoples and polities. Throughout, I explore the materiality of sovereignty and the politics of money, as exemplified at their historical juncture in Seminole gaming and at their theoretical intersection in questions of autonomy and interdependency. An ethnographic approach shows the high stakes of tribal gaming to be measured not only by financial risks and benefits but also in ongoing efforts by American Indians to control the conditions of their indigeneity. Fr om Bing o to Billions

Tribal gaming, defined as gaming operated by American Indian tribal governments on Indian lands, is big business. According to the National Indian Gaming Association (NIGA), a national tribal gaming advocacy group, approximately 65 percent of tribes in the lower forty-eight states operated gaming facilities in 2004 (National Indian Gaming Association 2004: 6).7 The National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC), which is the federal agency responsible for regulating tribal gaming, reported that tribal gaming revenues grew rapidly at the turn of the century, more than quadrupling from 1995 levels to $22.6 billion a decade later (figure 2).8 Not

Seminole Gaming in the Sunshine State





Figure 2. Indian gaming revenues. Adapted from the National Indian Gaming Commission “Growth in Indian Gaming” chart at www.nigc.gov (accessed July 12, 2006).

since the massive dispossession and transfer of Indian lands to settlers had any economic activity in Indian Country made such a dramatic impact on the lives of indigenous peoples and on regional economies, politics, and public perceptions. The scale and economic impact of tribal casinos vary dramatically, ranging from some of the world’s largest casinos, located near population centers—most famously Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun in Connecticut—to one-room operations in tents on the edges of far-flung rural Indian reservations. Gaming revenues in 2005 were unevenly distributed among tribes: the top twenty-one tribal gaming operations (5 percent of 391) earned 43 percent of revenues, while the bottom eighty-seven casinos (22 percent) grossed only 0.4 percent of revenues (National Indian Gaming Commission 2006). The most lucrative and high-profile casinos are located near urban areas, mainly among low-population tribes on the East and West Coasts. This economic and geographical fact has combined with a distort-

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Figure 3. Seminole Hard Rock, Hollywood, 2004. Photo by Robert Kippenberger.

ing media focus on tribal gaming in Connecticut and California to fuel a geographical redistribution of economic and political power within Indian Country. Seminole casinos span the range from modest to massive. The small casino on the rural Brighton Reservation draws Seminole and non-Seminole locals to gamble and eat at the buffet, which is the only restaurant within miles. Cowboy hats prevail, and pickup trucks fill the parking lot. The dazzling Hollywood Hard Rock resort attracts global jet-setters, local retirees, and South Florida hipsters alike to its five-hundred-room hotel, 130,000square-foot casino, outdoor mall named Seminole Paradise, live music venues, spa, and restaurants (figure 3). This casino gained unexpected exposure in 2007, when tabloid newspaper favorite Anna Nicole Smith died in her Hard Rock Hotel room. The Tampa Hard Rock resort has a smaller hotel, but it is still enormous by tribal gaming standards, drawing 20,000 patrons each weekend day by 2004 (Hoag and Berrios 2004; figure 4). The other three long-term Seminole casinos (at suburban Coconut Creek, in the agricultural town of Immokalee, and in a smaller Hollywood venue) generally attract local clientele.9 In 2006, the Seminole Tribe of Florida stunned the business community by winning a bid to acquire Hard Rock International and all of its cafés, hotels, and casinos. The unprecedented $965 million deal gave Seminoles a presence in forty-four countries around the world. Overall, Seminole casinos are unusually lucrative, benefiting

Seminole Gaming in the Sunshine State



Figure 4. Seminole Hard Rock, Tampa, 2005. Photo by author.

both from a large consumer base in booming Florida and from the region’s massive global tourism industry. By contrast, not all American Indian people benefit directly from tribal gaming, and many casino operations have closed or downsized. At a time when gaming dominates media coverage of Indian affairs, Indian social services advocates struggle to convey the urgent needs of most Indian people, who remain among the poorest groups in the United States.10 The birth and growth of Indian gaming is one important chapter in a larger story about the late-twentieth-century expansion of gambling in the United States. Studying tribal gaming therefore illuminates some of the ways that money, value(s), and cultural politics intersect in late capitalist America. Indeed, this book can be read as an argument for the centrality of American Indian cultural politics and economy to America, and to the anthropology thereof.11 Gross revenues from all gaming in the United States grew from $39.8 billion in 1994 to $78.6 billion in 2004, nearly doubling in a mere decade (American Gaming Association 2006). Gaming is a huge business: Americans spend more each year on gambling than on movie tickets, recorded music, spectator sports, theme parks, and video games combined (National Gambling Impact Study Commission 1999). Tribal gaming accounted for approximately one quarter of all U.S. gaming revenues in 2004.12 Intr odu ction

Tribal gaming is distinct from commercial gaming in that the former is owned by a government, not private individuals or corporations. In this sense tribal casinos are more akin to state lotteries, which proliferated across the nation after New Hampshire legalized its lottery in 1963, than they are to Las Vegas or Atlantic City casinos. In South Florida, gaming has consistently blurred distinctions between commercial and governmental activity, and also between capitalism and crime. Periodic battles over the legality and morality of commercial gaming have pitted locals against the state government, law enforcement against organized crime, and tourism promoters against churches. In the early 2000s, Seminole casinos fared well against competition from coastal jai alai, oceangoing casino cruise boats, and racetracks. Seminoles have been implicated in South Florida gaming, if only by name, since around 1900, when a white settler opened the first gambling hall in Miami and named it the Seminole Club. A painting of the Seminole warrior Osceola “looked down on dark green tables on which pools of yellow light were centered, while men and women titillated over a game of chemin de fer or roulette” (Muir 2000: 72). As governmentrun gaming grows across the United States, tribal nations and state governments alike face questions about the methods and ethics of running gaming operations to fund governance, and in both domains the lines between the market and government are redrawn. The significance of Indian casinos for American public culture is not only monetary but also cultural and political. As Jackson Lears wrote in his history of luck in America, “Debate about gambling is never just about gambling: it is about different ways of being in the world” (Lears 2003: 6). Indian gaming is reshaping popular images of the indigenous peoples of this continent. For example, a biting and disturbing 2003 South Park television episode (“Red Man’s Greed”) found humor in casino-rich Indians’ schemes to destroy non-Natives’ homes for the purpose of building a casino-access superhighway.13 As evident in this and other animated and print cartoons that derive their humor from the seeming contradiction of Indians wearing suits, gaming has spawned new racist stereotypes of wealthy Indians.14 In a settler society like the United States (or Australia or Canada), images of indigenous peoples long have been central to how settlers imagine and play out their nationalized politics and cultures.15 The dramatic shift in public portrayals of Indian people that has accompanied gaming reflects deeper realignments in the ways that many Americans Seminole Gaming in the Sunshine State





reckon the relationships among cultural difference, economic power, and political rights. Indian casinos now figure prominently in local, state, and even national politics, for example when Arnold Schwarzenegger assailed his opponent in the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election for accepting campaign contributions from wealthy gaming tribes, or when the 2005–6 casino-linked scandals surrounding the crimes of Washington insider Jack Abramoff raised cries for lobbying reform in Washington, D.C.16 Meanwhile, with state budgets running deficits, many states and municipalities turned to tribal gaming compacts as a source of revenue, realigning regional relations of dependence. Casinos bring into relief the double binds that characterize the politics of indigeneity in the United States and other settler states. Casino rights are based in tribal sovereignty, as discussed below, but once tribal nations exercise their political autonomy in order to gain economic self-reliance, they immediately must fend off attacks on their sovereignty. That is, so long as American Indians are economically dependent, their political independence largely goes unchallenged, but any economic independence in turn threatens their political autonomy. Similar double binds arise in the cultural context. Indigenous peoples in liberal democratic settler states must perform their cultural difference in order to maintain political recognition, as Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) has shown in the case of Australia, but often by exercising their political rights and powers indigenous peoples face new accusations that they are not culturally different enough.17 These double binds illuminate more general American anxieties, not limited to indigenous affairs, about the effects of economic power upon cultural difference and the role of differential political status in a democratic multicultural nation. By understanding tribal gaming, then, we learn more about America. More locally, on Seminole reservations, the direct economic impact of gaming has been staggering. Before 1979, when Hollywood Bingo opened, the Seminole Tribe of Florida administered a budget of less than $2 million, almost all from federal grants. Poverty was widespread. Although Seminole gaming dates to the late 1970s, it was only in the early 1990s that the installation of electronic games (such as video bingo) enabled the Tribe to earn profits sufficient to generate significant household wealth and dramatically expand tribal programs.18 By 2006, thanks to the new

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Hard Rock casino-resorts, tribal net income from gaming surpassed $600 million, and gaming operations added thousands of employees.19 Tribal economic success has translated into very real benefits for Seminole individuals and families. Every tribal member who seeks and can sustain employment is able to work for the tribal government, and entrepreneurs can obtain small business loans. All Seminole citizens enjoy free lifelong educational access and universal health insurance. Services for elders are comprehensive, including hot meal provision, grocery bill payment, recreation and educational travel, and other services provided by the Department of Elders’ Affairs.20 Direct bimonthly cash distributions to all tribal citizens augment household incomes. Infrastructure is being (re)built on all of the reservations, from sewers and roads to housing, schools, and administrative buildings. Gaming’s economic impact cannot be measured by financial indicators alone.21 This single-generation shift from grinding poverty to relative economic security has enabled—and also forced—Seminoles to consider what kind of people and government they want to be. I understand this as a process of valuation, in which Seminoles have both evaluated what it means to be Seminole and debated the value of money in community life. Studying processes of valuation demanded an ethnographic method that took seriously Seminoles’ knowledge and theories, hopes and fears, and everyday practices of living. As an anthropologist, I am disposed to find significance, unruly connections, and theoretical complexity in mundane and seemingly disconnected facets of day-to-day living. But approaching tribal gaming ethnographically is much more than a disciplinary stance: instead, I found that it was only through attention to everyday life in Seminole Country that I could explain the history and meanings of Seminole gaming and could build from Seminole theories and practices to rethink money and sovereignty. High Stakes is fundamentally a story of Seminoles’ complex, sometimes futile, but often extraordinarily successful efforts to maintain politically and culturally distinct values under new economic conditions. These efforts rely on knowledge and activities that sometimes lie beyond the view of an outsider anthropologist like me, for example taking place in Seminoleonly medicine ceremonies, in the intimacy of homes, and in Mikasuki or Creek/Muskogee, the Seminole languages that generally are not taught to

Seminole Gaming in the Sunshine State



10

non-Seminoles (and which I do not speak). Yet they also are materialized in moments of public display and intercultural contact, in market economics, tribal fairs and festivals, charitable giving, and overt politico-legal struggle. Indeed, gaming has become a key point of articulation between Indian and non-Indian communities, and understanding Seminole gaming helps us to see South Florida in new ways. In this land of Gold Coast and tourist wealth alongside urban and rural poverty, racial diversity, pitched development and environmental controversies, and famously murky politics, Seminoles have regained their position as key economic, political, and cultural players. This is also a book about history. Tribal gaming cannot be understood without accounting for two historical relationships: between indigenous economy and culture, on the one hand, and between settler colonial domination and indigenous governance, on the other hand. Before gaming, the Seminole Tribe and individual Seminoles had pursued myriad twentiethcentury economic development projects, often with federal Bureau of Indian Affairs assistance and oversight (see chapter 1). Despite cultural tourism and commercial craft production, light manufacturing and wage labor, poverty persisted. It was only after Seminoles opened smoke shops in the 1970s, and even more dramatically after they launched tribal gaming, that their economic fortunes turned. With gaming, Seminoles began to wrest control of tribal administration from the federal government and to debate anew the relationship between their economic status and their cultural distinctiveness. Why and how this has occurred, and what it means for both Seminoles and a broader indigenous and American public, are the guiding questions of this study. Ec onomy, Indigeneity, and the Cultural P olitics of Money

Tribal gaming brings to the fore unanswered questions about the nature of money and economy in American popular culture and social theory. Gaming has newly disarticulated and challenged a neocolonial association of indigeneity with poverty that has long structured federal Indian law and policy, U.S. interracial politics, and the day-to-day rhythms of life on Indian reservations. More specifically, casino success flies in the face of dominant American images of Indians as poor, antimaterialist, out of

Intr odu ction

the space and time of modernity, and as a result “traditional.” I often heard Seminoles lament that no one bothered them so long as they were poor and selling trinkets to tourists, but once they started making money they came under harsh public scrutiny and were subject to new stereotypes and resentments from non-Indians. Tribal gaming has reorganized economies of race and difference. In Florida this has taken place during a historical period in which Cubans’ large-scale migrations and growing business power have partially shifted wealth and political clout from white American elites to others. Despite its newness, tribal gaming also reveals ways that “economy” and “money” were already racialized in U.S. settler society. Gaming-based indigenous wealth and its sometimes fantastic imaginaries mark a new chapter in the wider settler logics that tie indigeneity to particular economic forms and actions. Scholars in and of the anglophone settler states (e.g., Australia, Canada, New Zealand), where indigenous peoples live as small minorities within white-majority democracies, increasingly have theorized the conditions of indigeneity in relation to settler modernity and settler colonialism (Coombes 2006b; Gelder and Jacobs 1998; Povinelli 2002a; Wolfe 1999, 2001). Such work helpfully calls attention to the characteristic forms taken by rights debates and the politics of indigeneity in settler liberal democracies. I build on this emergent conversation to consider some of the ways that economic forms and relations, in particular, shape indigeneity in the United States and other settler societies. Seminoles and other American Indians engage with casino capitalism in historically and culturally specific ways, and by doing so they unsettle the logics of indigenous-settler relations. Indian gaming also affords new insight into the nature of money, as I discuss in chapters 2 and 3. It is not only indigenous wealth that disrupts the settler expectation of an economically dependent indigeneity, but also Indians’ use of money: this is a matter both of economic scale and of economic form. Gambling, which is a seemingly nonproductive and highly monetized mode of exchange, is often understood to be animated by the “fantasy” of “accruing wealth from nothing,” of yielding “wealth without production,” as Jean and John Comaroff wrote when describing “millennial capitalism” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 313–14). They and others have suggested that the rapid growth of casinos and, more generally, of specula-

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12

tive “casino capitalism” (Strange 1986) exposes the structuring conditions of postmodernity. Gambling also brought into relief the risks and morality of nineteenth-century speculative capitalism (Fabian 1990), and it has been a key activity and specter through which Americans have reckoned the relationship between human action and uncontrollable forces, often called “luck” (Lears 2003). Indian casinos are a new twist on old questions about money, governance, and the morality of gaming in the United States. In both American popular culture and classic Western social theory, money and capitalism are often identified with an essentialized modernity, and as such are understood to erode or dissolve cultural and individual distinctiveness. Karl Marx ([1844] 1978: 104), for example, was concerned that money was an “agent of divorce” that also made “brothers of impossibilities”: that is, money has the power to bring things into equivalence (for example, different objects with distinct use values, or different characters of people) that are essentially different, while it also separates things (for example, a person’s labor from that which it produces) that are one. Money turns qualitative differences into quantitative ones, reordering everything and everybody along a single scale of value. Georg Simmel ([1907] 1990: 168) offered a more positive analysis of money as a social form, yet he similarly contended that money “strives to dissolve substance into free-floating processes” and renders human relations abstract. Indeed, a long line of social and popular accounts has taken money to be an abstracting and deracinating force in social life. Does money erase differences (both among objects and among those who exchange them), for better or worse, and therefore erode those values and practices that people call “culture” and “tradition”? Does culture have a currency, and how can its value be represented? Such questions are not neutral for indigenous people who aim to pursue economic gain with money while also remaining distinctively indigenous. My purpose is twofold: first, to analyze how Seminoles exploit the fungibility of money— seemingly its most abstracting feature—to transform value in ways that reinforce their social and cultural distinctiveness; and, second, to suggest how this empirical observation compels a rethinking of social theories of fungibility and money more generally. By far the most common question posed when I describe my research to non-Indians is whether casinos are causing Indians to lose their culture.

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But this is not solely an outsider concern. As discussed in chapter 3, many Seminole grandparents worry about how to convince their grandchildren to sew patchwork clothing (the striking and complicated style for which they are known) or to speak a Seminole language now that youth can afford Nintendos and cars. Yet, contrary to expectations that money would erode cultural distinctiveness, gaming has also subsidized and catalyzed Seminole cultural production. As I listened to Seminoles worry about whether their children were “losing our culture,” I realized that the trope of indigenous “cultural loss” is not simply a neocolonial conceit reliant on overly static and bounded conceptions of culture, although more often than not it is precisely that. It is also a historically informed indigenous discourse about social reproduction, as Seminoles attempt to identify for one another what is valued and what must, in speakers’ understandings, be reproduced in order for the community and tribal nation to endure. The discourse of cultural loss, then, can be a mechanism for articulating and regulating the values that hold indigenous and other human worlds together. By analyzing Seminole cultural production in the casino era (chapter 2), I both highlight the centrality of cultural distinctiveness to Seminole life and examine the political and economic currency of culture. Tribal S overeignty in the Casino Era

The second major theme of this book is sovereignty. American Indian tribal gaming is built upon the foundation of tribal sovereignty, and it raises basic questions about sovereignty’s nature and limits. Because tribal governments are sovereigns, they have the authority to legislate and regulate gaming operations. As tribal governments defend gaming rights and decide how to allocate casino revenues, indigenous people consider both what tribal governance is and what it does. I explore the practices, ideologies, and values of political distinctiveness that guide Seminoles’ efforts to defend tribal sovereignty, enact governance that is true to indigenous political theories, and navigate U.S. legal and political systems. In the casino era, Seminoles have vastly expanded the tribal bureaucracy and wrested governmental control from federal agencies (see chapter 4), contemplated constitutional reform, and worked to hold elected officials accountable for spending. They have participated at high rates in tribal elections and taken jobs with the tribal government. Ethnographic study of Seminole gaming

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offers new insight into tribal sovereignty, and it enables reconsideration of political theoretical and anthropological theories of sovereignty.22 Tribal sovereignty has become a catchphrase of American Indian rights movements since the 1960s and 1970s Red Power struggles, and it is the legal framework for most American Indian rights claims. Tribal sovereignty is most often understood to mean the political authority of American Indian tribes over their citizens and territories, and it forms the basis for government-to-government relations among the tribes and between each of them and the U.S. federal government (Wilkins and Lomawaima 2001).23 Generally, tribal sovereignty is derived from two types of claims. First, and all too often overlooked outside of indigenous communities and Native American studies, it is grounded in indigenous peoples’ claims to inherent political authority, which is based on both a precolonial order and ongoing lived experiences, irrespective of recognition by settler state governments. Second, tribal sovereignty is traced to processes of recognition during and since the time of conquest. Colonial powers and the early American republic established government-to-government relations with Indian tribes by entering into treaties and other diplomatic agreements. The U.S. Constitution codified the governmental distinctiveness of Indian tribes, both in the Commerce Clause, which authorizes Congress to regulate commerce with “foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes,” and in the Apportionment Clause, which excludes “Indians not taxed” from state populations used to allocate Congressional representation (Deloria and Wilkins 1999: chapter 3). Tellingly for this discussion, both clauses regulate monetary exchange.24 Constitutional references to Indian tribes have been interpreted to mean, among other things, that unless otherwise specified by the U.S. Congress, the fifty states do not hold sovereignty over Indian tribes within reservation borders. As governments, American Indian tribes are free from state taxation and business regulation. As a result, they enjoy competitive advantage in sectors including high-stakes gaming and the sale of highly taxed and regulated commodities, such as tobacco, alcohol, gasoline, and fireworks.25 Native individuals, however, pay federal taxes just the same as other U.S. citizens.26 Gaming rights, then, are not “special rights” granted on the basis of race or economic disadvantage. Rather, they are governmental rights exercised by sovereigns (Light and Rand 2005; Rand and Light 2006).27

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Ethnographically, I understand sovereignty to be Seminoles’ collective assertions, everyday enactments, and lived experiences of political distinctiveness (see also Warrior 1994: 87; Womack 1999: 51). Seminoles and other tribal nations defend their sovereign rights within the U.S. legal system while also maintaining what Audra Simpson has called the “lived experiences of nationhood” (Simpson 2000). Definitions and origins of indigenous sovereignty, as Joanne Barker has shown, are numerous and sometimes confusing, and the significance of sovereignty is “embedded within the specific social relations in which it is invoked and given meaning” (Barker 2005a: 21). Seminoles have been at the forefront of sovereignty struggles over gaming rights. Howard Tommie (Bird), tribal chairman from 1971 to 1979, laid the groundwork for Seminole casinos, but it was only after he left office to join a casino development partnership that the young and charismatic incoming chairman James E. Billie (Bird) shepherded a casino ordinance through the Tribal Council. Hollywood Bingo’s opening drew the attention of Broward County sheriff (and later Florida attorney general) Bob Butterworth, who sought an injunction to close it on the grounds that it violated state gambling laws. The Tribe became entangled in a series of gamingrelated legal and political disputes. Ultimately, in the case Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Butterworth (658 F.2d 310 [5th Cir. 1981]), a federal appellate court held that Seminole tribal sovereignty protected tribal gaming from state taxation and regulation. This ruling opened the tribal gaming floodgates across Indian Country. Responding to pressure from state governments and commercial gaming interests, Congress in 1988 passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), the key federal legislation that regulated tribal gaming.28 This law established levels of regulation that correspond to different classes of casino games: traditional games (class I) are wholly regulated by tribes; many card games, bingo, and games similar to it (class II) can be operated and regulated by tribes, but only if they are legal in the surrounding state (even in dissimilar contexts such as charity bingo); and slot machines, blackjack, and other “Las Vegas style” games (class III) are restricted by the rules for class II plus the requirement that tribes and states negotiate a gaming compact in good faith. Seminoles had only class II games as of 2007, since they had not been able to negotiate a gaming compact with the

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State of Florida. IGRA restricts the uses toward which tribes can allocate casino revenues to funding tribal operations or programs to provide for the general welfare of the tribe and its members, promoting economic development, donating to charitable organizations, and helping to fund operations of local extratribal government agencies (Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, 25 U.S.C. § 2701). Seminoles’ choices about how to spend casino revenues, however, are not simply reactions to these external legal constraints: to the contrary, Seminoles had already opened their casinos and developed revenue spending patterns well before this law took effect, and even within the law’s limits Seminoles subsequently made fiscal and policy choices. Therefore, analyzing casino-based spending can tell us something about the values that Seminoles hold and the role of economy and governance in supporting, undermining, or altering those values. Sovereignty and self-determination had been nearly absent from most Americans’ conceptions of indigenous peoples and their rights until casino politics and disputes over hunting and fishing rights (especially in the Pacific Northwest and the upper Midwest) introduced sovereignty into regional vocabularies during the late 1900s.29 These political struggles produced backlashes in the form of antisovereignty political organizations.30 It is perhaps surprising that tribal sovereignty would be unfamiliar or threatening in the United States, a federalist nation-state in which tribal governments are one among multiple governments. After all, most American children learn in civics class that the country’s distinct levels of government are not simply nested within each other, but rather share and divide power. Tribal gaming not only calls attention to the place of American Indian tribes within the federalist system, but, as discussed in chapter 5, it also has reshaped states’ rights and federalism more generally. In South Florida, Seminoles assert their place in the governmental landscape when they enter into mutual aid agreements with the rural town of Clewiston to share policing services, when they negotiate the terms of the Everglades Restoration Plan and administer their own water monitoring, when Seminole Police Department officers ticket drivers who exceed twenty-five miles per hour in populated areas of the Big Cypress Reservation, or when sovereign immunity protects the Tampa Hard Rock from slip-and-fall liability lawsuits. In these and other ways, casinos raise unresolved questions about the legitimate basis for differential political statuses and rights in and beyond American democracy. Intr odu ction

Most theorists of sovereignty, both of indigenous sovereignty and of other forms, inextricably link it to autonomy, contrasting sovereignty to dependency. Scholars have suggested that a feature of globalization is the recent erosion of autonomous state sovereignty (see, e.g., Hardt and Negri 2000; Sassen 1996). With the exception of Iris Marion Young (2001), few have questioned the link between sovereignty and autonomy. Seminoles, however, enact sovereignty in part through relations of interdependence, for example through economic exchange and political and legal negotiations with other sovereigns. This observation compels a more general reconsideration of whether sovereignty should be conceptualized primarily in relation to autonomy. Therefore, I balance an analysis of sovereignty as autonomy from neocolonial interference (chapter 4) with a relational account of sovereignty as forged through relations of interdependency, obligation, and reciprocity among sovereigns and peoples (chapter 5). As in monetary exchanges, sovereign relations do not begin with autonomous agents that must be made commensurable. Rather, this book shows how money and sovereignty bring people and peoples into interdependent relations through which they forge distinctiveness. An Indian, American, and Fl oridian History

Understanding Seminole gaming requires attention to the remarkable historical events that so clearly shape Seminoles’ present-day approaches to economic and political practices. Many Native and non–Native Americans know Seminoles to have a distinctive community with a history of independence, and as a result Seminoles have not been subject to intense gamingrelated attacks on their cultural legitimacy. Nor have they disagreed internally about gaming to the same degree as many indigenous groups. In what follows I make no attempt to present a comprehensive Florida Seminole “history and setting”; rather, I offer a few orienting points for fellow nonSeminole readers in order to show how Seminole politics, economy, and culture have intersected over time.31 Most of the approximately 3,300 citizens of the Seminole Tribe of Florida live on or near six South Florida reservations (map 1).32 This is the largest number of reservations administered by any American Indian tribal government, but governing them has been made easier by the casino-era Aviation Department, which flies officials between reservations in its helicopter fleet. The oldest and highest-population reservations—Big Cypress Seminole Gaming in the Sunshine State

17

Tampa

Tampa

FL

60

OR

A’S ID

60

95

TP

St. Petersburg 27

ATLANTIC OCEAN

K.

Fort Pierce

Fort Pierce

Okeechobee

Sarasota

Brighton 75

Port Charlotte

Lake Okeechobee

95

Moore Haven

18

80

Clewiston

80

Fort Myers

Palm Beach

27

Immokalee Naples

Coconut Creek

BigBig Cypress Cypress

ALLIGATOR ALLEY

Fort Lauderdale

75

Hollywood TTAAM MIiAM I TRAIL T RA I L

Gulf of M ex i c o

41

Miami

EVERGLADES 1

N Key Largo 0 0

50 miles 50 km

A I D O R F L

K

E

Y

S

Seminole reservation Seminole trust land Miccosukee reservation

Map 1. Seminole Reservations. Map by Mapping Specialists, Ltd.

(52,338 acres and population 537 in 2001), Brighton (35,805 acres, pop. 525), and Hollywood (formerly Dania but renamed after the adjacent municipality, 498 acres, pop. 761)—were settled in the 1930s.33 Three newer reservations—Immokalee, on the site of a former private agricultural work camp (600 acres, pop. 194, est. 1979), Tampa, created after the discovery of Indian human remains at an urban construction site (39 acres, pop. 38, est. 1985), and suburban Fort Pierce, which houses a local Seminole community (60 acres, est. 1996, not settled until 2005)—reflect scattered patterns of Seminole settlement that date back at least to the nineteenth century.

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Each reservation has its own “feel,” from the urban cosmopolitanism of the governmental center in Hollywood to the cowboy culture on the plains and pastures of Brighton, where most residents’ ancestral language is Muskogee/Creek, to the slower-paced swamp living of Big Cypress, where Mikasuki and English mix. Nonresident tribal citizens (pop. 784 in 2001) often live near reservations, and some hope to move onto reservations when housing shortages subside. New housing, late-model vehicles, and gleaming multistory tribal administration buildings reflect recent gaming affluence, but high crime rates, alcohol-related traffic accidents, endemic diabetes, and occasional tragic deaths by drug overdose indicate ongoing social struggles. Seminoles are both urban and rural, both wealthy and economically insecure, both healthy and ill, both Southern Baptist and practitioners of traditional religion. They are often speakers of Mikasuki or Muskogee/Creek along with English and sometimes Spanish, and they are members of one of eight major matrilineal clans or of no clan at all.34 To speak of Florida Seminoles as a monolithic group violates not only their lived experiences but also the culturally significant valuation of internal diversity that guides social organization, political action, and everyday life. The point is not simply that Seminoles are internally diverse—this is true of all human communities—but rather that Seminoles generally and explicitly value internal difference and thereby ensure that any individual’s or subgroup’s authority (over knowledge, politics, or culture) will be limited. The absence of extended portraits or personalized vignettes in this book reflects my adherence to a Seminole aesthetic and politics of knowledge whereby it is preferable to avoid singling out individuals; instead, I use brief quotations in an effort to situate rather than generalize Seminoles’ points of view. The democratically elected governing bodies of the Seminole Tribe of Florida are the Tribal Council, which handles most policy, and the board of directors of the corporate wing, Seminole Tribe of Florida, Inc. The council and the board, which was designed to operate tribal economic ventures, were established as parallel governing bodies by the Tribe’s 1957 constitution.35 For various historical reasons, the Tribal Council operates gaming, and the relative power of the two elected bodies has shifted from the board to the council since gaming brought more revenues to the council side. Voter turnout in tribal elections, which are usually contested by multiple

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candidates, is remarkably high. For example, in the May 2001 election, voter participation on the three major reservations was 87 percent overall, with 96 percent for Big Cypress, 95 percent for Brighton, and 74 percent for Hollywood.36 Under the post-1957 “modern” tribal government, as many Seminoles call it, clan councils no longer meet regularly to make key political decisions, yet religious/medicinal and matrilineal clan organizations influence all levels of political life. Former Chairman James Billie (Bird) often pronounced that Sonny Billie (Panther), a traditional religious leader, was “the real chief of the Seminoles” (e.g., September 1, 2000). Political life more generally is inflected by Seminole religion, which is characterized by Green Corn ceremonialism and complex medicine and healing practices (Sturtevant 1954a), and by Southern Baptist Christianity (Buswell 1972). Matrilineal clans are not simply individual and family identifiers; they also obligate Seminoles to take action in governmental and ceremonial life. This can be seen at the Green Corn Dance, the most important annual traditional religious event, where clans carry specific and interdependent responsibilities (see chapter 5). Clans also influence electoral voting patterns, and although few women have been elected to tribal government since its reorganization in 1957, they exercise political influence in part through matrilineal clan organization.37 Clans and families (even for the increasing number of tribal members who carry no clan because their mothers are non-Seminoles or are Seminoles with no clan) organize relations across the domains of politics, economy, and self-defined Seminole culture. Reservation lands in Florida were never allotted, and as a result Seminoles enjoy unusual control over reservation space.38 As discussed in chapter 4, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and other federal agencies did not exercise extensive influence over Seminole governance and everyday life until after the 1957 reorganization of the tribal government. Thus, many living Seminoles both recall and teach how they lived before BIA administration and reservation settlement combined to change their lives. The Tribe began to regain control over government funding and policy in the late 1970s and 1980s, as a result of gaming revenues and shifting federal policy. This comparatively short window of federal oversight contributed to a widespread Seminole ethic of self-governance that both catalyzed and has been strengthened by gaming.

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Gaming is only the latest example in a long history of Seminoles’ struggles to maintain their political power against the odds. Seminole colonial-era formation as a distinct people reflected both the impact of European colonization upon indigenous peoples and, as the anthropologist William Sturtevant wrote, “the contrary remarkable persistence of Indian social identity and distinct cultural tradition” (Sturtevant 1971: 92).39 During the seventeenth century, indigenous peoples from Georgia and Alabama responded to pressures from settlers and related upheavals in Creek/Muskogee politics by accelerating their movement into presentday northern Florida, which at the time was claimed by Spain.40 By the mid-eighteenth century, when Florida temporarily came under British rule (1763–83), colonists had begun to apply the term Seminole to the groups of separatists settling in towns scattered throughout the border region. The name, derived from Creek/Muskogee simanóli41 and in turn from the Spanish cimarrón, is most often translated as “wild” or “runaway.” Some Seminoles compare their current political strategies and economic successes to this earlier period, when they played European and American powers off one another, maintained trade with Spanish Cuba, and built large cattle herds across northern Florida. Seminoles’ legendary nineteenth-century resistance to American military and political domination most clearly set the pattern of independence that Florida Seminoles cherish to this day. By the early nineteenth century, the Florida border had become a site and symbol for American expansionism: it divided Southern slavery from a weak Spanish colony in which escaped black slaves increasingly sought refuge. The specter and reality of Seminoles’ harboring (and appropriating the labor of ) escaped slaves, along with expansionist ideologies, motivated Southern states, local militias, and the U.S. military to lead incursions into Florida. This had devastating consequences for Seminole Indians and Black Seminoles alike (S. Miller 2003; Mulroy 1993; K. Porter 1996).42 Battles over Seminole lands led to a series of conflicts known as the First Seminole War (1817–18), and Spain ceded the territory to the United States in 1821.43 Seminoles fought hard to stay in Florida. Beginning in the 1830s, the United States government undertook a campaign to remove Indians from the peninsula, employing a multipronged strategy that included war, forced movement, negotiation, financial enticement, coercion, and ma-

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nipulation of indigenous governance (Covington 1993; S. Miller 2003). Seminoles’ concerted resistance to congressionally sanctioned removal led to the longest, costliest, and deadliest of the Indian wars, and some military historians consider these to have been the first guerrilla wars fought by the United States (Mahon 1967).44 The Seminole Wars launched the careers of, among others, the generals and subsequent presidents Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor. By the end of the Second Seminole War (1835–42), approximately 3,800 Seminoles and maroons had been forcibly removed to Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) (Mahon 1967: 321), some on the pretense of “treaties” that represented only small numbers of Seminoles. Many died in battle and transit, and all endured terror, violence, and upheaval. “Black Seminoles,” or “Seminole maroons,” disproportionately moved to Indian Territory after the United States guaranteed their passage, and current disputes in Oklahoma about the citizenship status of “Seminole Freedmen” reflect this history. By contrast, I know of no citizenship disputes about freedman descent among Florida Seminoles.45 Forced into the southern Florida swamplands, where they survived attacks and hunger, the few hundred remaining Seminoles avoided removal. The Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma are separate indigenous nations, and in fact they took adversarial positions in mid-twentieth-century land claims disputes. Nonetheless, ceremonial ties, powwow trails, and archaeological and language preservation efforts facilitate intertribal collaboration. Although seemingly an episode of the distant past, the wars remain a vital part of Seminole historical consciousness. Florida Seminoles today do not recognize the removal “treaties” that sent their kin to Indian Territory or to death. Instead, they claim to be the only “unconquered” tribe because they never surrendered and never signed a peace treaty with the United States. Seminoles honor the military, political, and religious/medicine leaders of the period in children’s educational curricula, museum exhibits, surnames (e.g., Osceola, Jumper), first names (e.g., Abiaka), “Indian names” (the local term for indigenous names given by clan relatives), and ceremonial practices. The state of Florida also commemorates heroes of the Seminole Wars, albeit quite differently: the governor’s mansion was rebuilt in 1957, the same year Seminoles reorganized their government, and it was designed to resemble the Hermitage home of Seminoles’ former enemy Andrew Jackson.46 Intr odu ction

In war’s wake, Seminoles chose relative isolation in the Everglades, rebuilding while Florida obtained statehood (1845) and the American nation fought a civil war. South Florida remained sparsely populated, leading some historians to call it the “last frontier” of the Eastern United States (Mohl and Mormino 1996: 419). Seminole oral tradition, documentary history, and tribal museum exhibits remember this as a time of consolidation and recovery. Outside observers of the day remarked upon Seminoles’ disinterest in adopting American ways (MacCauley [1887] 2000; Nash 1931; Pratt [1888] 1956). Key features of life included clan-based matrilocal residence in scattered thatched-roof chickee camps; the annual Green Corn Dance as a rite of renewal, court of law, and ritual center; governance by clan elders and interclan councils; frequent dugout canoe travel among camps; the trade of pelts, plumes, and hides to settlers (Kersey 1975); and deep distrust of the U.S. government and outside interference. Even as Seminoles consolidated a postwar way of life, a “new Florida” was born, driven by the 1896 completion of the Flagler railroad to the outpost of Miami, a real estate boom, rapid population growth, the strengthening of state government, and growing agricultural and tourism industries (Proctor 1996). Still, in 1900 Florida had by far the smallest population of any Southern state, with its vast lands largely undeveloped (Colburn 1996: 345). The 1900 census recorded the population of Fort Lauderdale as 91 and Miami as 1,681 (Sturtevant and Cattelino 2004: 436). After a series of devastating 1920s hurricanes and floods, as vividly depicted by Zora Neale Hurston in the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God ([1937] 1998), private developers joined with state and federal governments to accelerate a massive Everglades drainage project aimed at uncovering land for agricultural and residential development while reducing threats from flood and disease. Everglades drainage radically altered Seminoles’ natural, social, political, and economic environment. By the 1920s, many Seminoles worked in the cultural tourism trade (West 1998), and some moved to reservations in the 1930s and took up wage labor (Kersey 1989). Christian missionaries’ conversion attempts almost completely failed until the 1940s, when Creek/ Muskogee and Seminole Southern Baptist missionaries from Oklahoma began to win converts (Buswell 1972). Seminoles were banned from living in the Everglades National Park upon its 1947 establishment, and several families were forced to relocate. Indigenous struggles for land and water in the Everglades have continued ever since. Seminole Gaming in the Sunshine State

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Seminoles’ 1957 tribal reorganization and establishment of formal relations with the United States (see chapter 4) laid the groundwork for their subsequent gaming operations and their residential security on reservation lands. However, reorganization also brought federal assimilation efforts and internal conflict. Political disagreement over whether and how to reorganize led to the creation of the separate Miccosukee Tribe (pop. 369 in 1994), which was federally recognized in 1962 and which operates a lucrative casino near Miami.47 The conflict also led to the political separation of several dozen people, known as “Independent Seminoles,” who refuse recognition by the federal government, have not extinguished their claim to Florida, do not operate a casino, and live on nonreservation private lands on the West Coast of Florida. Membership in the three groups depends on the laws of each, but all three communities recognize one another as relatives. Resources flow between them through kin networks, and individual and family tribal enrollments sometimes shift among them. The state of Florida also saw rapid transformation between 1950 and 2000, a period one historian has called “Florida’s Big Bang”: Florida’s population exploded from 2.7 to 15.9 million, and South Florida embraced the space age, retirement communities, air conditioning, theme parks, and snowbirds (Mormino 2005: 2). During my 2000–2001 residence, I experienced the political fallout of the Elián González affair, voted in contested Broward County during the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, and lived near many of the September 11 hijackers. Throughout, it seemed that if I could understand Seminole gaming and South Florida more generally, I would learn much about America. A New York Times Magazine writer similarly found Florida perplexing but oddly telling of things American, as his title indicated: “America in Extremis: How Florida Became the New California” (Paterniti 2002). Michael Paterniti wrote: “How does one account for a state in which everything now seems to happen first—or somehow in the extreme, that as a microcosm of America, has come to reflect the psyche of America itself ?” (30). After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, South Florida’s Caribbean and Latin American population surged, with waves of Cuban immigrants followed by Haitian and other island groups, and then Central Americans. Many consider Miami to be “the capital of Latin America” (Stepick et al.). In 2000, 60 percent of Miami’s city residents were foreign-born, and almost one in

Intr odu ction

five Floridians spoke Spanish at home (Mormino 2005: 290, 294). Between its migration from the south and from colder climes to the north, and its overall exploding population, South Florida often gets labeled “new.” This leaves Seminoles and Miccosukees in a curious position. Florida, as the journalist Diane Roberts put it (2004: 3), “pretends very hard that the past doesn’t matter.” Racial segregation remained legal and widespread through the midcentury, forcing Seminoles to make their way in a social landscape dominated by a white-black racial logic. They faced discrimination in schooling, commerce, and social interactions.48 Gary Mormino (2005: 44), in his social history of Florida, characterized the state thus: “Florida has always straddled the line between respectability and scandal, between honest toil and an easy buck, between strict adherence to the Protestant work ethic and games of luck and chance.” From nineteenth-century shipwreck salvage and pirating operations on its beaches to early-twentieth-century land speculation and colossal real estate fraud in its swamps, from Prohibition-era rum-running to the massive Miami banking industry, South Florida has been built at the edges of capitalism and luck. Referring to the history of booms and busts, of speculation and mobility, Mormino continued: “To be a Floridian was to gamble on the future” (45). Seminoles have been caught in these gambles, but they also have actively engaged in them. High-stakes gaming represents only their most recent attempt to make the most of “location, location, location” while refusing to accept the ideological implications of Florida’s image as a “frontier” (Mohl and Mormino 1996) seemingly on its way to the manifest destiny of a settler society. What Lies Behind and Ahead

In June 1999, I traveled to Florida to determine the feasibility of conducting research with the Seminole Tribe. My trip came after conversations with tribal citizens and officials at a powwow in St. Petersburg, which I attended as a staff member of the Film and Video Center at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. The St. Petersburg Times had recently run a multipart exposé on Seminole tribal spending (Testerman and Goldstein 1997), so suspicion of outsiders was high. In fact, the tribal chairman had just issued an edict that discouraged tribal members from speaking to outside journalists without permission from the chairman’s office.49

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I met at tribal headquarters with Jim Shore (Bird), general counsel and director of the legal department. In 1980, Shore became the first Seminole to graduate from law school after being blinded in a car accident. At the helm of the legal department for over two decades, he has guided gaming litigation to the U.S. Supreme Court, negotiated water rights and tax-free cigarette settlements with state and local governments, and developed legal theories and strategies at the cutting edge of federal Indian law. He is the son of a major religious leader, from respected families on both sides, and Creek/Muskogee is his first language. Many Seminoles speculate that it was Shore’s commitment to cleaning up the tribal government that led to an assassination attempt: in 2002 he was shot through his home’s sliding glass door, taking three bullets in his torso and arms. He was able to call 911, survived, and soon returned to work under heavy security. The FBI and police have not determined who was behind his shooting. But this was still in the future when I first met with him. Shore inquired about my interests, then spoke of the nature and limits of tribal sovereignty. He stressed the importance of maintaining Seminole reservation communities where people know each other and their clan memberships, where they have different values than in the “outside world.” Seminoles, he said, must not abandon community and culture while entering the “modern world.” In fact, he claimed, it is in part by entering the “modern world” that Seminoles can keep their community, values, and culture. Gaming is a case in point. Previously, Seminoles had to rely on the federal government, but after gaming they could do things for themselves that the “[federal] government was supposed to do but didn’t,” including providing housing, sewage, and other basic services. Seminoles, he said, can take care of themselves better than the U.S. government ever did. He commented that it might be a “good idea” for an outsider to study Seminole sovereignty and gaming, because then white people might understand what Seminoles have been trying to say about sovereignty and culture, about what gaming has meant. He added, only half-jokingly, that it would be useful if I could explain to Seminoles what white people were up to (July 14, 1999).50 New research methods—“decolonizing methodologies” (L. Smith 1999) —are required for anthropological research on indigenous issues. NonNative and Native anthropologists must contend with the legacy of mis-

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trust that often-destructive anthropological knowledge production has generated.51 Research with Native communities also is shaped by debates within anthropology about the colonial history, logics, and representational practices of the discipline. Long gone, one hopes, are the days when non-Indian anthropologists showed up on reservations and proceeded to conduct ethnographic research with little accountability to indigenous communities. Research—who does it, what it is and means, who can interpret and represent whom—has become a site of struggle and debate, but also at times one of meaningful collaboration. Research is a matter of sovereignty, especially when tribes assert control over who conducts research in their communities.52 I moved to Florida in July 2000 for yearlong fieldwork, to be continued during regular follow-up visits. I had been granted unrestricted research access with no limitations on my publications. Of course, official permission is a start, but it is another matter to find a useful role among close-knit communities on six distant reservations. I lived off-reservation west of Fort Lauderdale, a location that afforded relatively central access to multiple reservations (most research took place at Hollywood, Big Cypress, and to a lesser extent Brighton) and that did not exacerbate on-reservation housing shortages. Like most Seminoles, I racked up many miles driving among the reservations on long roads slicing through the rural peninsular interior. Billy L. Cypress (Bear), executive director of the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, allowed me to volunteer there, logging approximately two days each week as a researcher, writer, and hanger-on. I occasionally edited, took photos, or wrote copy on a volunteer basis for the Seminole Tribune, the tribal newspaper. These activities offered me structured roles, they kept me busy, and they placed me in a relation of reciprocity whereby I could offer concrete skills and measurable time to projects designed by and for Seminoles. As a white researcher most recently living in New York City, I encountered understandable caution, but this was somewhat mitigated by my volunteer roles, my shared background of rural economic disadvantage, collegial relations, and a host of unexpected and unexplainable factors. It turned out to be important that people did not perceive me as wanting to “be Indian”: one man semi-jokingly said he had waited six months to talk to me, to make sure that I didn’t start wearing Indian jewelry and patchwork, to be certain I knew who I was before he would talk to me about who he was.53

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There is an active public life on Seminole reservations, much more so since gaming: at any moment there may be several tribal and reservation events going on—from sports tournaments to cultural activities, health education programs to political meetings—and people even complain of scheduling conflicts. I attended public and semipublic events, including Tribal Council and board meetings, fairs and festivals, rodeos, conferences, cultural classes, museum tours, parties, and groundbreakings. Gradually, I began to conduct semistructured interviews. I participated in countless conversations, social activities, meals at the Billie Swamp Safari tribal restaurant and elsewhere, and other informal interactions that informed this work. Most people requested that their real names be used, and that is the practice employed in this book unless otherwise noted. Each return trip to Seminole Country deepens my knowledge and obligation, yet this remains very much an outsider’s account. High Stakes is organized into two sections, first on economy and then on sovereignty. Chapter 1, “Casino Roots,” establishes gaming as one stage in a complex history of Seminole economic development. In chapter 2, “Cultural Currencies,” I explore the relationship of gaming to cultural production, and I show how gaming is tied to Seminoles’ efforts to perpetuate their peoplehood and distinct ways of life. In chapter 3, “Fungibility,” I analyze the politics of money by focusing on per capita dividends, economic diversification, and tribal control over casino management. The second half of the book examines the politico-legal dimensions of Seminole tribal gaming. Chapter 4, “Rebuilding Sovereignty,” analyzes tribal housing as a case study of the relationship between governmental administration and the social meanings of indigenous self-determination. In chapter 5, “Sovereign Interdependencies,” I show how Seminoles enter into relations of interdependency in the service of sovereignty, and I argue that indigenous peoples’ relations to settler states unsettle the singularity of sovereignty. The concluding chapter discusses Seminoles’ 2006 acquisition of Hard Rock International and stitches the two sections together analytically by showing how sovereignty is material and money is political, not only but especially for indigenous peoples.

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1

​Casino Roots

​I

n journalistic and scholarly accounts alike, tribal gaming frequently is called a “new buffalo,” for example in the title of an early book on the topic: Return of the Buffalo (Lane 1995). This trope refers to the anticipation by Plains Indians that a “new buffalo” would return to offer sustenance and healing in the wake of colonial destruction. It is a powerful image, yet one that renders gaming resources external to indigenous economic and political action. Similarly, studies of casinos’ “impact” on indigenous communities implicitly render gaming as a capitalist project that acts upon indigenous peoples.1 But casinos did not just happen to Seminoles and other American Indian tribes. Instead, they followed from indigenous actions that emerged from specific histories and that shaped the everyday significance of casinos across Indian Country and beyond. Some Indian nations, including Hopi, Onondaga, and (until recently) Navajo, have voted down tribal gaming in part because they view it as incompatible with the cultural life they value.2 Others, including most Seminoles, do not see a conflict between gaming and their cultural distinctiveness, for reasons that have much to do with their economic, political, and cultural histories. There is pervasive pride on Seminole reservations that this is where high-stakes tribal gaming began. But if Indian gaming did not simply “happen,” how best can we situate its history?

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One might categorize casinos as continuous with older indigenous games of chance, and some scholars have taken this approach by emphasizing the antiquity and authenticity of Indian gaming (Darian-Smith 2003: 56–57; Gabriel 1996; Pasquaretta 1994; Stein 1997: 146–47) or by taking gaming to be an allegory for indigenous peoples’ survival of colonialism and its risks (Pasquaretta 2003).3 Some casinos incorporate indigenous themes and iconography, from the Mystic Lake (Shakopee Mdewakanton) casino illuminating the sky with beams in the shape of a giant teepee to the Rainmaker sculpture at the Mashantucket Pequot Foxwoods casino.4 By contrast, I have never heard Seminoles claim that their casinos reflect something particularly Seminole; to the contrary, people often asserted that casinos are their business, not their culture. When I asked where gaming came from, no one responded with a timeless tale of Indian games of chance. Except for patchwork vests worn by staff at the smaller casinos, the occasional chickee-evocative palm frond in casino interiors, and the recent addition of several “Seminole Pride” video bingo games at the Hollywood Hard Rock (with lucky sevens in the medicine colors— white, black, red, and yellow—and images of chickees, baskets, Osceola, and other Seminole icons), Seminole casinos do not look very distinctive. John Fontana, general manager of Tampa Hard Rock, explained that casino management sought to avoid “tak[ing] a tacky or cheesy approach to the culture.” Additionally, he explained, the multiplicity of Seminoles’ opinions about cultural accuracy and tradition would complicate any attempt to offer a single, definitive visual interpretation of Seminole culture (August 24, 2005). Minor modifications to Hard Rock resorts have accommodated Seminole tastes and taboos, for example the last-minute replacement of steak knives that had imitation snakeskin handles just before the Tampa Hard Rock opening, while others remain points of discomfort, such as the Tampa hotel’s imitation snakeskin elevators. The casinos themselves, then, do not convey much in the way of indigenous history. That the story of Seminole casinos cannot be told as a timeless indigenous game of chance, however, does not strip Seminole gaming of history. Instead, its roots are in Seminoles’ struggles to secure tribal control over governance, as discussed in chapter 4, and in their efforts to sustain themselves economically while maintaining a distinctive way of life. This chapter shows Seminole gaming to be one stage in a complex history of

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twentieth-century tribal economic development initiatives that contingently linked, separated, and produced Seminole economy and Seminole culture. Unlike many other nations, American Indian tribes generally lack an economic base (of population, taxable property, and individual wealth) sufficient to generate revenues through taxation. Because reservations are federal trust lands, tribes cannot offer land as collateral in order to secure loans. Like the state of Florida, which collects no income tax and therefore faces fiscal strain on state programs (Colburn 1996: 370), and like local governments that offer property tax breaks to recruit corporations, Seminoles have experimented with the relationship between governance and economy. In the Seminole case, however, this is further complicated by explicit concerns about the relationship of “economy” to “culture.”5 In order to locate gaming within Seminole histories and practices of valuation, it is necessary to analyze prior economic projects—ranging from cattle to crafts, from alligator wrestling to smoke shops—in which the relationship between economy and culture was generated in intercultural spaces and in the gendered life activities and productive work of Seminole people. Commenting upon the economic success of Seminole casinos, anthropologist J. Anthony Paredes wrote: “There is, indeed, a certain irony if not paradox in the fact that it was the Seminoles, so long respected for clinging to the ‘ways of their ancestors’ in the swampy vastness of the Everglades, who would be so pivotal in unleashing the juggernaut of Indian gaming in modern America” (Paredes 1995: 355). Yet, Seminole cultural values and economic development have been inextricably intertwined since the early 1900s. Indeed, it was in part through twentieth-century economic practices that the very idea of Seminole culture itself—as a measurable, identifiable, and potentially commodified thing—emerged. Instead of posing a paradox of culture and economy, I follow anthropologists, such as Fred Myers (2002) and Elizabeth Povinelli, who “theorize the relationship between the productivity of indigenous practice and the production of cultural identity” (Povinelli 1993: 24).6 To understand the processes by which Seminoles engage with the meanings and stakes of culture, this and the next chapter employ Bourdieu’s (1993) concept of “cultural production,” which signals the ways that culture is delimited, valued, and generated in a power-laden field of social

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and economic relations. In the context of art and literature, but with broad implications, Bourdieu called for the study not only of the material production of culture but also of its symbolic production, “i.e., the production of the value of the work or, which amounts to the same thing, of belief in the value of the work” (Bourdieu 1993: 37). This approach focuses analysis on the field of actors and circumstances in which Seminole “culture” is generated and valued. It helps us to see culture and economy in action, and in the making.7 At a historical moment when selling culture is increasingly demanded and remunerated on a global scale, especially for indigenous peoples (Turner 1999), the historical coproduction of Seminole economy and culture sheds light upon the more general question of how to measure the currency of culture. Indians and C owb oys

A 1959 Miami Herald article titled “Indians, Cowboys at Peace: Former Have Become Latter,” suggests that “A legendary Indian chief looking down from the happy hunting grounds on the Florida Indians of today would probably turn pale with anger” because “as the cash register sings jingle, jangle in the background,” Seminoles have become cowboys. An accompanying cartoon (figure 5) contrasts Indian life (bareback riding) with new cowboy ways and their technologies. A befuddled Seminole man, standing before a family huddled in a chickee, asks another Seminole mounted on a saddled horse and dressed in cowboy attire: “What’re we coming to?” The answer: “A saddle!” (F. Porter 1959). Seminole cattle, a key twentieth-century federal and later tribal economic development project, sparked the imagination of many observers who considered cowboys to stand for all that was American and, therefore, in a world of mutually exclusive racial identities, not Indian.8 But it is historical fallacy to oppose cattle ranching and Indianness. Seminoles and their ancestors had worked cattle since they obtained cows from Spanish colonists, long before the U.S. claimed Florida and non-Indian cowboys ranged the West. Indeed, by the early-to-mid-1700s, stock raising was both a major source of meat and a pillar of the Creek and proto-Seminole “export economy” (primarily Spanish trade) and “internal political economy” (Sattler 1998). Seminole cattle ranchers reminded me that their ancestors had owned large herds in northern Florida—Richard Sattler (1998: 86–

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Figure 5. Seminole cowboy cartoon, 1959. Courtesy of Miami Herald.

87) reported Seminole cattle sales of 1,000 head each—and that they had fought against Americans who raided their herds and seized their pasturelands.9 In 1936, the federal government shipped 500 head of Hereford droughtrelief cattle from Apaches in Arizona to the fledgling BIA Seminole Agency (Black 1976: 1). Officials hoped that cattle would provide Seminoles with much-needed income, starting them on a path to self-sufficiency through modern, scientific agriculture. Like nineteenth-century federal policies of land allotment, this cattle program “assumed that the routine work of agriculture would provide the necessary training in thrifty habits that all ‘civilized’ peoples possessed” (Deloria and Lytle 1983: 9–10). Government officials worked with Seminoles to distribute cattle on the Brighton and Big Cypress Reservations, build fences and develop pastures, seek technical assistance from Extension Service experts, and structure herd management. The program encompassed both tribal and individually owned herds, with individual owners paying fees to the cattle cooperative in return for pasture improvement, marketing, breeding, and other services. Cattle ownership under the new regime had far-reaching consequences. The Indian agent distributed cattle only to male Seminoles who resided on newly designated federal reservation lands, and some at Brighton consider

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the cattle program to have been a government ploy to “herd” reluctant Indians onto the reservation. As Stanlo Johns (Panther), land use manager, cattle owner, and respected cultural educator, put it: “It took the government years and years to get all the Indians on the reservation. Before, a lot of the Indians didn’t want to live on the reservation. They were saying that this was just a trick way of getting you to where they would ship you out of here, because way back two hundred years ago they were sent off to Oklahoma and they didn’t like that. I guess that’s been drilled in their heads for years and years.” Then, he added, the government got smart and used cattle as an incentive (February 28, 2001). Seminoles in the new cattle program became reliant on government technical and financial aid, and cattle program administration formed the nucleus of the emerging federal apparatus that would dominate Seminole governance through the 1970s. Faced with decentralized Seminole governance before the 1957 reorganization, federal officials turned to elected cattle trustees to represent collective interests (Kersey 1989, 1996). Cattle also facilitated the emergence of new economic and status distinctions (Black 1976; Garbarino 1972).10 In order to own cattle, both individuals and the Tribe as a whole took on unprecedented debt. This mired them in a debt relationship to the federal government that would not disappear until casinos, but it also had productive potential: cattle owners could leverage their herds as equity in order to obtain loans unavailable to other reservation Indians. Cattle as equity, in turn, enabled new capital-intensive pursuits—for example, housing and business ventures—that were previously unimaginable. Male cattle owners’ emerging class status and increased business contacts led commentators to characterize them as “the less conservative, more white-oriented members of the tribe” (Fairbanks 1973: 43–44) or as agents of acculturation (Garbarino 1972). Some nonowners resent that the Tribe pours resources into a cattle industry that primarily benefits individuals, not the Tribe as a whole, and that ties up large tracts of land as pastures. As of 2001, Seminoles were among the largest cattle operators in Florida, collectively owning the twelfth-largest cow and calf operation in the United States. The tribal herd, of which all tribal members are shareholders, totaled approximately 7,000 head, while individuals’ herds averaged about 100 head.11 The Tribe also operated a 6,000-acre cattle ranch

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Figure 6. Working Paul Bowers’s cattle at Big Cypress, March 2001. Photo by author.

near Managua, Nicaragua, and had opened a Latin American market for its breeding stock. Cow life cycles contribute to the seasonal rhythm of reservation life. While working cattle, families and friends renew their ties to each other and to pasturelands as vital places in the reservation landscape. For example, in March 2000 I spent a day with the owners and cowboys at Big Cypress who worked Paul Bowers’s (Panther) cattle. They rounded up, branded, vaccinated, injected with bovine growth hormone, dehorned, and otherwise tended to the approximately 200-head herd of range Brangus (figure 6). If it is seldom lucrative for the Tribe and only marginally profitable for most individual owners, why does this cattle program persist, and what can this tell us about the significance of cattle to Seminoles? As among indigenous communities in the West (Iverson 1994), cattle have become a marker of Seminole belonging and community identity. Cattle also link Seminoles to their non-Indian neighbors in Florida’s peninsular interior, where agriculture rules the economy, rugged masculine individualism is celebrated, cattle families go way back, and racial tensions run deep. In this land of self-identified “crackers” and Indians, of big prairie skies and subtropical

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fenced-in pastures, it is in part through cattle that groups consolidate as both racially different and regionally linked. Multiple events and institutions celebrate Seminoles’ cattle heritage, but rodeo is the most visible. On a warm November 2000 day, the Brighton Reservation hosted the Southeastern Circuit Finals of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (P.R.C.A.), the major rodeo organization. The event was held in a large arena while being broadcast on the Tribe’s closedcircuit television station; attendance was approximately 2,000, more than half non-Seminole. Sponsors, in addition to the tribal government, included a local Dodge truck dealer and a Western-wear store. After singing the U.S. national anthem and applauding horseback displays of the American and Seminole flags, we watched a full complement of rodeo events, including bareback and saddle bronco riding, calf roping, steer wrestling, barrel racing (the only women’s event), and bull riding.12 All-Indian rodeos occur each year at the Tribal Fair in Hollywood and at Brighton Field Days, a February celebration that also features patchwork clothing competitions, athletic contests (e.g., archery, canoe races, and log peeling, which is a necessary skill for chickee building), live entertainment, a parade, and vendors selling everything from Mexican pottery to Confederate flags. Seminoles have been involved in rodeo at least since the 1950s, when they held a rodeo to fund a tribal delegation’s travel to Washington, D.C., to testify against Federal termination policy. Today, they are leaders in the Eastern Indian Rodeo Association, an intertribal group. When Seminoles join with other indigenous people in rodeos, they rewrite rodeo’s dominant narratives of “winning the West” and of cowboy power over the land (Lawrence 1982). Youth rodeo is one of the only tribal education programs with extensive adult male participation, and Moses Jumper Jr. (Snake), tribal recreation director, viewed it as a way to link children to their Seminole heritage (January 16, 2001). 4-H steer programs further encourage youth involvement. Additionally, each spring hundreds of children and adults gather at Big Cypress for the Junior Cypress Cattle Drive. Participants listen to speeches about the historical importance of cattle to Seminoles before mounting horses (or, in my case, hitching a ride on a swamp buggy) to drive cattle through the reservation and gather for a barbecue and an allIndian rodeo. Cowboy aesthetics, albeit in modified form, have become a Seminole aes-

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thetic, which is especially significant in a community where clothes (most famously patchwork) long have been central to individual and tribal identity. With casino wealth, expensive ostrich boots and other Western-wear accessories have become a common form of conspicuous consumption on rural reservations.13 Cowboy motifs extend beyond clothing at Brighton and Big Cypress, where cattle graze in the pastures, country music blares from extended cab pickups, and rodeo grounds dominate the built environment. Country music star John Anderson has performed his hit song “Seminole Wind” at the tribal Christmas party. The song’s lyrics locate the values of old Florida in Seminoles (against “flood control,” and the “progress” that “took its toll”), while the music video (shot on the Big Cypress Reservation) shows stomp dancing, patchwork clothing, and airboats. Country music on the reservations is nothing new: Paul Buster (Otter), fifty-one, a country singer and songwriter, recalled that his father used to listen to Grand Old Opry on a battery-operated radio in their chickee camp. He credited country music lyrics with helping to end Seminoles’ prior punishment of individuals who spoke English (July 11, 2001). Cattle ownership still conveys status, although casino dividends have all but erased the income gaps that once separated cattle owners from others. Richard Bowers (Panther), chairman of the Big Cypress cattle owners’ committee, assistant to the tribal cattle manager, third-generation cattle owner, and president of the Intertribal Agriculture Council, characterized cattle as “the social fiber of the community.” When I asked Richard and his brother Paul about the role of cattle owners, Paul replied that if you are a cattle owner “you’re somebody in the community” (April 13, 2001). Others pointed out that disproportionate numbers of cattle owners are elected to tribal leadership positions, especially on the board of directors. Anthropologist Alexander Spoehr recorded the following observation in his field notes after a 1939 conversation with Naha Tiger (Snake), a Brighton elder: “A girl with a lot of hogs has an easier time getting a good husband than one with no property. . . . Naha thought that in old times the women proportionately owned more hogs than the men. And they owned the houses and the fields, though the land itself was not owned, so far as I can make out” (Spoehr 1939). Under the cattle program, government officials allocated cattle to men, and men’s economic power and social status grew as property ownership and inheritance shifted away from women and

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matrilines.14 More recently, with tribal control over the cattle program’s administration, the male gendering of cattle as Seminole heritage has somewhat diminished. Many women now own cattle, some rodeo, many run the accounting and business aspects of cattle operations, and they provide hearty meals on days when family cattle are worked. Louise Gopher (Panther), a middle-aged Brighton resident, is the principal owner and manager of a herd that she and her siblings inherited from their father. Gopher once presented a paper on female cattle owners at an academic conference, in collaboration with anthropologist Susan Stans. She estimated that about half of the herds were owned at least in part by women. She considered cattle ownership to be her “expensive hobby”; you can’t get rich on cattle, she said, but it is “a tradition you carry on” (March 13, 2001). Although one cannot say about Seminoles, as E. E. Evans-Pritchard once declared about the Nuer, that “their social idiom is a bovine idiom” (1940: 19), male cattle ownership and cowboy culture have associated aspects of Seminoleness with masculinity. By analyzing the often-hidden role of women in Seminole cattle operations—as owners, managers, cooks, accountants—it is possible to recognize both the male gendering of cattle as marking Seminole tradition and the embeddedness of cattle in the extended matrilineal family. Gender is a microcosm for the interplay of cultural production and economic development in cattle. That is, the cattle program shifted the gender of Seminole property and inheritance, yet Seminoles subsequently have reframed this economic regime as a site for cultural production, and women’s roles are reemerging. In these and many other ways, cattle are not “simply” an economic venture: they bind a distinctly Seminole community while also revealing some of its internal distinctions, and they show the historical contingency of the indigenization of “economic development.” Crafts of Culture

At gift shops sprinkled across Seminole reservations, visitors and residents alike browse shelves of bright patchwork skirts and jackets, sweetgrass baskets, palmetto dolls, and beaded jewelry. Women sell these wares at tribal festivals (figure 7). Others have documented the development and forms of Seminole art and crafts (Blackard 1990; Downs 1995).15 Here my project is narrower, to show how Seminole crafts have been shaped by eco-

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Figure 7. “Grandma” (Mary Tiger, Panther), 1988. Photo by Robert Kippenberger.

nomic development initiatives and, simultaneously, have been a site for the production and consolidation of Seminole “culture” as embodied in material objects, labor, and market transactions. Craft production has been inextricably intertwined with—though not entirely subsumed by—Seminole cultural tourism, and therefore it has arisen from a deeply intercultural and commodified space of interaction between Seminoles and nonIndians. Women defined and sustained these practices, such that today Seminole tradition itself is partly located in gendered craft production, women’s paid labor, and its objects. Cultural tourism as an economic development strategy gained currency during the 1900s among indigenous peoples around the world (Graburn 1976; Phillips and Steiner 1999). Critics of the commodification of American Indian identity—the appropriation of Indianness that accompanies persistent inequality (Castile 1996)—might argue that Seminoles have been compelled to market themselves in an economy where consumers demand

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authentic indigeneity for appropriation, and where poverty-ridden indigenous communities long had little else but culture to offer.16 For Seminoles, however, the marketing of culture and of craft objects has enabled new and meaningful modes of cultural expression, and it does so in at least three ways: (1) by intersecting with these objects’ use and aesthetic appreciation within Seminole communities, for example when new patchwork clothing stands as a sign of renewal at the Green Corn Dance and when objects depicting clans serve as internal identity markers; (2) by pointing to a history of cultural tourism that Seminoles consider distinctive; and (3) by contributing to the demarcation of Seminole practices as cultural within a South Florida multicultural landscape. Seminoles began to self-consciously market their culture—and themselves as culture—during the 1920s, after the hunting and trapping economy bottomed out, and once the completion of the Tamiami Trail highway and the Florida tourism boom opened new markets. According to ethnohistorian Patsy West (1998: 9), by 1930 more than half of all Mikasukispeaking Indians in South Florida were involved in the tourist economy, many employed in white-owned tourist villages across South Florida.17 Well before Disney, roadside tourist enterprises were powerful economic engines in Florida, as illustrated by the Cypress Gardens owner’s success in convincing local meteorologists to forecast days as “partly sunny” rather than “partly cloudy” (Mormino 2005: 89). Some government officials criticized white-run Seminole villages for exploiting Indian workers (see, e.g., Glenn 1982: 106; West 1998: chap. 11), and it is startling to hear stories of Seminoles being displayed alongside “wild” animals. West, however, argues that tourist villages offered Seminoles spaces in which they could sustain “traditional” ways of life. Seminole crafts emerged as a modern cultural category in the context of government- and missionary-sponsored economic development initiatives.18 By the 1960s, the BIA Seminole Agency and the board of directors decided to pursue the tourist village model as a tribally owned operation. In 1960 the Seminole Okalee Indian Village and Arts and Crafts Center opened on the Hollywood Reservation, featuring craft sales, cultural demonstrators, and alligator wrestling.19 Although the Tribe only intermittently profited from the Okalee Village, it long remained a funding priority. In 2004 it relocated to the Seminole Paradise mall at the Hard Rock, where customers

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can view crafts as well as alligator wrestling, story telling, and animals representing the Seminole clans.20 At the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum at Big Cypress, museum officials constructed a craft village that is managed by George Billie (Panther), an elder with prior work experience in commercial villages. Some might characterize such villages as falling prey to the pitfalls of ethnographic display that, as analyzed by Barbara KirschenblattGimblett, creates “the illusion that the activities you watch are being done rather than represented, a practice that creates the effect of authenticity, or realness” (1998: 55). However, many village workers are doing, not just representing, both because they generally earn wages and sell crafts and because the long history of Seminole cultural tourism and its objects means that there is little distinction between doing and representing as modes of Seminole cultural action. The long-term economic power of craft production is difficult to gauge, but a gender lens adds clarity. Most scholars and government officials considered craft production to be supplementary income, relative to men’s earnings. As a result, crafts have been treated primarily as cultural forms, not economic practices, despite evidence that women’s craft production generated substantial portions of household incomes.21 In 1999, Marie Phillips (Panther) told a University of Florida interviewer: “It was not just a hobby or something that we were supposed to learn; but we had to learn in order to survive.”22 Elaine Aguilar (Otter) said that her single mother survived by making crafts, sitting at the sewing machine daily by 5:30 a.m.: “She made everything. Anything to make money to feed her kids” (January 3, 2001). Despite its demands, craft work often was preferred: Tampa Tribal Council liaison Richard Henry (Panther), for example, recounted that his aunts welcomed the escape from difficult labor cutting flowers in gladiola fields: “Getting away from the backbreaking to just sitting around demonstrating, showing your culture. It was a relief for them” (August 25, 2005). Since gaming has augmented incomes, hardly any Seminoles make a living from craft production or demonstration, and there is a widespread perception that fewer young people are taking up craftwork. Elder Jimmie O’Toole Osceola (Panther), an accomplished patchwork maker (which is unusual for a man), believed that young people’s incorporation into American life directed them away from crafts: “They are too busy with other culture. Young people very busy with schooling and education, and the

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boys are very busy with sports nowadays, so they’re not doing any woodcarving. They like things that is done in a few minutes. Craft takes long time to make ’em. Not one day” (May 22, 2001). Nonetheless, gaming has sparked new opportunities for individuals to produce crafts, for money or not, especially in tribal cultural education programs. A high-end collector’s market, with several Seminole buyers, has opened up for patchwork and baskets.23 Women own several of the largest craft shops. In the early 1970s, one observer stated that “most of the wares for sale at the Arts and Crafts Center, clothing excepted, are made just for sale to tourists and do not represent part of an artistic heritage” (Palmer 1973: 68). This is not the case in the 2000s, if it ever was. As forms of cultural expression and celebration, patchwork adorns stoles on the Tribe’s Afachkee school graduation robes, Seminole dolls hang as Christmas tree ornaments in the lobby of the tribal headquarters, and contestants in the Miss Seminole contest demonstrate basketry, doll making, or other artistic forms in the talent competition. Most tribal festivals feature well-attended clothing contests that often draw more than one hundred contestants. Clothing contests offer substantial cash prizes in difficult-to-distinguish categories such as “Traditional,” “Modern/Traditional,” and “Modern Contemporary,” and they draw large crowds who debate the latest design and fabric trends and the judges’ tastes (figure 8).24 Even as crafts stand in for self-consciously “traditional” Seminole identities and values, producers innovate, for example sewing patchwork onto Miami Dolphins fabric or stitching a Florida State Seminoles football helmet design into an elaborate sweetgrass basket. Crafts also represent the Seminole polity when tribal officials present visiting dignitaries with patchwork jackets. In these acts of political performance and hospitality, crafts facilitate diplomacy, measure honor and status, and represent sovereignty. Some Seminoles grow angry when outsiders produce patchwork and other “Seminole” crafts, and the head of the tribal cultural education program once advocated copyrighting the designs. Such concerns reflect a global indigenous turn to cultural property as one model of objectification and restricted circulation (Brown 2003; Christen 2006; F. Myers 2002). When I asked Carol Cypress (Panther), a freelance cultural educator and accomplished beadworker, whether it bothered her that other Seminoles use her designs, Cypress looked surprised and responded that those designs

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Figure 8. A clothing contest at the 2001 Brighton Field Days. Photo by author.

do not belong to her. Cypress exchanged pattern ideas with other Seminole women, and her work also reflected contacts with non-Seminoles: she used whatever colors and designs were in style that year, based on her perusal of fashion magazines, and she exchanged materials and ideas with beadworkers from other tribes (November 27, 2000). Cypress’s beadwork and other Seminole crafts stand for Seminoleness by materializing social life, individual innovation, and intercultural contact. In recent years, Seminole artists have taken on the challenge of learning historical designs and methods, producing period styles for the tribal museum’s exhibits, Seminole war reenactments, and clothing contests. This periodization and accompanying workshops on historical methods mark a transition of crafts to a new form of historical culture making (figure 9). Cypress explained that gaming proceeds have enabled Seminoles to purchase and display artifacts. She added that gaming had contradictory effects: some people make more beadwork because they no longer have to hold down paid jobs, while others have stopped making beadwork because they do not need the money. The casino generation is reconfiguring the economy of culture.

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Figure 9. Pedro Zepeda (Panther) shows Juanita Osceola (Panther) and Shirley Motlow (Panther) how to make “old-style” split palmetto baskets at a 2000 museum workshop in Big Cypress. Photo by author.

Ever glades Smiles

Alligator wrestling is a paradigmatically Seminole activity at the intersection of tourism, cultural labor, and gender. Cultural tourism promoted women’s crafts as markers of Seminole heritage, and, by extension, located cultural transmission in women’s labor, yet tourism also gave birth to a wholly masculine form of Seminole cultural production in alligator wrestling. Beginning around 1920, Seminole men earned money at white- and Indian-owned tourist attractions by climbing into a pool of water with at least one alligator, catching it, and “wrestling” it (figure 10). Soon alligator wrestling, which had antecedents in Seminole hunting and sports (B. Jumper 1994: 27), became “an activity synonymous with the Florida Seminoles” (West 1998: 42).25 Some critics decried alligator wrestling as silly, fake, or exploitative, but wrestlers gained status within Seminole communities and became respected as expert practitioners and tradition bearers. A number of wrestlers leveraged their skills to travel across the continent for fairs and expos. In the early 1950s, Moses Jumper Sr. (Panther) took William Sturtevant to the

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Figure 10. Wrestling for fascinated (and horrified?) spectators at the Jungle Queen. Courtesy of the Seminole/ Miccosukee Photographic Archive.

white-owned Jungle Queen tourist boat on the New River in Fort Lauderdale, where Jumper wrestled alligators. Sightseeing boats stopped twice daily at the dock, with its chickees and alligator pit. Women sold souvenirs, men wrestled gators for tips, and on that day three small girls earned coins by singing “Jesus Loves Me” in Mikasuki and reciting the U.S. pledge of allegiance in English (wcsf: Box 5). Individual wrestlers have developed their own routines and styles, but common skills include sitting atop the alligator, opening and closing its powerful jaws (showing its “Everglades smile”), and rolling it over on the back in order to scratch its belly and make it “go to sleep.” Some wrestlers tell audiences how Seminoles coexist with alligators in the swamps, others describe alligator anatomy and behavior, and some try tricks like inserting heads or hands into the beasts’ open mouths and pulling them out before the alligators’ jaws snap together. One wrestler told me that in the 1980s he could earn $200–$300 per show, performing three shows daily.

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Gaming has eliminated the financial incentive for men to risk their limbs in the gator pit, yet alligator wrestling remains a colorful component of Seminole cultural celebrations, museum exhibits, and tourist attractions. One night I attended a “Biker Bash” hosted by the Coconut Creek Casino, where participants in a charity motorcycle ride could have their pictures taken “wrestling” baby alligators. When Naomi Wilson (Snake) reigned as Miss Seminole and competed for an intertribal title in Oklahoma, she represented her nation by wrestling an alligator for the talent competition; her mother, Elsie Bowers (Snake), recounted that Naomi brought down the house (June 27, 2001). Alligator wrestlers perform Seminole heritage, in a reminder of Seminoles’ connection to the Everglades and a demonstration of Seminole bravery. Alligator wrestling also operates discursively as a metaphor for Seminole values of toughness and fortitude. For example, at a Tribal Council meeting, then-chairman James Billie (Bird), an experienced alligator wrestler, greeted a longtime employee who was returning from a grave illness by comparing her experience to wrestling alligators. Billie sometimes joked about cajoling visiting politicians and businessmen to hop into the alligator pit before he would support their causes. Alligator wrestling conjures up images of Indians conquering wild beasts, primal reptiles with nut-sized brains and vicious teeth, in a simultaneous triumph over nature and reminder of indigenous peoples’ association with nature. From the time when explorers wrote of the Everglades as dangerous swamps full of Indians and alligators, the two have been joined, and Seminoles have turned this association to their favor by cashing in on alligator wrestling and promoting images of themselves as fearless and skilled. It is rare for women to wrestle alligators, and I know of only three who have done so. Two are members of the Snake Clan (other clan unknown), which is associated with legitimacy in handling reptiles and whose elders give permission before wrestlers climb into the alligator pit. One of the women, as reported by her son, began wrestling by substituting for her husband when he was incapacitated by alcohol and could not safely report for work at a tourist attraction. In 2000, Chairman Billie jumped into an alligator pit after a long hiatus from the craft, only to have his finger bitten off. The Seminole Tribune quoted Billie on his motives: “I thought I’d go back in there and reinstate my manhood” (Kenny and Gallagher 2000: 1).

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He would often display his stump to joke about his “battle wounds” in life and politics. Many Seminoles lament alligator wrestling’s decline, and some are considering ways to preserve it. Recreation director Moses Jumper Jr. (Snake), whose father was Sturtevant’s Jungle Queen host, has considered including wrestling in youth recreation programs. Since gaming, however, young men enjoy unprecedented educational, career, and income-earning options, and hardly anyone seems to disapprove of boys’ choices to pursue safer and more lucrative paths. Indeed, many tribal members were amused and somewhat befuddled by a September 2000 national media frenzy over the Okalee Village’s need to publicly advertise alligator wrestling positions to non-Seminoles. A front-page New York Times article, “Filling the Job Is Like Wrestling Alligators” (Bragg 2000), was picked up by NBC’s The Today Show and international press. A National Public Radio segment began: “It seems that more Seminole Indians want to be yuppies than alligator wrestlers” (National Public Radio 2000). Why would such an obscure story garner so much attention? Perhaps because it presented a paradox of money and the alienability of cultural labor: how can alligator wrestling be Seminole anymore, and how can Seminoles be Seminoles, when few are jumping in the pit, when they have other employment opportunities and funds to attend college instead?26 Alligator wrestling, as an economic form and a performative act, is inalienable from Seminoleness, insofar as only Seminoles themselves can authenticate it as a cultural practice through their labor. Casinos and the expanded economic and educational horizons they enable have disrupted the familiar equation of American Indian tourist arts and cultural heritage with poverty. With alligator wrestling, what began as an economic pursuit grew into a marker of cultural heritage, only to be displaced by new economic opportunities for men. This trajectory shows how culturally marked forms of labor introduce dilemmas of alienability and inalienability that in turn enter into casino-era debates over the politics of culture and authenticity. Working f or Wages

By the 1930s, Seminole men and women increasingly moved into the wage labor force. As adult and child day laborers in Florida’s plentiful vegetable

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Figure 11. Working the tomato fields, probably near Big Cypress. Ethel Cutler Freeman Papers, neg. 2002–1586, National Anthropological Archives.

fields (figure 11), parking lot attendants in Miami, and construction workers for federal reservation projects, Seminoles’ twentieth-century labor participation expanded beyond the bounds of seemingly “traditional” indigenous economic practices (e.g., trading, hunting) and the selling of culture. Nor were these forms of wage labor understood to be traditions or cultural performances, in contrast to cultural tourism.27 Like other Indians, Seminoles took part in large-scale twentieth-century public and private sector American economic expansion (Littlefield and Knack 1996), but because wage labor is ideologically positioned in America as not indigenous (Albers 1996), Indians’ labor has only recently attracted the attention of historians and anthropologists (Berman 2003; Hosmer 1999; O’Neill 2005; Pickering 2000; Raibmon 2005). The problem here is not only that the symbolic dissociation of Indians from wage labor distracts from seeing the real conditions of labor and capital (cf. Albers 1996: 251); we need to better understand how the symbolic and economic dimensions of indigeneity are coproduced. With the notable exceptions of alligator wrestling and craft demonstration, wage labor has not become part of Seminole identity or heritage. This serves as a reminder that Seminoles and their interlocutors

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selectively (if not necessarily strategically) have indigenized economic activity, sometimes reproducing and sometimes rewriting ideologies of indigenous productivity. Seminoles’ participation in the wage economy reflected and shaped other aspects of social life, for example in kinship-based hiring or the creation of class distinctions based on federal employment. Although Seminoles have consistently worked in the private sector, employment long has been structured by relations with the federal government. For example, in the 1930s some Seminoles temporarily quit their Indian New Deal jobs as ditch diggers rather than apply for required Social Security cards, which, as Suzie Jim Billie (Panther) told her granddaughter in a 1984 interview, they associated with federal control and the threat of removal to Oklahoma (SPOHP #187A: 3). Contrary to Seminole household organization, Depression-era federal regulations did not accept women as heads of households eligible for relief work, so only men worked in this capacity, while many women sought agricultural day labor or cultural tourism jobs (Kersey 1996: 15). Meanwhile, Seminole entrepreneurs sold frog legs, palm fronds for Palm Sunday, and other products. By the midcentury, the BIA, the Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO), and the tribal government sought to reduce Seminole unemployment, both by exercising “Indian preference” in hiring—sixty tribal members worked for the BIA and 180 for the Tribe in 1967 (Palmer 1973: 52)—and by creating new employment opportunities, such as a mid1960s craft factory at Big Cypress (Garbarino 1972: 27). In the late 1960s, master’s student Ronald Mertz studied employment termination at an Amphenol electric component factory on the Hollywood Reservation. The factory, completed in 1967, had been built under the BIA Industrial Development Plan and was to hire 120 workers with priority for Tribal members. By July 1, 1968, only nineteen of seventy-one Seminoles who had begun work remained employed (Mertz 1970: 13). Mertz found no correlation between termination and the individual’s reservation residence, educational attainment, or English language skills: 51.9 percent had quit, 21.1 percent were released for absenteeism, and 13.5 percent each were laid off or fired (Mertz 1970: 61). Mertz offered no conclusion as to why this jobs project failed, but subsequent research offers clues. I found that few Seminoles considered their jobs to be an integral part of their identity, with the notable exception of several who characterized

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their jobs as perpetuating a Seminole way of life (see also O’Neill 2005). To be sure, many spoke of pride in jobs well done, for example when Jimmie O’Toole Osceola (Panther, b. 1925) described the aesthetic pleasure he took in manufacturing tinted eyeglass lenses (May 22, 2001), or when Ingram Billie Jr. (Wind, b. 1929) spoke of skills deployed during his twenty years as a government surveyor (October 13, 2000). Still, paid jobs took a back seat to other forms of community distribution and obligation, and absenteeism and quitting reflected the difficulty of reconciling ceremonial and kinship responsibilities with the mode of labor time that E. P. Thompson famously argued to be a critical element of capitalism (Thompson 1964).28 Despite low expectations and racism on the part of employers, Seminoles worked successfully at many diverse jobs. However, their distributive priorities and senses of a morally valid temporality often lay elsewhere. In combination with health problems, this rendered sustained employment elusive. Gaming has generated new employment opportunities, and these tribal jobs generally accommodate practices that had resulted in absenteeism and chronic underemployment when Seminoles worked for extratribal, or “outside,” employers. The sheer number of tribal employees has altered daily rhythms and household incomes on Seminole reservations. In 2002, the tribal government employed 1,334 people to serve a tribal population of approximately 3,000. Of these, 35 percent were tribal members, but 43 percent of department heads were tribal members.29 Additionally, the Gaming Department employed 1,962 workers—the number has since multiplied— only twenty of whom were tribal members.30 Some Seminoles avoid working in the casinos because they consider it improper to handle so much money, while others eschew such low-paid and uninteresting jobs. In an effort to bring more Seminoles into gaming management, in the early 2000s the Gaming Department inaugurated a rotating internship program, after which successful graduates move into permanent positions. The amount and diversity of employment by the tribal government has encouraged Seminoles to stay in South Florida: one consequence of gaming is a more consolidated reservation community. Individuals can secure positions with the Tribe that often far outstrip their outside opportunities, in large part because Seminoles’ formal education rates are relatively low: in 2002, out of a tribal citizenry of just under 3,000, with over half children, twenty-seven held a bachelor’s degree or higher.31 No

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Seminole graduated from secondary school until 1945 (Kersey 1989: 147), and the first public high school graduate was in 1957. As a result, there has not been as dramatic an elite class formation or “brain drain” as on many other reservations. Larry Frank (Otter), for example, attended the University of Oklahoma and worked for a Native American organization in that state for years before returning to Florida in 1981 and later becoming the manager of Hollywood gaming; he was relieved that tribal members with high educational attainment could now find job opportunities with the Tribe (October 11, 2000). Gaming has allowed Seminoles to obtain college degrees and pursue a variety of occupations without having to sacrifice community residence or service.32 When I asked cattle rancher and longtime employee Stanlo Johns (Panther) about the impact of gaming, he replied by talking about jobs, saying that previously everyone had worked off the Brighton Reservation, “but in the past ten years the tribe has been able to employ all the people that want a job, and never has denied anyone a job as far as I know of.” He added that now Seminoles are trying to put their culture in practice, recovering after a period when parents were too busy working outside jobs to teach their children. At the same time, he expressed frustration that outsiders did not seem to be able to see that Seminoles at Brighton worked hard: “Most people think that everybody just lives off the bingo hall, and that’s it. That’s not in our case. Some people may do that, but in our case here we’re trying to make a living by working the dirt, working the area, working with what we got” (February 28, 2001). Several Seminoles commented that the Tribe needs more tribal members with business degrees to run the casinos, while others lamented the shortage of Seminole doctors, nurses, and teachers. Many youth stated a desire to work for “the Tribe” or “the community,” often speaking of “giving back.” Of course, not all Seminoles work for the Tribe or for each other, and some who are employed “on the outside” value the freedom of working beyond the reach of reservation politics, gossip, and surveillance. The Seminole Tribe of Florida Personnel Policy Manual that was in effect during 2000–2001 explained that “The Tribal Council gives preference in all of its employments to Indians,” including in hiring, training, and promotion; first preference is given to Seminoles and second preference to members of other federally recognized tribes (Seminole Tribe of Florida

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n.d.: 5). Indian preference is permissible under U.S. law because it is a governmental, not racial, distinction (Morton v. Mancari, 1974). Supervisors in Seminole Broadcasting, for example, were proud that all of their employees were Seminoles, and Mondo Tiger (Wind), manager of Blue Top Construction, said that his operation emphasized hiring Seminoles: “It’s the number-one goal for this office and my staff ” (March 12, 2001). Some non-Indian employees resented that Seminoles whom they viewed as less qualified were promoted or that tribal members could get away with tardiness or absenteeism that would be punished in non-Seminoles. On the other hand, Seminoles frequently complained that they were not given adequate opportunity to rise in the ranks, and that non-Indian department heads treated them with condescension. For example, Charlotte Gopher Burgess (Snake), a gaming compliance officer, expressed concern that tribal members were overlooked for promotions: “They [non-Seminole managers] look at us as though we’re beneath them, we don’t know, we’re not capable of learning. We’ve got enough people out there that given a chance would do a good job, but they’re not given a chance.” Gopher Burgess recognized the importance of background checks for gaming employees, yet she advocated leniency in hiring tribal members with criminal records for minor offences (August 23, 2005). When non-Seminole employees won door prizes at community meetings, I heard grumbles in the audience. Older people would grow especially irritated when the winner celebrated, and some explained that Seminoles are not supposed to “act up” when they win things. One middle-aged woman lamented that since the Tribe began hiring so many non-Indians, there is hardly a time or place for Seminoles to gather by themselves. She gave the example of non-Indian attendance at the Big Cypress Christmas party, yet she brought me as her guest to that year’s event. This was less a testament to my belonging than a reminder that concerns about non-Indian employees, while sometimes expressed in blanket terms, in fact operated selectively to frame more particular complaints about individuals and to articulate the difficulties of maintaining bounded sociality alongside economic and bureaucratic expansion. Working for the Tribe promotes workplace flexibility and social ties among tribal citizens. For example, I heard many accounts of Seminoles who previously had to quit their “outside” jobs—or be fired—in order to attend the Green Corn Dance (which lasts at least four days) or to observe

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mourning obligations upon the death of a family member (which for some requires four weeks, for others less, and for still others four lunar months). In a novel bureaucratic designation, the Tribal Council offers, by request, “traditional leave” for “ceremonial and observance purposes” (Seminole Tribe of Florida n.d.: 6). This has enabled people to hold down jobs they would otherwise lose, although it raises difficult questions about who should be eligible and how to prevent abuses. One woman was offended that she had been unable to secure traditional leave to attend the Green Corn Dance. The human resources department periodically considered instituting cultural education programs that would instruct department heads on accommodation for mourning leave and other employmentrelated cultural matters. Overall, the growth in tribal employment means that Seminoles spend more time together in the same physical spaces, and tribal offices are always abuzz with conversation, birthday parties, and other social interactions. Tribal employment also has changed the relationships among time, money, and cultural production, as more Seminoles than ever log hours on cultural projects as part of the paid working day. This brief glance at Seminole wage labor suggests that instrumentalist approaches to casino and smoke shop revenues, discussed below, are not unprecedented: Seminoles long have spent their days engaged in economic activities—some individualized, some tribally operated, some family based—that they do not identify as cultural or as central to individual or group identity (even in cases when those activities produce Seminole sociality). At issue is less alienation in Marx’s sense than the selective alienability of indigenous economic action from the production of cultural identity. With wage labor and gaming operations, on the one hand, and paid craft production and tribal cultural tourist enterprises, on the other, Seminoles attach cultural identity differentially to various instantiations of both indigenous labor and indigenous capital. Vices and Vir tues: Fr om Cigarettes to Gaming

Seminoles’ late-twentieth-century foray into cigarette sales and gaming disarticulated and reconfigured prior relationships between successful tribal economic development projects and cultural production. The cases of cattle, crafts, and alligator wrestling illustrate that market integra-

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tion can afford indigenous peoples opportunities to explore new and expanded forms of cultural production, but few Seminoles today claim that gaming and cigarettes, the Tribe’s primary income generators, represent Seminole cultural identity. Instead, they view these ventures instrumentally as moneymakers. In this sense, Seminoles often treat smoke shops and gaming the way they had viewed most wage labor, with the important difference that “outside” jobs were easily lost, whereas smoke shops and gaming “belong” to Seminoles, albeit not as distinctly Seminole forms of economic activity. This marks a new configuration of economy, politics, and cultural production. In 1976, after hearing about efforts by other tribes to open cigarette shops, the Seminole Tribe of Florida jumped into the act. Almost immediately, they faced legal and political battles with municipalities and the state of Florida over their right to sell cigarettes without outside taxation or regulation. Seminoles asserted that, as a government, they were not subject to state and local taxes. As a result, they could clear large profits on goods (like cigarettes) that were highly taxed and regulated under state law. Rather than litigate the question, the Tribe and the state of Florida negotiated an agreement. Cigarettes set the stage for casino strategies, as Seminoles defended smoke shops by hiring lobbyists and lawyers to negotiate, crafting public relations strategies, and formulating theories of tribal sovereignty. As Carolyn Billie (Bird), executive administrator of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Inc., put it: “I think that was the first test of the sovereign issues, with the cigarettes, and then it moved on from there” (December 13, 2000). Located near casinos and busy intersections, the small and rather drab smoke shops—mostly customized mobile homes with drive-up windows— attract customers day and night (figure 12). Discount cigarette sales were the first Seminole venture to yield sustainable, substantial revenues: tribal annual income jumped from $600,000 in 1968 to $4.5 million in 1977, mostly due to cigarette sales (Kersey 1996: 121). In 2001, the Tribe operated ten smoke shops and over two dozen bingo-hall vending machines.33 Individual Seminoles owned additional smoke shops, licensed by the Tribe and subject to tribal fees. A tribal tobacco ordinance governs all transactions, and a tribal tobacco association sets and regulates prices. Smoke shops are taxed and regulated—by tribal law.

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Figure 12. One of the more distinctively decorated smoke shops, subsequently torn down to build the Hollywood Hard Rock, 2002. Photo by author.

No tribal members I asked could recall internal debate about the morality of selling tobacco. This is distinguished from subsequent failed efforts by some elected officials to instigate on-reservation alcohol sales, which unleashed criticism from politically powerful Baptists and, more generally, from critics who worried that on-reservation sales would contribute to alcoholism within the Tribe.34 Few tribal members smoke, and few consider themselves responsible for others’ vices; instead, Seminoles located smoke shops within a history of their own severely and structurally limited economic opportunities.35 Some recounted histories of failed tribal attempts to pursue other, “cleaner” business ventures, efforts that could not beat the long odds set by structural poverty and racism. As with gaming, cigarette sales raised questions of corruption and improper political influence.36 Generally, Seminoles are concerned that resources should be obtained legitimately, morally, and in keeping with their values. For example, the legend of how the Kissimmee River got its winding shape tells how a hungry young hunter turned into a snake after ignoring his companion’s warning not to violate elders’ laws by eating fish that were found out of their proper place.37 Unlike crafts or alligator wrestling, cigarettes prompted Seminoles to

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grapple less with the dilemma of selling culture than with the specter of selling out. For the first time since cattle, the Tribe had an opportunity to make large sums of money in a sector that was not easily slotted into Seminole tradition. But cigarettes caught Seminoles in a double bind: previously, when selling culture, they had to worry about commodification and exploitation, but now by not selling their culture (that is, by selling something outside, “not Seminole”) they contended with accusations of “selling out,” of trespassing on economic terrain that delegitimized the specificity of their cultural and political claims. Public response was often negative. For example, in the mid-1980s the city of Tampa sued the Tribe for building a smoke shop on reservation land acquired after Native human remains were discovered at a nearby construction site. Josephine Stafford, a city attorney, told the Associated Press of her disappointment at the Tribe’s decision to sell cigarettes rather than use the site solely as a memorial. She reported telling tribal leaders: “You know what you could do is have a few carved canoes and statues and interview some old Indian ladies and get some recipes and put out a cookbook” (Associated Press 1986).38 Her comments represented “imperialist nostalgia”—or the imperial desire for that which one has destroyed—in its fullest (Rosaldo 1989). The absence of cultural specificity in Seminoles’ talk about, labor in, and adornment of smoke shops is further evidence of their instrumental status. Despite the readily available association of American Indians with tobacco, most tribal members did not consider cigarettes to express Indianness. That said, after reading a draft of this chapter, cultural educator Willie Johns (Panther) reminded me that tobacco is important within Seminole medicine (phone conversation, fall 2005, date unrecorded). Unlike most other tribal businesses, smoke shops generally did not display Seminole iconography such as patchwork patterns or thatched roofs. Nor did they carry distinctive names: instead, tribal shops were named by number only, and most individually owned shops were simply designated by the owners’ first names. Very few Seminoles worked in smoke shops. Elsie Bowers (Snake), general manager of the eight shops owned by the board, employed fifty people in 2001, only two of whom—her direct assistants—were Seminole. Her department followed “Indian preference” in hiring, but she said that Seminoles do not want the jobs, they no longer need the money, and even in the

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old days she had to fire several because of chronic absenteeism (June 27, 2001). I never heard tribal members grumble about the absence of Seminole labor in smoke shops, in contrast to complaints about relying on non-Seminole school instructors, museum staff, or health care providers. Smoke shop labor, with the exception of top-level management, is alienable from indigenous subjectivity. Market forces reinforce this differential economy and politics of alienability, since customers who buy cigarettes do not demand cultural authenticity, whereas tourists would rather see “real” Seminoles wrestle alligators and produce crafts. Criticism of indigenous instrumentality and alienability fueled public outcry over smoke shops in Florida. Non-Indian competitors complained about “uneven playing fields” and “special rights,” and public officials decried reductions in tax revenues.39 Journalists, business leaders, and politicians asked, Why should Indians enjoy these special privileges? No one asked, Why is there so much uproar over the fact that only Seminoles can sell discount cigarettes, when, practically speaking, only Seminoles can sell Seminole crafts and wrestle alligators? The answer, in part, lies with the relationship between culture, on the one hand, and political difference, on the other, as bases for rights in contemporary America. Special rights debates about tribal smoke shops (and casinos) mask the fact that cigarette sales are rooted in Seminoles’ uniqueness: their political uniqueness. It is American Indian tribes’ status as specific kinds of polities— (semi)sovereign tribes—that authorizes tax-free cigarette sales on reservations. Within special rights discourse, the political basis for economic specificity goes unmarked or is delegitimized, unlike the supposed cultural uniqueness of crafts and alligator wrestling. This is not a matter of critics’ improperly mixing culture with politics, as if the two are in fact separate and identifiable domains. Rather, the analytical task is to trace patterns in how and when debates over indigenous productivity compel Seminoles and non-Seminoles to generate and worry about relationships among culture, politics, and economy. Most Seminoles and observers agree that there is little that is distinctly Seminole in smoke shops and casinos, but they often disagree about the implications. For critics, Seminoles’ economic instrumentalism and the alienability of their economic actions undermine their indigeneity, calling into question the legitimacy of these economic ventures. By contrast, Seminoles often view

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the expansion and diversification of the tribal economy as strengthening their community. Smoke shops and other twentieth-century Seminole economic development projects call attention to the economic logics—of inalienability, cultural valuation, and instrumentalism—that structure putative oppositions between indigeneity and capitalism in settler societies. Many scholars contend that indigenous market participation entails capitalist dependency and promotes internal colonialism (Beckett 1982; Faiman-Silva 1997a, 1997b; Jorgensen 1990), often suggesting that market integration intrinsically threatens indigenous lifeways. Others, such as Stephen Cornell and Joseph Kalt, argue that the key to economic development “success” is not the form of economic activity but whether it is “self-determined economic development” that is controlled by tribes (Cornell and Kalt 1992: 5). Like the Menominees and Metlakatlans studied by historian Brian Hosmer, twentieth-century Seminoles repeatedly “chose economic modernization as the best possible way to preserve, not abandon, distinctive identities” (Hosmer 1999: 224). Just how they have figured the relationship between culture and economy, however, has varied. Some choices—cattle, craft production, alligator wrestling—yielded meaningful cultural practices and identities, while others—some forms of wage labor, smoke shops, casinos—have been income generators but not sites of indigenous cultural identity. Through the lens of cultural production we can see how Seminoles’ and others’ distinctly modern conception of a Seminole culture— as identifiable, measurable, capable of loss or preservation—partially emerged from, and has been challenged in relation to, economic development. Gaming has extended this process to an unprecedented economic scale, so it is to gaming that we now return.

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2

​Cultural Currencies

​I

n late July 2000, just after I had moved to Florida, my new neighbor Brian, a thirty-something white civil engineer, expressed his interest in Seminoles. Like many Floridians, he claimed to know exactly how much each Seminole received in monthly per capita casino dividends, and he remarked upon Seminoles’ rapid transition from poverty to gaming-based wealth. Brian did not begrudge them the money, but he was beginning to think that, because of casinos, Seminoles had “sold out.” He worried that “they have just about destroyed their heritage.” “Money is the root of all evil,” Brian stated, and he speculated that Seminoles no longer felt the need to hold jobs.1 He finished, with sincere concern: “I think of them as a proud people, but these days I’m not sure they feel that way about themselves” (July 30, 2000). At parties, over coffee, and in supermarket checkout lines, non-Indians of all political stripes who learned that my work addresses Florida Seminole casinos expressed concerns akin to Brian’s. They asked questions like: “So, are Seminoles losing their culture?” or “Have they sold out?” The 1999 final report of the National Gambling Impact Study Commission (NGISC), a body established by Congress, found that “a common theme among many opposed to Indian gambling is a concern that gambling may undermine the ‘cultural integrity’ of Indian communities” (National Gambling Impact Study Commission 1999: 6–3).

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A representative of a leading group opposing casinos and tribal sovereignty claimed that tribes hide behind the idea that “they need sovereignty to preserve their culture,” when instead they “use it to build casinos.” He added that corrupt governments among gaming tribes are “a bigger enemy of Indian culture than anybody,” and “Indians don’t need sovereignty, or a whole federal bureau, to maintain their culture” (quoted in Golab 2004).2 At stake in debates over tribal gaming are the value and the currency of culture. Tribal gaming calls attention to what Molly Mullin has called the “culturalization of difference,” whereby non–Native Americans understand the distinctiveness of Native peoples—and manage and market that distinctiveness—primarily as a matter of culture (Mullin 2001: 3). As the historian Paige Raibmon has argued, “authenticity” is the terrain upon which indigenous difference is worked out, and “white society continues to station authenticity as the gatekeeper of Aboriginal people’s rights to things like commercial fisheries, land, and casinos” (Raibmon 2005: 206).3 But this does not mean that Seminoles’ casino-era valuation of culture should be understood only as a reaction to outsider concerns over authenticity, since Seminoles also undertake cultural production through semiautonomous modes of indigenous valuation. Seminole cultural production in the casino era takes place at the intersection of the culturalization of difference with cultural sovereignty, which Wallace Coffey and Rebecca Tsosie define as the “effort of Indian nations and Indian people to exercise their own norms and values in structuring their collective futures” (Coffey and Tsosie 2001: 196). Casino profits and controversies have prompted Seminoles, too, to reconsider the meanings and modes of their cultural distinctiveness. This chapter shows Seminoles’ casino-era cultural claims and projects to emerge from their historical consciousness of mid-twentieth-century federal government assimilation programs, Baptist missionization, and perceived “cultural loss.” In the gaming context, Seminole culture has both a temporality and a politics, and it is an integral component of nation building. To understand these processes, this chapter offers case studies of the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum and tribal language preservation initiatives, along with a discussion of the bureaucratization of culture. Seminole concerns about self-defined culture center on the necessity to

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connect a collective future with a collective past and present, not only on easily-recognizable cultural projects or institutions. Therefore, the second section of this chapter turns from cultural institutions to the everyday practices of casino-era social reproduction, or the ways that Seminoles collectively reproduce themselves and that which they value. Money affects people’s relationships with one another by shortening them (as in a commodity sale) or lengthening them (as in debt). Therefore, an influx of money into any social group enables and forces people to reconsider the temporality, institutional structure, and morality of their internal and external relationships. A consideration of social reproduction illuminates why and how Seminoles have made particular choices about how to allocate casino revenues, and it prompts me to ask why money, as an economic form and a potent symbol, raises concerns for Seminoles and social scientists alike about the commodification of social life.4 All of this demonstrates how indigenous social reproduction mediates different “regimes of value,” or the diverse social contexts in which the value and conventions of exchange operate (F. Myers 2001a; Appadurai 1986). “Cultural L oss” and “Cultural Renaissance”

Gaming raises questions about what counts as productive action in the world, so an analysis of casino-era cultural production can show how indigenous peoples navigate the relationship between self-identified culture and casino capitalism. Casinos long have been a focal point for American debates about modernity, as illustrated in historian Ann Fabian’s analysis of the ways that gambling debates structured nineteenth-century concerns about the social effects and moral implications of capitalist speculation (Fabian 1990). Production was uncertain, as many Americans worried that gambling engaged participants—and society as a whole—in pseudoeconomic activity that disrupted productivity and generated seeming (but unreal) value from nothing. As Fabian asserted: “Gambling was neither production nor consumption, and its study provides a different view of the debates about the morality of great profits and about the origins of value” (10). In early-twenty-first-century America, anxiety about the nonproductivity of gaming often is linked to concerns about larger political economic shifts from manufacturing to a service economy. Nonetheless, Seminole casinos and their revenues have been catalysts for cultural production and

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historical reckoning, even as casinos also have posed new cultural challenges (see also Klima 2002).5 Many Seminoles associate casinos with new cultural opportunities. Casinos have augmented personal incomes, and some individuals and families have chosen to spend a portion of their growing financial resources on cultural activities. At a collective level, the stunning growth in tribal budgets has facilitated a rapid expansion of tribal cultural programming. Seminole preschoolers drink sofkee (a corn porridge), recite the pledge to the Seminole flag in their own language, and listen to stories about the antics of trickster rabbit or how the deer got its hooves. The Pemayetv Emahakv Charter School at Brighton, which opened in fall 2007, offers instruction in Seminole language, culture, and history. Meanwhile, pupils at the K–12 Ahfachkee School in Big Cypress tend a garden and learn about medicine plants, while Brighton summer students have studied the principles of geometry through chickee construction. Adults attend art classes and tribal festivals, and the tribal museum records and archives oral histories. The proliferation of casino-funded organized activities has intensified reservation sociality, even though these goings-on might not at first glance (or in all Seminoles’ eyes) seem to be particularly “cultural.” For example, the nationally recognized Seminole Rez Rally annually brings hundreds of participants together (over 1,000 in 2007) on reservation-based teams that walk or run for diabetes awareness. Throughout the year, families gather for tribal intramural basketball and bowling tournaments, they display collector cars or barbecuing skills at Indian Day or July 4 celebrations, or they cheer for the Miami Dolphins from the Seminole Tribe’s private box at Dolphin Stadium. Groups of elders and students travel to destinations such as powwows in New Mexico, resorts in the Bahamas, or Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. In fact, casino-era reservation activities have become so plentiful that families often face scheduling conflicts, and it’s easy to fill dresser drawers with commemorative T-shirts from tribal events. Casinos have prompted Seminoles to consider the currency of culture, both in the sense that they reckon the value of culture and in the sense that they recognize the materiality of culture. Cultural Education Department director Madeline Tongkeamha (Tiger/Panther) directly linked casino money to cultural strength: “I think that all this money frees us to do more with our culture” (August 28, 2000). As Richard Bowers (Panther) told a

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University of Florida interviewer in 1999, “You have the ability and the economics to do what you want to do. In Corn Dance, a lot of the resources that we have are poured into there because it is our culture. We have culture classes for people who don’t know, maybe, some of the stories that we heard. . . . Once we have the economics, I think we can get back our culture” (SPOHP #224: 10). This embrace of the potential of casino money to “do more with” or “get back” culture does not mean that Seminoles straightforwardly equate economic wealth with culture. Rather, it is common to state, as Max Osceola Jr. (Panther) did at the 2002 Miss Seminole contest, that “Indians have always believed we are rich. We just didn’t have any money. What were we rich in? Culture, tradition, family” (August 18, 2002). Money is not the locus of culture or the source of all wealth, but neither is it the case that wealth and money are opposed to culture. As the above quotations indicate, the sense of being “freed” and “getting back” traditional ways permeates Seminole discourse around casinos and culture. This might surprise my neighbor Brian and others who assume that more money for Indians contributes to “cultural loss.” Why might we think that wealth, more than poverty, makes it hard for indigenous communities to live in ways they find valuable and distinctive? In part this is because poverty structures popular conceptions of indigeneity, as I discuss in the next chapter, and in part this reflects a broader American suspicion that money pollutes, instrumentalizes, or erases art and culture.6 But this raises a more general question: why is indigenous culture so often cast as being lost? Tropes of cultural loss themselves have histories and logics, and settler societies’ algebra of indigenous culture presumes loss while finding gain suspicious.7 This is not a straightforward question of authenticity: rather, the stakes of perceived cultural loss vary among peoples who are differently positioned in relation to expectations that they “have a culture” in the first place. For American Indians, the question of culture is pressing, in part because their political status in practice often relies on maintaining cultural difference that is observable to outsiders and, more important, because cultural distinctiveness establishes a meaningful present and ensures a collective future for indigenous peoples. The assumption that Seminoles would amalgamate into a diffusely American culture is not new. For example, a sympathetic 1887 ethnographic report by Clay MacCauley for the Bureau of American Ethnology concluded

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that Seminoles either would die in an attempt to fend off white incursions or “they will have to submit to a civilization which, until now, they have been able to repel and whose injurious accompaniments may degrade and destroy them” (MacCauley [1887] 2000: 530). Roy Nash’s 1931 government report offered a clearer prediction: “Nature has decreed the ultimate goal. It is amalgamation. Five hundred Seminoles surrounded by the rapidly increasing white population of Florida are destined to be absorbed as inevitably as a lump of salt thrown into Lake Okeechobee is destined to be dissolved. A thousand years hence there will not be a drop of recognizable Indian blood in the State of Florida” (Nash 1931: 75). Although often admiring of their ways, Nash referred to Seminoles as an “anachronism” and predicted that the Green Corn Dance soon would disappear. Another ethnologist referred to Seminoles as “the last wild band of North American Indians” (Skinner 1911: 154).8 Of course, Seminoles have not disappeared, but neither has outsider suspicion that they soon will. Many Seminoles tell a story of cultural loss, too, but often with different historical reference, narrative content, and normative implications. Discourses of cultural loss by middle-aged and elderly Seminoles generally center less on the present than on the 1960s and 1970s, a time that one man labeled the “period of cultural debasement.”9 The Tribe’s 1957 reorganization had generated increased contact with federal officials and provided new jobs. New housing and other federal modernization projects altered family relations and introduced bureaucratic organization to tribal governance (see chapter 4). Reservation Baptist pastors discouraged Seminoles from observing traditional religious practice, Green Corn Dance attendance declined, and Baptists disproportionately were elected to office (Buswell 1972; Freeman 1960; Sturtevant 1954a).10 Many Seminoles partially or wholly embraced the goals of modernizing projects, speaking English with their children and otherwise hoping that adopting some practices of their ever-more-numerous white neighbors would lead to a brighter future. Children attended local public schools and Indian boarding schools in greater numbers. Anthropologist Merwyn Garbarino (1972) characterized this as a period of rapid change leading inexorably to assimilation. Jim Shore (Bird) considered the 1960s and 1970s to be the “lowest point” for Seminoles. He said that, at least on his home reservation of Brigh-

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ton, people had once believed that organized Christianity was their worst enemy, but in the wake of tribal reorganization and widespread Christian conversion they became their own worst enemy by losing their language and traditions. Nonetheless, he observed, after trying mainstream ways and deciding they didn’t like them, Seminoles once again grew interested in their traditions during the 1980s. He considered this to be the most recent in Seminole “cycles of nationalism” (December 6, 2000). By 2000, tensions between Baptists and Green Corn Dance attendees had declined, with many families participating in both religions and embracing traditional medicine.11 Some tribal members pointed to this religious shift as a sign of cultural renewal and balance. Here it is important to underline that Seminoles frequently link midcentury cultural loss to poverty and powerlessness, emphasizing that material constraints discouraged distinctive Seminole ways of life. They considered poverty, more than wealth, to undermine tradition and nationalism. Against this history of poverty-linked “cultural loss,” many Seminoles today consider themselves to be on a road to cultural renewal, in which they seek less to reject “modern” life than to achieve a balance that a local cliché names “the best of both worlds.” Nonetheless, parents struggle to interest children in cultural knowledge against the press of television, video games, and the Internet. As Jason Jackson has argued (2003: 106–7), indigenous discourses about cultural loss can facilitate cultural continuity. Indeed, one response to concerns about competing cultural messages has been for Seminoles to make their own media. As anthropologists have noted, media institutions are loci of indigenous cultural activism, nationalist projects, and struggles over identity and citizenship (see, e.g., Ginsburg, AbuLughod, and Larkin 2002b). WSBC, also known as Seminole Broadcasting, is the tribal closed-circuit television station, with production facilities on several reservations. Described by director Danny Jumper (Panther) as a “culturally educational community access TV channel” (December 12, 2000), Seminole Broadcasting covers community events such as senior citizen gatherings, Tribal Council meetings, and cultural programs. Broadcasting also produces documentary films, publishes a community calendar, and films family events upon request. Offscreen, staff members record and archive cultural knowledge. The widely read Seminole Tribune newspaper covers tribal news and sports and publishes birth announcements.12

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Some Seminoles speak of a casino-based “cultural renaissance.” While it would be tempting to end the story here—with the conclusion that casinos have buttressed Seminole cultural production and enabled the (re)assertion and revaluation of Seminole culture—this would overlook the way that the casino-based bureaucratization of cultural production has shifted both the politics and the locus of culture in Seminole Country. Bureaucratizing Culture 66

The casino era brought an increasing bureaucratization of culture, and with this came new modes of cultural production: work-based (rather than family-based) cultural transmission, codified curricula and other new forms of knowledge production, and paid cultural experts. These economy-based shifts prompted Seminoles to ask normative and practical questions about where culture is located and who should hold the power to convey and regulate it. Tribal gaming advocates such as the National Indian Gaming Association often cite the strengthening of tribal governance as a primary benefit of casinos, yet the growth of tribal institutions has compelled Seminoles and other indigenous groups to retool their cultural production within a newly bureaucratized field. This has consequences for the forms and meanings of culture itself. The limits of government as a vehicle for cultural education became apparent, for example, when Brighton cultural education instructors decided against teaching material that they deemed to belong within the strict domain of particular clans, such as medicinal knowledge and clan-specific stories, since they agreed that such knowledge was inappropriate for tribal-level consolidation. Such disjunctures and dilemmas—and debates about how best to manage them—have become the daily fare of Seminole cultural education in transition. While most Seminoles lauded tribal cultural education programs, some questioned whether the tribal government apparatus should be so central to cultural transmission. More specifically, adults worried that the tribal government had replaced the clan and family as the appropriate agents of cultural education. Even Billy L. Cypress (Bear)—executive director of the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum and the tribal member with the highest educational attainment in the American system (PhD candidacy in education at Arizona State University)—emphasized that no institution can substitute for the family. He blamed his own generation for failing to teach their

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children Seminole language(s) and culture, and he regretted that present conditions therefore required institutions to fill the knowledge gaps (August 24, 2000). On the other hand, some tribal members considered the institutionalization of culture to yield beneficial results that would be unattainable within families alone. For example, to museum employee Brian Zepeda (Panther), being Seminole required knowledge beyond what language use and other family-encoded cultural practices could offer: “Sure, you can speak the language, but if you don’t know your history or why we do things, it kind of makes it incomplete.” Historical and cultural institutions like the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, he contended, offer resources beyond what would be attainable through other modes of cultural transmission (February 28, 2001). The tribal government’s dedication of financial resources to professionalizing cultural projects has raised new questions about expertise. Seminoles in institutionalized positions of cultural authority face criticism from other tribal members for grandstanding or overextending their individual knowledge. As growing revenues have enabled a limited number of Seminoles to explore new media and methods of cultural production—publishing poetry or stories, recording music, obtaining college degrees—they frequently have garnered non-Seminole recognition to the detriment of their internal community standing. Tribal members also criticize one another for representing their own clans’ versions of legends, creation histories, or other knowledge as being authoritative or universal. Individuals diffuse potential criticism by, for example, prefacing public storytelling with a disclaimer about the clan-based specificity of the speaker’s knowledge. Speakers also externalize cultural judgment—for example, when the emcee of a Seminole clothing contest shielded himself from an evaluative stance by adding, after announcing the non-Seminole judges’ results in each category, that “that’s what the judges saw” (February 17, 2001). Another strategy is to criticize outsiders, rather than Seminoles, for failing to represent multiple Seminole points of view. For example, Brighton residents complained that curators from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian recorded creation histories only from Mikasuki-speaking authorities, whose renderings differed from Creek/ Muskogee versions and thus did not represent a significant portion of Seminoles. (The curators took this concern seriously, and the resulting

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exhibit included no creation histories.) Such criticism regulates the distribution of cultural knowledge, deindividualizes expertise, and prioritizes family- and community-based cultural production over individual virtuosity. Non-Seminole professionals positioned as “experts” on Seminole culture, often employed by the Tribe, face criticism when they gain authority and visibility that tribal members view as disproportionate or inappropriate. When tribal members disagree with non-Seminole employees’ professional opinions—for example about the meaning of a Mikasuki or Creek/ Muskogee word or about the wisdom of tribal officials’ actions—nonSeminoles’ jobs and everyone’s goodwill are put at risk. Meanwhile, some Seminole cultural educators resent that they do not receive adequate recognition, either from the “outside” world or from the tribal bureaucracy. For example, in a 1999 University of Florida interview, Lorene Gopher (Snake) from the Brighton Cultural Education program compared herself to PhD holders: “At the culture [department], I think they [i.e., the tribal government] could pay us more because what we know and what we try to teach, I do not care if I go to Harvard, they are not going to be able to teach me what I know already, as far as the culture or the history. As far as I am concerned, I should have a PhD” (SPOHP #252: 46–47). Gopher laid claim to authority that is more legitimate than formal American education, and she criticized the tribal government for failing to recognize her expertise. Others emphasized the similarities between American formal education and Seminole religious training, for example when medicine expert and ceremonial bundle carrier Sonny Billie (Panther) compared his and my formal training experiences, multi-stage and temporally-demarcated programs of study (medicine school takes place each winter)13, and educational privileges and responsibilities (November 15, 2000). These claims to training and expertise are a reminder that while casinos have encouraged new forms of bureaucratized culture, they did not introduce formalization, since formalized learning long has been in place. Rather, casino revenues facilitated changes in the institutional location of culture and the recognition of cultural authority. Two casino-era cultural projects that represent the dilemmas of bureaucratization and expertise alongside the promise of gaming-enabled cultural production are language preservation and the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum.

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“Save That Darn Language”

Seminoles and Miccosukees are unusual among eastern Native American groups for their high frequency and wide distribution of Native language use, especially Mikasuki. Linguist Jack Martin estimated that in 2000, there were 200 speakers of Creek/Muskogee and approximately 1,600 speakers of Mikasuki (cited in Sturtevant and Cattelino 2004: 429). Yet Mikasuki and Creek/Muskogee fluency and proficiency have declined since the midtwentieth century. Garbarino (1972: 55) observed during the late 1960s that no Big Cypress family spoke English as a primary language in the home. Many of today’s middle-aged adults first learned English in school, and some of their parents speak little English. In interviews, tribal members confirmed reports by U.S. officials from the early 1900s that Seminoles punished as criminals those who spoke or wrote English.14 Today, by contrast, few children speak Seminole languages fluently.15 Language preservation is a goal of many Seminoles, who frequently cite decreasing fluency as a marker of cultural loss. Former chairman James Billie (Bird) emphasized the importance of speaking the languages in everyday life, saying that next to economic development, language was his highest priority: “Once the money got there [and] it was reasonably safe, then I go out and find a priority. The first priority is to save that darn language, somehow, one way, shape, or form” (April 13, 2001). In 2000, Billie received the Indigenous Language Institute’s “Those Who Make a Difference” award in recognition of his work. Seminole language preservation efforts have been under way, almost all funded by the Tribe’s casino-based budget. For example, the Education Department hires Mikasuki-speaking teachers and/or aides for the Afachkee School, the Hollywood preschool program, and other educational sites, and adult Mikasuki classes are offered intermittently. The new Brighton charter school offers extensive language training. During the 1990s, the Tribe pursued an abortive effort to record and teach Mikasuki as part of the Rosetta Stone Project, which was produced by a company that marketed language CD-ROMs. The project drew so much interest among tribal members that one Seminole employee had to move from her office to her home in order to avoid the distraction of people stopping by to watch her work. Most Mikasuki teachers use an orthography developed by Christian mis-

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sionary and linguist David West, who spent at least half of each of thirteen years beginning in 1955 on Seminole reservations under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics and Wycliffe Bible Translators (SPOHP #33AB: 9).16 Instructors have been hindered by the lack of a Mikasuki dictionary and the absence of effective written curricular materials in either of the Seminole languages. Beginning in 2001, the Brighton Cultural Education Department hosted an annual language workshop, led by linguists and Creek/Muskogee dictionary authors Jack Martin and Margaret Mauldin (Martin and Mauldin 2000), with the goal of developing a Creek language instruction curriculum. Cultural educator Lorene Gopher (Snake) has written a Florida Seminole Creek dictionary that, as of 2006, she hoped would be published by the Tribe with restrictions on copyright and circulation (August 20, 2005). Carol Cypress (Panther) recently completed a restrictedcirculation Mikasuki dictionary in collaboration with Jack Martin (February 10, 2007). Although language preservation is a widely shared and well-funded goal among Seminoles, language codification and the use of outside experts raise concerns. Earlier efforts by linguists grew out of Christian missionization projects, leading some Seminoles to question the motives of outside scholars. With the exception of three dissertations (Boynton 1982; DerrickMescua 1980; Nathan 1977) and the new dictionaries, very little scholarly work has been completed on Mikasuki or Florida Seminole Creek/Muskogee. Some Seminoles, especially Mikasuki speakers, asserted that the languages should remain only oral, not written (indeed, avoidance of writing was part of the attraction of the CD-ROM project).17 Many Seminoles thus privilege “regenerativity” over the “memorialization” of language, in Robert Moore’s terms (2006), by paying more attention to the practical and identity-reinforcing possibility of maintaining a particular kind of plurilingual speech community than to the aesthetic, historical, or scientific pleasure of preserving languages.18 Some Seminoles consider language to be cultural property, and they fear that outsiders will steal and possibly earn money off of them.19 Adult language classes were closed to non-Seminoles, and several people discouraged me from learning Mikasuki (even though some of the same individuals subsequently encouraged me to come back and study it). At stake in this boundary making is indigenous control over cultural forms and representations, as language preservation connects directly to language rights and thus to sovereignty (Errington 2003).20 Chap ter 2

The motives for all of this talk about talk—these concerns about oral language preservation—are many. For one, indigenous language use has everyday practical benefits. The inability of youth to converse with their non-English-speaking elderly relatives, for example, interferes with dayto-day family living as well as with intergenerational cultural transmission. The efficacy of Seminole medicine/religion and, hence, the physical health of individuals who seek Seminole medicine rely on native language use (Sturtevant 1954a: 149). Use of Seminole languages also draws group boundaries around communicative acts, for example when Tribal Council meetings switch from English to Mikasuki or Creek/Muskogee at politically sensitive moments. Several people explained that this switch prevented non-Seminoles from understanding delicate conversations, though it also excluded many Seminoles. Language, of course, is not only a practical tool: virtually all Seminoles, even if they cannot speak Creek/Muskogee or Mikasuki, consider their languages to be an essential component of their cultural identity. “Having a language,” therefore, has become integral to “having a culture,” which in turn structures the possibilities of national recognition and belonging (Handler 1988, Silverstein 2003). As Lorene Gopher (Snake), director of cultural education at Brighton, said, language “identifies who you are, because if you don’t have a language, what else can you identify with? Because you can always get somebody’s clothes and wear them” (August 20, 2005). When I asked James Billie (Bird) why he prioritized language preservation over other needs, he responded: “For communication in my culture, because that’s the only thing that is there that sort of identifies who you are. No other group of people that I’m aware of speaks that language [Mikasuki], and so when you lose that one particular unique language, you lose your uniqueness as Seminole. And then the other uniqueness is their clans. The rest of it—making canoes and baskets—that can be made anywhere, because you learn how to use certain things out of the habitat you’re located in” (April 13, 2001). Billie tied language not only to communication but also to identity, and he ranked it, alongside clans, at the top of the scale of Seminole cultural value. Others emphasized the cosmic cost of losing the language. Mondo Tiger (Wind) explained that his grandmother used to tell him that when the language died there would be no culture left, and the world would come to an end. He was fairly sure this meant that the world would come to an end C u lt u r a l C u r r e n ci e s

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for Native Americans as such (not necessarily that it would blow up; April 12, 2001), although practitioners of traditional medicine emphasized that Seminoles carried universal responsibilities to maintain the world and that they could meet these obligations only if they maintained their linguistic and cultural distinctiveness. Language carries obligation and is a force of both collective separation (from other peoples) and interdependency (for maintaining humanity).21 Not surprisingly, language is highly political. First, it draws boundaries, both among Seminoles and between Seminoles and others, as the above Tribal Council example suggested. As Bonnie Motlow (Panther), a nonfluent Mikasuki speaker, said, language is “what keeps us separated” (September 14, 2000). Mikasuki and Creek/Muskogee are, in this sense, performative emblems of collective and individual positions in a shifting field of identities (Silverstein 1998). Language fluency also lends political authority to speakers. One aspiring politician told me that it is virtually impossible to win an election at Big Cypress without knowing Mikasuki, even though most constituents can speak English. That native language use is a political and nation-building measure is also evident in children’s recitation of Creek/Muskogee and Mikasuki pledges to the tribal flag at Seminole events, and in one former official’s comparison of efforts to save Seminole languages with Israel’s success in reviving and codifying Hebrew as an official language. As tribal chairman and the emcee at frequent tribal gatherings, James Billie (Bird) often told jokes in Mikasuki, associating the language with fun and including all who could understand it within a convivial community.22 The use of language to index and demarcate “Seminoleness,” however, is complicated by the presence of two indigenous languages within one tribe, and by the exclusion of Seminoles who do not speak or understand either of the two Native languages.23 Seminole linguistic boundary maintenance is not new, but rather had operated historically through some people’s refusal to learn English. Older Seminoles recall that as children in the 1930s and 1940s, they learned from their parents that dire consequences—both immediate punishment by adults and greater loss for their people—would follow if they learned English. Children were told that government education programs were part of a plot to remove Seminoles to Oklahoma, and parental suspicions must have been reinforced when one Seminole agent withheld food rations from

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families who refused to send children to school (Covington 1993: 197). Others warned that in the future, when a people from afar called mi:kili would come to liberate Seminoles from U.S. domination, those Indians who spoke or read English would be killed, whereas liberators would spare all other Seminoles.24 Alice Snow (Bird), born in 1922, remembers: “When I was young they don’t want me to go to school. But I said that, well, I’m going to go to school. And my mothers don’t let me go to school. When the little buses come around they told us to hide.” She was told that if Seminoles learned to read English, the typescript always would be reflected in their eyeballs. When the mi:kili came, they would look into Indians’ eyes, “and when they see that the written paper reflected, when they see that . . . they going to punish them. Then the end of the world. Before another world, that’s gonna happen. And that’s the reason they don’t want us to go to school” (April 13, 2001).25 Some Seminoles have interpreted mi:kili to refer to Communists, others to English kings.26 To this older generation, preserving Seminole linguistic distinctiveness and avoiding American education strengthened resistance to American military domination, made more likely Seminoles’ future liberation from colonization, and delayed the end of the world. The urgency of these elders’ cultural and political cause, if not necessarily the specific views they espoused, is reflected in casino-era efforts to preserve Seminole languages. Ideas abound: to dub movies in the languages, to produce computer-animated cartoons of legends, to hold language contests with lucrative prizes, to create language immersion schools, and, always, somehow to convince parents to speak indigenous languages at home. Paul Buster (Otter), a musician and cultural educator, translated the children’s song “Puff the Magic Dragon” into Mikasuki (July 11, 2001). Creek/Muskogee instructors at Brighton led games of “language bingo.” Many see casino revenues as the best hope for accomplishing their goal. Whatever the impact of their efforts on everyday speech, it remains the case that Seminoles are reworking the meanings and stakes of indigenous language in the casino era. A Place to Learn, a Place to Remember

The late twentieth century saw rapid growth in the number of American Indian tribal museums, with Patricia Erikson reporting that by 2002 more

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than one hundred Native communities in the United States had established their own (2002: 17). This growth can be attributed in part to casino revenues, which for the first time enabled many tribes to pursue expensive cultural projects: indeed, a museum often is built soon after a tribe opens a casino. Beyond casinos, tribal museums are the consequence of growing interest in storing and displaying objects acquired under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA 1990), as well as the rising popularity of “multicultural” American museums that display the cultures, histories, and arts of minority groups (Karp and Lavine 1991). The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, the Mikasuki name of which has been translated as “a place to learn, a place to remember,” sits on a sixty-acre cypress hammock at Big Cypress, an hour’s drive from the nearest population center. The museum opened with 2,000 attendees on August 21, 1997, on the fortieth anniversary of tribal reorganization. The Okalee Museum, a smaller branch, now stands in a pedestrian mall outside the Hard Rock casino in Hollywood. Although the Tribe had operated small museums in the past, the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum put Seminoles on the map of museum professionals and collectors, drew busloads of schoolchildren and European tourists, and forced the Tribe to evaluate in monetary and other terms the value and risks of institutionalizing cultural production and display in the casino era. The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum represents strategies of cultural production that are entwined with casino politics and tribal sovereignty claims: it reflects Seminoles’ valuation of cultural distinctiveness, constructs a pedagogy of difference through which Seminoles can learn about their past, and asserts cultural authority to a tourist public. The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, which is slated for future expansion, consists of a 5,000-square-foot exhibit area, a curatorial building, a gift shop, picnic grounds, a library, and a mile-long educational boardwalk. The main building entrance and the covered pavilion in front evoke chickees (figure 13). The boardwalk passes through a beautiful swampy cypress hammock, introducing visitors to indigenous plants and leading to a model chickee village with live demonstrations by Seminole artists. While I volunteered at the museum, Seminole tour guides, usually dressed in patchwork, welcomed visitors and escorted them to view a five-screen video, We Seminoles, about Seminole culture and history.

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Figure 13. Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, 2002. Photo by author.

Exhibits are arranged in three permanent galleries, covering economy, social organization, and religion. David Blackard, the former museum director who was involved in the gallery design, explained that the galleries corresponded to early American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan’s divisions of society (March 6, 2001). Text panels using quotations from elders teach viewers about hunting, fishing, traditional marriage, material culture, and the Green Corn ceremony (figure 14). The first Seminolecurated exhibit was mounted in 2006, and in 2007 the museum opened an exhibit of contemporary art that ranged from abstract metal sculpture to ink drawings. Most older display objects are on loan from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, but the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum increasingly has acquired a permanent collection. For example, in 2006 they purchased a portrait of nineteenth-century Seminole leader Micanopy and an original 1774 diplomatic letter of recognition from the British crown’s governor to Seminole leader Cowkeeper. Even as the museum aims to present “Seminole culture,” it has become an arbiter thereof. During the initial exhibit design, for example, the staff selected individuals to model for mannequins based on who “looked Seminole.” The museum presents programs aimed at both Seminoles and nonSeminoles, including school tours, art classes, and lectures. As David

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Figure 14. Brian Zepeda (Panther) leading a tour of Seminole students through the Green Corn Dance exhibit, 1998. Courtesy of the Seminole Tribe of Florida.

Blackard, former museum director, acknowledged, employment has been the only consistent interface with the tribal community: “The museum currently has had difficulty getting the tribal members interested in any of our other activities” (June 28, 2001). Yet he also pointed to efforts that augmented participation, such as well-attended stickball games at a 2001 museum festival (the women won by a narrow margin).27 More recently, the museum has developed community outreach to Seminole reservations. Casinos made the museum possible, and the museum linked casinos to sovereignty in new ways. Several war veterans told me that when they returned from Vietnam they occasionally gathered in a cypress grove to drink, and there they sometimes discussed the possibility of establishing a tribal museum. This dream went nowhere until gaming made it feasible. Having a tribal museum represented tribal independence from federal control. Then-chairman James Billie (Bird), who often mentioned that he had been born in a Miami chimpanzee farm where Seminoles were displayed alongside exotic animals, explained the federal government’s prior failure to support Seminole museum-building efforts as a denial of nationhood: “Uncle Sam wants you to know only Uncle Sam’s way of life. [He wants you to] be in his museum as another artifact, another species of human

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that he’s conquered. So why is the government going to give you anything to build something up that sort of defines itself as a sovereign unit? So as soon as we got our own monies I built a museum” (April 13, 2001).28 Here Billie identified the museum with “build[ing] something up that . . . defines itself as a sovereign unit,” linking sovereignty to self-representation through cultural institutions. The museum, then, represents and materializes gaming success and the underlying tribal sovereignty claims upon which gaming is based. The cultural politics of gaming are manifest in the museum. Even as tribal casinos enable Native American groups to establish museums, gaming simultaneously provokes public criticism of tribes’ cultural legitimacy, to which museums are rejoinders (Bodinger de Uriarte 2007). As Brian Zepeda (Panther), museum operations manager, explained: “The first question that people ask us is: ‘What do you do with all the money from gaming?’ This [the museum] is one of the answers to that question” (February 28, 2001).29 Museum-based claims to cultural distinctiveness often take a multiculturalist form (see Gordon and Newfield 1996). The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum stakes a multiculturalist claim to Seminoles’ place in the landscape of Florida, where struggles remain heated over the role of multiculturalism in the state education curriculum and where tourism boards increasingly promote racial and cultural diversity as an engine of economic development. As Louise Gopher (Panther), who was involved in the museum’s planning, described its mission: “We want people to know that we have a culture” (March 13, 2001). During Native American month (November) and throughout the school year, the museum hosts busloads of non-Indian pupils from elementary schools seeking to fulfill state curricular mandates for multicultural education. The museum also sends employees to public schools and to meetings of local chambers of commerce and tourism boards, thereby contributing to the corporate multiculturalism that increasingly characterizes American business practices. The Ah-Tah-ThiKi Museum, like the Aboriginal acrylic paintings analyzed by Fred Myers (2002: 5), is “an objectification . . . of local culture into new and changing contexts of social relationships” that can be understood as a form of activism taking hold within a multicultural context. The museum also promotes a sovereignty-based mode of cultural pro-

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duction.30 Museums, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues (1998: 65), bring together the politics of culture with the trappings of nationhood: “Having a past, a history, a ‘folklore’ of your own, and institutions to bolster these claims, is fundamental to the politics of culture: the possession of a national folklore, particularly as legitimized by a national museum and troupe, is cited as a mark of being civilized.” The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum produces nationhood in its film and exhibits but also through tribal diplomacy and administration, for example when Seminole officials escort visiting dignitaries to the museum. Museum staff represented the Tribe at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, participating in diplomatic ceremonies with Aboriginal Australian groups. The museum also fulfills tribal government duties, including repatriation by the NAGPRA officer and historical preservation by the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer. In these and other ways, the museum is not only a display but also an everyday project of tribal sovereignty. Casino-linked cultural projects point to the currency of culture for indigenous peoples in contemporary settler societies. Here we see money not as corrosive of culture or abstracting of difference, but rather as a force through which culture (itself an abstraction) is evaluated, produced, disciplined, and channeled. Wallace Coffey and Rebecca Tsosie (2001: 202) have placed culture at the definitional and causal foundation of sovereignty, arguing that “cultural sovereignty is the bedrock of Native peoples’ selfdetermination,” where “cultural sovereignty posits that culture is the living basis for the survival of Indian nations as distinct political and cultural groups.” “Having a culture” is a matter of patrimony, a trait of nationhood, not only for indigenous nations but also for nation-states (Handler 1985).31 Lest it seem that Seminoles approach these matters only through bureaucratized institutions or easily identified “cultural” practices, I now turn to Seminole social reproduction. By doing so, I connect casino-era cultural politics to pressing issues of how Seminole sociality and difference can be sustained through gaming-linked practices of consumption, monetized exchange, and intergroup interaction. Making and Breaking the Ties That Bind

Cultural production through self-identified cultural institutions and practices is only one of the ways that casinos simultaneously threaten and reChap ter 2

inforce Seminoles’ distinctiveness: tribal gaming also forces Seminoles to reconsider the value and mechanism of their reproduction as a people. “Culture” is an abstraction that humans create for themselves in relation to others, as is “society,” but beyond self-identified “cultural” practices Seminoles also face new questions about how to maintain social forms and practices that enable their communities to continue as such. Money is at the core of these predicaments and possibilities. Georg Simmel ([1907] 1990: 297) considered money to fundamentally change social relations, positing that the abstract and interchangeable nature of money leads to a reduction of distinctiveness in human relations, because money “is conducive to the removal of the personal element from human relationships through its indifferent and objective nature.” The remainder of this chapter examines the dilemma of casino money as a matter of social reproduction, or the ways that Seminoles regenerate people, objects, and relationships in order to pursue a collective future (Weiner 1980). Rather than trap this argument in what Jean Baudrillard (1975) has called the “mirror of production” (whereby the meaning and, even more, the value, of production go unquestioned), “social reproduction” allows me to consider the link between the Seminole casino-based economy and the quandaries and potential of monetary power in Seminole social life. Annette Weiner began from the premise that “any society must reproduce and regenerate certain elements of value in order for the society to continue” (1980: 71), and this led her to search for both reproductive flows and the elements of value that moved through them. This usefully points to exchange and objects as domains of future making.32 Social reproduction works against the more generalized forces of deterioration and loss that Weiner suggested face all human communities, but that I would further suggest are especially urgent for American Indians. This is so both because of colonialism’s legacy and, in the case of Seminoles, as an effect of tribal gaming wealth. The continuation of Seminole society is a pressing and much-discussed concern among tribal members, whether for elders who recount stories of nineteenth-century U.S. efforts to kill or forcibly relocate them, for middle-aged individuals who worry about language and cultural loss but are proud of surviving assimilation efforts, or for young people who are eager to take full advantage of casino benefits.

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One site of casino-era Seminole social reproduction is the circulation and consumption of new objects and experiences. Analysts of gambling have suggested that it is “a dramatic example of pure conspicuous consumption” (J. Smith 1996). As a form of exchange in which money is gotten for money, and in which players hope to earn “something for nothing” (Lears 2003), gambling produces nothing directly. Andrew Hines Jr., thenpresident of the Florida antigaming umbrella group No Casinos and retired chief of the state’s second largest electric utility, urged Florida voters in 1994 to reject a ballot initiative to expand gaming by linking gaming to organized crime and arguing that gaming injects “a something-for-nothing atmosphere” because it is “not a value-added industry” (Fiedler and Faiola 1994). Similarly, in 2002, New York Times columnist William Safire accused tribal gaming of “promoting a noxious something-for-nothing slots philosophy.” Yet, as this chapter’s discussion of cultural production suggests, I find Seminole casinos to be enormously, if indirectly, productive: of Seminole sociality, governance, and cultural distinctiveness. It is not only for players that gaming is a matter of consumption: for tribal citizens, each of whom draws regular per capita dividends from casinos, gambling has enabled new and expanded forms of consumption. Expensive new vehicles fill tribal parking lots and driveways, some young people wear designer clothing, plastic surgery is on the rise, household renovations are underway, and it is not uncommon to see tribal members with Rolex watches or high-end electronics. New York City and Las Vegas have become attractive shopping vacation destinations, especially for women, while many men have taken big-game hunting trips to the American West and, in at least one case, to Africa. Tribal citizens now can travel widely on domestic and international vacations, including to powwows and other American Indian events. Going out to eat can mean a trip to Sonny’s Barbecue or another affordable chain restaurant, or it can entail dinner at more expensive locales like Benihana, high-end restaurants at Seminole casinos, or steakhouses. Interested youth spend summer weeks at educational and recreational camps, pursue hobbies, and enjoy other enrichment opportunities. In the overall environment of South Florida, such practices are hardly

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notable, and consumption on Seminole reservations does not approach the scale of the wealthier neighborhoods of nearby Fort Lauderdale, Miami, and Naples. Moreover, it must be emphasized that many Seminoles choose not to spend money on high-end consumer items, while others, for various reasons including boom-and-bust household spending patterns, bear debt burdens and lack the disposable income necessary for such consumption. Nonetheless, Seminole consumption in the casino era is significant as a focal point for discussion about the value of Seminole community, a marker of transition from prior colonization-linked poverty, and an index of shifting relative wealth between Seminoles and neighboring non-Indian communities. In diverse South Florida, where “new money” is everywhere, but where Seminoles also maintain ties with some “old money” families who had employed and traded with them, the broader cultural significance of Seminole wealth is still very much up for grabs. Seminole gaming thus illustrates the anthropological argument that wealth is less about the ability to fulfill set needs than about relative social position. That is, Seminoles’ relative wealth is the flip side of Marshall Sahlins’s argument (1972: 37) that poverty “is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.”33 Casino-era consumption practices have exposed Seminoles and other American Indians to allegations of assimilation, as if materialism and consumption are inherently nonindigenous and inherently Western.34 They are not, but nor are they social categories that transcend history and culture; instead, “tactics of consumption” are contingent and embedded in relationships of power (de Certeau 1984). Before rushing to the conclusion that consumption either endangers or strengthens indigenous cultural integrity, then, we need to understand the social meanings of consumption in Seminole communities. New conspicuous consumption has prompted intratribal criticism and has undercut solidarity, but it also has reinforced distinctive sociality. Many Seminoles worry about the effects of consumption, although generally for slightly different reasons than their non-Seminole critics. Some tribal members recall the pregaming era as more “simple,” before money complicated life. Others characterize conspicuous consumption as fraying social and political ties, for example when worrying that teenagers’ obses-

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sions with electronics erode family values. Parents are especially concerned that casino wealth has enabled youth to buy more drugs, although to date there is no conclusive evidence that reservation drug and alcohol use have been exacerbated by increased income. Some tribal citizens told me that conspicuous displays of wealth were not very “Seminole,” stating that it was fine for people to enjoy their money, but they shouldn’t show it off. At Tribal Council meetings and in private conversations, adults complained about other Seminoles who repeatedly took out tribal loans to remodel their homes, each time throwing away perfectly good used furniture. Personal spending became a policy issue whenever the Tribal Council declared a reduction or elimination of individual loans (despite such proclamations, loans rarely seemed to diminish) or when they debated the ethics and efficacy of withholding money for loan repayments from individuals’ dividend checks. The trope of waste pervaded morality tales about abandoned furniture, vehicles, and electronics, as Seminoles worried not that they owned too much, but rather that they did not value what they owned, or that they bought the “wrong” things, such as drugs.35 Commenting in 1999 on the proliferation of Seminole consumption, Helene Johns Buster (Panther) told a University of Florida interviewer that she believed it would be only a matter of time before Seminoles developed stable spending strategies: I feel that [the money] is rightfully due to us. It is kind of like newfound money. You buy all of your play things and all of the things you always wanted with that. And then after you get all of that stuff you realize, hey, there is still a life, I still have to live a life, even with all of my toys I still have to go and make a life for myself. Hopefully, we’re going to get, as a tribe, into that place where we say, oh, okay, we have all our toys now. Now I need to learn how to invest this money. I need to think about my future. We’re not at that point yet. (SPOHP #248: 23) Here consumption has a temporality, a progressive history. In a similarly insightful comment upon the situational meanings of money and wealth, one middle-aged man told me that he just doesn’t know how to tell when enough money is enough, since he never had money before. Gloria Wilson (Snake), a middle-aged woman elected as Hollywood Board representative in 2005, ran on a platform of personal and tribal fis-

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cal responsibility. Wilson had worked for several years for the United South and Eastern Tribes (USET) in Nashville, and she credited that time away from the reservation for giving her business skills and for helping her to see beyond the attraction of immediate spending. She said that she spoke to tribal members about personal financial management in the following terms: We all come from the same place. There are no Astors and there are no Gettys in our Tribe. We all started the same place, and we’re all pretty much at the same place. So we all know one another. So, the way I’ve done it [public education], like with the young people I’m always like: “If you start now, saving your money—it could be 50 bucks a month or whatever—as long as you’re saving it, putting it in the right places, you could be a millionaire by the time you’re forty-something years old.” Wilson was planning to purchase one share each of Disney and Nike stocks for Hollywood Reservation kindergarten and high school graduates, respectively, as an incentive to learn financial management. She targeted leadership training at women and youth. Like other adults, she worried that young people who had not known poverty would not appreciate gaming wealth and might squander it. She explained that she grew up in a chickee (the key image of poverty and old ways) and had to work afterschool jobs, but “the bad thing about gaming to me is that it’s taken our people from nothing to—how do you wanna say—totally immersed in money.” There had been no time to get “acclimated to the situation,” she continued; rather, “it’s like winning the lottery: you get your money right away and then all you got is money and all you know how to do is spend” (August 17, 2005).36 Like others, Wilson worried that gaming-based spending would delink the Seminole past from the present and would threaten the Seminole future. Even as it threatens collective continuity and cohesiveness, gaming-era consumption also can facilitate social reproduction. Seminole consumption often follows and reinforces patterns of relatedness, especially matrilineal clan obligation, although this is not generally evident in the objects purchased. This occurs when, for example, maternal uncles host elaborate birthday parties for their nieces and nephews, or when baby showers are held at the four-lunar-month marker of a child’s full entry into the world.37

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New spending power also supports cultural production, for example when Seminoles purchase expensive sweetgrass baskets and elaborate patchwork clothing from one another or buy clan totems such as gold panther jewelry and commissioned sculptures. One man customized his motorcycle and helmet with Seminole medicine colors and Panther clan symbols. Consumption also stands for Seminoles’ collective triumph over federal dependence and poverty.38 Seminole parents take pride in providing for their children, now that they no longer rely on the federal government for rations or on philanthropic groups for clothing. In fact, it is common for Seminole adults to comment upon their past poverty when purchasing or displaying new objects. Insofar as they reinforce patterns of relatedness and refer to a history of poverty and oppression, Seminole consumption and exchange enact social reproduction. Rez Cars

Cars were focal points for assessing the social dangers of consumption in the casino era. For some Seminoles, cars represent the power of objects and their circulation to embody, maintain, and transform social value. In American Indian popular culture, a “rez car” is old, often broken down, and always in need of ingenuity to keep it running. In the independent film hit Smoke Signals, for example, two women generously pick up passengers in need of a ride and display consistently good humor, all while driving a rez car that only runs in reverse. Ojibwe39 rocker Keith Secola’s hit “NDN KRZ ’49” is a classic riff on the rez car, and it includes the lines: I got a sticker says “Indian Power” I stuck it on my bumper It’s what holds my car together. Anishinaabe poet and cultural critic Jim Northrup penned a poem titled “REZ CAR,” and he has published pictures of himself standing next to his car, which sports vanity plates with the same words. Seminoles illustrated toughness and ingenuity by recalling particular vehicles that they had kept running long beyond their time, including cars with holes in the floor that let passengers see the road below, not to mention one truck with a tear in the seat that was ideally placed for the discreet passing of gas. Rez cars display Indian poverty, but they also embody good humor, inventiveness,

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and fortitude. As Fred Myers (1989: 25) found in Aboriginal Australia, “cars become . . . objectifications of a set of social relationships.” In counterpoint to the values embodied by the rez car, Moses Jumper Jr. (Snake) illustrated his concerns about a casino wealth–based loss of sociability at Big Cypress by telling me about new automobile consumption patterns. Jumper moved his family from Hollywood to Big Cypress because it was quieter and had wide open spaces, and because he wanted to raise his children in a socially close-knit environment. It was the kind of place, he explained, where everyone waved to each other as they passed on the quiet reservation roads. He said that nowadays, by contrast, every time you turn around people are buying new cars and trucks, so no one knows who to wave to anymore (January 16, 2001). Anyone who has spent time in the rural South will recognize the implications for sociality when the carefully honed etiquette of the steering wheel wave is disrupted. At Big Cypress, people only wave to familiar vehicles, so waving signals familiarity and friendliness. For Jumper, not being able to figure out who to wave to represented the dangers of casino-era conspicuous consumption, as material goods—and the values they embody—get in the way of meaningful social relations and undermine the intimacy and familiarity that once characterized reservation life. Others used cars to exemplify money’s failure to fix social and political problems, for example complaining that drunks just ask their Tribal Council representatives for new vehicles every time they crack up a car in an accident or drive one into a roadside canal (the ubiquitous canals pose significant danger along swamp roads). During a 2002 federal trial over alleged embezzlement by three non-Seminole tribal employees, the local press made a great deal out of testimony that elected officials had spent discretionary budgets on “Lexuses, Cadillacs, and other luxury cars” (Cabral 2002c). Indeed, cars have been a consistent trope in local articles about casino-based Seminole spending. This is a contemporary echo of white Americans’ scandalized early-twentieth-century representations of Indians behind the wheel as engaged in “mindless squandering,” a phenomenon that Philip Deloria discussed in a wonderful essay about Indian cars (2004: 144). In a Miami Herald article about Seminoles’ effort to counter images of the Tribe as reckless and freewheeling, Gloria Wilson (Snake) invoked fancy cars as a signifier of misplaced family priorities: “We’ve always

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Figure 15. My Honda Civic, parked at a Big Cypress craft shop, 2002. Photo by author.

had a joke that the people driving the BMWs and Lexuses and Cadillacs, they are the ones who get more than one dividend.40 Those of us who are single or are investing our children’s money for the future are still driving older cars” (Cabral 2002a). Here, fancy cars represent interrupted social reproduction and corrupted social ties. Without question, luxury cars have been a target of recent Seminole desire and consumption, more so than most other goods. On rural reservations many residents drive extended-cab pickup trucks, some with custom paint jobs, or SUVs. In urban Hollywood, one sees BMW convertibles, Corvettes, and a few Hummers. Several tribal members have begun to collect vintage automobiles, and car shows are a regular feature of Indian Day and other cultural celebrations. Advertisements in the Seminole Tribune, which have changed dramatically since gaming (from offering bail bonds and nocredit-loans to financial consultants and travel agents), now feature many vehicles. The issue of June 30, 2006, for example, included a half-page advertisement by Millenium [sic] Limo, Inc., which promoted stretch Hummer limousine rentals including the “Seminole Edition,” “Independence Edition,” and “Tribal Edition” (along with the “American Idol Edition”). In this car culture, my used 1993 black Honda Civic (figure 15) became a marker of my social status and a way to befriend me (while poking gentle

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fun), in at least three ways. First, people laughed that mine was among the oldest and least flashy cars on the reservation, in contrast to the old days when white scholars, missionaries, and BIA employees seemed to be the only people who owned functional vehicles.41 Second, I kept my car longer than most Seminoles, so when I returned to Florida in subsequent years people often reminded me of a shared history by asking me, with a chuckle, if I still had “that little car of yours.” Finally, at the onset of my fieldwork at Big Cypress, the familiarity of my car to Seminole drivers became a barometer of my social presence, as measured by waving. I knew that I had crossed a social threshold once drivers began to wave at me on Snake Road, the winding thoroughfare—lined with cow-filled pastures and canals teeming with alligators as well as egrets and anhingas drying off their wings—that leads to the reservation from Alligator Alley (I-75). If the rez car in Indian humor, literature, and film is a plucky vehicle that runs on sheer ingenuity, today’s rez car in Seminole Country has transformed. When I asked Andrew Bowers Jr. (Snake), Brighton Council representative, about stereotypes of Seminoles in the gaming era, he paused before answering with an allegory about the Indian car: “There used to be a saying about Indian cars: it’s all dented up, headlight out, no taillights, tag hanging by a piece of wire. These days it’s a brand-new vehicle with a temporary tag: that’s an Indian car.” He laughed, adding: “I like the old, dented vehicle” (August 23, 2005). In his and others’ critiques, the temporariness of the tag and the uncertainty of the steering wheel wave, more than the vehicles themselves, are the concern. While local press coverage of gaming very often mentions the presence and seeming scandal of Seminoles merely owning Hummers, SUVs, and BMWs, tribal members are concerned less about consumption per se than about how to maintain a vibrant Seminole sociality under new material conditions. Wealth, Biosocial Reproduction, and Boundaries

Money prompts questions about who has it and what kind of relations it fosters or forecloses. As anthropologists have found elsewhere, when people worry about the social barriers that money crosses in circulation they normatively articulate what those very barriers should be, establishing moral discourses of money and sociality (Bloch and Parry 1989). Whether money has special qualities—as an object whose object is to circulate—

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that facilitate the breakdown of barriers has been a matter of some disagreement (Robbins and Akin 1999). In any case, anthropologists concur that talk about money’s character and power enables certain forms of action, including the creation of collective projects formulated as critiques of money or its particular potentialities, as Bill Maurer (2005) found for alternative currencies and Islamic banking. Money does not only shorten relations of exchange, it also compels people to consider the future and, as Keith Hart (2001) has shown, the past. When an American Indian tribal nation gains money and wealth, citizens face new dilemmas of defining the social and temporal boundaries of a tribal community. Casinos call into question who Seminoles are and what binds Seminoles together. Discourse about casino wealth links economic value to the reproduction of cultural and social value, and this is crystallized in Seminole debates about biological reproduction and childrearing. Children symbolize and become Seminoles’ future. Adult concerns about casino wealth and child rearing illustrate “the interplay between human life cycles and the life trajectories of material and immaterial resources” (Weiner 1980: 72).42 Perhaps the most common worry about gaming and children was that casino wealth would discourage Seminole youth from valuing work. Moses Jumper Jr. (Snake), director of the tribal recreation department, contrasted current wealth with the poverty of his childhood, saying that poverty “taught us a lot about living and working and competing.” Today’s children lack this drive, even in sports: “The hunger’s not there anymore.” He worried that casino wealth erodes long-standing Seminole values of hard work and self-reliance, even as he applauded the use of casino revenues to build social services such as his recreation department, which had grown from an annual budget of $16,000 in the 1970s to $1 million by 2001 (January 16, 2001). Some parents said that because of casinos they worked harder to instill a work ethic in their children. Wealth raised anxieties for Seminole parents about how their children could enjoy the benefits of economic plenty while also maintaining ways of relating that they considered distinctly Seminole. Technology exemplified these concerns. Parents could signal their familial devotion by buying electronics for their children. But they complained that they could not understand children’s new gizmos, that Nintendo games isolated children

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in their bedrooms, that young people could no longer be torn away from high-speed Internet connections and portable DVD players for familybased activities. Such concerns are familiar to most American parents, but they are intensified for Seminole parents, who not only worry in generalized ways about a perceived decline in family values but also feel obligated to perpetuate a distinct Seminole culture and polity. Jacob Osceola (Panther) recounted that when he visited his young son on the Tamiami Trail and suggested that they go for a ride, the boy refused to get into Osceola’s pickup truck, complaining that it did not have a VCR. Osceola grew visibly annoyed at the memory, saying that he responded by making his son climb into the truck and ride while Osceola told the child about his ancestry and about Seminole history and culture. In this morality tale, technology threatens to interfere with intergenerational cultural transmission, weakening the bonds that tie children to their parents and ancestors. Despite his irritation, however, Osceola did not oppose technology, and he even suggested that the Tribe produce Seminole-language videos of legends and action stories as a way to make Seminole culture and history more attractive to young people (January 29, 2001). Adults also worried that gaming wealth encouraged Seminole children to develop an inappropriate sense of entitlement. One woman described her children as acting like “princesses and kings,” and she found it necessary to remind them that she grew up in a chickee without electricity, drank soda only once or twice a month, and hardly ever ate ice cream. In response to such comments, children oscillated between recognizing their parents’ sacrifices and rolling their eyes at the “we walked to school uphill, both ways” character of their elders’ remarks. Carla Cypress (Panther), twenty-four, then a museum staff member and mother of three, worried that youth remain unaware of the injustices and suffering endured by other tribes because Seminoles are relatively isolated and financially comfortable (July 12, 2001). Charlotte Gopher Burgess (Snake) tells her son that learning Seminole ways is not optional, that “he has to learn to do it this way because ‘this is how I grew up, this is how Grandma grew up, this is how you have to do it.’ He doesn’t want to but he knows that he has no choice but to learn our ways” (August 23, 2005). Noah Billie (Panther),43 an accomplished painter, depicted both threats and solutions for intergenerational cultural transmission in his 1992 paint-

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Figure 16. Noah Billie (Panther), Traditions, 1992. AhTah-Thi-Ki Museum, permanent collection. Reproduced with permission of the Seminole Tribe of Florida.

ing Traditions (figure 16). In a tribally produced made-for-public-television film series (Seminole Artists: no. 6), Billie said that his works often created a scene to illustrate a story. He explained that this painting depicted a man speaking to children with a city in the background, and with shadows representing Seminole legends, clans, and values. The lesson, he said, is that learning tradition may keep children from crime. In this painting Billie connects cultural transmission to social reproduction, as legends, clans, and values keep children safe and make possible a Seminole future that includes both cities and stories. The city is not opposed to Seminoleness but instead forms a background (in horizontal continuity with a chickee) that evokes the geometric Seminole patchwork designs in clothing worn by the storyteller and a girl listener. Some Seminoles worry that casino wealth will lead to “inappropriate” reproduction if outsiders marry into the Tribe or have children with tribal members as a way to take advantage of Seminoles’ prosperity. Michele

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Thomas (Panther) told of non-Indian parents in Okeechobee who counseled their children on the financial benefit of marrying a Seminole, and she joked that “we are so good looking now that we have all this money” (August 18, 2005). I frequently heard non-Seminole Floridians joke about the prospect of striking it rich by marrying a Seminole. Some Seminoles complain about “dividend babies,” the children of non-Seminole (usually white) women who allegedly get pregnant by Seminole men as a way to make money on their children’s casino dividends. Although in-marriage and in-parenting by non-Seminole men also is common, it creates less resentment, presumably because the resulting children are matrilineal clan members. In the context of dividend babies, casino wealth becomes a way of talking about community boundaries, insofar as dividend babies stand in for loss (for the tribal community) or inappropriate gain (for the nonSeminole partner) at the boundaries of tribe, race, and kinship. Blood and race figured in Seminoles’ concerns about social reproduction, and this can be compared to the racial ideologies of kinship traced by Circe Sturm (2002) among Oklahoma Cherokees and Karen Blu ([1980] 2001) among Lumbees. Blood seems to be a less elaborated racial discourse among Florida Seminoles than among Cherokees. Nonetheless, as Sturm and Blu also found, the social “problem” of intimacy with non-Seminoles is inextricably linked to racial hierarchies. Some tribal citizens expressed concern that children today hardly “look Seminole,” and some drew racialized mental maps of the reservations based on the composition of surrounding communities (with Brighton considered more white, Immokalee more Latino, Fort Pierce more black, Big Cypress more Indian, and Hollywood a mix; speakers universally acknowledged these to be generalizations, even stereotypes). Middle-aged and elder Seminoles with mixed parentage told of past discrimination by both whites and Seminoles (one man half-joked that he was picked on as a “mixed blood” child because one parent spoke Mikasuki and the other Creek/Muskogee). Former chairwoman Betty Mae Jumper (Snake) recounted that in the early 1900s her grandfather protected her and her brother from would-be killers carrying out clan sentences of infanticide for babies of mixed Indian-white parentage (Jumper and West 2001: 39–42).44 Many commented that Indians’ racial position in South Florida had shifted after the massive Cuban migration, since now most non-Indians assume that Seminoles are Cuban

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or Mexican. One young woman complained that she gets dirty looks from older Cubans when she cannot return their Spanish-language greetings, saying she feels guilty enough about not being able to speak Creek/Muskogee, so she doesn’t need an additional source of guilt from people who think she has abandoned Spanish. Among many American Indian tribes, according to sociologist Angela Gonzales, gaming has produced new forms of “indigenous displacements” alongside successes, as illustrated by the casino-linked involuntary tribal disenrollment of citizens (Gonzales 2003). Perhaps the disenrollments most widely covered by the American press were among the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Mission Indians and the Redding Rancheria in California (Light and Rand 2005: 101). Casino politics have intensified and made more demanding the procedures by which the federal government recognizes indigenous groups as tribes, as Renée Cramer has shown (2005). However, research is inconclusive on the causal relationship between gaming and tribal citizenship disputes. It is certain that publicity surrounding gaming proceeds has spurred many previously nonenrolled Americans to contact tribes with inquiries about establishing membership. LaVonne Kippenberger (Panther), tribal enrollment administrator, explained that her office fields thirty to forty weekly phone and e-mail inquiries about how individuals can join the Tribe, with many questioners asking how they can get a share of casino profits. Inquirers often mention the money first, Kippenberger reports, and their calls and e-mails spike after any newspaper report about Seminole casinos. Some people claim to physically resemble the warrior Osceola, others say they always knew they were Indian, and still others simply ask about the money. None, she says, are valid, but fielding the calls takes its toll on her: And it’s horrible. Those are the ones, out of my whole job, that is what I get absolutely worked up about. Because it’s so personal, and it’s so offensive. And I completely let it consume me. I have not yet learned how to handle it. . . . I have to maintain a level of professionalism, and I can’t just hang up and call them names. I have to hold my tongue when I want to blurt out: “And what exactly makes you think you’re Indian?” And they want to tell you their stories, they want to tell you their sob stories. Because these people who do their genealogies are so into it,

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because there’s nothing else for them to do. . . . And then I say: “Well, if someone in your family were a Seminole Indian, then you would know. If you were a citizen of the Seminole Tribe, you would know.” (August 29, 2005) In response to these and other pressures on enrollment, the Tribe increasingly demands paternity tests, wrestling with thorny questions like in vitro fertilization and Seminole mothers who refuse to reveal the identities of their children’s fathers. Some Seminoles advocate turning away from blood quantum toward more traditional modes of reckoning belonging, and there is a minority movement for constitutional reform that would replace one-fourth blood quantum with clan membership as a necessary qualification for tribal citizenship. Clan loss is a source of great concern. Tribal citizens frequently expressed dismay that many youth carry no clan, and several recounted a board shareholder meeting in which the secretary/treasurer allegedly told the assembly that the largest “clan” in the Tribe now was “no clan” (that is, tribal citizens who carry no clan). According to the secretary’s office, this is not the case, nor was it what the secretary said; Panther remains the largest clan, followed by no clan (or “clan X”). Widespread discomfort with the ascendance of “no clan” reflects a more general unease about clan loss. Meanwhile, petitions circulate that call for increasing blood quantum requirements, or for decreasing them. Some parents of nonenrollable children advocate a new status for “descendants,” who would gain recognition and access to some services but not to per capita dividends. When I asked Richard Henry (Panther) about the relative value of reckoning membership by clan or by blood quantum, he replied that both were important: “It’s like any society: you got your rules and regulations. . . . So you just gotta stick with them. But these are rules that have been passed down from generation to generation, so this is what we’re taught to go by” (August 25, 2005). Henry focused less on the particular content of the rules than on their role in constructing community values and boundaries. In difficult conversations about tribal belonging and citizenship—which take place in tribal government offices and on paperwork but also in whispers about individuals’ parentages, appearances, and personalities—Seminoles articulate what Audra Simpson has called a “changing algebra of nationhood” (Simpson 2003: 76). In this shifting terrain, as in the Kahna-

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wake Mohawk case Simpson analyzed, the “logics of exclusion” and inclusion operate at the intersections of tribe and settler state, and yet Seminoles also continue to figure belonging through “non-juridical form[s] of care” (227, 264) that are based on social and affective ties, obligations, and alternative modes of recognition. Seminoles’ interwoven casino-era concerns about tribal belonging, dividend babies, intermarriage, and wannabes illustrate less that casinos disrupt Seminole sociality than that casino wealth is a focal point for the articulation and discipline of social and political boundaries.45 Seminoles assess the present and future through debates, discourses, and enactments of gaming wealth. Without resorting to a culture-ofpoverty argument, it is important to recognize the real challenges that face Seminole adults who had been reared in poverty but now must learn to raise their children under radically different economic circumstances. Social practices and cultural values are embedded in economic relations, and social reproduction relies upon systems of value that link multiple generations. In the 2000s, Seminole values of self-reliance, hard work, toughness, and unconquerability are being retooled, removed from a discourse of poverty and recast in a new language of economic power. Such transitions mark the currency of culture and the strategies of social reproduction in Seminole Country, but they also are intrinsically and deeply political. Hence, the next chapter turns to the politics of Seminole casinobased money and wealth.

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​Fungibility: The Politics of Casino Money

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oney in the hands of Seminoles and other indigenous peoples is, both in the settler colonial logics that structure federal Indian policy and also in the everyday processes of tribal governance, an essentially political matter. Casino money calls attention to the political processes whereby tribal economic power both undergirds and threatens tribal sovereignty. Furthermore, it brings into relief the tribal politics of economic distribution and diversification through which Seminole values of political leadership and economic nationalism take hold. It is perhaps a truism that money and politics go hand in hand, but for indigenous peoples the materiality of sovereignty and the politics of money take forms that uniquely reflect both indigenous and settler politico-economic orders. Chapter 2 emphasized the role of casino revenues in Seminole cultural and social (re)production. Here, I turn to the intersection of money and political practice, exploring the distribution of casino revenues and the significance of tribal economic diversification and economic control. Tracking the way that governance and casino money come together in Seminole Country, I take the fungibility of money—its exchangeability for itself—to be constitutive of Seminole economic nationalism. Throughout, I highlight the often unexplored ways that money conditions the politics of indigeneity.

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Seminoles often express pride that they were the first American Indian tribal nation to launch high-stakes casino gaming, that their legal activism opened the door for a gaming revolution that spread across Indian Country, and that gaming has improved their daily lives. I was surprised, then, that most people responded to my inquiries about why and how they decided to pursue gaming with a shrug. Some do not remember, while others do not care. As chapter 1 detailed, gaming was one in a long line of Seminole economic development initiatives. As such, when Hollywood Bingo opened in 1979, there was neither a developed discourse about Indian casinos nor an expectation of their success or political importance: unlike other tribes who followed, Seminoles had no model of “Indian gaming” and its attendant wealth. Then-chairman James Billie (Bird) recounted unsuccessful efforts by some Southern Baptists to impeach him after the gaming ordinance passed, but by the time my research began, most Seminoles did not think about the source of gaming revenue in negative moral terms: people simply were glad to have the money, and a few saw gaming money as morally sanctioned by their history of dispossession.1 The morality of gaming concerned a few tribal members, especially Southern Baptists who followed a religious prohibition on gambling, but many Baptists told me that even while they disapproved of gaming, they also appreciated what it had brought to the Tribe and to them as individuals.2 Howard Micco (Bird)—an elder who had worked for the BIA in construction, owned cattle, and became a Baptist preacher in the 1970s—answered a question about gaming as follows: “I don’t believe in it. They can have all that, and make money, and give me some of it, that’s all. But I don’t play, I don’t gamble.” Still, he added, gaming had been “a great benefit for the Seminoles, for me too,” and he especially hoped that it would fund a nursing home (August 18, 2005).3 Perhaps not surprisingly, the history that everyone could and would narrate was less about casinos, their origins, or their morality than about the resulting transformation from poverty to wealth in Seminoles’ individual and collective lives. For most Seminoles, the magnitude of casinos’ economic impact dwarfs the particularities of their genesis. That said, several women and men recounted one history that underlined the physical and

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conceptual relationship between tribal political organization and casinos’ economic success. This was the account of the Council Oak. The Tribe built its first high-stakes bingo hall on the Hollywood Reservation, on the corner of State Road 7 and Stirling Road, where the Council Oak had long stood. Seminoles have written poetry and told stories about holding political meetings under this tree before they built tribal offices, and they often recall the tree’s role during the 1950s Constitutional Committee meetings. Indeed, some singled out the Council Oak as a symbol of their political autonomy and power as a people.4 In his poem “The Council Oak,” Moses Jumper Jr. (Snake) compares the tree to the Seminole people and nation: There is a comparison here I want you to see Of how the Seminoles are like this mighty oak tree. •••

Some nations and trees have fallen in their attempt to grow, Perhaps defeated, trodden and weakened to slow. But in years we have faced the storm and rain, Stood above the flood as in stature we’d gain. (M. Jumper 1991: 13) The tree still stands in the middle of the casino parking lot, spared from the bulldozer (figure 17). Meanwhile, the new Hollywood Hard Rock casino across the street features a high-end steak house named the Council Oak, with menu text associating the Tribe’s casino success with its history of political struggle and strength, as symbolized by the tree. In 2004, the Tribe celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of gaming in a ceremony held beneath the Council Oak, placing a plaque beneath the tree that honors the long history of Seminole political organization and the recent economic successes of tribal casinos. The Council Oak also featured prominently in the promotional video that accompanied Seminoles’ acquisition of Hard Rock International: “It is a monument to the power of unwavering perseverance, and a symbol of the Tribe’s innate ability to branch out into new and profitable ventures” (Seminole Hard Rock Entertainment 2006a). The ceremonial signing of the Hard Rock deal was conducted beneath the Council Oak. Such commemorations testify to the tree’s historical and sentimental value, as well as its considerable public relations potential. They also remind Seminoles and non-Indians alike that Seminole economic develop-

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Figure 17. The Council Oak, 2002. Photo by author.

ment is an outcome and expression of indigenous political organization. Yet Seminoles’ political activism and sovereign status are not simply the background to gaming: casinos have supported a new form of indigenous economic nationalism and have become the focal point for community debates about political leadership and the just distribution of wealth. Money and Indigeneity

Tribal gaming raises questions about the political relationship between money and social life. As the last chapter discussed, American Indian tribes who operate casinos face frequent accusations that by engaging in market exchanges and becoming capitalists they are sacrificing their cultures in order to chase the almighty dollar. Yet money is uniquely political for American Indian gaming tribes, for whom poverty and wealth are closely tied to their analyses of colonial oppression and to the politics of authenticity. In order to understand casino politics, then, I first take a detour to examine the logics by which money is associated with modernity in ways that exclude indigenous peoples. Social theorists since Karl Marx and Georg Simmel have treated monetary transactions as categorically distinct from “traditional” exchange, with the corollary that money is both a harbinger and condition of modernity.

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The abstraction and depersonalization intrinsic to monetary exchange, Simmel argued ([1907] 1990: 477), creates barriers between people that are “indispensable for the modern form of life.” Simmel and Marx each drew correspondences between modes of exchange and the shape of society. Money, for Simmel, operated across many levels of analysis: he argued that objects exchanged for money lost their individuality (123), that “money is responsible for impersonal relations between people” (297), and that these objective relations exemplified modernity.5 In social theory and American public culture alike, as Viviana Zelizer (1997, 2005) has so effectively shown, the impersonal aspect of money is associated with modern life, while personalized exchange seemingly corresponds to tradition and family.6 These ideas have mapped onto peoples, associating “modern” peoples with money (and capitalism) and “traditional” peoples with other, primitive, forms of exchange. As Marianna Torgovnick has written (1990: 8), in Western intellectual traditions the primitive is “a precapitalist utopia in which only use value, never exchange value, prevails.” Anthropologists have struggled to pull the social theory of exchange outside of its roots in the capitalist/primitive economic divide.7 At the same time, anthropological studies of exchange and material culture have challenged assumptions about the impersonal nature of monetary transactions, and market economies more broadly, by focusing analysis on how money and its meanings circulate in communities undertaking market integration.8 Money’s fungible quality makes its use indeterminate unless it is earmarked or enclaved. So, for example, revenue streams from casinos can be reallocated among budget line items, or individual family income can originate with either casino dividends or federal cash benefits without any necessary effect upon spending. Yet just as the fungibility of money can separate its source from its use, it also enables people to generate new forms of inalienability and distinctiveness. Seminoles accomplish this through the resignification of casino revenues. Keith Hart (2001: 5) has argued that “Money’s chief function is as a means of remembering” (see also Eiss 2002).9 Understanding the historical and cultural patterns in monetary remembering and forgetting is an empirical anthropological project.10 In the context of tribal gaming, it is also a political one. The question of money’s relationship to modernity and tradition is hardly limited to scholarly debate: popular-cultural talk about money in

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the United States often takes it to erase personal bonds (“money can’t buy love”) and cultural difference, as discussed in the previous chapter. But the discourse of money as removing the personal/distinctive by embodying the modern also encodes racial associations, with punishing consequences for indigenous people who simultaneously wish to inhabit their indigeneity and to escape poverty. Indigenous peoples worldwide generally are imagined to be poor, and their economic status and practice are constitutive of the very conditions of indigeneity. Within the conceptual framework of the “Fourth World,” indigeneity lies outside dominant economic forms and systems, peripheral to markets and capitalism, except as a secondary site of “development,” just behind the Third World (Graburn 1981). Gaming brings into relief a double bind of tribal sovereignty: American Indians enjoy political autonomy under conditions of economic dependency, but indigenous economic power undermines their political status. In U.S. federal Indian policy dating at least to the General Allotment (Dawes) Act of 1887, the question of how indigenous peoples subsist has been inextricably tied to settler assessments of their political and cultural lives. The Dawes Act and subsequent legislation aimed to shape Indians’ character and, importantly, to prepare them for U.S. citizenship by promoting agriculture and individual property ownership (Wagoner 1998). David Wilkins (1997: 148) shows that in the U.S. Supreme Court case Northwestern Bands of Shoshone Indians v. United States (324 U.S. 335 [1945]) Shoshones’ nomadic subsistence practices undermined their land claims in the eyes of the court. Such logics, derived from a British tradition represented by John Locke, link private property and its attendant governing structures to settler “civilization” (Tully 1994). Historian Alexandra Harmon analyzed how debates about American Indian land monopolies in the Gilded Age placed indigenous peoples in a double bind. U.S. policymakers such as Senator Henry Dawes, author of the allotment policy that led to the reduction in indigenous landholdings across the continent, condemned Indian communal land ownership by saying it discouraged selfishness, which to him was a necessary condition of civilization. However, when individual Indian people began to acquire large estates he and others criticized them for generating excessive wealth and inequality within Indian communities (Harmon 2003). The double binds of economy and sovereignty were evident in 1953 as

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Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 108, which would “terminate” federal relations with a number of American Indian tribes. A major criterion for “termination” was a tribe’s economic condition, with economic self-sufficiency linked to the termination of tribal sovereignty (Philp 1999: 158).11 When Laura Mae Osceola (Panther) testified before Congress in opposition to Florida Seminole termination, a congressman challenged her on the likelihood of her people’s future “progress.” She responded: “In twenty-five years they won’t need your help. We will be giving you help!” (quoted in Kersey 1996: 31). Few observers would have predicted Seminoles’ subsequent economic power. Recent Supreme Court rulings suggest that indigenous commercial success threatens to undermine the basic tenets of tribal sovereign immunity in the eyes of the court.12 Legal theorist T. Alexander Aleinikoff observed that gaming wealth threatens sovereignty because some lawmakers hold that “the increasing wealth and sophistication of the tribes argue for their assimilation and the ending of special Indian programs. To adopt the language of the late nineteenth century, Indians no longer need the guardianship of the federal government” (Aleinikoff 2002: 123). Jack Gordon, an attorney representing a woman who unsuccessfully tried to sue Seminoles over a casino slip-and-fall injury, criticized the case’s outcome by telling a reporter: “When they [Seminoles] got sovereign immunity, no one envisioned they’d be taking wheelbarrows of cash away the way they are now” (Testerman 2005). Or as Native American Times columnist Tom Giago (2006) put it, “The feeling among the non-Indian was that if Indians are making so much money they can now fend for themselves. . . . In the new mindset casino Indians ceased to be Indians.” Poverty symbolically structures indigeneity in the contemporary United States, making a “rich Indian” an oxymoron to many—a signal of corruption, cultural loss, or value gone awry—and a threat to some. Gaming opponents such as Jeff Benedict, the author of a prominent book about Pequot gaming (Benedict 2001) and past president of the Connecticut Alliance Against Casino Expansion, portrayed antigaming activism as “a contest between the will of the people and the power of big money” (quoted in A. Brooks 2003). The specter of the “rich Indian” has entered popular culture as both a joke and a threat, from the South Park episode about landgreedy casino Indians summarized in the introduction to a Sopranos episode

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about crooked Indian casino operators cutting a deal with the mob to a Simpsons episode in which the rich Indian casino CEO offers wisdom and a vision of the future while Marge loses $20,000 and Homer takes out a second mortgage on their home. Paul Pasquaretta quotes anthropologist Jack Campisi, who has worked with Mashantucket Pequots and other tribes, as saying that in the popular imaginations of contemporary Americans, “the only thing more despicable than a poor Indian is a rich Indian” (Pasquaretta 1994: 712).13 A closely related joke circulating around Indian Country is that while it used to be that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” a phrase associated with nineteenth-century U.S. military conquest, now it’s that “the only good Indian is a poor Indian.” As Katherine Spilde has argued, the “rich Indian” stereotype has political consequences, as it conjures up images of indigenous surplus (she finds this to be reminiscent of the allotment era) that undermine sovereignty claims (Spilde 2004).14 Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs analyze a similarly political discourse of Aboriginal lack and excess in Australia (Gelder and Jacobs 1998).15 Seminoles encounter “rich Indian” commentary with regularity. Michele Thomas (Panther) recalled one example: when the Brighton Parent Advisory Committee (PAC) entered the Okeechobee Christmas parade with a float of preschool children wearing Seminole patchwork and Santa Claus hats, a female spectator shouted at them: “Aren’t you guys those rich Seminoles with the casinos? Give me some of that money.” These days, added Thomas, “all we are when we’re in public is a rich Indian” (August 18, 2005). The circumscription of indigeneity by economy is not only a tactic of the political right or jealous individuals: the American countercultural and New Age Lefts have marshaled critiques of capitalism and Western acquisitiveness by employing the trope of the antimaterialist, communal, and precapitalist Indian (P. Deloria 1998; Huhndorf 2001). The association of capitalism with (white) modernity and indigenous exchange with tradition makes it more difficult for indigenous opponents of gaming to stage critiques that are understood as anticapitalist, not precapitalist.16 At the center of these debates is the fungibility of money. As “the purest form of capitalism,” anthropologist Carolyn Anderson writes (1998: 11), Indian gaming is an icon of modernity, in which “money makes everything fungible: time, labor, social obligations.” In social analysis, fungibility is often transposed from money to the people who gamble with or

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otherwise use it. Ideologies of indigeneity and money intersect to make the junctures of fungibility—the points when people exchange, redirect, and resignify money—especially political for American Indians. Therefore, it is not enough to counter a modernist formulation of money’s force with the rejoinder that money does not necessarily abstract personal relations. Instead, I suggest that in Seminole gaming we see the very most abstracted feature of money—its fungibility—as selectively generating inalienability. Money is neither a preordained (or liberatory) corrosive force nor a “mere” inert tool of social action: rather, the qualities of contemporary American money prompt Seminoles to use it in ways that are simultaneously novel and situated. As the remainder of this chapter demonstrates, this occurs when Seminoles exploit the fungibility of money to assert their distinctiveness as a people and a nation. Di vidends, Leadership, and Exchange

Per capita dividends (or “per caps”) are a hot issue in Indian gaming debates.17 Variously interpreted in local and national press coverage as representing unchecked individualism, unearned income, or capitalism at its best, per capita dividends have become a political lightning rod within many tribes and a source of tension and jealousy between Indians and their non-Native neighbors (Bunting 2004). Understanding the choices by some tribes to distribute casino revenues in per capita dividends to all tribal members can help to evaluate the social and political meanings of money in its value-laden circuits of distribution. Per capita dividends shed light upon the redistribution of wealth, the meaning of exchange and its relationship to power, and the political measures by which money is judged to be “earned” in late capitalist societies. The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act stipulates that tribes may distribute gaming revenues directly to their members with approval of the NIGC. Yet only a minority of tribes (approximately 32 percent) distributed per capita dividends by 2005 (Meister 2006–7: 4). The National Indian Gaming Association and other gaming advocates highlight this number to emphasize that most gaming wealth is tribal, not individual. Indeed, the Albuquerque Journal noted that “a common misperception of Indian gaming is that casino profits are distributed directly to tribal members” (M. Gallagher 2005). Some tribes, such as the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux near Min-

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neapolis, have chosen to distribute a large percentage of casino revenues in per caps, making tribal citizens millionaires. Others, such as Pueblos in New Mexico, do not distribute per capita dividends at all: instead, they redistribute casino wealth through social services, scholarships, targeted loans, and other tribal programs (M. Gallagher 2005). Seminoles fall in between, distributing enough that tribal citizens need not live in poverty but retaining large sums for the Tribe as a collective. Of course, distribution is not an option for the many tribes who operate casinos that generate minimal profits. For the most part, Seminole tribal citizens support the Tribal Council’s decision to allocate a significant proportion of the annual budget to per capita distributions, 26 percent in 1999 according to tribal reports (Seminole Tribe of Florida 1999). Indeed, some advocate higher dividends. Each tribal citizen receives a dividend check (previously monthly, but now biweekly), regardless of age or reservation residence. Contrary to public perception (Darian-Smith 2003: 37), individuals pay federal taxes on that income.18 In 2000–2001, tribal offices were abuzz on dividend day each month, with a steady flow of tribal members picking up their checks. Especially during the Christmas season, Seminole vendors set up tables on dividend day where they marketed crafts while fellow tribal members were flush. On a more sinister note, some parents claimed that outside drug dealers kept track of dividend day, picking a prime time to market their wares on the reservation. I have chosen not to reveal the amount of a Seminole tribal citizen’s monthly dividend check. One can find the figure in most South Florida newspaper articles about the Tribe, even on seemingly remote topics like the Miss Seminole contest. By refusing to follow suit, I recognize the deep anger that many Seminoles feel when their dividend income is made public, and I force myself and my readers to ask: why are nonSeminoles so curious about this number? Why do outsiders want to know how much each Seminole receives, rather than, for example, how much the Tribe spends on its school, museum, or citrus enterprise? Seminoles bitterly recounted their resentment and embarrassment about the publicity of dividends, often expressing the (also very American) conviction that people have no right to inquire about others’ personal finances. For example, during a tour at the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, a guide responded

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to a visitor’s question about dividends by refusing to disclose the number and asking the questioner whether she would like to be asked the amount of her income. Seminoles often compare their per capita distributions to owning stock in a corporation, and many note that while critics paint dividends as “unearned” income, newspapers rarely expose earnings by non-Seminoles from inheritances, stock dividends, and other nonwage sources. Like Alaska oil payments, capital gains, and federal assistance programs, gaming per capita dividends call into question what constitutes “earned” money. This, in turn, underlines the moral dimensions of money, but it also points to the deeply political question of how money is distributed within groups. In Seminole dividends we can see that, as anthropologist Nicholas Thomas wrote (1991: 9), “many of the factors which make a particular exchange relation distinctive are not visible in its enactment but must be traced through the longer-term dynamics of the social situation.” The reasons why Seminoles choose to distribute a portion of casino revenues in per capita dividends are many. First, the purposes for which casino revenues can be spent by the tribal government are limited by IGRA, so dividends are one way to render casino revenues relatively fungible (since individual Seminoles can use them as they wish). Second, Seminoles have employed the per capita model since the 1950s to distribute federal funds (Kersey 1996: 86) and income from cattle and other enterprises of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Inc., so this mechanism is familiar. Third, raising dividend levels is a time-tested tactic by Seminole politicians seeking reelection, and eliminating dividends would be political suicide. Not surprisingly, dividends are especially likely to increase during election years, and candidates often promise to seek greater increases if elected. Fourth, per capita distributions fit well with American values of individual choice over asset management: in a 1994 newspaper interview, Councilman Max Osceola Jr. (Panther) explained that the Tribal Council distributes gaming profits directly to the people so they can lead more independent lives: “That’s the American way” (quoted in French 1994). Fifth, and relatedly, dividends are a mechanism for wealth distribution that honors and reinvigorates a long-standing Seminole value of noninterference in one another’s affairs. This resistance to interference has been examined by several scholars (Garbarino 1972; Kersey 1989; King 1978; Mertz 1970;

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Palmer 1973: 40–41; Pietrzak 1982; Skafte 1969; Weisman 1989; Wickman 1999), who link it to the privileging of equality that guides a widely observed Seminole tendency toward decision making by consensus. Per capita distributions maximize families’ and individuals’ independence while minimizing political disagreements by decentralizing choices about how to spend the rapidly growing tribal income.19 In a community that has endured anti-Indian racism couched in the terms of welfare dependency, financial independence takes on special value. Seminoles are proud to be able to provide for their children: adults compare the abundant food on their tables to earlier reliance on federal government commodity foods, and they contrast children’s designer FUBU and DKNY clothes to the missionary hand-me-downs they once wore. In contrast to what Kathleen Pickering (2000: 134) found in her study of Lakota household economies, Seminoles generally do not view public assistance as an extension of U.S. government trust responsibility toward them, or as owed them based on treaty agreements or colonial dispossession.20 There is both liberation and irony in Seminoles’ lining up at tribal offices to receive their dividend checks: on the one hand, for Seminoles who remember the days before gaming, dividends represent a welcome contrast to dependency; on the other hand, dividends raise the specter of a new form of dependence on the tribal government, in an extension and perhaps deepening of economies of governmentality. Indeed, some Seminoles express concern that people depend too much on the tribal government. But it matters who governs whom, and how. That these are Seminole checks, not U.S. checks, takes on historical significance against the backdrop of anti-Indian racism. Perhaps the most important, and least publicly recognized, motivation behind Seminole per capita distributions springs from long-standing values of leadership that are linked to the distribution of wealth. Jacob Osceola (Panther), a middle-aged entrepreneur and former elected official who has studied Seminole medicine, explained per capita dividends with reference to the Green Corn Dance. This ceremonial gathering and rite of renewal, which generally lasts four days in early summer plus preparation days (and planning for months beforehand), marks the new year (Buswell 1972; Capron 1953; Sturtevant 1954a, 1954b).21 Osceola said that on a particular day of the Corn Dance the men go hunting (he once killed eight deer in a day), and when they return to the camp they distribute the meat by Chap ter 3

circulating from family to family. Each family takes one piece of meat, and the men stop distributing it only when all the meat is gone. I should note, however, that this equal distribution does not demand disinterestedness on the part of the families, as illustrated by a Seminole legend about how the turtle got his red eyes. The male turtle stood by while others claimed nice cuts of meat during a posthunt distribution, leaving him only blood to bring home to his waiting wife. Disgusted by his failure, she threw the blood into his face, and this is why the turtle has red eyes (summary of telling by Carol Cypress [Panther], March 3, 2001).22 The ceremonial distribution of meat, Osceola explained, is a model for Seminole leadership and political power, as leaders gain legitimacy by gathering resources and distributing them. This is what dividends are all about. Moreover, Osceola noted that money is an economic form especially conducive to this model of distribution and leadership: the fungibility and divisibility of money facilitate familiar patterns of political power. Osceola was not surprised that Miccosukees, whom he considers to be more traditional than Seminoles, had chosen to distribute a larger percentage of casino revenues in dividends (December 14, 2000). Similarly, in a Miami Herald article about allegations of corruption in the way that elected officials spend their large discretionary budgets, Hollywood Council representative Max Osceola Jr. (Panther), himself a target, discussed Seminole values of redistribution: “Osceola said the Seminole Tribe has its own way of sharing wealth, an attitude that he said dates to the tribe’s roots as hunters who shared their kill with the entire village. ‘You’re not rich by how much you own but by how much you share,’ Osceola said. ‘To me, it’s a different philosophy. Instead of hunting, we’re entrepreneurs’” (Bolstad 2001b). Osceola associates wealth with political power, but wealth is determined by sharing rather than accumulation. In 1955, Ethel Cutler Freeman wrote in her field notes that Seminoles did not value accumulation: “The Seminoles despise the man who lives rich. They conside[r] him selfish for he should have shared with his kin” (ECFP, Box 31). In Jacob Osceola’s and Max Osceola’s vision of wealth and political power, it is not only the privilege but also the obligation of leaders to ensure the material well-being of the collectivity through distribution.23 The value of distribution also holds in a range of political activities. For example, at electoral campaign dinners held in backyards or reservation community centers, the candidates offer opulent feasts. More generally, T h e P o l i t ic s o f C a s i n o M o n e y

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the food at tribal events is always hearty and plentiful, with Styrofoam boxes and cups provided for taking home leftover grilled meat, rice, Spam, or hamburger gravy, sofkee, pie and cake, and other typical fare.24 Tribal representatives distribute door prizes at community meetings, including big-ticket items like furniture, sewing machines, and televisions and other electronics. When elected officials eat lunch at the Billie Swamp Safari or the Brighton casino restaurant, they routinely direct the wait staff to bill them for other tribal members’ meals (constituents sometimes grumble if they don’t), and on occasion they also pick up the tabs of non-Seminole acquaintances. In all of these instances, the distribution of wealth is linked to political authority. Elaine Aguilar (Otter), Immokalee representative on the Tribal Council, saw gaming as an extension of a tribal ethic of shared economic responsibility: “Growing up you always was supposed to care for your fellow man, and do for him. So I guess that is what the Tribe is all about” (January 3, 2001). Aguilar locates the source of the Tribe’s wealth and power in the people who make up the community, not in the government. In Tribal Council meetings and private conversations, tribal members often repeat the refrain that it’s their money, after all. This is not a radically individualistic account of wealth, nor an ideology of generalized reciprocity (see Sahlins 1972). Instead, it reflects a conception of tribal leadership and indigenous popular sovereignty as given by, and belonging to, the people who legitimate it, not the individual elected officials who distribute it. Indeed, most people seemed to agree with Charles Osceola (Bird) when he stood up in a Tribal Council debate about excessive spending to say that too much focus on tribal officials as individuals weakens the Tribe as a whole and renders it more vulnerable (February 9, 2001). While it is not surprising to see the politics of individualism versus communalism playing out in press accounts of per capita dividends, the Seminole case suggests that per caps might be understood less as a sign of American-style individualism than as an expression and formalization of somewhat overlapping indigenous political philosophies and norms. Scandals of Failed Distribu tion

In the contexts of feasts, door prizes, and hunting ceremonies, the politics of distribution seems tame enough, but both non-Indian and Seminole

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public outrage grows, albeit in different ways, when tribal officials hand out or horde large sums of money from their discretionary budgets. The sheer size of these budgets—in the range of $5 million to $6 million annually per politician in 2002, with emergency allocations augmenting them to $15 million and beyond—raised many eyebrows within the Tribe, drew media attention and federal investigation, and led to the grassroots recall of the tribal budget in 2004.25 Yet among most tribal members with whom I spoke, the primary concern about officials’ discretionary spending was not the fact or the size of the allocations but the equity with which they were (or were not) distributed and the transparency of the process. While the local press focused on the amount of casino wealth as a marker of corruption, many Seminoles more narrowly articulated the problem as one of failed distribution. They rarely located the problem’s source in money or gaming, instead identifying leadership failure, interpersonal tensions, and personalized greed. Some tribal members understood elected officials’ greed to be evidence of assimilation to white ways. For example, an older woman stood up in a Tribal Council meeting and excoriated the councilmen for thinking about money all the time, accusing them of selling out and adding that “as a cow eats grass, you eat money from slots.” She warned them that “sometimes you gotta sleep in a chickee—you can’t always sleep in the white man’s house” (November 8, 2000).26 Gaming-era Seminole political scandals, including the 2001 suspension and 2003 termination of longtime tribal chairman James Billie (Bird), can be understood only in relation to the distribution of wealth and political leadership. Billie had held his office since 1979, making him the secondlongest-serving tribal chairman in Indian Country (after Phillip Martin, Mississippi Choctaw). Under Billie, the Tribe embraced gaming, diversified its economy, launched cultural programs, and expanded the tribal bureaucracy. Billie coupled personal charisma with political savvy, and his leadership, personality, and musical career combined to make him a wellknown if sometimes controversial figure throughout Indian Country and South Florida. Although Billie’s suspension formally rested on allegations of sexual harassment by a tribal employee, few Seminoles seemed to render political judgment on those grounds (though some women criticized his and other men’s attitudes toward women and hoped that more women would run for office). The Tribal Council accompanied his suspension with

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Figure 18. The tribal jet in its Big Cypress hanger, 2001. Photo by author.

authorization for an internal forensic audit and an embezzlement investigation of three non-Seminole employees close to Billie.27 While Billie maintained significant support, many tribal citizens claimed that they had supported him until they decided that he was lining his own pockets and letting power go to his head. For example, some balked at perceived favoritism and excess in Billie’s use of the tribal jet (figure 18). Local newspapers had often pointed to the Gulfstream IV airplane—purchased from King Hussein of Jordan and then customized with the Seminole medicine colors—as a sign of out-of-control tribal spending. But if local press coverage focused on the luxury represented by the jet as a scandal in and of itself, most Seminoles’ gossip centered less on the jet as an object of spending than on who got to ride on the jet. During and after Billie’s suspension, the same politicians who approved his ouster came under scrutiny for their own spending practices, and this led to the 2004 budget recall. Subsequently, the Tribal Council began instituting new budgetary procedures, holding open budget hearings and rotating Tribal Council meetings from reservation to reservation (with information technology staff and other advance crews setting up the representatives’ computer screens, the WSBC broadcast, and the decorations and food). Nonetheless, reservation skepticism about spending remains

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high, and calls for constitutional reform include measures that would diffuse power and reduce incumbents’ edge in elections. Throughout this dramatic and difficult episode in the Tribe’s recent political history, outside media sources reported on “free-wheeling spending habits,” “lavish lifestyles,” and “luxury cars.”28 Instead, most tribal members debated the unequal distribution of tribal funds and privileges, focusing on leaders’ failure to distribute wealth evenly, humbly, and generously throughout the tribal community. It was not that Seminoles excused corruption: quite the opposite, they condemned it in a particular way. Per capita dividends and complaints about tribal officials’ spending each highlight the politics of money’s proper use and the perceived threat of money’s fungibility to dissolve the social barriers that guide morality. But if gaming-centered debates about waste and acquisitiveness seem novel, it is important to recall that indigenous money management long has been a matter of federal Indian policy. Questions of how Indians manage their money are never politically neutral. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century public and policy images of American Indians generally characterized them as unable to manage funds. The historian Tanis Thorne (2003) has observed that when, in the early twentieth century, the oil-rich Creek man Jackson Barnett failed to spend his money in (white) socially sanctioned ways, a public controversy ensued, complete with lawsuits over federal management of his trust and widespread press coverage. During the nineteenth-century allotment period, Indians were granted citizenship and private property based on government assessments of their “competence,” determinations that measured indigenous cultural and often racial difference (Wagoner 1998). At the same time, the federal government established trust funds to hold native peoples’ income (e.g., from land and mineral leases). However, in a major recent lawsuit, Cobell v. Kempthorne, the federal trust system itself has been exposed for a stunning level of mismanagement, to the tune of billions of dollars.29 At a more local level, it is important to ask whose fiscal management gets scrutinized and whose political status is considered “special” in South Florida, where municipal politics have been notoriously corrupt, and where Disney enjoys lucrative exemptions from local and state taxation and jurisdiction. Indeed, Seminoles frequently compared their government favorably to local city politics and the “special rights” over land and gover-

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nance enjoyed by corporations like Disney. What American Indians do with their money is hardly a new question for public policy in the United States, but casinos have intensified the debates and the scrutiny. Ec onomic Diversification We’re not only B-I-N-G-O. Mitchell Cypress (Otter), then-president of Seminole Tribe of Florida, Inc. 112

If money, for many observers, is a certain kind of force in the world, then economy is its dominion. But what counts as “an economy” and what the management of “an economy” means to people are not simply determined by the form of economic transactions in which they participate. Casinos have generated a Seminole tribal economy that is delineated as such, debated, and asserted as evidence of tribal sovereignty. One of the ways that monetary transformations of value link Seminole economy to sovereignty is through tribally directed economic diversification. In addition to allocating gaming revenues for per capita dividends, tribal social services (see chapter 4), and cultural programs (see chapter 2), Seminoles invest casino money in other economic development projects. In the early 2000s, however, the Seminole “economy” remained almost entirely fueled by gaming. As such, gaming generated dilemmas of governance not dissimilar to those of oil-rich nations (see, e.g., Apter 2005; Coronil 1997). In each case, nations enjoy a competitive advantage arising from the monopoly over a resource that generates sufficient wealth to raise the standard of living for their citizens. Yet pitfalls include an imbalance in profit margins that discourages diversification and thereby renders the nation vulnerable to market fluctuation.30 Seminoles are well aware that gaming could disappear or become less profitable with acts of Congress, and tribal leaders and parents often invoke this possibility when encouraging youth to obtain diplomas and job skills. For these and other reasons, diversification is a buzzword today across Indian Country.31 A roving band of high-priced consultants travels Indian Country seeking employment by tribes eager to diversify, while non-Native entrepreneurs have jumped on this bandwagon by seeking Seminoles’ financial backing for everything from a beach anti-erosion net system to movie scripts. The acquisition of Hard Rock International, announced in 2006, was a major move toward diversification, and the accompanying promotional video included a long

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Figure 19. Pepper production at Seminole Farms, 2001. Photo by Noah Zatz.

segment with the title: “The Power of Diversification” (Seminole Hard Rock Entertainment 2006a). At the intersection of economy and sovereignty are the social meanings of economic diversification as a nation-building project in which Seminoles lay claim to “having” and effectively managing a tribal economy. When visitors to the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum watch the introductory film We Seminoles, or when potential business partners read tribal brochures or view promotional videos, they encounter a list of tribal economic development projects that have been funded by casinos: sugarcane fields, citrus groves, cattle, an airplane manufacturer, a turtle farm, ecotourism, a hunting and meatpacking business, Seminole Farms commercial agriculture, and more (figure 19). Seminoles have diversified their casino operations by adding hotels, sporting events, retail establishments, and restaurants; they also own a four-star hotel in Managua, Nicaragua, and have sponsored Nicaraguan cultural programs in the United States. Even before the Hard Rock acquisition, the Tribe had pursued less publicized ventures in the fiT h e P o l i t ic s o f C a s i n o M o n e y

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nancial sector: investment in other Indian gaming ventures, a casino boat, an offshore reinsurance firm, financial transaction firms, and real estate. Many nongaming venture-capital and other finance projects were shortlived. Diversification poses challenges to tribal governance, especially as newly acquired capital enables the Tribe to venture into unfamiliar business territory. At a December 2000 meeting, the Tribal Council unanimously passed a resolution, without debate, to allocate $3 million to purchase a finance firm that specialized in benefits, trusts and wills, and investments.32 The council then considered a resolution to buy the majority share of a modest cattle company, a much less expensive proposal. For the first time (four months into my attendance), I witnessed councilmembers and attendees engage in a lengthy debate about a capital acquisition. They discussed the cattle breed, interstate transportation and vaccination, feed costs, and agricultural commodity prices. Tribal Council representatives knew much about cattle, but they were still in the process of becoming comfortable with the ins and outs of investment strategy in new sectors. This intersected with Seminole deliberative norms to generate uneven scrutiny. Seminoles make most political decisions by consensus: when uncomfortable or uncertain, people generally default to silence and nonparticipation, but when they have expertise they often ask hard questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the tribal enterprises that have come closest to succeeding, with the notable exception of smoke shops and gaming, have built directly upon the expertise of tribal members. This is not simply a matter of finding good management or acquiring technical knowledge, since Seminoles now have the money to hire top managers. Instead, it is about the inalienability of indigenous expertise in the political mechanisms that fuel the tribal economy. Diversification beyond gaming has its limits, set largely by the expanding boundaries of community knowledge and control. The Billie Swamp Safari on the Big Cypress Reservation is an example of a relatively successful diversification effort. The Safari, as locals call it, includes the Swamp Water Café (serving standard fare and local favorites such as Indian tacos), airboat rides through the Big Cypress Swamp (figure 20), reptile shows featuring venomous snakes and baby alligators, and narrated tours of a cypress hammock and wildlife preserve in a swamp buggy (an amphibious converted military jeep). Visitors can stay overnight at the

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Figure 20. A promotional photograph of the Billie Swamp Safari, 2001. Photo by Robert Kippenberger.

Safari in chickees, view caged endangered Florida panthers, and catch an alligator-wrestling show or craft demonstration. The Safari has been featured on many travel and adventure television shows. Several factors have contributed to the Safari’s relative success. First, and most importantly, the Safari filled a social void for residents of the rural Big Cypress Reservation. Previously, people had to drive forty-five minutes to the nearest sit-down restaurant, but now tribal members and employees had a place to gather for food, fellowship, and meetings. The Safari also caters family and tribal events, and its bottomless Styrofoam cups of Southern sweet tea are staples of take-out business (but they are also the scourge of antidiabetes initiatives). Second, ecotourism appealed to preexisting consumer images of Indianness by emphasizing Seminoles’ connection to the land and the Everglades. Third, the Safari perpetuates a century-old tradition of Seminole cultural tourism. Economic diversification is not just a way for Seminoles to make money or protect assets. Diversification is also a matter of pride, politics, and nationalism. When American Indians can list an array of tribal enterprises, as Seminoles often do, outsider perceptions that Indian tribes are just gaming soften: as then-president (and subsequently chairman) Mitchell Cypress (Otter) said, “We’re not only B-I-N-G-O” (November 9, 2000). Or as Brighton Tribal Council representative Andrew Bowers Jr. (Snake) put it:

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“I don’t think the Seminole Tribe should be just known as bingo players, bingo hall operators. There’s got to be more to life than that. These days we’re stuck on gaming. Don’t want to look anywhere else” (August 23, 2005). In response to my question about future tribal priorities, Alex Johns (no clan), then–board representative from Brighton and the first elected official with no clan, said:

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It’s great to capitalize off of gaming, but without being diversified . . . I don’t think gaming will be around forever. And I don’t want people to say, “Hey, the Seminole Tribe is rich just because of gaming.” I want people to see that gaming has created other opportunities for us: because of gaming we’re able to create different businesses, put our people to work, give them prestigious positions, teach them from ground up and let our people do their own management. . . . Economically, that’s what I want to see for the future of our tribe, being diversified in business and being noted for being business savvy. (February 7, 2001) For some Seminoles, diversification also offers escape from the moral quandary of operating casinos. David Motlow (Panther) is a middle-aged son of a Baptist preacher and grandson of a traditional healer, a Vietnam veteran, and a participant in efforts to preserve Seminoles’ natural resources. When I asked him about gaming, Motlow replied with a story from his grandfather, who told him that an eagle is a good hunter “and a proud representation of what Indians believe.” An eagle’s head is white, like a maturing man. But an eagle is like anything else that gets killed, in that the vulture eats it. The vulture finds the weakest and kills and eats it. Motlow compared this to gaming: “Gaming is the same way, because you’re going at a person’s weakness. It’s greed. And so when he lays there dying you come along picking his bones, but you know, sometimes you have to do that. But you don’t look at that forever, you try to look at other things. That’s what makes us stronger, we have to look at other things, we just can’t look at gaming and assume that that’s the way life is.” Motlow believes that it is the Tribe’s responsibility to take on bigger and better challenges, to diversify, to use gaming as an interim fix while coming up with ways to leave an imprint on the world: “And so preparing for it, that’s why we’re here. And that’s where that unconquerability comes back in, because if we don’t [pursue moral economic ventures] then what we’re telling

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the world is that we’ve been defeated again. So it[’s] got to go beyond that point, and that’s where the tribe is headed now” (July 2, 2001). As the language of unconquerability suggests, diversification is evidence of effective governance and symbolically affirms Seminole nationhood. Timothy Mitchell (1999) and others have argued, following Karl Polanyi (1944), that modern nation-states are characterized by the development of a seemingly discrete economic sphere. That is, one of the things that makes a nation is having and managing an economy.33 While for Seminoles the economic and political spheres generally are not conceived as entirely separate (as shown historically by the fact that clans organized them), Mitchell’s analysis usefully links the condition of having an economy to the achievement of nationhood. This helps us see that casino-driven diversification is more than an economic strategy: diversification produces and demarcates the very “economy” that Seminole officials manage, debate, and render national. Ec onomic C ontr ol

Along with economic wealth and diversification, tribal economic control has enacted but also challenged Seminoles’ conceptions of self-reliance and political power in the casino era. Tribal control over economic action sets political limits to fungibility by drawing the boundaries of a Seminole economy-in-the-making. In 1979, Hollywood Seminole Bingo was managed by Seminole Management Associates Ltd., in which the outgoing tribal chairman, Howard Tommie (Bird), held majority ownership (Kersey 1996: 124). The management company collected 45 percent of casino profits from the Tribe, in return for fronting capital and providing ongoing management. This relationship exposed the Tribe to allegations of organized crime connections because of the past business practices of certain non-Seminole management-company partners, and it also provoked internal criticism that the profit losses built into the management agreement were too high.34 The specter of organized crime, which long has been linked to gambling in South Florida (Muir 2000) and elsewhere, has provided a target for national antigaming activism and anti-Indian legislation that aims to curtail gaming rights, and it also has goaded tribes to strengthen their internal casino regulations.

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Media treatment of tribal gaming includes a corruption genre. For example, a Baltimore Sun article about Seminoles’ relationship with Cordish Company, the developers of Hollywood and Tampa Hard Rock, repeatedly deploys words like “perilous,” “risky,” and “gray areas” when describing Seminole gaming, while characterizing the “inherent risks” faced by Cordish as “doing business with one of the nation’s more colorful and controversial Indian tribes—a group with a history of wild spending and troublesome business deals.” The article goes on to catalog Seminole officials’ spending on “purchasing luxury cars, chartering jets, buying tickets to sporting events and paying for breast implants for wives and girlfriends,” and draws a contrast between the developer’s “squeaky-clean business image” and “a tribe known for sparring with the government, spending excessively and scuffling with the law” (Little and Adams 2004). Associations of Seminole gaming with lack of regulation and corruption are older, dating back, for example, to a 1985 Miami Herald article about opposition to a Seminole racetrack on the grounds that “the lack of regulation would attract organized crime” (Steinback 1985), or to the city of Coconut Creek’s initial fears that a Seminole casino would “bring traffic, organized crime and prostitution, and generally besmudge the city’s character” (Nolin 2001). Florida Attorney General Peter Antonacci characterized Seminole gaming thus: “In this unregulated sense, you might be playing against the mob, for all we know” (Holly 1991). At a national level, the conservative American Enterprise magazine went so far as to cite authorities’ concerns that “Indian casino cash makes a tempting target for international terrorists who need to launder money” (Golab 2004). The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal has consistently criticized tribal gaming as being susceptible to organized crime, unregulated, filled with people of dubious Indian heritage, and a front for white investors (e.g., Wall Street Journal 2002). With Indian casinos, American concerns about gambling as corrupt intersect with perceptions of American Indian tribes as lawless.35 That is, suspicion of tribal gaming’s legitimacy is overdetermined by the convergence of images of criminality and economic instability in Las Vegas and other gaming hot spots, on the one hand, and those of Indians as unregulated or exempt from American legal constraints (in business, hunting and fishing, etc.), on the other hand. In public comments since 1979,

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state officials and other Florida critics consistently have referred to Seminole gaming as “unregulated,” either ignoring or dismissing federal and tribal regulation. Sympathetic observers, meanwhile, contend that “Indian gaming is one of the most regulated industries in the U.S.,” noting that tribal regulators, sometimes states, and the NIGC all exercise regulatory supervision (Wanamaker 2003). Despite the financial risks entailed, and much to the surprise of many observers, the Seminole Tribe bought out all of their outside gaming­management contracts by summer 2000. This released the Tribe from putative crime connections. It was also a financial watershed. The practice of tribal control over casino management has continued subsequently, even as the tribal government has worked with outside developers and financiers.36 Jo-Lin Osceola (no clan), then–general manager of the Coconut Creek casino and the youngest person and only woman to manage any Indian casino, was proud that her casino was the first to open under Seminole tribal management. She believed that tribal control had made casinos more efficient, in part by standardizing machines, organization, and accounting methods across facilities. For Osceola, keeping casinos under tribal management meant “being able to control the decisions” and opening up education and employment opportunities for tribal members (November 29, 2000). Jim Allen, the CEO of Seminole Gaming since 2001, has prioritized training tribal members for leadership positions. He compared his past employment in commercial gaming to his work with Seminole Gaming, explaining that the latter integrates corporate culture with Seminoles’ distinctive governance and community life. Orientation for the thousands of non-Seminole employees includes a brief introduction to Seminole history and culture, and Allen wants all employees to understand that “we’re here because of the tribe’s sovereignty” (August 17, 2004). John Fontana, general manager of Tampa Hard Rock and a tribal employee since 1980, lauded the professionalism of Seminole Gaming while comparing some aspects to a family business, adding that working for the Tribe required attention to culturally specific modes of interaction, especially Seminoles’ reluctance to make direct demands or order people around (August 24, 2005). With the opening of the Hard Rock casinos in Hollywood and Tampa, the tribal government continued to manage its own casinos, but they also

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entered into complex new financing, development, and franchising agreements. For example, the Tribe raised capital to develop Hard Rock casinos by issuing bonds through a conduit municipal-bond authority (which then lent the money to the Tribe), pioneering a financing structure built upon the governmental status of Indian tribes. This strategy was challenged and curtailed by the IRS, which in a preliminary ruling found the bonds invalid, but it nonetheless opened up new possibilities for tribal bond issuance.37 Another innovative measure was to stipulate that developer fees would be flat, not fees for services. By not structuring the contract as a management agreement, the Tribe shielded its deals with developers from federal NIGC oversight. Still, the first Hard Rock deal was hugely controversial on Seminole reservations and beyond, triggering emergency Tribal Council meetings and a bitter legal dispute between the Tribe and the developer, Power Plant Entertainment, which is a subsidiary of Cordish Company (Little 2006). When covering the deal, newspaper articles frequently represented Seminoles’ authority to regulate and tax their own enterprises not as a positive exercise of governance subject to tribal ordinances, but rather as the absence of governance. For example, a St. Petersburg Times article characterized the Tampa Hard Rock as “the largest private project built in the county without comprehensive site planning, impact fee requirements, citizen input or local government oversight” (Testerman 2003). Or as a Sun-Sentinel article put it, “Most tourists probably have no idea their constitutional rights do not apply when they visit an Indian casino” (Santiago 2005).38 Tribal legal authority here is miscast as an absence of constitutional rights. At the February 9, 2001, emergency Tribal Council meeting to discuss the Hard Rock deal, several elected officials and attendees expressed concern about the terms of the council’s deal with the developer, and they challenged the finder’s fee reportedly given to a white employee who had a prominent role in the negotiations. As Josephine North (Panther) put it: “It’s our money; it’s not white people’s money.” Tensions boiled over when the chairman told the assembled: “You’re all spoiled.” The deal went forward, but some Seminoles complain that they haven’t seen sufficient results from the Hard Rock’s evident economic success in their personal pocketbooks, while others worry that the risk exposure of Hard Rock investment threatens tribal social programs and long-term financial sta-

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bility. Some tribal members engaged in soul-searching about ownership run amok when the Hollywood Hard Rock sustained damage by Seminole guests who test-ran the facility before its grand opening. To be sure, even most Hard Rock critics appreciate the benefits of the two facilities and their revenues. Many tribal events are held in private meeting rooms at Hard Rock casinos, from Tampa school incentiveawards programs to the Miss Seminole contest in Hollywood. There has been some effort to indigenize Hard Rock resort spaces, for example by offering discounted retail-store leases to Seminole vendors, reopening the Okalee Museum and the Okalee Village in Hollywood Hard Rock’s Seminole Paradise mall, building poolside chickees at both resorts, opening a Seminole craft/art store at Hollywood, and hosting various regional and national indigenous events. Recently, a former member of the band Village People donated his famous Indian-style headdress to the Hollywood Hard Rock for display. Economic control is at issue when Indian-gaming critics suggest that tribes are vulnerable to being fleeced by multinational management corporations and fly-by-night investors. Critics question whether tribes or nonIndians really control tribal gaming.39 For example, a December 2002 cover article in Time (Barlett and Steele 2002a) alleged that rich multinational corporations, not Indian tribes, were gaming’s beneficiaries; the Boston Globe referred to the Mohegan Sun, which was financed by an overseas investment group, as “a monument to a classic American deal, a latterday version of Indian treasure being carried off by non-Indians” (Murphy and Piore 2001). Such critiques rightly point to the power of big investors to draw up contract terms that disadvantage inexperienced and underfinanced tribal partners. In fact, the Seminole Tribe has sought legal redress against developers who they believe to have benefited unfairly from illegal contracts. Even so, gaming critics’ hasty assumption that tribal governments cannot play in the big league of business reveals an underlying suspicion that tribes are unable to direct their own economic affairs. By pointing to the scandal of outside investors, critics overlook the structural hurdles to capital investment that force tribes to enter into disadvantageous contracts in the first place. Seminoles remember how difficult it was before gaming to obtain loans from banks: the Tribe could not offer collateral, in part because reservation trust land is inalienable, and

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the banks were suspicious of the Tribe’s sovereign status for purposes of enforcing contract terms. John Fontana, Tampa Hard Rock general manager, recalled that in the early days of gaming, the only way for the Tribe to secure loans was to offer a percentage of profits to management companies (August 24, 2005). These structural barriers linked to federal trust status and sovereign immunity—these economics of political structure—have hindered capital investment throughout Indian Country, both at the level of tribal enterprise and for individuals seeking credit and loans (see Pickering 2000: 70).40 Seminole individuals also recounted facing race-based exclusions at lending institutions. Meanwhile, private investors shied away, BIA and tribal-government spending of federal funds often yielded little long-term benefit, Seminoles lacked business training sufficient to protect their interests, and the tribal government operated in the red. It is easy to see how, for Seminoles and other Indian nations, effective tribal control over casino management has become a key to gaming success and a potent symbol thereof. Tribal control over casino management, then, has increased long-term revenues, decreased outside suspicion about organized crime entanglement, eased pressure from federal regulators, and reduced tribal members’ resentment of outsiders’ getting rich off of Seminole enterprises. Perhaps most importantly, self-management has expressed and instilled an ethic of tribal self-reliance that has been central to Seminole ideologies of political power and nation building. At the same time, ideologies of self-reliance mask the ways that casinos are dependent on a non-Seminole consumer base and larger capital flows. What does “self-reliance” mean in the context of market integration? Tribal control illustrates the social meanings of control over capitalist exchange, showing how restricting the movement of capital does political and cultural work, especially in communities that so long were the subjects, rather than the managers, of economic development. Tribal authority over exchange, then, is imbued with political value that exceeds the casino income it generates. C onclusion

As “new capitalists” (Darian-Smith 2003), gaming tribes reconfigure relations of economy and dependency that had excluded indigenous peoples from control over monetized and capitalistic modes of exchange. More

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generally, they force scholarly reexamination of the relationship between forms of exchange and value. As demonstrated by the politics of fungibility, Seminole tribal gaming aptly illustrates Arjun Appadurai’s (1986: 3) contention that “what creates the link between exchange and value is politics.” Casinos have enabled Seminoles to develop a new form of “economic nationalism,” in which the tribal nation increasingly is consolidated and conceived around economic life. Like other government leaders, Seminole tribal officials appeal to discourses of nationhood that are based in economic strength, diversity, and corporate organization.41 American Indian tribes must achieve economic power in order to leverage political power and maintain their sovereignty (Barsh and Henderson 1980: chapter 20), yet indigenous wealth and its uses additionally come to symbolize sovereignty in relation to a history of indigenous poverty under settler colonialism. For Seminoles and some other Indian tribes, the use of gaming wealth for diversification and the tribal control over economic enterprises represent a departure from reliance upon federal programs. At the same time, there is notable slippage in Seminoles’ speech between referring to the tribal economy in national terms and in corporate ones, and some Seminoles worry that corporate interests and worldviews unduly guide tribal governance in the casino era.42 Indian wealth is not just an economic or sociological question: it is also profoundly political and symbolic, as casinos illustrate. Key to understanding the politics and practice of Indian gaming is consideration of the money form. Seminoles’ ability to transform the value of money—to exploit its fungibility—directs analytical focus to the situated meanings, circuits, and uses of money. It also calls attention to fungibility as a political quality of money.43 Beyond money, indigenous wealth and control over “an economy” point to the role of economic action in the assertion and exercise of sovereignty. Put another way, Seminole gaming brings into relief the materiality of sovereignty in the casino era.

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Figure 21. Mateo Romero, Indian Gaming, 1992. Oil on gator board, 48 × 72 in. Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, N.Mex. Courtesy of the artist.

Interlude Mateo Romero’s Indian Gaming

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ateo Romero is from Cochiti Pueblo and lives with his wife and children in Pojoaque Pueblo. The following text, excerpted from Romero’s Painting the Underworld Sky: Cultural Expression and Subversion in Art (2005), 31–33, accompanied the publication of his oil painting Indian Gaming (figure 21). This painting . . . is about our “self-addictions” (that is, selfimposed addictions). . . . In the end, blaming Indian gaming for people’s personality disorders is mainstream hypocrisy. In a self-destructive, self-indulgent, spiritually bankrupt mainstream society like ours, one can legally engage in drinking, smoking, gun ownership, gas-guzzling and polluting cars, prostitution (in some areas), Viagra, junk food, and finally gambling (in some areas). This is the essence of the American Dream: Choose your own form of little suicide but pay your taxes. Once the Indians get a piece of something not completely uplifting and wholesome, we demonize the hell out of it. And yet, Indian gaming is solid economic development for Indian communities. A double standard exists in the mainstream regarding Indian gaming. If the white man engages in gaming enterprises, and he’s successful in amassing a fortune in revenue, he’s considered an entrepreneurial business-

man. If Indian governments engage in similar activities along familiar pathways, they are painted with broad strokes of the brush as being seedy, affiliated with crime, dangerous. In my community, gaming revenues go to my son’s day care program, improvements in the roads where we live, housing, the tribal police, the public library, the cultural center and museum, and scholarship programs.

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​Rebuilding Sovereignty

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riving past the strip malls and residential developments of Hollywood, Florida, visitors know they have entered the Seminole Reservation when they approach blocks of modest houses punctuated by the thatched roofs of backyard chickees (cìkî, or “home” in Mikasuki). More than any other element of the built environment, chickees mark the reservation space as distinctly Seminole. For many Seminole families, chickees function as storage facilities, workshops, garages, or detached porches. Chickees also confer “Seminoleness” on vendors’ booths at Seminole festivals, as employee breakrooms, and on the Seminole Tribal Council flag, with its chickee logo (figure 22).1 Even off the reservation, chickees are a familiar Florida sight: hotels, tropical restaurants, and public buildings use chickees as poolside bars, educational venues, and in any setting where their thatched roofs convey just the right tropical, native touch. As we have seen, chickees stand in Seminole discourse for past poverty and also for a distinctly Seminole way of viewing the world. Recall, for example, the woman who told elected officials that “Sometimes you gotta sleep in a chickee—you can’t always sleep in the white man’s house.” Yet if today chickees have come to signify Seminole culture, the history of Seminole housing reveals a complicated, fraught relationship among chickees, culture, economy, and governance. Indeed, current attitudes represent a marked shift from the 1960s, when U.S.

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Figure 22. Seminole flag (digital). Courtesy of the Seminole Tribe of Florida.

officials prohibited Seminoles from constructing chickees in reservation housing developments. Since then chickees have become material markers of Seminole sovereignty. In this chapter, I examine Seminole governance to argue that gaming revenues have enabled a shift from the modes of governance previously established through Seminoles’ midcentury reliance on federal funding and administration. If the last chapter illustrated the politics of money, this one demonstrates the materiality of casino-era sovereignty, or the ways that sovereignty takes material form and is built with material resources. Casino-era sovereignty is both a matter of bureaucratic governance and of everyday practice. It is materialized, for example, in Seminoles’ houses and kitchen appliances, in their medically insured bodies, and in their nutritionally-balanced senior-citizen Hot Meals. This chapter traces changes in Seminole governance from the mid-twentieth century—the period of most intense federal government control over everyday Seminole governance— through the casino era. Tribal sovereignty is most often understood as a political and legal status, as the political authority of American Indian tribes over their citizens and territory (Barker 2005a; V. Deloria 1979; Deloria and Lytle 1984; Wilkins and Lomawaima 2001). Critics of grounding the concept and practice of tribal sovereignty in American law or Western legal traditions include the literary scholar Craig Womack, who asserted: “Tribal sover-

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eignty was not invented by Chief Justice John Marshall [the author of key nineteenth-century judicial rulings] nor extended throughout Indian country via federal Indian law, though these political definitions affect tribes in very important ways. Sovereignty is inherent as an intellectual idea in Native cultures, a political practice, and a theme of oral traditions; and the concept, as well as the practice, predates European contact” (Womack 1999: 51). Womack joins the political philosopher Taiaiake Alfred in privileging indigenous theories of sovereignty over settler law as both the source and the future of indigenous self-determination, although Alfred (2002) is skeptical of the term sovereignty, calling for its rejection as bringing too much European baggage. I understand sovereignty ethnographically to be Seminoles’ shared assertions, everyday processes, intellectual projects, and lived experiences of political distinctiveness. Robert Warrior, drawing upon Vine Deloria Jr., has advocated a “process-centered understanding of sovereignty” (Warrior 1994: 87), which involves “a process of asserting the power we possess as communities and individuals to make decisions that affect our lives” (124). In this spirit, I aim to demonstrate how Seminole tribal administration and economy take form and meaning as sites of sovereignty in the making. Put another way, I am concerned to maintain a productive tension between seemingly distinct modes of sovereignty and governmentality, as outlined by Michel Foucault. For Foucault, sovereignty connoted a unitary premodern juridical power based on right, law, and territory (the prince was the paradigmatic sovereign), while governmentality (which, importantly, did not unseat sovereignty) described the modern constitution of subjects through circulatory power tactics and fields: governmentality constitutes and regulates populations and individuals.2 If Foucault limits sovereignty’s domain to theories of right, this analysis of Seminole gaming shows that overly juridical and unitary understandings of sovereignty blind us to the lived experiences and multiplicities of sovereignty. Neither singular notions of sovereign power nor popular sovereignty theories can account for the ways that indigenous sovereignty is both built from and sustains collectivities. Indigenous sovereignty unsettles the singularity of sovereignty as it was developed in Europe and its colonies, opening up new questions for political theories of sovereignty that have developed to explain these European and settler sovereign formations.

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Few scholars have looked beyond the economics of casinos to address what it means to American Indian people that tribal gaming enables them to control and expand their social services and tribal government. This chapter, the complement to the next chapter on sovereignty and interdependency, charts Seminoles’ collective political power as it takes material shape in casino-era tribal administration. Seminoles’ efforts to secure tribal control over social services have been undertaken in response to the history of American settler colonialism, as well as in relation to federal-government and civil-society assimilation projects targeted at Indians. Housing is just one arena, and perhaps an unexpected one, in which casinos have enabled Seminoles to reorganize these settler-indigenous relations. Indeed, similar stories can be told about education, health care, naturalresource management, and so on.3 However, because Seminole housing was a focus of midcentury federal and private modernization programs, it is a particularly rich site in which to analyze the modes by which Seminoles have experienced and reworked the relationships among administration, gender and kinship, and self-determination.4 Assump tions of S overeignty

Government administration and citizenship are cultural processes woven into the limitations and possibilities of everyday life. For American Indians, who since the Marshall Supreme Court cases of the 1830s have been legally categorized as “wards of the state,” social reproduction takes place partly (but not only) in relation to settler-state policies and administrative activities. In the context of Australia, Jeremy Beckett (1988: 12) has argued that the legacy of colonialism requires indigenous peoples to enter into “a special, collective relationship with the state” for their survival. For centuries, Seminoles have actively debated their collective relation to the United States, but the twentieth century brought new possibilities and limits to this conversation. Thus, a brief historical outline of the Tribe’s current governing structures sets the stage for an analysis of sovereignty and administration in the gaming era, and for the broader question of how to understand sovereignty as an everyday process even while attending to the importance of sovereignty as a formal politico-legal status. In the 1930s, Seminoles slowly began to move onto reservations that had been purchased for their use by the federal government; these were

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not treaty reservations but rather were designated lands within Seminoles’ region of residence that were put into federal trust for their use. In 1935, in the wake of a South Florida visit by Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, a small group of Seminoles voted to reorganize under the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934. This federal legislation sought to preserve Indian cultural and political integrity, albeit under imposed governmental forms that required federal approval.5 Most Seminoles did not participate in these proceedings, indicating a failure of support within this community that usually approved political measures by consensus (Kersey 1989).6 Nor did Seminoles follow the vote by adopting an IRA-style government until twenty years later; instead, they continued to govern with interclan and intraclan councils, with camp-based decision making, and—on the reservations—as individuals and cattle-program trustees in dialogue with the federal Indian agent, whose powers and resources were quite limited. Seminole governance attracted the interest of other Floridians during this period, for example in newspaper coverage of punishments for interracial marriage and their administration of the death penalty (e.g., Miami Daily News 1946). At a time when Florida’s municipal and state governing structures were just beginning to take shape, and when the Everglades beckoned as a development bonanza but loomed as an untamed and disease-filled wilderness, Seminole justice in the Everglades held romantic appeal and stood for the possibilities and limits of social order in the Sunshine State. Before reorganization, most Seminoles had viewed radical independence from the federal government as the only hope for sustaining a healthy way of life, and there are hints of this stance to this day when Seminoles speak of being “unconquered” because they never signed a peace treaty with the United States.7 In the 1950s, however, Seminoles were forced into federal Indian-policy debates when they were added to a federal list of tribes slated to be “terminated” under House Concurrent Resolution 108, an assimilationist bill authorizing the severance of federal relations with designated American Indian tribes and permanently terminating those tribes’ collective rights and benefits (Fixico 1986; Kersey 1996; Philp 1999). A small group of Seminoles actively fought termination, traveling to Washington, D.C., and meeting with local politicians to defend their tribal status. They succeeded, with assistance from anthropologist William Sturtevant and other expert witnesses, but this raised the important internal question of

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whether Seminoles would most effectively protect their political status by reorganizing under an IRA tribal government or by avoiding increased contact with the federal government. Their ensuing actions were part of a larger political trend, as identified by Charles Wilkinson (2005: 86): “The fear of termination had the effect of mobilizing American Indians. . . . Indian people realized that something had to be done and that they could count upon nobody save themselves. That realization became a major impetus for the gathering of the modern tribal sovereignty movement.” The issue of reorganization widened a political wedge between the mostly reservation Indians who supported it and several communities living near the Tamiami Trail who did not. An earlier point of dispute had been the 1950 filing of a petition with the Indian Claims Commission by a group of reservation Seminoles. Under the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1946, Seminoles sought redress for the unlawful seizure of their lands by the United States. Many “Trail Indians,” however, refused to join the petition because settlement would require the petitioners to forgo all further land claims. Reorganization and the land claim highlighted the divergence of views among Florida Indians about how best to structure relations with the United States (Covington 1993: chapter 14; King 1978: chapter 8).8 Interpersonal tensions and differences in religious and cultural commitment also contributed to the growing rift. In 1957, reservation Seminoles and their political allies accepted reorganization by a vote of 241 to 5, and on August 21 the Seminole Tribe of Florida was reorganized and federally recognized under a constitution approved by the BIA. At the same time, the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Inc., the business wing, was chartered as a corporation. Mike Tiger (Snake), the tribal treasurer and a former board representative, emphasized that reorganization was not the origin point of Seminole politics and law: “The tribe was a very political entity before they were organized. They were well organized, had their own infrastructure to manage themselves based on their traditional customs and traditional medicine.” Seminoles, he explained, “organized political, aboriginal customs and laws and traditions like marriages, divorces, adoptions, separations, traditional customs that would be enacted if there was a needy person. The Tribe watched over its own and cared for its own for thousands of years before the white man came” (August 29, 2005).

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In his book title, historian Harry Kersey Jr. called the 1957 tribal reorganization An Assumption of Sovereignty. In the text, he showed how Seminoles’ efforts to secure recognition by the federal government both reflected their assumption that they already were sovereign and also facilitated their assuming (in the sense of gaining) sovereign power (Kersey 1996). At the fiftieth anniversary of reorganization, Seminoles are celebrating but also debating the scope of tribal power since they formed the “modern” tribal government. Meanwhile, they also continue to work out relations with their kin who refused reorganization. Some of the Trail groups, who were by then organizing separately as Miccosukees, achieved federal recognition in 1962. Their recognition followed in part from national security concerns after Miccosukees were recognized by Castro’s Cuba, in a Cold War episode that demonstrated the potential of international relations to affect the politics of both tribes and nation-states.9 A third group, the Independent Seminoles, to this day resists being subsumed by federal Indian laws or reservation spaces.10 In the wake of their 1957 reorganization Seminoles benefited from new federal programs and trust funds, but they also became increasingly subject to federal control. As Stephen Palmer (1973: 39) observed in the late 1960s during his brief ethnographic dissertation fieldwork: “There is, however, no realm of either political or economic activity in which the B.I.A., through the Seminole Agency, does not have some interest and control.” After reorganization, the BIA Seminole Agency approved tribal government actions and budgets, exercised fiscal and technological expertise, employed many tribal members, and worked with other federal agencies to move Seminoles into government-built reservation housing developments. Joe Dan Osceola (Panther), a chickee builder and tribal ambassador11 who was the first Seminole to graduate from Florida public high school (in 1957) and who had served as tribal president from 1967 to 1971, explained that before he was elected, Seminoles had insufficient education to understand the details of their own governing documents. This left the BIA in control, and he mused that this was just how the BIA wanted it (February 13, 2001). The legacy of midcentury BIA dependency remains evident in adult Seminoles’ mastery over the intricacies of federal regulations and entitlements. With gaming, however, direct federal presence and power in Seminole

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Country declined. This resulted both from the Tribe’s increased gamingfunded control over tribal administration and from shifts in the federal government’s understanding of its trust responsibility to American Indians. Greg Maddox, himself American Indian from Oklahoma (tribe unknown), headed the BIA Seminole Agency in 2000–2001. Maddox began our interview by emphasizing that the agency’s role had “changed tremendously over the last thirty years.” Previously, he explained, there had been approximately twenty-five BIA employees, and the BIA ran everything, but now they were down to a few employees and an operational scope largely limited to land-trust issues, a few grants, and contracts. Nonetheless, he emphasized, the federal government still had a trust responsibility, especially to oversee the numerous services that the Tribe had contracted from it. In the wake of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, tribal governments across the country took advantage of new opportunities to contract with the federal government to provide their own social services such as housing, job training, and education.12 Maddox pointed out that although the right to contract was based in changing federal policy, it really grew from activism by tribes who had been calling for self-determination and administrative control. He continued: “They [tribal governments] want to adapt their programs to meet their needs. That started long before the [federal] passage of self-determination. It started with the voices of the tribes, saying ‘that isn’t right.’ . . . That really is about sovereignty. Tribes didn’t pull this out of the air—it all stems from treaties that were made by the federal government.” “Progressive” tribes like Seminoles and Mississippi Choctaws, said Maddox, have radically decreased their dealings with the federal government, increasing tribal power while leaving BIA staff on the sidelines: “You can kind of feel unwanted. You want to feel like you’re making a difference” (October 16, 2000). Relations between the BIA and the Seminole Tribe have been materialized in the changing fates of their respective governmental buildings. The BIA Seminole Agency long had occupied the nicest building on the Hollywood Reservation, but by 2001 the agency was housed in half of a somewhat run-down, moss-covered building hidden among trees near the Hard Rock construction site. By contrast, the tribal government offices, once physically contained within the BIA Seminole Agency, now occupied a four-story gleaming tower with a helipad, an emergency bunker, an audi-

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Figure 23. Tribal headquarters, with statue of Sam Jones (or Abiaka), a nineteenth-century war hero, 1999. Photo by author.

torium, and an all-around corporate feel (figure 23). “Tribal headquarters,” as most people called it, had been built on the site of an old leased-out pig farm, prompting some Seminoles to chuckle that the place had gone (how far depended on the speaker’s view of tribal politics) from pig manure to political power. By 2005, the tribal offices had outgrown the headquarters building, the new parking lot annex was jammed by 8 a.m. every workday, and departments had begun renting off-site satellite office spaces. Meanwhile, well-appointed administration buildings have been built at Big Cypress and Immokalee. The shift in personnel and funding from the BIA to the tribal government packs symbolic punch when Seminoles point to these buildings as icons of changing political relations, even as some worry that the tribal government is growing too large and impersonal. When I asked former Tribal Council chairwoman Betty Mae Jumper (Snake), the first woman to be elected as chair of any “modern” tribal government in Indian Country,

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what had changed since her term in the late 1960s, she proudly looked around the tribal office where she sat. She explained that she and others once could only dream about having a big building for the tribal headquarters, a place where they could meet inside and in comfort. They used to meet at a concrete table underneath the Council Oak, she added, but everyone would have to run into a garage whenever it rained. She wondered what happened to that concrete table, grumbling that somebody probably threw it away, just as they throw everything away these days (April 18, 2001; see the conclusion for more on the fate of the concrete table). Tribal “control” over administration in the casino era means many things, including sprawling bureaucracy, emergent political orders, internal tensions, and new temporalities of governance. Like economic control over gaming and other ventures, as discussed in the last chapter, administrative control has both ideological and practical components. Self-determination has entailed a new view of Seminole power and has required bravery. As Health Director Connie Whidden (Panther) recalled: “Well, personally for me it was kind of scary because back then it was a new concept. Were we really capable of running the programs? We’d been so dependent on the BIA for so long” (June 5, 2001). As a way to describe the uncertainty of self-determination, some people told stories about other Seminoles being concerned that new gaming wealth would prevent them from procuring federally distributed commodity foods, even though the latter could not approach the economic value of the former.13 Seminoles had reason to be concerned about the costs of self-determination, since tribal takeovers of social services across the United States were, to some extent, necessitated by Reagan-era federal cutbacks on spending for Indian affairs (Castile 2006). Devolution and local control, those pillars of Reagan’s policies, opened spaces for tribal governments to wrest control over their administration, but at the cost of funding streams. One might call this sovereignty by neglect.14 And even as they laud casino-era selfdetermination, Seminoles recognize that their sovereignty remains limited by the federal government, which could further curtail it by exercising congressional plenary power. As Gloria Wilson (Snake) put it: “I think it [sovereignty] only goes as far as the federal government will allow us to have it” (August 17, 2005).15 Despite its limits and risks, self-determination matters. As Whidden

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sat in the newly renovated Hollywood health clinic and spoke of increased casino-era tribal health services—from universal health-care coverage to substance-abuse prevention programs, from obesity initiatives to nationalaward-winning fitness “rez rallies,” from reservation clinics to rural ambulance services—she underlined the value of tribal control: “We want our money. We can run our programs better, so give us the money. Give us the money, and we’ll buy back the service, but we want control over our health.” Even if the tribal administration doesn’t always do a good job, she noted, at least they would be dealing with their own mistakes, not those of the BIA (June 5, 2001). Or, as Jim Shore (Bird), general counsel, halfjoked while explaining why Seminoles would rather trust themselves than federal authorities with their money: “We can misspend it just as good as the [federal] government” (July 17, 2001). Tribal control over administration in the casino era accelerated the rate at which Seminoles’ goals and ideas could be realized through government, creating a new temporality of governance. Stanlo Johns (Panther), who had held several jobs in tribal government, remembered that creative solutions to reservation problems once were routinely thwarted by bureaucratic delays, but “now we don’t have to wait on anyone anymore, and I think to me that means a whole lot, to be able to do something ourselves instead of having to wait on people” (February 28, 2001). Tribal control also smoothed time. Whidden explained that gaming revenues, combined with tribal control over health-service administration, enabled continuity of care for Seminole patients, lending predictability to a health-care cycle that on many other American Indian reservations is marked by crisis as the end of the Indian Health Service fiscal year approaches (June 5, 2001). Gaming-era governance also extends present actions into a foreseeable future, holding out the real possibility that one’s actions will have a direct effect upon the collective future of Seminole people. As Shore emphasized, tribal control links the present to the future, for better or worse: “We like to be able to plan our own destiny, good or bad.” In the end, he added somewhat ruefully, getting control over one’s destiny often boils down to money (August 10, 2000). Indeed, many Seminoles explained that they had pursued casinos first and foremost as vehicles toward tribal economic power, with the belief that economic security would advance the project of self-governance by

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providing for the welfare of tribal members and reducing dependence on the federal government. Fundamentally, casinos emerged directly from the conviction that economic power both symbolizes and produces political sovereignty. As Stephen Bowers (no clan) put it: “We have progressed so much economically, and now we can just say no, too. As an Indian tribe, you know, you can be sovereign, a nation, but if you’re taking money from the state, you’re essentially not really sovereign” (January 18, 2000). Such articulations of collective autonomy as indexed by reduced federal dependency reflect both a long-standing Seminole valuation of self-reliance and also a distinctly American discourse about the shame of welfare dependency. This focus on economic “self-reliance,” as Seminoles often name tribal economic power, is especially potent because welfare dependency has long been a focus of anti-Indian racism in the United States (V. Deloria [1970] 1988; Pickering 2000). “Self-reliance” also promotes health and well-being, as underlined by Jeannette Cypress (Panther), a middle-aged tribal administrator, who drew a contrast between her children’s casinoera health care and her experiences as a teenager without dental care: “My kids don’t have to go through that because there’s a dentist, and you don’t know how embarrassing it is to be a teenager with no front teeth” (October 2, 2000). Self-determination also carries obligations, and fulfilling indigenous sovereign obligations is at least as difficult as—and more pressing on a day-to-day basis than—fighting for sovereignty rights in U.S. politics and law. In April 2001 I attended an Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum and Water Resource Management Department field trip to Big Cypress for Brighton students, an event-filled excursion that included outdoor presentations on archaeology and ecology led by departmental staff and by Happy Jones (Bird), a Brighton elder with expertise in botany (figure 24). During a picnic lunch in the woods (punctuated by jokes that baloney sandwiches were real Indian food), I introduced myself to the children and explained that I was writing a book about gaming and sovereignty. One of the students asked me what sovereignty was. I stumbled (finding it uncomfortable to be asked for the answer to my in-progress research question), leaning back on a pick-up truck tailgate and stammering some platitude about how the kids should consult their elders about sovereignty, and how it was about being a nation and governing themselves. Joe Frank (Panther), a college-educated BIA

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Figure 24. Happy Jones (Bird) teaches Brighton children about Seminole medicine plants, 2001. Photo by author.

forester and an active Green Corn Dance participant, graciously stepped in to explain that sovereignty is “being able to make your own decisions.” He then went on to say that this was why the children must learn that day’s lessons in medicine and history (April 16, 2001). For Frank, sovereignty required gaining knowledge and skills sufficient to make your own decisions, and this in turn entailed more than achieving legal status or becoming an autonomous choosing subject: sovereignty obligates Seminoles to learn, to know, to remember, and to act upon a distinctive and valued way of being in the world. Or, as Vine Deloria Jr. put it: “‘Sovereignty’ is a useful word to describe the process of growth and awareness that characterizes a group of people working toward and achieving maturity. If it is restricted to a legal-political context, then it becomes a limiting concept which serves to prevent solutions” (V. Deloria 1979: 28). Seminole governance, as discussed throughout this book, shows sovereignty to be cultural, moral, and material, even as it is also a politico-

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legal status. When Max Osceola Jr. (Panther), the Hollywood Tribal Council representative, spoke of “self-determination,” he referred to indigenous control over life in its fullest: “not just government: culturally, socially, not just economics.” For him, governing meant the right to “make social decisions, cultural decisions: how to live.” He continued: “When I say govern, I don’t mean it only in the sense of the federal government, of the senators and the congressman, but the right as the head of the house, or in your clan” (January 23, 2001). This sense of sovereignty is less juridical or recognition-based than it is a forward-looking political process geared toward the realization of collective political and social life. It is also notable for the purposes of this chapter that the clan and the household figure prominently in Osceola’s description of governing. It is to housing that we now turn, in order to look beyond the ideologies and administrative apparatuses of self-determination by examining its materiality. Fr om Chickees to C oncrete Bl o ck Stru ctures

Housing is one among many domains in which casino wealth has enabled Seminoles to reorganize administrative relationships with important economic, social, and political consequences. Seminole housing offers insight into the ongoing processes of settler coloniality in the United States, much as scholars have examined housing as a domain of colonialism in other periods and locales (Celik 1997; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Mitchell 1991; G. Wright 1991), including indigenous-settler contexts among First Nations in Canada (Harris 2002; A. Perry 2003). Yet Seminole housing not only tells a story about colonialism, but also illuminates the possibilities, limits, and unexpected entailments of tribal sovereignty. In order to understand the significance of recent casino-funded Seminole tribal housing programs, I first trace midcentury federal and philanthropic efforts to move Seminoles out of matrilineal extended family residences into standardized single-family concrete block structure (CBS) houses. As a modernizing project, federal housing for Seminoles instituted new spatial and civic orders, which in turn shaped subsequent gaming-era Seminole efforts to control tribal housing administration.16 Before the nineteenth-century wars, Seminoles in northern Florida generally lived in log houses, many with two stories, organized into Creek/ Muskogee-style towns that consisted of approximately eight to thirty ham-

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Figure 25. John Jumper’s camp, 1908. Courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (N02960). Photo by Mark R. Harrington.

lets (later called “camps”; Sturtevant and Cattelino 2004: 431). During and after the wars, Seminoles in the swamps began to live in chickees, which are open-sided thatched structures with roofs of palmetto leaves attached to rafters, secured by corner support posts of cypress or palm logs. Chickees were well suited to the heat, humidity, and seasonal floods of the southern Florida swamps, and during the dangerous war years they could be built and dismantled quickly. Early twentieth-century Seminole households, or groupings based on residential propinquity and shared sets of activities (Yanagisako 1979), organized a variety of social, economic, and political obligations. Households formed the essential economic unit, and the matrilineal clans around which they were organized comprised the central Seminole political units. A household (figure 25), often called a “camp” or “village” in academic and government literatures (and in present-day Seminole English), consisted of multiple chickees arranged around a central cooking chickee with a continuously burning fire, which Seminoles identify as the “heart” of the camp and a symbol of life itself (e.g., B. Jumper 1994) and which is also

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depicted on the tribal flag.17 Camps were organized according to matrilocal patterns; thus, they generally included women from a single clan, their children, their husbands from other clans, and unmarried male clan relatives.18 Clan property passed through women in the matriline (Kersey and Bannan 1995: 197). Husbands were responsible for building chickees and for contributing to the household economy, as Harley Jumper (Panther) explained to anthropologist William Sturtevant in the early 1950s: “If you marry a girl, you have to learn how to make houses, and you have to help her kinfolks in the things they do. That’s the way we teach our young ones” (wcsf, Box 1). When a marriage broke up, a man generally returned to his own clan’s camp, while a woman retained her chickees (Spoehr 1944: 146). Beginning in the 1930s, Seminoles increasingly moved onto reservations. Former tribal chairman James Billie (Bird), citing Seminoles’ reluctance to relocate to reservations, called them concentration camps (April 13, 2001; Charles Billie-Hiers [Bird] made a similar statement in an interview on January 31, 2001). To be sure, American Indian reservations carry significance far beyond their spatial organization or formal legal status. Thomas Biolsi analyzed reservations as spatial modes of governmentality, whereby modern individuals (and subjects) were produced (1995a). American Indian scholars and artists often represent reservations with ambivalence, acknowledging their constraining nature while recognizing their generative role in producing indigenous identities, communities, and collective power (Alexie 1995; McMaster 1998). Because the U.S. government had attempted to concentrate Seminoles for forced Western removal during and after the Seminole Wars, many Seminoles feared that if they moved onto the new reservations they would be transported to Oklahoma.19 Government control over residence connoted subjugation, and Seminoles’ ongoing ambivalence toward reservation space is exemplified by a prohibition on holding the annual Green Corn Dance on reservation land.20 Nonetheless, families’ motivations for moving onto reservations were many: during this Florida boom time, some sought stability after being pushed off their lands by new non-Indian landowners,21 some moved because the federal government offered on-reservation jobs as part of Indian New Deal federal employment programs (Kersey 1989), while others clustered on reservations as they converted to Christianity.

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By the 1950s at Dania (later Hollywood), Seminoles’ chickee settlements and few ramshackle frame houses had become a “problem” that local charitable organizations sought to solve. The Friends of the Seminoles, the Florida Federated Women’s Clubs, and other organizations took up the cause, placing advertisements in local newspapers and raising funds (Jumper and West 2001: 144–49). Financing was an obstacle because American Indian reservation lands were and are held in trust by the federal government, and thus are inalienable. As a result, banks and other lending agencies were unwilling to finance reservation development and mortgages. By 1956, however, local charities had reaped the fruits of fundraising drives and worked with the Indian agent to build six new wood-frame houses. These philanthropic efforts set the stage for the federal government housing projects that soon followed. The turning point in Seminole housing was the 1957 tribal reorganization. Florida Seminoles had occupied an uncertain space between individual citizenship and tribal status, able neither to profit from private land ownership nor to benefit from government programs designated for federally recognized American Indian tribes.22 After reorganization, however, Seminoles became eligible for Indian housing programs stemming from the 1949 Housing Act, and they took advantage of Kennedy and Johnson administration housing programs (Biles 2000). Efforts to move Seminoles from chickees to federal housing developments took colonial form. Nonetheless, Seminole housing programs were not a simple case of top-down governmental paternalism. Seminoles worked hard to secure new housing, and many still vividly recall logging the 590 hours of labor required for home ownership under a federal mutual self-help program. Several adults explained that as schoolchildren in the 1960s they longed for houses because it was difficult to study in chickees. By the late 1960s, a new generation of tribal political candidates campaigned on platforms that included housing development, echoing both the midcentury equality ideals of post–New Deal liberalism and, to some extent, the critiques of state-based inequality leveled by 1960s Red Power activists. By 1966, approximately 42 percent of all Seminole families had abandoned their chickees for CBS houses (figure 26); at Hollywood, the number was 64 percent (Seminole Tribe of Florida 1966b, RQP).23 Federal programs brought many Seminoles a step closer to reaching the “American dream”

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Figure 26. An early CBS home, probably on the Big Cypress Reservation. Ethel Cutler Freeman Papers, neg. 2002–1430, National Anthropological Archives.

of modern home ownership and class mobility. Yet, the new housing developments also revealed tensions between American and Seminole values of citizenship and sociality, tensions most evident in the domains of kinship, gender, and domestic space. Remodeling Family and Gender

When I asked middle-aged and elderly tribal members what it was like to move from chickee camps into single-family housing developments, they generally coupled pride in progress with a lament for the breakdown of the extended family and the erosion of the clans. Because clans had organized Seminole social, economic, and political life, housing transition did not simply affect individuals, it had broad implications for the Seminole public. As Elizabeth Povinelli (2002b) has argued, indigenous citizenship and entitlement within settler modernity are contested upon the terrain of kinship relations.24 Other scholars have made related claims for the mechanisms by which colonialism enters into and relies upon kinship and intimacy as sites of governance (Chatterjee 1993; Kanaaneh 2002; Stoler 2002).25 Thus, it is not surprising that Seminoles’ discussions of kinship take on political tones in the context of federal housing programs, linking

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the erosion of Seminole clans and culture to federal housing and, more broadly, to federal intervention in Seminoles’ day-to-day lives. The BIA Seminole Agency created housing policies that privileged nuclear families, for example drawing up blueprints based on the assumption of nuclear family habitation and initially extending homesite loans and leases to nuclear families with male heads of household. Former director of the Housing Department Joel Frank (Panther) emphasized the importance of clan living, lamenting that “housing has gone a long way to destroy a lot of it. We have taken the family out of all that support that was there in the village concept and isolated them, so they have had to fend for themselves as an independent unit” (January 9, 2001). Some Seminoles, including former Housing Commissioner Jacob Osceola (Panther), speculated that the BIA and HUD intentionally disrupted clan residence by distributing housing without regard for clan settlement. Osceola argued that this was part of a larger government project to make Seminoles more “American” (October 10, 2000). Mary Jene Coppedge (Panther) offered a similar view to a University of Florida interviewer: “And the government knew exactly what they were doing when they brought single dwelling homes into this reservation, because they knew that would eventually break up the extended family and that the language would die from there. Trying to kill the culture, they knew that all along” (SPOHP #233: 34). Osceola’s and Coppedge’s theory is consistent with available evidence— such as the government memo “Let’s Get Married,” which offered information on the laws and procedures of civil marriage (cited in Palmer 1973: 48)—that the BIA was engaged in multipronged efforts to promote the nuclear family as the basis for Seminole social and economic life.26 For example, a 1967 BIA Seminole Agency memorandum on “Domestic Relations” lists the following as “social ills” that contribute to “domestic instability”: the absence of legal marriages; nonsupport (by fathers); infidelity (which the author suspects is “aggravated by the increased numbers of working mothers”); the dominance of women in Seminole society; indebtedness; and families with children of two or more unions living together. Advocating more meetings exclusively for men and more staff attention to fathers and husbands, the memo “is an attempt to strengthen the nuclear family.”27 These policies resulted neither from benign government misunderstanding nor from direct state repression. Instead, they

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represent a mode of governance exercised by the United States toward Seminoles that is common to “welfare colonialism,” in which the political projects of state governance are administered in part via social services that attempt to “modernize” and regulate family structure among internal minorities and indigenous peoples (Paine 1977; Beckett 1988). For men, moving into BIA housing developments transferred family authority from the maternal uncle to the father. Previously, maternal uncles, not fathers, passed clan-specific knowledge, discipline, and (often) property to their sisters’ children. Federal officials, however, privileged biological fatherhood, and Seminole Agency staff emphasized that “the father must learn his role in the modern family” (Seminole Tribe of Florida 1966a: 5 [ECFP]). Southern Baptist missionaries promoted fatherhood and provided a religious model for its expression, and Seminole Baptists were especially quick to move into the new houses. In one sense, men gained authority over their wives and children through their roles as nuclear family fathers and heads of household, but in another sense men lost authority through their diminishing roles as maternal uncles and clan elders. Seminole women also reconfigured ties of kinship and sociality during housing transition. Feminist scholars have pointed to ways that post– World War II housing developments reflected and shaped gender roles, personal experiences, and professional possibilities for American women (see, e.g., Hayden 1984). For Seminole women, these changes took place in reference to a different kinship structure and settlement pattern. Elsie Bowers (Snake), originally from the Brighton Reservation, responded to my question about housing with a typically gendered account. In 1970, as a young adult with three children, Bowers moved into her first nonchickee house. She liked the amenities but she keenly felt the social costs. Living in chickees, she said, “we were always together,” eating, sleeping, and hanging out. But, “once we got our individual houses, this whole thing split us up.” In chickees women were in control, but that was lost with new houses (June 27, 2001). Bowers contrasted an idealized family and sociality grounded in women’s control to the individuality of life in reservation housing. Like other women, Bowers found that the unforeseen financial burdens of housing (house and furniture payments, more grocery bills because BIA Seminole Agency policy prohibited Seminoles from raising pigs or chickens in the housing development) propelled her into the paid

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workforce. Ironically, then, it was only by working outside the home that most Seminole women could afford to pursue their dreams of middle-class domesticity. Housing transition highlighted the newfound agency of the first generation of American-school-educated Seminole children, whose English competence and school-based familiarity with “white culture” placed them in positions of unprecedented importance as intermediaries. The Fort Lauderdale Sunday News emphasized the role of children in housing transition: “The Seminole urge for homes began when young Indian school pupils started needling their parents for more comfortable houses equipped with bathrooms” (Flagg 1956). Nonetheless, many Seminoles of this generation remembered their move from chickees into houses negatively. For example, Helene Johns Buster (Panther), who moved into a Brighton CBS house in 1969 as a teenager, told an interviewer: “To me, when that breakup happened, with the camps and the stuff, and we moved into the CBS homes, that was probably the biggest, the most sorrowful time in my life” (SPOHP #248, 27). Not surprisingly, Seminoles forged complex kinship configurations in and through their new houses. For example, despite the designation of 720-square-foot (24' × 30') two-bedroom houses for nuclear families, some residents maintained matrilocal patterns. Many took part in practices of clan-based adoption, foster care, and babysitting. These and other efforts by Seminoles to create comfortable homes—to make social, practiced space out of physical place, in the terms of Michel de Certeau (1984)— set the stage for a new generation of policies and practices after the Tribe took control of its own housing administration. Modernizing Pr oje cts: Pursuing the American Dream

Federal housing programs for Seminoles aimed to reorganize not only kinship and gender but also space, in the pursuit of a distinctly modern spatial and civic order.28 In his study of Egyptian colonization, Timothy Mitchell (1991: 44) argued that modernist states introduce a “new way in which the very nature of order [is] to be conceived.” More locally, Andrew Ross has shown the American Dream of middle-class modern home ownership to have been a structuring ideal of modern Florida, from the mid-

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twentieth-century population boom to present-day housing trends like New Urbanism (Ross 1999). Seminole housing projects arose at a moment when government officials and a growing segment of the American public put their faith in scientific housekeeping, standardized design, and domestic technologies as harbingers of progress (Hayden 1981; G. Wright 1981). On Seminole reservations, these spatial disciplines and dreams were inextricably tied both to the realization of American citizenship—in the sense of substantive participation in the institutions and everyday practices of American civic belonging—and to the spatial projects of settler ­colonialism. In a modernizing conflation of space with time, the language of progress/ modernity and primitivism characterized many outsiders’ observations of Seminole housing transition. In BIA and Cooperative Extension reports from the late 1950s and 1960s, government officials contrasted “modern” housing developments with Seminoles’ “traditional” clan camps, touting the improved health benefits (e.g., less hookworm, safe drinking water) and overall progress represented by single-family houses. Local newspapers lauded new tribal housing developments, contrasting them with “primitive” chickee living. An article in the All Florida Magazine was typical: “And what amazing progress they are making, moving forward 100 years in one giant step, out of primitive living conditions into the wonders of the electronic age” (Carlton 1960). These images of “traditional” Seminole clan camps as disordered—as the “primitive” chaos upon which the contrastive “modern” order relies (Torgovnick 1990)—ignored the fact that Seminole clan camps had, in fact, been highly ordered spaces. In camps, families arranged chickees in circular patterns, locating their cooking fire at the center of the camp and positioning fire logs and chickee poles in accordance with specific directional rules. Nonetheless, rather than understanding their project as a reordering of space, government officials and philanthropists adhered to a vision of progress that equated modernity with order itself. Moreover, in their focus on Seminoles’ housing-linked technological embrace of “newfangled gadgets,” shiny appliances, electricity, and an “amazing number of radio and television sets” (Hogan 1956), outside observers failed to recognize that Seminoles had selectively incorporated technology into camp living. They had done so, for example, with electric sewing machines for making patchwork, radios playing country music,

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Figure 27. Housing development, Big Cypress, 2007. Photo by Robert Kippenberger.

and light bulbs hanging from chickee rafters under which schoolchildren gathered to study (Garbarino 1972).29 Government officials sought to create order by building planned developments with regularly spaced houses of identical construction (figure 27). As Paul Buster (Otter), fifty-one, a cultural-education specialist and country musician, put it: “Back in those days they didn’t build houses where you wanted: they built houses where they wanted” (July 11, 2001). Similarly planned (though often higher quality) developments were sprouting up all over South Florida during this period, reflecting a population boom and a nationwide government and private-sector effort to construct single-family houses. Standardization was not just an instrument of cost efficiency but also a distinct goal of federal housing programs, which aimed to encourage and assist “the use of new designs, materials, techniques, and methods in residential construction, the use of standardized dimensions and methods of assembly of home-building materials and equipment, and the increase of efficiency in residential construction and maintenance” (Housing Act of 1949, Pub. L. No. 81–171, 63 Stat. 413). Seminoles remembered the spatial aspects of their housing transition with ambivalence. They frequently characterized the new cookie-cutter residences as stifling and uncomfortable, with few windows, poor circula-

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tion, and no air conditioning. Paul Buster (Otter), who moved into a house around age twenty, found that CBS living restricted hearing, placing walls between people that prevented elders’ speech from reaching children (July 11, 2001). Many residents disliked the density of their new developments: whereas clan camps had been built far apart, families from different clans lived side by side in housing developments. People felt hemmed in, claustrophobic, and they experienced a lack of privacy. At the same time, many expressed pride in their houses and extolled their newfound equality with other South Florida communities. A key institution that promoted modern and efficient living at the midcentury was the home-economics movement, which sent state and county “home demonstration agents” to teach women, especially in poor and minority communities, how to order their homes in accordance with principles of science and economy. Cooperative Extension home-economics programs promised Americans, especially women, that from within their homes they could take part in a project of efficiency that would improve themselves, their families, and their nation. Beginning in the 1950s, home demonstration agents worked to order Seminole space through housekeeping instruction, demonstrating cleaning techniques and assisting with furniture purchases (SPOHP #112: 3; Boehmer 1957 [FCESAR]). In 1956, local philanthropic women’s groups sponsored a contest among Seminole housewives to see whose housekeeping skills would improve most quickly. Each judge allotted points in categories such as “Furniture neatly arranged,” “Clean comb for each person,” “Care of house plants,” and “Plant fruit trees” (RQP, Box 2, Housing file).30 In this typical image of modernization at work (figure 28), Mary Parker Bowers (Snake) appears to listen attentively while a home demonstration agent instructs her on the use of her new oven. After locating this photograph in an archive, I returned to Hollywood in 2002 and delivered a print to Bowers, then eighty years old (figure 29). Delighted, she began to tell me what it was like to move into her first nonchickee house, located near the Council Oak on the current Hollywood Bingo site. She laughed, saying: “God, that’s a job we got into! Before we just had a fire! We thought it [housekeeping] was too much work.” She remembered that the home agent, May Ola Fulton, whom she considered friendly and a good teacher, taught her how to operate, clean, and maintain her stove and other appliances. Bowers proudly recalled that she won first place in a housekeeping Chap ter 4

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Figure 28. Mary Parker Bowers (Snake) learns how to operate her oven. University of Florida Archives.

contest. Her pleasure and nostalgia upon viewing the staged photograph reflected little of the power dynamic under consideration in the image, though her memories of increased household labor displayed ambivalence about moving from chickee to CBS living: “Gosh, it was a job then. [In a chickee] we just had an open house. Air-conditioning ran through it. [In the new house], extra bills came in. Pay the light bill and water bill.” Historical studies of gender and housework in the United States support Bowers’s recollection that appliances and other “modern” housing conveniences did not reduce, but rather may even have increased, women’s household labor (Cowan 1983). She then pointed to an original painting hanging on her wall that depicted a chickee scene. She explained that she used this and other paintings as pedagogical devices for her grandchildren: “I have pictures to show ’em, that’s how we lived.” Sometimes, she added with a tone of resignation, the children don’t seem to believe that she really lived like that (August 21, 2002). Although Bowers and many other Seminole women embraced aspects of CBS living, government efforts to enlist them into maintaining a new spatial order through modern housekeeping techniques fell short. Instead, Seminoles engaged in everyday practices that integrated their previously established modes of embodiment and domesticity with new living conditions. For example, faced with prohibitions on building chickees Rebuilding S overeignty

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Figure 29. Mary Parker Bowers in 2002. Photo by author.

in housing developments, many families maintained their old chickees, often located miles away. One young man remembers that his grandmother never grew accustomed to using her pantry; instead, she kept her food in a large, covered garbage can, a practice that, in her camp, had kept the food secure from vermin. In BIA reports from this period, observers often mention that new Seminole houses were dirty and poorly kept.31 Anthropology graduate student James O. Buswell III observed that in the new houses there was “no conception of the differentiation of indoors [sic] space-use for which it was designed”: Even in the best homes the use of space and surface areas seems to the white observer to be completely unplanned. Thus in one fairly modern, air-conditioned C.B.S. house at the Hollywood reservation the following items were noted in the front room: couch, chairs, table occupied by lamp and books, coffee table, piano, portable record player, electric sewing machine, and carpet. On the various surfaces were the following: Books (two New Testaments, a dictionary, a one-volume Encyclopedia, The Golden Book [child’s] Encyclopedia, The Life of Christ, “Greater Cleveland” booklet, mathematics text); and the following miscellaneous articles: sewing equipment and supplies, a bottle of glue, doll’s baby bottle, loose leaf notebook, records, magazines, cloth of

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different colors, medicine bottles, flannel-graph materials, glasses case, papers, a bath towel, bottle opener, and about two dozen empty softdrink bottles. (Buswell 1972: 28) Buswell’s observations resonate with government practices that took the “unordered” status of one’s home, whether among Seminoles or other poor and minority populations, as a sign of social disorder and administrative failure (G. Wright 1981). The built environment can be both a locus for ideologies of citizenship and a structuring possibility for the achievement of citizenship (Caldeira 2000). Seminoles’ dwelling practices have been central to their complex negotiations of American and Seminole citizenship, not only via governmental policies but also in everyday practices of political belonging. Seminole citizenship is complex and, importantly, moves across the domains of tribal, local, state and federal polities. Elsewhere, I have described this as “overlapping citizenship” (Cattelino 2004: chapter 7). By working closely with the BIA, HUD, and other federal agencies to acquire housing, Seminoles pursued a collective relationship with the federal government, but they also developed new individualized relationships to the nation-state as citizens. They lived out the vision of planners who “contended that new models for housing . . . would provide the proper setting for a great [American] nation” (G. Wright 1981: xv). So, for example, one local newspaper articulated the desires of Mrs. Henry Billie (clan unknown), who had just moved into her home, in terms of American belonging and civic participation: “She wants to be a ‘good American’ and plans to register to vote as soon as books are opened for registration” (Flagg 1956). As the motto for Fannie Mae, the American housing-financing corporation established in 1968, puts, it: “Our Business Is The American Dream.”32 Homeownership, the bedrock of the American dream, is a foundation upon which the full realization of citizenship is culturally and economically organized in the United States. For Seminoles and other American Indian tribes, however, citizenship through homeownership was circumscribed by their individual inability to hold title to federal reservation lands and by neocolonial housing programs. Thus, citizenship as a form of political belonging has been structured by the particular relationship between tribes and the United States.

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Making Houses into Homes: P ost-Casino Tribal C ontr ol

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Thanks largely to casino funding, the Seminole Tribe of Florida now operates its own housing programs, and reservation housing is getting a facelift that reflects the overall expansion of casino-era social services.33 As of 2001, the Housing Department employed over fifty people on a full-time basis. Before casinos, tribal housing programs had been funded almost entirely by grants and loans from BIA/HIP (HIP was the BIA’s low-income Indian housing program) and HUD. In contrast, in 2000–2001 the department was funded at 36 percent by HUD grants and at 64 percent by tribal funds.34 In many ways, Seminoles appear to have embraced the modernization project of midcentury federal programs. Most live in CBS single-family houses filled with standard middle-class household technologies and furniture, and most practice housekeeping techniques that adhere to the general principles of the home-economics movement. The structure of Seminole governance also reflects the trappings of modern bureaucracy, complete with complex organizational charts, red tape, myriad regulations, and allegations of favoritism. To be sure, Seminole tribal control over housing and other services does not escape the logics of governmentality, and some Seminoles complain that former dependence on the federal government simply has been shifted to the tribal government. As Andrew Bowers Jr. (Snake) put it, “If you always hang around the reservation you’re never gonna do anything; you become dependent on the tribal government for everything. I find it ironic these days when I see these kinds of things because a few years ago we used to . . . Indians used to say that we don’t want to be dependent on the federal government, we want to do our own thing.” He noted that Richard Nixon and the Indian Self-Determination Act had paved the way for change. “Since then, we made strides to try to do things ourselves, but, in turn, our people decided to lean on the tribal government instead of going out and competing with the rest of the world and then getting experience, exposure, whatever it is” (August 18, 2005). Since the gaming boom of the mid-1990s, Seminoles increasingly have administered their social services in ways they consider to be distinctly Seminole, whether by teaching tribally specific curricula in education

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programs or incorporating Seminole dwelling norms and practices into housing policy. Joel Frank (Panther), housing director in 2000–2001, viewed tribal housing programs as an indication that Seminoles were “moving toward self-government and [a] government-to-government relationship” with the United States: “The [federal] government’s attitude has shifted from the big brother role to ‘You’re a big boy now, you can fend for yourself.’” When I asked him where this change originated, he replied: “Sovereignty. The issue of sovereignty, and the tribes’ beliefs of self-governance and that we’re independent nations. That goes back through the history of time, even before there was the United States. When the settlers first came and when they were making deals with the monarchs in Europe. It’s a time-honored thing going back in the history of man, when nations were formed, and it’s no different here.” Gaming, he added, was central to this shift on a national level, but it was just a means, not an end: “Gaming has been just one of the means to achieve the tribe’s overall goal. It’s always been an issue of self-reliance and self-governance” (January 9, 2001). Housing Department officials aimed to direct their newfound financial power and administrative control toward localized policies. For example, Frank had hoped to hire an urban planner to study the relationship between housing and Seminole social structure, and he planned to develop future housing with an eye toward prereservation settlement patterns (e.g., building in circular patterns). He believed that gaming success offered the Tribe an unprecedented opportunity to “insert cultural values which seem to have been lacking in our community development” (January 9, 2001). Seminoles have incorporated distinctive dwelling practices into tribal policy since gaming enabled them to take control of housing programs. In a departure from past BIA regulations, the Tribe now financially and administratively supports housing-construction initiatives that promote “traditional” and hybrid dwelling structures and practices (figure 30). The tribal Housing Department funds chickee building and maintenance as one component of its home-improvement programs, and most tribal members’ home sites, even on the urban Hollywood Reservation, include at least one chickee. William Osceola (Panther), a Tribal Council liaison from the Tamiami Trail area, worked throughout the 1990s to obtain hybrid housing for his constituents, eventually building thatched-roof, walled houses with electricity that were arranged in matrilineal camps. Osceola,

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Figure 30. A hybrid housing structure built for Seminole tribal citizens living along the Tamiami Trail, 2006. Courtesy of the Seminole Tribe of Florida.

who lived in one with his wife’s clan (Otter), explained: “The camps belong to the women here. Traditional, they belong to the women. Us guys, we don’t own anything, we just live here. We can’t discipline the kids. The women, the uncles, they discipline their own family. That is tradition” (SPOHP #265: 24). If Seminoles once contended with pressures of assimilation in federal housing policy, tribal housing programs at the turn of the twenty-first century, ironically, had to accommodate federal agencies’ demands for traditionalism. William Osceola (Panther) complained at a 2001 Tribal Council meeting that he had been struggling to secure additional homesites for offreservation Seminoles living within the Big Cypress National Preserve, but he came up against federal regulations stipulating that American Indians could build homes on protected lands only if they were constructed in “traditional” styles. Thus, he tried, with a sense of historical irony, to balance modern conveniences with making sure that the houses were “traditional” enough for government officials. In tribal education programs, chickees have been resignified from markers of primitivism to expressions of cultural pride. For example, children from the Brighton Reservation constructed a chickee at the

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Figure 31. Chickee employee break room at Seminole Farms, 2001. Photo by Noah Zatz.

Okeechobee High School (their majority-white public school) as a multiculturalist expression of pride and belonging in the local community. Some Brighton youth spent summers studying under a chickee at a tribal enrichment program, Emahakv Vpelofv (Learning Hammock), where they learned about chickee construction during math lessons. Tribal programs use chickees for storage, decoration, and even as employee break rooms at tribal businesses (figure 31). Casino-era flexible tribal housing policies have enabled Seminole families to customize their houses, illustrating how changes in formal institutions of governance have produced new lived experiences. For example, the Housing Department builds houses to accommodate diverse family sizes and structures, including matrilineal extended families. The Tribe also accommodates needs of the many Seminoles with disabilities, for example building ramps and renovating houses to accommodate diabetes amputees and others in wheelchairs. Housing at Fort Pierce, which opened for occupancy in 2006, was developed as a gated community; this form achieved a level of restricted access that residents desired for their semiurban reservation. Beyond housing type, one of the clearest effects of tribal control over housing administration is that individual Seminoles and their families can make new choices about where and with whom they want to live. Seminoles

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have been returning to scattered settlement patterns, sometimes building in matrilineal clusters. This had been impossible until casino-generated funding allowed for new infrastructure. Tribal members commenting on these changes universally expressed pleasure that things were returning to the way they “should” be, articulating a desired correspondence between moral, spatial, and political orders.35 Beyond the level of policy, and at the level of embodied practice, many Seminoles mark and experience their houses to be Seminole and “traditional.” For example, some have taken up the relatively recent practice of physically representing clan belonging on their houses, displaying signs, sculptures, or other clan iconography. One elderly woman from the Bear clan propped a store-bought teddy bear next to her driveway. Some incorporated chickee themes into the first generation of reservation luxury houses, in the form of outbuildings or entrance foyers. Other Seminole homemaking practices are less visible. Some families grow medicine plants, and others arrange their houses’ exteriors and interiors in accordance with a distinctive Seminole spatial order. For example, some constructed outbuilding chickees so that the doors line up in a perpendicular relation to their house’s entrances, creating openings that faced the four directions. Others arranged bedrooms so that all family members slept with their heads facing away from the direction of death and the journey to the afterlife. A pre-BIA practice that has regained social significance is women’s property ownership. Deeds and leases are routinely passed down through families, often through women along the matriline. One man from the Panther clan told me, while relaxing in a chickee outside his Big Cypress house, that he did not really own the house: it had been his mother’s, and it would pass to her female descendants, but until his sisters could overcome drug and alcohol problems he would remain its “caretaker.” The recent growth in intermarriage has complicated gendered property ownership and matrilineal inheritance, since non-Seminoles cannot lease homesites or own or rent tribal housing. Still, it is safe to say that the trend has turned away from mid-twentieth-century male ownership toward more flexible and, in some cases, self-consciously traditional ownership practices. Finally, chickees’ significance is also generated by the very labor that builds them. Some youth learn to build chickees as a way to connect with

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Figure 32. Joe Dan Osceola’s chickee-building business in Hollywood, 2001. Photo by author.

their Seminole heritage, and some professional chickee builders value their work as a cultural practice. One young man told me that his elderly clan aunt had reprimanded him for failing to build a chickee for his wife, as a husband should do upon marriage. Many tribal festivals include log peeling and sometimes palm tacking contests, in recognition of chickeebuilding skills and heritage. Entrepreneurs run a brisk business building chickees for Seminoles and non-Seminoles alike, at a substantial price, despite being undercut by non-Indian competitors who outbid them for hotel contracts. As I was told by Joe Dan Osceola (Panther), chickee-building business owner (figure 32), Seminoles can make a good living off the fact that non-Indians want chickees to evoke “subtropical paradise—they find it romantic” (November 28, 2000).36 Changes in tribal housing after Seminoles took over their housing programs demonstrate the close ties linking Seminole dwelling, economy, and sovereignty. In 1980, Barsh and Henderson argued that until tribes could marshal sufficient economic resources they would fall short of the government-to-government relationship envisioned by legal doctrines of tribal sovereignty. The authors could not have anticipated either the growth of tribal casinos or how Seminoles would intersect with a growing

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post–Red Power self-determination movement partially focused on tribal administration. As Joanne Barker argues, self-government has become conceptually tied to indigenous sovereignty, as part of the struggle “to decolonize social institutions from federal/state paternalism and to reformulate them along the lines of distinctive cultural perspectives. This is evident in everything from efforts to revitalize traditional forms of education and health care to reclamation of legal traditions and practices” (2005a: 22). Seminole casino-era housing administration is just such a case, and the history of other tribal social services is similar. Administration counts in a community where so much of members’ time and experience is tied up with tribal government activities. Indeed, Seminole casino-era sovereignty has taken hold in part through such day-to-day details of tribal administration. “Depend on Yourself”

Since the era of federal housing projects and home economics, Seminoles have refashioned and, in a sense, repatriated the American dream. Elaine Aguilar (Otter), former Tribal Council liaison from Immokalee, stated that casino revenues had allowed Seminoles to return to a model of governance more true to their history and values: “I think we’re finally getting to where, you know, we’re doing what our elders used to do: depend on yourself. You don’t depend on other people to do things for you” (January 3, 2001). As the housing case shows, these are historical matters: Seminole conceptions of sovereignty as independence take shape in relation to a long history of dispossession, domination, and state paternalism at the hands of the United States. These experiences and memories lend special currency to the ideal of tribal control, and they show sovereignty to be at once deeply historical and also oriented toward possible futures and a meaningful present: history is obligated (see Klima 2002).37 They illustrate the centrality of economy, home, and family both to the workings of settler colonialism and to the realization of indigenous sovereignty. They also demonstrate the materiality of sovereignty. In these and other ways, Seminole housing takes its shape and meaning through the social and concrete construction of sovereignty.

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5

Sovereign Interdependencies

​G

aming has dramatically altered and often intensified the political relations between the Seminole Tribe of Florida and other governments, from casino revenue-sharing agreements with municipalities to local philanthropic giving by the Tribe, from legal entanglements in the U.S. courts to intertribal political activism. Gaming has had contradictory effects on individual Seminoles’ relations with non-Seminoles, sometimes facilitating new connections (e.g., in commercial and educational settings) and at other times reinforcing separation (e.g., by augmenting on-reservation activities). Such relations prompt questions about casino-era sovereignty: have casinos drawn Seminoles into economic and political relationships that undermine their sovereignty? Or, do such relations express sovereignty? Or both? Can Seminoles’ valuation of self-reliance and independence, as discussed in the last chapter, be reconciled with new forms of collective interdependency? In this chapter I follow Seminoles’ gaming-related engagements with other politico-legal and economic actors to show how Seminoles, and possibly other indigenous groups, assert and realize their sovereignty in part through relations of interdependency. In the gaming era, Seminole market integration and politicolegal entanglements call for reconsideration of what it means to be institutionally and economically enmeshed with others while

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also asserting sovereignty. Gaming has called attention to the ways that American Indians shape their regional environments, a phenomenon analyzed by Karen Blu but too few others ([1980] 2001). By emphasizing interdependency as a condition of sovereignty, I highlight the unique status of American Indian tribes as semisovereign nations, but I simultaneously suggest that taking tribal sovereignty seriously illuminates the relational dimensions of sovereignty for the United States and other nation-states. Tribal sovereignty is more than just a peculiar holdover or a “special right”: instead, it has much to teach us about how peoples forge political authority and distinctiveness around the world. In scholarship and politics, the sovereignty of indigenous peoples all too often is measured along a singular axis of autonomy and dependency. At one pole is political autonomy/independence, for example in a typical definition of sovereignty as “supreme political authority, independent and unlimited by any other power” (Alfred 2002: 460). This view of sovereignty derives in part from political and legal definitions originally grounded in Western natural law theories, which held the sovereign to be an unlimited (and in some cases divinely sanctioned) political authority over territory and law, with no other human power above it (Bartelson 1995; Hinsley [1966] 1986).1 That is, being sovereign means being autonomous, and insofar as a subject or a nation is not autonomous, it is not sovereign. Although this notion of sovereignty acknowledges some relationality by recognizing the importance of treaties and other international agreements as exercises in autonomous choice, it still relies on autonomy as an essential characteristic of the nation-state, and it ignores power by assuming formal (if not actual) equality among nations.2 Scholars and activists concerned with indigenous sovereignty long have had to contend with balancing the dominant model of sovereignty as independence with the reality of indigenous peoples’ relationships to settler states (Barsh and Henderson 1980; Biolsi 2005; V. Deloria 1979; Deloria and Lytle 1984; Fowler 2002; Kickingbird et al. 1977). As Amanda Cobb (2005) has pointed out, no modern sovereign exercises absolute sovereignty, and, in this, indigenous sovereigns are no exception. Few, however, have addressed the implications of these relationships for broader theories of sovereignty, or have taken indigenous approaches to sovereignty as starting points for imagining new relations of obligation and reciprocity

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among polities and peoples, including nation-states.3 A key exception was political philosopher Iris Marion Young (2001), who took indigeneity to be a paradigm for retheorizing self-determination. Young criticized prevailing theories that took self-determination to be sovereign autonomy characterized by “noninterference,” arguing that such theories both neglected to account for the interdependency that pervades relations among peoples and also failed to offer a normatively adequate interpretation of selfdetermination.4 Young charted a course for rethinking self-determination as relational autonomy, with freedom based not on independence but on nondomination. I follow her lead by tracking the gaming-based intensification of Seminole sovereign interdependency. Before turning to interdependency, which too easily can be read as an equalizing frame (that is, as ignoring unequal power relations between tribes and nation-states), it is necessary to acknowledge the ways that indigenous sovereignty has been limited by settler states. The U.S. courts and Congress have severely restricted American Indian tribes’ sovereignty (for example, by curtailing tribal criminal jurisdiction over nonmembers on reservation land and by extending congressional plenary power), and the interdependency of tribes and settler sovereigns—especially the ways that settler states have been shaped in relation to indigenous peoples—often is obscured and forestalled by uneven power grids. Of course, intersovereign relations between nation-states are similarly uneven and power-laden, as illustrated by international debt relations. Importantly, as Young and other feminist theorists have argued, this does not mean that more powerful actors are independent.5 An anthropological analysis of tribal sovereignty as a relational mode of political distinctiveness sheds unexpected light upon the operations of nation-state sovereignty by showing how settler states, including the United States, establish national sovereignty in part through relations of interdependency with indigenous peoples. That is, thinking of sovereignty as interdependent can help us understand settler coloniality and can point the way to normatively and empirically based reassessments of intergovernmental relations between indigenous peoples and settler states. Tribal gaming, as the most visible, economically significant, and controversial modern test of tribal sovereignty, offers an especially clear window into understanding these relations. In this context, law is one of the key sites of interface between indigenous and settler sover-

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eignty, so the second section of this chapter explores Seminole gamingrelated legal action in U.S. courts. Relational S overeigns

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American Indians’ relations of interdependency have intensified in the gaming context, both because tribal nations now rely on an “outside” consumer base for casino revenues and because gaming has brought them into new political and legal relations with non-Indians at various governance levels (Harvey 2000; Spilde 1998).6 Yet it is important to recall that Seminoles and other tribes had been economically and politically entangled with other polities well before the twentieth century, sometimes but not always in ways that advanced their sovereignty. For example, during the colonial period Seminoles entered into strategic alliances that shaped borderland battles and, ultimately, the sovereignty of England, Spain, and the United States (Saunt 1999; White 1983); they brokered protection agreements with colonial powers, escaped black slaves, and other Indian groups (K. Porter 1996); and they opened trade routes throughout the Southeast and the Caribbean in efforts to protect their lands and people from American military occupation (see generally Covington 1993; McReynolds 1957; Sturtevant and Cattelino 2004; Sturtevant 1971; Wickman 1999). Indian-gaming critics often cite gaming tribes’ participation and influence in local, state, and federal politico-legal systems as evidence of corruption or “special interest” activity (e.g., Scheer 2003). In an influential Time double feature on Indian casinos and political influence, for example, the authors claimed that in the “out-of-control world of Indian gaming,” small West Coast tribes engage in “California scheming” and exercise “disproportionate clout” by donating to politicians and backing ballot initiatives (Barlett and Steele 2002a: 52, 54, 55). In the 2003 California recall election campaign, Arnold Schwarzenegger assailed his opponent for accepting contributions from gaming tribes, branding them “special interests” despite his own reliance on Las Vegas gambling conglomerates and other corporate donors (Barker 2005b); he later changed his position and blamed Democrats for blocking state-tribal gaming deals that would have augmented state revenues.7 In a very different critical mode, some indigenous activists and intellectuals worry that tribes’ gaming-based participation in the U.S. legal system and tribal-state revenue sharing agree-

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ments undermines tribal sovereignty (see, for example, Giago 2006). Both critiques share the assumption that indigenous participation in extratribal economic, political, and legal systems constitutes a problem, either because it signals corruption and “special rights” or because it entails selling out and acceding to colonial dependency. While there are many good reasons to worry about the political costs and uneven playing fields in dealings between tribal nations and other governments, it is helpful—analytically and politically—to separate these questions of power and domination from an unreflective privileging of autonomy as the basis and endpoint of sovereign action. A good place to begin rethinking the politics of Indian casinos is by charting the relational sovereignty of Seminoles and other tribal, local, state, and federal governments. Tribe-to-Tribe

An especially important place to look for how American Indian sovereignty operates relationally during the casino era is intertribal governance. Like treaties between nation-states, intertribalism expresses and enacts the parties’ sovereignty. Gaming has drawn tribes into organizations such as the National Indian Gaming Association and its regional affiliates, spurring new forms of intertribal political activism. Gaming also has created new commercial relations between tribal governments in the form of intertribal venture capital and lending. Seminoles have helped plan and finance distant tribes’ gaming ventures. Closer to home, Seminoles and Miccosukees, who are neighbors and kin, selectively collaborate on governmental initiatives, for example targeting gaming marketing so as to avoid undue competition. Many nongaming-related intertribal activities are funded by casino revenues. For example, in the casino era Seminoles increasingly travel to intertribal events such as powwows, Indian sporting events (from golf and bowling tournaments to rodeo to the North American Indigenous Games), and education programs. Increased tribal budgets permit the Seminole Tribune staff to attend Native American Journalists Association conferences, tribal departments to participate in intertribal meetings, and tribal members to lead the Intertribal Agriculture Council and other Native groups.8 The Hollywood Hard Rock has become a meeting ground for indigenous organizations, from gaming advocacy groups to the Native Ameri-

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can Music Awards (Nammys). Gaming money fostered the growth of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, which was built in part from large contributions by gaming tribes. Seminoles also donate to other tribes, for example sending hurricane-relief emergency crews— with a fire truck, ambulance rescue unit, and four planeloads of food and supplies—to Gulf Coast tribes in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Mejicano 2005). These interactions chart new geographies of Indian Country as community, polity, and possibility. Increasing intertribal contacts could be seen as part of a larger movement in Indian Country toward “pan-Indianism,” which in its recent form is traced to the 1960s Red Power movement, but the framework of “panIndianism” too often connotes inauthenticity, instrumentalism, or cultural loss. Besides, very few Seminoles were involved in the American Indian Movement (AIM) or other 1960s activism.9 Nonetheless, the Seminole Tribe was one of four 1969 founding members of the United Southeastern Tribes (USET, later renamed the United South and Eastern Tribes, Inc.). Joe Dan Osceola (Panther), Seminole board president at the time and the first USET president, explained USET’s promise: “I told [tribal members] that USET is the beginning of Indian power within this region. You can break one arrow, but you cannot break four arrows together” (February 13, 2001). With exploding economic power generated by member nations with gaming—for example, Oneida Nation of New York, Mashantucket Pequot, Mohegan, and Florida Seminole—USET has grown dramatically in scope and power since the mid-1990s, and their biannual meetings now welcome U.S. congressional representatives and tribal officials from across the region. Gaming has facilitated intertribal alliance. At the same time, gaming has put new pressures on Indian tribes to emphasize that they are distinct polities, not a racialized interest group. Members of Congress have proposed bills to mandate gaming revenue-sharing among tribes or to implement “means testing” for federal Indian programs.10 Critics often allege injustice that gaming revenues are making some Indians rich while others remain poor, deflecting onto wealthier tribes the much larger and colonially generated problem of American Indian poverty (e.g., Barlett and Steele 2002b, Bauer 2004, Scheer 2003; for a counter-critique, see Spilde 2003). One would expect Seminoles and other relatively wealthy tribes to

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balk at such critiques and policy proposals, but it is telling that even the poorest tribes generally oppose mandated revenue sharing, on the grounds that it would violate tribal sovereignty by lumping diverse Indian nations into a single redistributive unit.11 It remains to be seen whether Seminoles will extend their gaming-era intertribal governmental relations by joining transnational indigenous movements, which grew rapidly in the late twentieth century (Muehlebach 2001; Niezen 2003; Pritchard 1998). The appointed tribal ambassador, Joe Dan Osceola (Panther), helped to forge diplomatic and economic contacts with indigenous groups in Latin America. Cultural workers have connected with other indigenous groups across the globe, and tribal representatives have met with indigenous leaders during trips abroad. Seminoles also seek direct relations with nation-states: several Seminoles reminded me that their ancestors had long traded with Cuba before becoming part of the United States (Sturtevant and Cattelino 2004: 432), and some have proposed reopening sovereign-to-sovereign trade with Cuba on a cash basis. That said, Seminoles have not joined other Indian leaders at the forefront of international organizing, nor has their legal activism extended to international law claims. From Tallahassee to the Red Cross

Tribal sovereignty is also enacted through relationships between indigenous peoples and surrounding settler communities. The traditional scholarly and political emphasis on the nation-to-nation tribal-federal relationship has been important, but it has overlooked the potential of local and state/provincial relations to reinforce or threaten tribal sovereignty.12 Across Indian Country, tribes with large gaming profits have donated to state and local political campaigns and political causes, much to the consternation of critics who often (mis)characterize tribes as simply being unregulated interest groups.13 Meanwhile, state gaming has exploded in the late twentieth century, states rely on lotteries and income from Indian gaming agreements to shore up failing economies, and Indians are asserting their place as governments within the borders of states. These emerging relationships have deep impacts on state economies, and they are affecting states’ rights and powers. At the local level, tribal gaming has had profound effects on regional economies and political configurations.

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Seminoles’ relations with the state of Florida have been looser than between many other gaming tribes and their surrounding states. This is because, as discussed below, Seminoles operate only class II games (e.g., electronic bingo), which do not require any dealings with the state, whereas many other tribal governments negotiate class III (e.g., slot machines) gaming compacts with states. The state of Florida, struggling against budget overruns, was newly considering negotiating a gaming compact with the Seminole Tribe after Governor Jeb Bush left office in 2006.14 Meanwhile, many other states, for example Connecticut, rely directly on tribal revenue-sharing for fiscal survival. The total fiscal benefit of Indian gaming to other governments, including tax revenues and direct revenuesharing agreements, came to $8 billion nationally in 2005, and revenue sharing grew faster than tribal gaming revenues (Meister 2006–2007: 3). A Norwich Bulletin ten-year retrospective series on the Mohegan Sun casino covered state and local disagreements about how much of the estimated $425 million in annual state revenue from tribal gaming revenue should be reserved for cities and towns, which had received about $88 million annually (Hackett 2006). In such debates, gaming not only reorganizes tribal-state relations through new interdependencies, but it also prompts reconsideration of the just distribution of financial resources and political power to other polities, including municipalities. Seminole individuals and the Tribe as a government increasingly participate in Florida state political processes, and gaming has intensified this engagement. Seminoles now have the ear of Tallahassee legislators on issues such as economic development and natural-resource management. The Seminole Tribe retains lawyers and lobbyists in Tallahassee, and the tribal government purchased a condominium near the capitol to facilitate political contact. Local and state elected officials regularly court tribal support for their initiatives and electoral campaigns, teenagers have secured a few internships with lobbyists and the Florida congressional delegation in Washington, and tribal delegates attend gubernatorial inaugurations and other high-profile political events. Most notoriously, the Florida State University sports-mascot issue has brought the Tribe closer to one of the state’s land-grant universities. FSU relies on official Seminole Tribal Council approval in order to retain their “Seminole” mascot under an exception to a 2005 NCAA ruling against

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Indian mascots. The FSU-tribal mascot-based relationship has yielded new tribal education programs and scholarships for Seminoles at FSU, collaboration toward establishing a charter school at Brighton and a Seminole history and culture center at FSU, and an endless stream of symbolic gestures. The latter include photo opportunities, the participation of a tribal citizen in a televised halftime show, football tickets (each year large numbers of tribal citizens travel north to the homecoming game, where Miss Seminole crowns the FSU homecoming royalty), and newly erected statues of Seminoles outside the FSU football stadium. Tribal general counsel Jim Shore (Bird) accepted an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from FSU in 2005. In 2006, as an outcome of conversations between tribal and university officials, FSU developed an introductory-level liberal-studies course on the History of the Seminoles and southeastern tribes. In 2007, FSU advertised a new tenure-track faculty position in Native American history, with preference for expertise in the American southeast. Kyle Doney (Panther), one of several Seminoles attending FSU in 2005, explained his motive for choosing that school: “I always wanted to go to FSU because the whole name means Seminoles and, I don’t know, I always liked that” (August 22, 2005).15 The New York Times ran an article about the Tribe’s relationship to the university, with the headline “Bonding over a Mascot” (LaPointe 2006). Mascots are hardly the only way that Seminoles have asserted political belonging in the Sunshine State while simultaneously reinforcing their differential political status. In the context of gaming disputes with the state, for example, the Tribe took out a 1997 advertisement in several non-Indian newspapers that, according to the Seminole Tribune, was part of an effort to “save their favorable image from the current attacks on Tribal sovereignty and integrity” (P. Gallagher 1997: 1). The advertisement begins with a question: “Which Floridians employed over 2,200 other Floridians, paid over $3.5 million in federal payroll taxes and purchased more than $24 million worth of Florida goods and services last year?” The answer: “The same Floridians who operate citrus groves, manage one of America’s largest cattle herds and have acted as stewards of the Everglades for over 200 years.” It concludes with bold print flanking the tribal seal: “100% Seminole. 100% Floridian” (figure 33). Citrus, cattle, and Everglades stewardship highlight the shared concerns of Seminoles with other Floridians,

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Figure 33. Advertisement in the Seminole Tribune, commemorative edition published for the Ah-Tah-ThiKi Museum grand opening, 1997. Author’s collection.

and the repetition of the word Floridians underscores a common citizenship and sensibility. By asserting that it is possible to be 100 percent Seminole and 100 percent Floridian at the same time, the advertisement creates an isomorphism between the two categories of belonging for Seminoles, in a representation of overlapping citizenship that implies that the nonSeminole reader shares an identity with Seminoles. Yet one could argue that the advertisement also implicitly reminds non-Seminole readers that although Seminoles are 100 percent Floridian they do not give up their distinctive and exclusive Seminoleness; rather, they maintain it at a full 100 percent. Perhaps less obvious than intertribal or state sovereign interdependency are the ways that Seminoles and other Indian nations enact their sovereignty in relation to neighboring municipal, county, and regional polities. What Karen Blu wrote in 1980 remains apt: “The regional factor in Indian studies has been largely ignored or glossed over, as has the amount of in-

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fluence Indians have on their localities” ([1980] 2001: xii). In South Florida, Seminole casinos have transformed regional economic and political landscapes, compelling Seminoles and local communities to work together in unprecedented (if sometimes tense) partnerships. By 2006, Seminole Gaming employed approximately 7,000 people (Seminole Hard Rock Entertainment 2006a), turning its casinos and reservations not only into entertainment destinations but also into workplaces for large numbers of diverse Floridians.16 Seminole casinos rely on the goodwill and patronage of local customers, and the Tribe must court public opinion during battles over gaming rights. When asked whether gaming had affected relations with surrounding communities, tribal citizens and staff universally responded that it had done so, but opinion varied widely as to how.17 Some Seminoles said that gaming had strained their relationships with non-Seminoles, and they recounted stories of being fleeced by used-car dealers (who assumed Seminoles had lots of spare cash) and caterers (who overcharged them). Some said they use false surnames when placing orders by phone, suspecting that an Osceola would be charged more than, say, a Johnson. The Tribal Council passed an antisolicitation law on the reservations amid concerns that Seminoles were being overcharged, and Elaine Aguilar (Otter) told the Miami Herald: “I tell these people, ‘Don’t let them know you are Indian, especially Seminole.’ . . . That’s when they see dollar signs” (Cabral 2003a). One man was accosted at a bar by non-Indians who loudly announced the amount of Seminoles’ per capita dividend checks, and some children reported playground taunts. At the same time, Seminoles perceived new respect, especially from white people. As examples they pointed to tribal leaders’ invitations to serve as local parade marshals and honored dignitaries at non-Indian events. Some were pleasantly surprised when Desiree Jumper (Panther) won the Miss Sugar pageant in the agricultural reservation-border town of Clewiston. At the level of tribal government, General Counsel Jim Shore (Bird) said that non-Indian local governments were the “biggest challenge” to Seminole self-determination. Gaming has heightened tensions. For example, once the Tribe generated sufficient resources from gaming to buy out long-term reservation leases to non-Indian business owners, they faced accusations of being bad neighbors and citizens; this was especially

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true when they evicted (non-Seminole) residents of leased mobile-home parks in order to build the Hollywood Hard Rock casino (K. Hill 2000). The Tribal Council has faced new pressures from local and state governments to finance road improvements and other public projects adjacent to reservations. The tribal government also fights constant gaming-related political and legal battles over local jurisdiction and sovereign immunity from suit. A controversy about noise emanating from the Hollywood Hard Rock culminated in the 2006 resignation of a Davie town council member (the town abuts the Hollywood reservation to the west) when it was discovered that she had circulated a racist cartoon depicting a tribal official as a halfnaked savage (Holland 2006). Building relations with local governments is indeed risky business for tribes. At issue here is less whether gaming causes conflicts (there have been many, historically) than the prominence of gaming as the key symbol and focal point of Seminoles’ participation in the social, political, and economic landscapes of South Florida. Despite tensions, Seminoles have asserted and realized sovereignty through relations with other South Florida governments, and gaming has brought tribal sovereignty into the public conversation as never before. The Seminole Tribe has entered into casino-revenue-sharing agreements with local municipalities, for example in set cash payments to the city of Coconut Creek (Cattelino 2007) and in alternatives to Hard Rock hotel bed taxes paid to Broward County (Fakler 2003). The Tribe emphasized that these were government-to-government agreements, not taxes, since tribal governments are not taxable, nor is the Seminole Tribe legally required to negotiate local compacts. Tribal press releases consistently highlight the hundreds of millions of dollars in local goods and services purchased by the Tribe annually and the overall estimated $1 billion “ripple effect” of the Hollywood Hard Rock in the South Florida region. Tribal representatives have obtained seats on regional planning and business councils in recognition of the casinos’ contributions to overall economic growth. The Seminole Police Department, which in 2006 was the second-largest tribal police force in Indian Country (DoBosz 2006), has entered into jurisdictional agreements with local law-enforcement agencies, and new tribal rural emergency-response services are collaborating with regional hospitals. Negotiating government-to-government memoranda of understanding over such matters, while neither especially glamorous nor highly visible, is the everyday work of local sovereign interdependency. Chap ter 5

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Figure 34. Presentation of $50,000 from the Seminole Tribe to the Indian River Community College, 2006. Courtesy of the Seminole Tribe of Florida.

One of the most visible effects of gaming upon Seminoles’ localized sovereignty is philanthropy (Cattelino 2007). Since the mid-1990s, when gaming revenues increased dramatically, tribal-government charitable giving has grown. As former Hollywood casino manager Larry Frank (Otter) put it: “We have extended our hand to the community” (October 11, 2000). It is now common to see photographs in local and tribal newspapers of tribal officials, always dressed in patchwork, posing with oversized checks they offer to local schools, athletic teams, county emergency services, and health organizations (figure 34). For example, in 2001 the Tribe pledged $3 million toward the creation of a historical park adjacent to the former Stranahan House trading post (now a modest museum) in Fort Lauderdale. In 2006, the Broward County Red Cross recognized Seminoles’ contributions by naming the Hollywood Tribal Council representative Max Osceola Jr. (Panther) to its board of directors. In the struggling town of Immokalee, home of many migrant farmworkers and a small Seminole reservation (located across from the jail on the site of a former Indian farmworker camp), tribal representatives have contributed to town programs including health care, education, and Little League. The Tribe has sponsored scholarships for students of color at Okeechobee. This town near Brighton had welcomed Indian students to its public schools, even S o v e r e i g n I n t e r d e p e n d e n ci e s

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when schools in Moore Haven—which is in the same county as Brighton and therefore should have been the designated school for reservation students—shunned them.18 The Tribe also contributed large sums to South Florida hurricane relief in the wake of the 2005 storms Katrina and Wilma; at the same time, those hurricanes revealed tensions over charity and intergroup obligation when some Seminoles complained that non-Seminole neighbors had sought tribally designated emergency water and ice distributions. Philanthropy, as a form of gift giving, often is a privileged mode through which power relations are articulated, established, or challenged, not only for individuals but also for polities and peoples.19 The collective governmental character of rapidly growing tribal charitable giving (individual giving is rarely discussed) has encouraged South Floridians to conceive of the Tribe as a tribe, and in this manner it has buttressed tribal sovereignty. Philanthropy also is a politically popular answer to the question of what Seminoles do with casino income. Gaming-era philanthropy reverses past neocolonial relations of giving. Seminoles are in a position to give charity after a long twentieth century in which charitable giving to Seminoles was among the more salient forms of interaction between tribal members and non-Seminoles. In today’s reorganized field of power, economy, and exchange, Seminole charity is a return or extension of past charity received, but the social meanings of philanthropy extend beyond an ongoing exchange relationship or the demonstration of goodwill. Seminole charity takes on special significance against the historical backdrop of economic destitution and missionization. Seminoles now can give, not only receive, and with giving comes respect and power. Charitable giving also reflects traditional religious and philosophical obligations that some Seminoles feel toward maintaining the whole world, not only their own families and communities, and it thereby extends sovereign obligations well beyond tribal boundaries. In sum, charitable giving illustrates ways that patterned transfers of material goods mediate power and sociality, as gaming-based indigenous philanthropy reorganizes the directionality of local economic and political relationships between American Indians and others. Federal Trust and Unbalanced Reciprocity

I have purposefully foregrounded nonfederal governments thus far because the tribal-federal relationship is overrepresented as the focus of most writChap ter 5

ing about tribal sovereignty. As I turn to tribal-federal relations, I recognize that they are characterized by domination in Young’s sense of the ability of one agent to arbitrarily interfere with another (2001: 35). Federal domination is exemplified by congressional plenary power, which the United States has interpreted to mean that Congress can do just about anything it wants to tribes, including terminating their legal existence. Acknowledging this domination, it could be tempting to view settler sovereignty as autonomous or absolute and indigenous sovereignty as granted or derivative. Yet a closer look, one attuned to the lived experiences of indigenous sovereignty, suggests that Seminole sovereignty sometimes evades, and sometimes alters, settler state sovereignty. Even in this unequal power relation there is interdependency, and gaming has intensified it. In treaties, which are classic exercises in sovereignty, and in other forms of federal recognition, Indian tribes share a trust relationship with the United States whereby the federal government holds certain assets (mostly indigenous land) in trust and agrees to bear responsibility for aspects of the ongoing health and well-being of indigenous peoples.20 As Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford Lytle (1984) and others have argued, this trust relationship binds the United States to tribes: it obligates the U.S. government. The trust relationship also reminds us that indigenous nations are constitutive of settler state sovereignty: after all, treaties were forged with American Indian nations in part as a way to legitimate colonial powers and settler nations in the eyes of other states and in the eyes of tribal nations (V. Deloria 1979: 23). While federal benefits for Indians are widely understood in American public culture to be “handouts,” they in fact represent the legacy of treaties and other relations of obligation between the various tribal nations and the United States. These relationships were forged within colonial relations and bear traces of that power differential, to be sure, but they also reflect the United States’ early and to some extent ongoing reliance upon indigenous peoples. They enact the interdependency of sovereignty between indigenous and settler nations. The question of federal trust and obligation is complicated for Florida Seminoles, who proudly assert that they are the only “unconquered” Indian tribe because they “never signed a peace treaty” with the United States after the Seminole Wars. Most Seminoles characterized their relation to the federal government simultaneously as independent, dependent, and obligated. This struck me as both illogical and entirely correct. For example, S o v e r e i g n I n t e r d e p e n d e n ci e s

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one young woman loved the feeling that stepping onto a Seminole reservation was like going to another country—she characterized it as leaving the United States—and she criticized federal interference in tribal affairs. Yet at the same time she recited many ways that the federal government failed to fulfill its obligations to Seminoles, such as funding for social services, and she actively advocated more Seminole involvement in U.S. electoral politics. For her and others, the political horizon of indigenous sovereignty was not complete autonomy, but rather the assertion of political distinctiveness as the basis for a relationship of mutual obligation and sovereign nondomination. Gaming has afforded Seminoles and other tribes both the motives and the means for involvement in federal policymaking and electoral politics. American Indians have established a notable presence on Capitol Hill in the gaming era, and tribes with successful casinos have the resources to exercise new influence. Their presence is felt in the landscape, from the National Museum of the American Indian on the Washington, D.C., mall to a nearby hotel owned and operated by a partnership of four tribes. Gaming revenues have increased Indian political contributions dramatically. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign-finance watchdog group, in 2000 the Seminole Tribe contributed $325,000 in soft money to major-party national committees and congressional and senatorial campaign committees (85 percent to Democrats, 15 percent to Republicans). In the same year, the Tribe spent $460,000 to retain Jefferson Government Relations, a Washington, D.C., lobbying group. By 2005, Seminoles’ reported lobbying expenses exceeded $1 million.21 Invited Seminole delegations attend presidential inaugurations, the tribal Education Department sponsors trips to Washington for youth achievers, and individual Seminoles have developed relationships with Washington legislators. While this can accurately be characterized as a politics of influence, it is simultaneously a matter of pursuing accountability from the settler state. Some Seminoles evaluate the tribal-federal relationship as one of obligation born of (often unbalanced) reciprocity. Most feel they are owed by the United States. This sensibility and political stance is in part a response to deterritorialization and colonization, as Seminoles recite a history of forced migrations, land expropriation, military conflict, and Everglades drainage. Often, it is coupled with patriotism: many Seminole veterans of

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the U.S. military characterize their service as defending this land, regardless of who governs it (Cattelino 2004: chapter 8). The historical discourses about being owed and offering service function as pointed reminders that the United States would not exist were it not for the indigenous genocide, cessions, wars, diplomacy, and service upon which it was built. A few Seminoles suggested that American democracy itself was derivative of indigenous governing principles, citing the possibility that the U.S. Constitution had been modeled on Iroquois legal codes.22 U.S. sovereignty does not lie outside or above the settler-indigenous relationship. Seminoles’ interdependent sovereignty with the federal government does not just reflect history, it also points forward to a future in which Seminoles may have a unique and important role. For example, as South Florida faces the destruction of the Everglades ecosystem by development and agriculture, the Seminole Tribe has secured its place at the negotiating table with a 2001 gaming-generated contribution of $25 million to the massive Everglades Restoration Initiative (Weinberg 2002). With neighboring Miccosukees, Seminoles see themselves both as the victims of settler environmental destruction and as key players in the reclamation of the Everglades, one of the nation’s more important and most venerated watersheds. Seminoles thus enact sovereignty—for example, by negotiating water-rights settlements (Shore and Straus 1990)—by simultaneously asserting their autonomy and building productive relationships with other sovereigns, relations characterized by negotiation, obligation, and interdependency. Settler state sovereignty is produced against, with, and through indigenous peoples, as illustrated by national debates about reconciliation and coexistence in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (Maaka and Fleras 2005; Povinelli 2002a). Indeed, scholarship on settler colonialism has argued that the commonality among Anglo settler states stems less from their shared European legal and cultural history than from their engagements with indigenous peoples and resulting dilemmas and violences (Coombes 2006b). The American federalist system consists in part of tribal nations, which puts American Indians at the heart of the American democratic form, and America’s history rests uneasily with its founding conquest. Tribal gaming, then, calls attention not only to the sovereignty of Indian nations but also to the status of other sovereigns, namely states (e.g.,

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Florida) and nation-states (i.e., the United States). These are uncanny sovereignties. Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs (1998) have deployed the Freudian notion of the “uncanny” to characterize the specter of aboriginal peoples in the postcolonial Australian national landscape, where they simultaneously lack and have “too much.” In the gaming context, indigenous peoples often are accused of having too much money and too many rights, but (and as a result) too little legitimate or recognizable cultural difference. Ironically, critics are on the right track when they suggest that gaming rights call into question the scope of American and state power, “subverting the nation’s constitutional order” (Bordewich 2006). Indigeneity both makes possible and unsettles the sovereignty of settler states, and gaming shows state and federal sovereignty to rest upon shaky—and, one might add, stolen—ground. Indigenous sovereignty in the casino era calls for forging new relationships of obligation, reciprocity, and nondomination between settlers and Native peoples. Gaming has broken open the possibility for such renegotiations, while also posing new risks to them. One of the most contentious and productive arenas for reworking the indigenous– settler relationship in the casino context has been law, so I now turn to law and tribal gaming as a case study of sovereign interdependency. Le gal Relations

Since 1979, the Seminole Tribe has pursued litigation to defend tribal gaming rights. This legal activism has enabled widespread expansion of tribal gaming across Indian Country, yet key courtroom losses have also contributed to an erosion of tribal sovereignty. Seminoles’ struggles illustrate the ongoing efforts of American Indian tribes to create and realize law and politics, not just to respond to them or be subject to them. They also enact indigenous views of sovereignty. As many legal scholars have argued, U.S. law fundamentally shapes the possibilities and limits of indigeneity in the United States, and has long done so (Harring 1994; Wilkins 1997; Wilkins and Lomawaima 2001; Wilkinson 1987; Williams 1990). Settler law can be understood as a colonial constraint upon indigenous action (Biolsi 1995b), but my ethnographic analysis shows Seminoles to enact legal pluralism by referencing both federal and indigenous legal authority. When Seminoles enter into American legal systems, they assert indigenous legal authority partially in the terms of American rights, but they also enact

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distinctive legal norms, and they sometimes alter American law. As Sidney Harring (2002: 447) has written of the relationship between colonial and Indian common law, “The coexistence of two legal systems inevitably transformed each.” The intersection of settler and indigenous law can be a locus of sovereign interdependency. Indian Action and American Law

The Seminole Tribe generally enters the U.S. legal system as a result of conflict with outsiders, usually about tribal sovereignty and jurisdiction. Since 1979, these disputes very often have directly or indirectly concerned casinos. Some tribal members describe the Tribe’s legal conflicts with war metaphors wherein the courtroom is a battlefield and attorneys are warriors, which is especially significant in a community that boasts such a proud and prominent history of military resistance to U.S. domination. One of the Tribe’s outside counsel, Jerry Straus of the Washington, D.C., Indian law firm Hobbs, Straus, Dean and Walker, LLP, believes that Seminoles have come to view the (U.S.) law principally as an effective vehicle for asserting and protecting their sovereignty and well-being, rather than seeing it simply as a colonialist conceit or an impenetrable system of rules and limitations. Citing the examples of cigarette sales, gaming, and thenchairman James Billie’s 1987 acquittal for killing an endangered Florida panther, Straus said: “I think that they value the law because it’s through legal actions that they have secured their rights. . . . The law has been kind to the Seminoles” (February 4, 2003). I also encountered appreciation for the law, for example when tribal members told me that they had traveled to the U.S. Supreme Court for oral arguments in the gaming case Seminole Tribe v. Florida, or when they spoke of a need for more Seminoles to become lawyers. No doubt it matters that the Tribe’s top attorney is a Seminole citizen whose legal knowledge extends to indigenous Seminole law. With no tribal courts (unlike Miccosukees), Seminoles turn to outside courts to resolve most disputes. This disturbs some tribal citizens. During the early 2000s, Seminoles increasingly criticized the Tribal Council and board’s practice of waiving sovereign immunity (their protection from civil suit entailed by their status as a sovereign government) when entering into contracts with outside partners, especially casino developers and service providers. For example, Willie Johns (Wildcat) said that outside businesses

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should be able to trust Seminoles, and he warned that waiving sovereign immunity set a bad precedent that eventually would erode sovereignty: “Every time you drop your sovereign immunity . . . are you liquidating yourself ?” He worried that Americans had done enough damage to Seminole sovereignty without Seminoles adding to it: “The people that gave us sovereign immunity [American founders, he had just said] are chipping at it all the time. We shouldn’t be the one also chipping at the rock, either. Instead, both the framers [of the U.S. Constitution] and the Indians are chipping at that same rock, and it’s getting smaller” (August 18, 2005). Since gaming, the absence of a court is not for lack of finances. Instead, a major reason is uncertainty about how to establish the court’s authority. Who would be the judges? It was unclear to every Seminole I asked how any tribal member could achieve the objectivity and distance sought in judges, since in general it is deemed both moral and inevitable that Seminoles would favor family. Clans have limited authority. The Tribe has solved this problem during clothing contests and the Miss Seminole pageant by turning to non-Seminole judges. But there is strong sentiment against hiring outside judges for a court system; as it is, there is unease about the fact that almost all officers in the Seminole Police Department (SPD) are non-Seminole. On the one hand, having a tribal court would strengthen Seminole self-governance. On the other hand, it is feared that a tribal court would not be able to surmount internal differentiation.23 Older tribal members remembered when Green Corn Dance councils issued sentences as severe as execution, but they did not see the Corn Dance as sufficiently inclusive of today’s tribal citizens to serve as a fully functioning court of law.24 A secondary concern about the legitimacy of tribal courts is whether the Tribe’s gaming and other business partners would agree to adjudication by tribal courts. Public ridicule in South Florida of a 2001 Miccosukee court ruling to forgive an accused murderer only reinforced this concern. With some Seminoles incarcerated and with gaming-related legal entanglements growing, the question of whether judicial authority is internal or external is acutely felt, but no answer is forthcoming. In the U.S. courts, the tribal government has prominently defended gaming rights, even though few Seminole citizens stay abreast of ongoing lawsuits. Immediately after launching Hollywood Bingo, the Tribe successfully litigated Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Butterworth (658 F.2d 310 [former

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5th Cir. 1981]), in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that tribal sovereignty protected the Tribe from Florida state regulation of their high-stakes bingo operations. This case set off a gaming revolution throughout much of Indian Country. The legal culmination of tribal gaming’s launch, however, was the 1988 congressional passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), which established the National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC) and set up the federal regulatory scheme for tribal gaming. Much to the dismay of many Indian leaders, IGRA linked a tribe’s ability to operate certain types of games to state laws and state negotiation. The statute stipulated that an Indian tribe may engage in, license, and regulate class II gaming—bingo and other games similar to it, as well as card games that are not prohibited by the laws of the state—only “if such Indian gaming is located within a State that permits such gaming” and if the tribe passes an ordinance for approval by the chairman of the NIGC. Though seemingly minor technical distinctions, gaming classes determine politico-legal relations and income levels. The restrictions on lucrative class III gaming—all other forms of gaming, such as slot machines and blackjack, that are not covered in class II or class I (social and traditional games)—are even more closely linked to the states. Tribes can pursue class III gaming only under the conditions of class II plus “conformance with a Tribal-State compact entered into by the Indian tribe and the State” (25 U.S.C. §§ 2701–2721, § 2710). In contrast to a model of nationto-nation relations with the U.S. federal government, and as a product of political compromises between Indian tribes and states in the lead-up to IGRA, this law hitched tribes’ fates to state governments, legally limiting tribal sovereignty in the interest of states’ rights.25 Since IGRA took effect, states have negotiated over compact terms such as casino revenue-sharing, criminal and civil jurisdiction, labor rights of casino workers, and tribal expenditures for road building and utilities (Light and Rand 2005). In Florida, Christian antigambling forces in the north, the Disney Corporation, and offshore casino cruise companies in the south pressured the state government to limit tribal gaming, and states’ rights advocates resisted any circumvention of state regulation. The state government has fought Seminole gaming every step of the way, in what attorney Jerry Straus has called “Florida’s War on Indian Gaming” (Straus 2000). As of 2007, the

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state refuses to negotiate a compact, so Seminoles cannot operate class III games, and it further contends that the Tribe’s current electronic games are illegal because they constitute class III, not class II, gaming. Both a state lawsuit against the Tribe and a countersuit by the Tribe remain stalled in the courts, as the parties consider negotiations and administrative remedies. Meanwhile, the Tribe sued the state to force them to negotiate a compact in good faith, but in 1996 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark federalism case Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida (517 U.S. 44 [1996 ]) that the state was protected from suit under the Eleventh Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Tribal officials are working through other political and legal channels to secure class III gaming, testing a provision of IGRA that authorizes the secretary of the Interior to prescribe Indian gaming procedures in lieu of a compact when states refuse to negotiate in good faith. This process has entailed a certain amount of drama—meetings of tribal, state, and federal officials canceled at the last minute; the Clinton administration’s eleventh-hour executive order authorizing the secretary of the Interior to establish procedures under the terms of IGRA; and the Bush administration’s subsequent suspension of the order. The matter became more urgent in fall 2006, after a successful ballot initiative allowed slot machines to open in Broward County, exposing Seminole gaming to new competition and putting legal pressure on the state government to negotiate a compact. Although Seminole Tribe represented a serious defeat for Seminoles, the Tribe followed up by arguing that under this precedent the state of Florida could not sue the Tribe for allegedly conducting unauthorized class III gaming operations. The Tribe won on the grounds of tribal sovereign immunity, in what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit called a case that “demonstrates the continuing vitality of the venerable maxim that turnabout is fair play” (Florida v. Seminole Tribe of Florida, 181 F.3d 1237 [1999]: 1237). Most non-Indians—reporters, legislators, and, it seems, the general public—understand IGRA to have authorized Indian tribal gaming; they locate the agency of Indian gaming in federal law. From the perspective of the Seminole Tribe, however, things look quite different, since they had operated and litigated casinos for almost a decade before IGRA’s passage. Indeed, IGRA limited the sovereignty of Seminoles and other gaming

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tribes. IGRA’s stipulation that tribes must negotiate with states has cost tribes a great deal of money, both in lost potential revenue and in legal fees, and it has encouraged the states to think of themselves as holding authority over Indian affairs. Even as IGRA has limited tribal sovereignty, it simultaneously and unexpectedly has reinforced sovereignty, albeit in smaller ways. To be sure, at least some Seminole officials would prefer that the U.S. Department of the Interior, not the state, approve gaming operations. At the same time, they have turned a legal and economic disadvantage into a political advantage. Through gaming negotiations tribal officials have become familiar with the operations of the state government, and they have used gamingbased lobbyists and lawyers to advance a variety of sovereignty-related causes. Meanwhile, they have taken advantage of their noncompact status by building a gaming empire based entirely on class II games, avoiding state involvement in casino operations. Bruce Rogow, an attorney and professor at Nova Southeastern University Law School who has represented the Tribe, explained that Seminoles’ legal strategy on gaming issues has been to force the state to negotiate a compact, and, in the course of it, to define gaming in Florida, not only for Indians but for the whole industry (January 2, 2001). Seminole gaming has redrawn the politics and business of gaming throughout the state. Seminole gaming cases also illustrate how indigenous activism can reshape federal law, despite power imbalances, by reordering settler states’ interdependence with tribes. Seminole Tribe may appear to be a narrow case about state sovereign immunity from suit by Indian tribes. However, it should be regarded, as legal scholar Vicki Jackson (1997: 542) argues, as “part of a broader canvas on which the Court is redrawing lines of federalism.” As W. Dale Mason writes, the Seminole Tribe decision “played a dramatic role in the redefinition of the federal-state balance of power” (Mason 2000: 240).26 In this case, which affects not only Indian tribes but also state employees and others seeking to sue states in federal court, indigenous legal action altered the landscape of American federalism; the case is taught in many law schools, not only in courses on federal Indian law but also as a question of constitutional law. Tribal gaming, as Mason (2000: 4) put it, “is helping to define the limits of state involvement in Indian affairs and the shape of American federalism generally.” This phenomenon

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of Indian legal action shaping American law can be traced historically to early cases over Indian property rights and taxation that defined core American legal and property regimes, ones that affect all Americans to this day (Aleinikoff 2002; Barsh and Henderson 1980; Wilkins 1997).27 Legal battles over gaming have propelled Seminoles into closer relations with other American Indians. For example, in 2005 the Tribe donated a large sum to the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), the premier organization bringing impact litigation on indigenous issues. NARF soon named Brighton council representative and former public defender Andrew Bowers Jr. (Snake) to its board of directors. Bowers asserted that it was important for Seminoles to work with other Indian organizations to advance sovereignty: “So to sit back here in Florida and say we’re doing our own thing, we’re proud of ourselves, we don’t care about what you do out there—I think that’s the wrong attitude” (August 23, 2005). But in order to understand why and how Seminoles have approached extratribal law in the gaming era, it is crucial to explore the indigenous foundations from which Seminole legal action has been built. Seminole Legal Consciousness

Seminole sovereignty is tied to what legal anthropologist Sally Merry (1990: 5), among others, termed “legal consciousness,” or “the ways people understand and use the law.” For Seminoles, having their own legal norms underlines their governmental status and shapes their understandings of (tribal and American) nationhood. What counts as law and how to understand its stakes are local and historical questions. As such, it is impossible to understand Seminoles’ gaming-based activism in U.S. courts without first considering what law is and does in Seminole Country. I do not want to oppose “Western” law to “tribal” law and reify their differences. Instead, I emphasize the imbrication of indigenous and settler legal regimes and sovereignties. Jim Shore (Bird), described in the introduction, was the first Seminole to graduate from law school, and his views on the law have put their stamp on the Tribe’s legal strategy since he took the position of general counsel in the early 1980s. Shore explained that Seminole sovereignty operates on two levels: one in relation to (U.S.) legal forms and the other in tribal members’ understandings of who they are and where they come from. The

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legal department, which Shore heads, defends the Tribe’s sovereign immunity and pursues an array of sovereignty claims, including many related to casinos. They also assist Seminoles with routine legal matters, and they vet many Tribal Council and board resolutions. Tribal Council ordinances govern much of Seminoles’ day-to-day lives, from property rights to rules about receiving social services, from citizenship/membership regulations to dividend distribution. Shore told me that most Seminoles do not think or talk about “sovereignty” as such, and indeed the word was not widely used when I began fieldwork (I hear it more with every passing year). But, Shore continued, that doesn’t mean that people don’t know or care about sovereignty: elders will emphasize the importance of being from an Indian tribe that has maintained its traditions, institutions, and clans. They will recount the history of Seminoles’ struggles against white colonizers and the achievement of survival through cultural continuity. For them, he claimed and I also found, the most important thing is “whatever they’ve done to hold on.” In that spirit, Shore pursues his own legal work, knowing, “I come from an old family, both sides. I know my language, the clan system, the dos and don’ts, and that’s what got us here. . . . This is behind me. We can win all the battles against the white folks, but if we lose our tradition we are our own worst enemy—we’ll defeat ourselves. We’ll have just hollow victories [in the courts]” (August 10, 2000). In this account by a trained attorney, legal battles are not ends in themselves. Instead, law is at the service of tradition and, moreover, of an indigenous system of legal rule: the “dos and don’ts” of matrilineal clans. Law is located not only in the U.S. legal system, but also in Seminoles’ cultural and political distinctiveness, and in the rules and histories that preserve it. It is part and parcel of cultural sovereignty. Shore’s suggestion that tribal members operate with a notion of sovereignty not labeled as such presented me with the dual analytical tasks of recognizing sovereignty beyond the politico-legal realm and determining where Seminoles locate law. Since Karl Llewellyn and E. Adamson Hoebel (1941) published their classic study of Cheyenne jurisprudence, sociolegal scholars have asserted that American Indians’ precolonial laws were organized, but that they often were grounded in institutions and principles not readily apparent to colonizers (Harring 2002). Seminoles often locate

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their law and sovereignty in the matrilineal clan system and/or in the Green Corn Dance, and I found that discussions of gaming-era Seminole sovereignty frequently ended up centered on one or both of these related institutions. Many Seminoles emphasized the foundational roles of the clans. Justice had long been meted out through clans, and clan membership brought rules of behavior and forms of obligation. As Max Osceola Jr. (Panther), the Hollywood Tribal Council representative, put it: “When I think of sovereignty I think of the right to do . . . almost to take care of your own selves. The right to govern, the right to rule—I’m not saying it’s like a dictatorship, but a right to make laws or ordinances or the things that are going to have a positive effect for not just your family but for the whole tribe, which [is] made up of families. So, these rights we’ve had since the beginning of time” (January 23, 2001). Osceola, the second Seminole to earn a college degree (in 1972 in political science from the University of Miami), at first defined sovereignty in a fairly traditional vein: as authority over the rule of law. However, for him governance is a process of taking care of “your own selves” that is located not only in the Tribe as a government, but also in the tribe as a collection of families. Shore, as quoted above, often emphasized the “dos and don’ts” of the clan system as a foundation of Seminole life. Kinship figures centrally in Seminole political discourse and voting patterns. The primary referent for clan law and obligation is the Green Corn Dance, where clans carry responsibilities that are interdependent and interlocking. For example, several men explained to me that Birds are organizers of the ceremonial grounds and masters of ceremonies, and they must introduce Panthers, who make and hold medicine and attendant laws. Panthers, in turn, cannot speak without Winds, who give them air. Other clans fulfill different important roles. This interdependency is tied to the totems’ respective roles in creation (see James Billie’s discussion in B. Jumper 1994: 8–9). Robert King’s 1970s dissertation research suggested that clan affiliation played a continued role in elections (favoring Bird and Panther) under the “modern” tribal government (King 1976, 1978), and indeed many tribal members told me that they voted in elections based in part on clan affiliation.28 Because of the large number of Seminoles who carry no clan, however, there are no current proposals to structure formal tribal governance around the clan system.

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As references to clans suggest, many Seminoles view sovereignty and rule of law to be grounded in the Green Corn Dance. Corn Dances are rites of renewal for men, important community gatherings, reinforcements of the centrality of clans, educational opportunities for youth and medicine students, and exercises of political authority by religious leaders.29 At Corn Dance, participants undertake activities characterized by reciprocity and interdependency, and by doing so they help renew the world.30 The Ah-TahThi-Ki Museum exhibit on the Green Corn Dance quotes religious leader Sonny Billie (Panther) as explaining: “It is for everybody, because we pray for the world.” Victor Billie (Bird), an Independent Seminole, told a reporter in my presence that he explains the Corn Dance to outsiders as “our school, court, and church at the same time” (February 3, 2001).31 The Corn Dance is both a site and an explanation of Seminole sovereignty. Jacob Osceola (Panther), a student of medicine, located the origins of Seminole sovereignty in this institution: “I believe that sovereignty started with the Green Corn Dance.” At the annual dance, he explained, criminals stood trial and important decisions were made (October 19, 2000). When he and religious leader Sonny Billie (Panther) appeared before a gathering of Afachkee pupils at the tribal museum, Osceola spoke at length to the youth about sovereignty:32 If you know about your culture—each culture has laws. The tribe had strict laws around the 1960s. It was tough to live by Indian laws and this is where sovereignty comes from. From the word sovereignty we make our money, from bingo. You guys goin’ to school should understand the word sovereignty. Sovereignty means the right to make self-government and our own laws. . . . Why did Congress give that sovereignty to Indian tribes? When the white people came here with their boats, we gave them bread and corn, taught them to farm, and they took over the country. . . . Congress saw that there was some kind of government here already. [For Seminoles,] government came from the Corn Dance. . . . To the Indian tribe back then, Corn Dance was probably the highest government in the land. (November 15, 2000) In this rich statement, Osceola linked sovereignty to self-government and Seminoles’ having their own laws, and he reminded the students that money and bingo come from sovereignty, which in turn comes from the

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Corn Dance. Seminole law is not romanticized: it was “tough to live by.” Here a sacred event is cast as the source of everything from bingo to Seminoles’ recognition by the United States as a legitimate government.33 In Osceola’s account, sovereignty is a process of reciprocity, albeit unbalanced: Indians gave food and knowledge, but then white people “took over the country.” Despite this deep imbalance, colonial powers entered into a relation of recognition whereby the Corn Dance conveyed and maintained Seminole sovereignty. In addition to reciprocity and recognition, temporality plays a key role in many Seminoles’ conceptions of sovereignty and law. For Osceola and others, it is crucial that Seminoles already had a government and a rule of law when colonists arrived. Their sovereignty within a Euro-American framework is recognition of a prior governmental status and system, not a grant or a right within the American system. This view of preexisting and inherent sovereignty is the essence of the U.S. legal doctrine (Cohen [1942] 1982: 231), if not popular conceptions, of indigenous rights.34 For Osceola and others, the precolonial presence of the rule of law structures presentday claims to nationhood: law is not only a mechanism, but also a symbol, of sovereignty.35 It is rare for non-Indian criticisms of “unregulated” tribal gaming rights to acknowledge that many tribal nations have autonomous foundations for law and sovereignty. Indeed, tribal members grow frustrated by outsider presumptions that they have no laws or rules on the reservations. As Jeannette Cypress (Panther) put it: “We have rules just like them, [but] they think that we can kill somebody, and run to the rez, and not go to jail” (October 2, 2000). As Seminoles’ legal actions demonstrate, law is both a mechanism for maintaining social order and also a potent symbol of political and cultural distinctiveness at the interface of interdependent sovereigns.36 In their decades-long gaming and sovereignty struggles, Seminoles have created and pushed settler law, even as they also have sought extralegal remedies and maintained clan-based legal authority outside of American law. For tribal officials, “the institutions of law,” as Clifford Geertz (1983: 174) suggested, “translate between a language of imagination and one of decision and form thereby a determinate sense of justice.” It is in this social space between imagination and decision that sovereignty takes shape through multiple and shifting relations of interdependency.37

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Au tonomy and Interdependency

Throughout this discussion I have moved away from the model of sovereignty as autonomy in favor of charting relations of interdependency. In this I have been influenced by feminist theorists. Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon (1994) assembled a genealogy of the keyword dependency in the United States, arguing that “dependency” has become increasingly pejorative since the height of industrialization, with especially severe consequences for women. In the United States, they showed, structural relations of dependency are masked in the workplace (as “free” labor) and the socalled free market.38 Just as dominant economic theories of dependency mask structural relations of interdependency in the marketplace, so too does the obfuscation of dependency in political theories of sovereignty privilege a narrow but powerful conception of the autonomous nationstate. This excludes political relations of interdependency that constitute political status and belonging, perhaps especially those forged by indigenous and colonized nations. Indigenous dependency has been a theme of U.S. legal doctrine and policy directed at indigenous peoples. In the landmark Marshall Supreme Court opinions of the 1830s, which still shape federal Indian law, dependency figured prominently in structuring indigenous rights and status. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, most famously, Marshall wrote for the Court that Indian tribes were “domestic dependent nations,” that they were “in a state of pupilage,” and that “their relation to the U.S. resembles that of a ward to his guardian” (30 U.S. [5 Pet.], 16–17 [1831]). The characterization of Indians as “dependents” subsequently limited their tribal sovereignty, placed conditions on their indigenous and settler-state citizenship, and inextricably linked their political authority to their economic dependency. As Barsh and Henderson (1980: 51–55) noted, this is despite possible alternative readings of dependency as implying voluntary relations between sovereigns. Focusing on indigenous dependency blinds us to the shape and limits of U.S. sovereignty. Vine Deloria Jr. (1979: 22) argued that not only indigenous groups but also European and other nation-states long have established and maintained themselves through interdependency and multilayered sovereignty, yet the ideology of state sovereignty as autonomy historically

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has masked these relationships.39 As Elizabeth Povinelli (2006: 3) has suggested in a different context, the task is less to differentiate between dependency and autonomy than to determine “which forms of . . . dependency count as freedom and which count as undue social constraint.” Both political theories that privilege autonomy as a marker of sovereignty and federal Indian policies that ricochet between models of dependency and sovereignty-by-neglect make the same mistake of narrowly locating political power in autonomy. My attention to sovereign interdependency in the gaming context has several implications for sovereignty and its theorization. First, we must attend to the sophisticated ways that indigenous groups—and, by extension, other nations—assert their sovereignty in part through interactions with others. This is not simply a self-interested strategy aimed at achieving autonomy.40 Instead, American Indian tribal sovereignty suggests that interdependency deeply conditions and structures political distinctiveness. As David Wilkins and Tsianina Lomawaima (2001: 249) wrote: “The connections and interdependencies of the modern world deny the possibility of a self-contained, unfettered sovereign, but limited sovereignties exist all around us: United States of America, the individual states that constitute the nation, and the senior sovereigns, American Indian tribes who have called this country home for millennia.” Attending to interdependency has the potential to deepen our analysis not only of indigenous sovereignty but also of other sovereign forms. Second, insofar as casino-era Seminole sovereignty illustrates the dilemmas of indigenous peoples in settler societies more generally, it points to the need for more comparative analysis, especially across the Anglo settler states (see, e.g., Maaka and Fleras 2005). Third, beyond a quest for recognition, interdependent sovereigns are entangled in material and ethical relationships of obligation and reciprocity that bring peoples into relations of commensuration and incommensuration. Indeed, sovereign valuation in relations of interdependency, obligation, and reciprocity bears structural resemblance to the ways that Seminoles value casino money. This is another way to see how sovereignty is material, and money is political. The sovereignty of nation-states is being reshaped by international governmental regimes, multinational corporations, and mass migrations (Hardt and Negri 2000; Sassen 1996). In this context, American Indian

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sovereignty, as a unique system of overlapping nations, can aid in imagining new national alignments. I do not hold up indigenous sovereignty as a model, given the ongoing neocolonial relations between indigenous peoples and settler states. Nonetheless, by exploring the value and meanings of indigenous sovereign interdependency, we may be able to imagine new and more just political futures, not only for indigenous peoples but also for a broader American and global public. 191

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Conclusion

​Betting on the House

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n December 6, 2006, the Seminole Tribe of Florida announced that it had contracted to acquire Hard Rock International, a multinational corporation, for approximately $965 million. The deal, which closed the following March, gave Seminoles a presence in forty-five countries around the world through a network of 124 Hard Rock Cafés, several Hard Rock Live performance venues, and hotels and commercial casinos. In its geographical and financial reach, the acquisition extended the boundaries of Seminole economy and sovereignty across the United States and beyond. Its announcement set off a media storm, with coverage by all major domestic and many international media outlets. The Tribe’s press release, quickly picked up and voiced by newswires around the globe, emphasized the magnitude and novelty of the acquisition: “The purchase is believed to be the first of a major international corporation by a Native American Indian Tribe and marks a milestone in the growing economic power and prominence of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and other Indian tribes in today’s business world” (Seminole Tribe of Florida 2006: 1). Gaming consultants called it a “milestone” as well (Hoag 2006), and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported financial analysts and Indian experts saying that the Seminole Tribe of Florida had “suddenly become a symbol of American Indian financial power and a blueprint for its future” (Holland,

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Blum, and Stieghorst 2006). A promotional video screened at the press conference predicted that Seminoles’ historical toughness and Hard Rock’s irreverence would be a potent mix: “What happens when the unconquered meets the independent? The world is about to find out” (Seminole Hard Rock Entertainment 2006a).1 Upon learning that tribal counsel Jim Shore (Bird) had been named to the board of directors of the new corporation, I phoned him to find out more. He mentioned having encouraged the press-release drafters to compare this acquisition with the launch of Hollywood Seminole Bingo. That, of course, was another December event, twenty-seven years earlier, mentioned at the opening of this book. Both instances, he said, showed the Seminole Tribe to be a “pioneer” in gaming and in business more generally (December 12, 2006). The resulting press release and related news articles emphasized Seminoles’ leading role in gaming while also bringing into focus the new scale and form of the Tribe’s investment in nonreservation businesses. Far from a modest bingo operation, the Hard Rock acquisition required sophisticated financing (with advice from Merrill Lynch and others) and the creation of a new for-profit company, Seminole Hard Rock Entertainment. Almost half of the purchase was funded through tribal equity and the rest from debt. As MarketWatch reported, the deal highlighted “the growth and increased sophistication of stock and debt issuances by Native American nations,” perhaps eclipsing Mashantucket Pequot’s $350 million bond offering in 1995 (Wines 2006). The purchase price was partially offset by the licensing fees that Seminoles had been paying Hard Rock for their Tampa and Hollywood facilities, fees in the hundreds of millions of dollars that had reached more than one quarter of Hard Rock International’s total annual revenues (Hoag 2006). Indeed, Seminole gaming profits had exploded since the 2003–2004 launch of the Tribe’s Hard Rock operations: gaming-industry experts estimated Seminole casinos’ annual earnings to have exceeded $900 million (Staley 2006). Seminoles’ casinos ranked behind only MGM Mirage and Harrah’s of Las Vegas in total cash flow for 2005, and if Seminole Gaming were a public company it would be one of the biggest gambling companies in the United States (Holland, Blum, and Stieghorst 2006). The Hard Rock announcement surprised just about everyone. It followed months of secret negotiations and competitive bidding by major

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private equity groups. As Seminole Gaming CEO Jim Allen told a Miami Herald interviewer, “We certainly were in the major leagues.”2 The Tribal Council had authorized their top gaming officers to pursue the venture, but most Seminoles knew nothing about it until they heard about a last-minute Tribal Council meeting that was convened to approve the final terms or until the deal was publicly announced shortly thereafter. Gary Bitner, the Tribe’s public-relations point person, had reason to believe that the international media knew little about Seminoles or tribal sovereignty, so the Tribe had hired six European public relations firms to assist with the announcement (February 11, 2007). Bitner explained that the seller, the Rank Group, announced the deal in London at 7:00 a.m., and then the buyer followed moments later in the United States: this was 2:00 a.m. in Florida, but tribal citizens had been stationed at telephones to field media calls. Confidentiality agreements had prevented the parties from divulging the deal until that moment, according to Shore, since to do so likely would have affected the purchase price. Indeed, the surprise of this announcement reflected a structural tension between Seminoles’ growing corporate power and their tribal governance. As their tribally owned businesses expand, it is unclear how Seminoles will balance a commitment to distributed power and knowledge within the tribal polity against corporate requirements for information control. After weighing whether to hold their press conference in Florida, tribal officials instead opted for the Hard Rock Café in New York City’s Times Square, a prominent and media-saturated space that offered muchcirculated images of Seminoles wearing patchwork and waving to the public while standing atop the Hard Rock marquee, surrounded by skyscrapers (figure 35). The press conference was, as several Seminoles later said, a “show,” and it highlighted the novelty of an Indian tribe purchasing a major multinational corporation. Bobby Henry (Otter)—who with his family has performed public blessings and dances at tribal-museum festivals, in the John Anderson “Seminole Wind” music video, and at countless other events—led a blessing in Mikasuki while dressed in a red long shirt, leggings, and a feathered turban. Several of his female kin stood on stage in full-length patchwork skirts and capes. Jim Allen, the CEO of Seminole Gaming who had analyzed the Hard Rock prospect and was credited with landing the deal, sat at the dais in a dark suit next to Tribal Council rep-

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Figure 35. Bobby Henry (Otter) and family, along with elected officials and Seminole Broadcasting staff, standing atop the Times Square Hard Rock Café marquee. Courtesy of Seminole Tribe of Florida/Hard Rock International.

resentatives Max Osceola Jr. (Panther) from Hollywood and Andrew Bowers Jr. (Snake) from Brighton, both wearing patchwork jackets. The CEO of Hard Rock International presented Osceola and Bowers with a guitar previously owned by Hank Williams Sr., and Sopranos actor and E Street Band musician “Little Steven” Van Zandt lauded the acquisition’s benefits for rock and roll and planet Earth. Tribal Council representative Bowers, when asked about the deal’s significance, focused on the tribal membership: “This means that the tribe is moving forward in its effort to support the 3,000-plus membership. And not only the 3,000, the future membership. That’s what this is to me.”3 Representative Osceola took the microphone and cast a wider net, while taking care to endorse Bowers’s view: “The benefit is not just to the Seminole Tribe (which is right, because we are going to gain the economic advantage from this), but also the local communities that we’re in. We’re going to provide jobs, we’re going to provide a lot of things that’s gonna

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benefit the local communities wherever we are, wherever we are in the world. I think it’s good for Seminoles, and it’s good for non-Seminoles, because in the end we’re all human beings.” Reminiscent of the discussion of economy and culture in chapter 1, Osceola then drew lines of continuity between past and present Seminole economic action, even as it changed form: “Now, as the environment has changed, we have to acquire different skills. Instead of hunting and fishing and growing crops, we have to provide with another element that provides for our tribe. We’ve been able to go into business, and now we have to learn to manage that business.” His was a narrative of progress, punctuated with achievements including his own college graduation in the early 1970s and the facts that the tribal attorney, Shore, is Seminole and that a Tribal Council member, Bowers, is an attorney. Osceola signaled that Seminoles’ aspirations were expansive: “And so to provide for the tribe, we’re looking beyond the borders, the four square borders of our reservations. We’re looking not just in the United States, we’re looking in the world. So this income will provide for our tribe, for our young people that are coming up, they’re going to have the ability to manage, operate. And this is a first step. This is the first stone that is being thrown in the pond that is going to go with the tidal wave.” The most widely cited comment from the Times Square event was this, from Osceola: “Our ancestors sold Manhattan for trinkets. Today, with the acquisition of the Hard Rock Café, we’re going to buy Manhattan back one hamburger at a time.” Or, as the promotional video put it: “The Seminole Tribe of Florida is now poised to expand its horizons even further, to all corners of the globe” (Seminole Hard Rock Entertainment 2006a). Where are the borders of Seminole sovereignty, and what does it mean that they seem to be expanding to follow tribal capital as it moves around the world? I completed initial fieldwork with the conclusion that American Indian gaming occupied a small corner of the world—it has grown bigger since— in which key questions of money and culture, and of political difference and belonging, came into relief as Seminoles and other Native people worked them out under new material conditions. Only ethnographic research could ground the seemingly mysterious operations of casino capital, which some analysts have taken to be emblematic of this global historical moment, in such situated and suggestive phenomena as the politics of

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per capita dividends and the changing state of rez cars. Only by attending to unexpected patterns and following the leads of Seminole informants could I draw the contours of tribal sovereignty in the shape of a chickee or an oversized donor’s check. The aim of this book, however, has not only been to account for such complex aspects of Seminoles’ lives and for their economic and political theories in the casino era, as difficult as that is. There are several additional reasons for non-Seminoles to care about Seminoles’ stories, claims, and values, as the Hard Rock deal suggests. Florida Seminoles first launched tribal gaming, and they remain at its legal and economic cutting edge: according to CEO Jim Allen, Seminole Gaming was one of only two investment-grade gaming companies in 2006, and “anybody who really studies the gaming industry” knows that the Seminole Tribe of Florida is one of the biggest gaming companies in the world.4 As such, Seminole experiences open a window onto an important phenomenon that has affected the lives of many Native Americans and non–Native Americans. The 2006 Hard Rock acquisition is only one example of tribal gaming’s scale and reach, but it vividly illustrates the uncertainty of boundaries between tribal sovereignty and capital. Just as the story broke, the Los Angeles Times separately reported on other tribes’ recent transnational ventures, including a Chickasaw partnership with a Chinese state-owned automobile company to build a British car model on Chickasaw land (the vehicles would be “made in the USA”), a Navajo agreement to sell agricultural goods to Cuba, and an Oglala Sioux business that provides back-office support for a U.S.–Chinese joint venture (Iritani 2006). As this book shows, in the casino era tribal sovereignty follows, but is not reducible to, capital flows, as gaming-related exchange both creates and remakes political relations among multiples kinds of sovereigns. Most Indian-gaming publicity and scholarship had previously been centered in California and Connecticut (one exception is Mason 2000), where indigenous authenticity has been publicly challenged by media investigations circulated in mass markets, not to mention by the ravages of coastal colonialism and settlement.5 Florida Seminoles, however, generally have not faced authenticity challenges, and they have maintained a strong sense of being an “unconquered” people and vital community. As a result, questions of money and culture in Seminole Country take a different form and

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open up alternative avenues of analysis, ones focused less on authenticity and more on value. Although the ethnographic method limits my comparative claims, this study’s analyses of money, indigeneity, and sovereignty can inform tribal gaming research elsewhere and offer insights into questions of broader scholarly and political importance. The Materiality of S overeignty and the P olitics of Money

Max Osceola Jr.’s suggestion that Seminoles were buying Manhattan back one hamburger at a time relied on the historical understanding that indigenous peoples had previously lost their lands, whether as swindled or willing participants in exchange, in part because they were unable to cut good deals. The “selling” of Manhattan is a tragicomic fable, one that discursively authorizes massive land dispossession and serves as a reminder that the seeming contradiction of American Indians who are rich and businesssavvy has a deep cultural history. Many blog and online-discussion-board writers (e.g., at Yahoo! News, CBS, and MSNBC) blasted or mocked the Hard Rock acquisition as just one more sign that Indians (now all lumped with the few who have grown wealthy from casinos) are no longer really Indian, or that they are undeserving of “special rights,” while others reveled in Seminoles’ “revenge” or “payback” and wished them well. Whatever the response, the deal called attention to the inextricable but also sometimes unexpected links between money and politics. It is too easy to reduce money to politics or vice versa, but Seminole gaming illuminates more specific ways in which sovereignty is material and money is political. As Seminoles revalue casino money, they call attention to the fungibility of money, to the exchangeability and indeterminacy of money that render moments of its valuation political. Seminole tribal gaming further illustrates the more general point that money and sovereignty are each relational. Desired forms of monetary exchange and sovereign action are frequently (though not always) figured by Seminoles to be reciprocal and obligated. We have seen this in the distribution of per capita dividends, scandals over money and political legitimacy, and relationships forged between the Seminole Tribe and other governments. More generally, an implication of this study is that both money and sovereignty are more usefully understood as constituted by relations of

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interdependency than imagined to be based in autonomy. Money neither renders previously autonomous things and people commensurable and thus measurable along a single scale of value, on the one hand, nor simply severs the social ties that anchor objects and human relations in their material specificity, on the other hand. “Market dependency,” for indigenous peoples and others, does not tell the whole story of what money is and does. Instead, to understand “market dependency” requires a historically and culturally situated account of what dependency is, what money has to do with it, and which political norms do or should guide exchange. The fungible quality of money has often been taken to directly increase the individuality and autonomy of those who use it. To be sure, this is an important part of the story. However, this study—through analysis of Seminole economic diversification and control, governmental spending on social services, and cultural production—shows how the fungibility of money can also bring humans into new forms of interdependency that are generative less of autonomy than of relational distinctiveness. Seminole sovereignty—and, I suggest, sovereignty more generally— is constituted by relations of interdependency that take material form in people’s bodies, houses, and lands. Seminole gaming is less remarkable for showing that governance requires money, which is hardly a new observation, than for illuminating ways that sovereign polities (and, by implication, subjects) are produced and sustained interdependently. Sovereign reciprocity and nondomination can easily be analytically mistaken for autonomy; this is especially true in contexts (such as Seminole governance) where self-reliance is deeply valued but does not tell the whole story. By calling attention to the materiality of sovereignty, I do not intend to simply echo gaming advocates who argue for “economic development” and “economic growth” as essential to strengthening tribal governance. Nor would I suggest that money liberates people or peoples. Rather, this book has suggested that indigenous sovereignty opens up new ways of understanding the nature of money and the material effects and foundations of sovereignty in indigenous peoples’ and others’ lives. Seminole gaming also sheds light upon the conditions of indigeneity in settler societies. Indigenous economic power in the casino era brings to the surface American anxieties about capitalism and materialism, service economies, and capital mobility. The order of things grows less clear

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when economic actions undertaken by the few tribes with substantial casino wealth start to look less like assimilation than like beating settler Americans at their own game—and perhaps changing the rules along the way. A risk of ethnography is that it loses sight of structural conditions: Seminole gaming is one small piece of larger capital flows, and it is worth considering whether some indigenous peoples’ embrace of “economic development” represents another mutation of colonial power through deepening capital penetration in Indian Country. But taking the Seminole case seriously shows the violence of reducing Indian gaming to a logic of capital, as if that logic is predetermined and as if it does not matter how or why indigenous peoples pursue gaming at the intersection of economic and political power. Sovereignty matters, and so do cultural processes and values, and together they produce, limit, and channel capital. This is true for the ways that Seminoles use casino revenues, and it is also true for ways that they and other Americans undertake such seemingly unremarkable tasks as paying taxes, transferring assets from parents to children, earmarking household expenditures, and donating or receiving charity. The point is not simply that Seminoles engage capitalism in culturally specific ways— everyone does—but rather that they exploit the fungibility of money to produce a politics of exchange that is inextricably intertwined with their sovereignty as it is lived day to day. Tribal gaming also forces reconsideration of U.S. sovereignty and political belonging. Gaming controversies highlight competing American norms of difference, including “special rights” discourse premised on nondifferentiated citizenship, multicultural demands that American Indians perform cultural difference as a condition of recognition, and sovereigntybased claims to differential political status. Gaming goes to the heart of the American political order. In the Wall Street Journal, Fergus Bordewich, the author of Killing the White Man’s Indian (1997) and a prominent skeptic of tribal gaming, characterized the point of view of “gaming’s beleaguered opponents”: “Tribal casinos represent a legal monstrosity that subverts the nation’s constitutional order.” He warned that without a national agreement on the limits of tribal sovereignty, “we may one day find ourselves living in a land that has little in common with the goals of today’s good intentions, and in which hundreds of ‘tribes’ of Americans are permanently distinguished from their fellow citizens mainly by the special rights that

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were bestowed on their Indian ancestors, and by the privilege of operating unregulated gambling casinos” (Bordewich 2006). “Special rights,” taxation, regulation, and sovereign immunity may seem like technicalities of federal Indian law and politics, but in fact they are keywords for considering the fundamental ordering and obligations of political belonging in the United States. Also seen anew through the lens of tribal gaming are the explosive latetwentieth-century growth of governmental and commercial gaming in the United States; the governmental sponsorship of this expansion through state lotteries and the selective legalization of commercial gaming, as well as through tribal-government gaming; and the fiscal politics and ethics of stopgap measures to save failing state budgets or weak tribal economies by injecting gaming revenues. In the “America in extremis” and “Latin American capital” of Southern Florida, Seminoles have become major players in tourism and agriculture, philanthropy and corporate citizenship, environmental protection and politics. If many see Florida as quintessentially “new,” Seminoles remind us that claims to political and cultural distinctiveness and to locally specific forms of economic action are neither new nor exceptional at the swampy and blurry edges of the United States. Betting on the House

Seminole adults shake their heads in amazement at the many changes they have witnessed over the years, yet they also take care to emphasize continuities in indigenous ways and values throughout the last century: in matrilineal clans, in the organization of political authority, and in battlefield, courtroom, or boardroom unconquerability. In 1931, government official Roy Nash began his survey of Seminole life as follows: The starting point in space is Miami. From the gold coasts of pleasure the Tamiami Trail runs west across the Everglades. Within 30 miles of the City Hall one encounters an astounding anachronism: In the canal a dugout canoe; standing in the stern, a man with poised spear. He wears neither shoes nor hat. He wears nothing that is worn in the city 40 minutes away. His only garment is a knee-length shirt, belted at the waist. Like Joseph’s coat, it is of many colors, bright, vivid, marking the wearer as a man apart from the metropolis of 110,000 which has sprung up like magic on the edge of his wilderness. A primitive hunter 30 miles

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Figure 36. National Airlines color postcard. Courtesy of the Seminole/Miccosukee Photographic Archive.

from a center of industrial civilization where airplanes purr and oceangoing liners dock and a hundred thousand idlers bask in the sun—the Seminole. (3) Two years later, in 1933, National Airlines ran a series of advertisements that highlighted the modernity and technological advancement of their new fleet. The visual joke and promotional value of one postcard advertisement centered on a Seminole family, dressed in patchwork and naturalized as part of the Florida Everglades, who pointed with seeming awe at the shiny airplane flying overhead (figure 36). Here, as for Nash, Seminoles were an anachronism, about to be overrun by technology and the population boom spreading westward from the Gold Coast into the darkest Everglades. Like most observers of his time, Nash predicted complete assimilation. He hoped that non-Indians would take responsibility for Seminoles’ welfare in order to accelerate their assimilation. In that bright future, “Seminoles, each standing on his own feet, will have become Floridians. The original American, now a social outcast, will again be an American” (Nash 1931: 75). These days, Seminoles hardly are concerned that technology and modernity will soon overwhelm them, while airplanes purr overhead. Instead, they take frequent trips on the Gulfstream IV tribal jet and the tribal heli-

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Figure 37. Hard Rock signing beneath the Council Oak. Seated, left to right, are Tribal Council members Max Osceola Jr. (Panther), David Cypress (Otter), Andrew Bowers Jr. (Snake), board president Moses Osceola (Bird), and tribal chairman Mitchell Cypress (Otter). Courtesy of Seminole Tribe of Florida/Hard Rock International.

copter fleet. Their failed airplane-manufacturing venture, Micco Airlines, was the first American Indian tribal entity to be granted a license by the Federal Aviation Administration. In 2006, Micco Airlines was purchased by a group in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. The majority owner and CEO was none other than James Billie, the former tribal chairman, aviation promoter, and long-time pilot, and, perhaps not coincidentally, proud member of the Bird clan. If the starting point remains Miami, as it was for Nash, the trail now leads to the Seminole casinos, and the limit of the Gold Coast suburban sprawl may just be drawn by an Everglades restoration initiative in which Seminoles have partnered with federal and other governmental agencies. Meanwhile, Seminoles wrestle less with alligators than with conundrums such as how best to preserve their languages, how to teach their children to value hard work in the absence of financial necessity, how to know when enough money is enough, and how to protect and expand tribal sovereignty when critics think that they already exercise too much power. The Tribal population is growing, with approximately half of tribal citizens under the age of eighteen. Many people worry about intermarriage and are concerned about children who carry no clans. Intermittent calls for constitutional reform combine with a robust reservation patronage system to sustain tensions in tribal governance. At the ceremonial signing cere-

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mony for the Hard Rock acquisition, tribal officials sat beneath the Council Oak at a concrete table (figure 37). No, this was not the object that Betty Mae Jumper (Snake) had wondered about (see chapter 4); rather, the tribal government had purchased a table to closely resemble the original, and it worked just fine. Among such dilemmas and practical measures, the question of “extinction” has become more of a wry joke than a real threat. No doubt, as Nash predicted, Seminoles have become American and Floridian, as their leadership in Florida tourism promotion and their proud history of United States military service attest. They also are Seminole. Far from Nash’s “anachronism,” Seminoles launched the tribal-gaming explosion that has transformed the economic, cultural, and political landscape of Indian Country and has prompted crises and reconfigurations of political belonging in America. Seminole gaming is not a paradox of culture and economy. Rather, it emerged from, and still stands in anxious relation to, Seminoles’ commitments to cultural distinctiveness and tribal sovereignty. The stakes of Seminole gaming remain high, but the odds are with the house.

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​Notes

Intr oduction: Seminole Gaming in the Sunshine State 1. Indian Country is both a technical legal term designating lands and peoples governed by the federal-tribal relationship and a more general concept referring to places where Indian peoples, governments, and ways are primary (Deloria and Lytle 1983: chapter 3). 2. The historian James Covington’s (1993: 273) characterization is typical: “Yet of all the tribes in the United States, the Seminoles of Florida have been the most reluctant to adjust themselves to the white world, and they still have reservations to which they can retreat from it.” 3. A few comments on terminology are in order. The Seminole Tribe of Florida is a governmental entity, which I (following many Seminoles) often shorten to “the Tribe,” yet it is also a social, ethnic, and self-consciously cultural group. I use the term Tribe instead of Nation in the Florida Seminole case to distinguish the Seminole Tribe of Florida from the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma (which often is referred to as Seminole Nation), although I generally write of “Indian nations” to emphasize their governmental status. I refer to the citizens of the Seminole Tribe of Florida as tribal members or tribal citizens; the latter is more accurate when discussing governance, but the former is more commonly used on Seminole reservations. The Seminole languages are Mikasuki (generally spelled differently from the name of the Miccosukee Tribe) and Muskogee; the latter more frequently is called Creek in everyday conversation and tribal language programs, so I call it Creek/Muskogee. Brighton Cultural Education director and language instructor Lorene Gopher (Snake) said that the word Muskogee makes her think of Oklahoma people (August 18, 2005). Others thought that because Muskogee was a term used by linguists, not Indians, the

word signaled an imposition from the outside. Seminole surnames, such as Osceola, Billie, Cypress, and Bowers, are widely shared among people who do not consider themselves to be relatives. I generally refer to tribal “gaming,” not “gambling,” in large part because this is the term that Seminoles most often use. Advocates tend to use “gaming” (which has connotations of leisure and sport), while opponents generally refer to it as “gambling” (which evokes vice). There is no neutral term. Finally, I employ the terms Indian or American Indian more than Native American, reflecting common usage, though I also frequently refer to “indigenous peoples” in order to signal the analytical and political connections among indigenous peoples 208

in anglophone settler states. 4. Ethnographic research was conducted with tribal permission during twelve continuous months beginning in July 2000, in addition to preliminary fieldwork during summer 1999 and subsequent regular return visits. Individuals whose interviews are quoted in this book have each been given their statement(s) in manuscript for review, with the option to delete or modify their words. Seminoles’ matrilineal clan affiliations are indicated in parentheses and are generally based on self-ascription (including in cases where individuals claim their father’s clan on the basis of clan adoption, a sometimes controversial practice in this matrilineal context). I also identify Seminole individuals who carry no clan, or whose clan I do not know (with apologies to the latter). Names with no parenthetical clan identifier are those of non-Seminoles. Paul Buster (Otter) once jokingly asked me what my clan was. When I quipped back that I could only say that I was of half Italian ancestry, he proposed giving me a “pizza clan.” I responded by asking what he thought about another man’s comment that Otters were “the playboys of the Everglades,” to which he simply answered: “smooth as silk” (July 11, 2001). 5. Key policy and law sources are W. Dale Mason’s (2000) book on Indian gaming politics, which outlines federal law and policy and develops case studies in New Mexico and Oklahoma; an edited volume on Indian gaming (Mullis and Kamper 2000); an edited volume on Indian gaming and law (Eadington and Cornelius 1998); and Eve Darian-Smith’s work on Chumash gaming (Darian-Smith 2002, 2003). Steven Light and Kathryn Rand offer the most comprehensive primer on gaming policy, outlining federal Indian policy and the politics of tribal gaming while advocating an approach to casino compromises that takes seriously indigenous theories of tribal sovereignty (Light and Rand 2005), and they have published the definitive book on gaming law (Rand and Light 2006). In addition, see summaries in Anders 1998, Stein 1998, and Wilmer 1997. Carole Goldberg and Duane Champagne discuss the ways that gaming has led to increased political power for American Indian tribes in California (Goldberg and Champagne 2002). For a summary of my approach to tribal gaming, see Cattelino (2005), and for a more general overview of the phenomenon, see the forthcoming “Indian Gaming in the United States” in the Handbook of North American

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Indians (Cattelino, forthcoming). Katherine Spilde’s anthropology dissertation examined gaming and sovereignty at White Earth (Spilde 1998). High Stakes is the first published ethnography of tribal gaming. 6. Valuation is an intrinsically social process, and I do not take autonomous individuals as my starting point. In this, I draw upon David Graeber (2001), Terence Turner (n.d.), Fred Myers (2002) and other anthropologists who analyze value as the significance of actions in relation to social totalities. Value is very much tied to values, in the moral sense, and it is always a comparative matter. As Graeber wrote, “The ultimate freedom is not the freedom to create or accumulate value, but the freedom to decide (collectively or individually) what it is that makes life worth living” (2001: 88). The financial and political effects of casinos have prompted Seminoles to ask difficult but vitally important questions of just this sort. 7. I have used the most recent data available on tribal government gaming and other forms of gaming in the United States. Data for some sectors are more recent than for others. 8. NIGC reported 2006 tribal gaming revenues to be $25.08 billion (www.nigc.gov, accessed September 10, 2007). 9. The Seminole Hollywood Hard Rock Web site is www.seminolehardrockhollywood. com, and Tampa is www.hardrockhotelcasinotampa.com. The seventh Seminole casino, a tent with a few gaming machines located on the swampy Big Cypress Reservation, was added in 2006 as part of a complex tribal-state-federal negotiation of Seminole gaming rights and compacts (see chapter 5). Plans are under way for a major expansion at Coconut Creek: in 2006, Seminoles requested that additional acreage be put into trust for a new gaming, hotel, and retail complex that would anchor the City of Coconut Creek’s new commercial district. 10. A Harvard study showed that American Indian incomes increased at a higher rate than the general U.S. population between 1990 and 2000, with gaming tribes exhibiting greater gains. Nonetheless, the same study emphasized that 2000 Census figures showed the real per capita income of Indians living in Indian Country was less than half the U.S. level. Indian unemployment was more than double the U.S. rate, and family poverty was triple the U.S. rate (Taylor and Kalt 2005: xii). In a column about New Year’s resolutions in Indian Country Today, Suzan Shown Harjo offered this one to “news editors and reporters”: “Resolved, to cover stories about all Native peoples. In the rush to follow the Indian money, most Indian stories are being missed. How about starting with stories about Native peoples who have no money and who exist in suffocating poverty? Even with the stunning success of tribal gaming in certain states, tribal people still are the most economically impoverished people in the country” (Harjo 2006). There are policy risks in public misconceptions that American Indians have grown wealthy: for example, the Washington Post led a story about Indian housing as follows: “Faced with the misconception that every

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tribe is casino-rich, 300 Native Americans went to Capitol Hill yesterday and today to lobby lawmakers to help turn around deplorable housing conditions in Indian Country” (Sarasohn 2006). 11. This is not the space to fully articulate my position on the epistemological relationships among the anthropology of Native North America, American Indian studies, and the anthropology of the United States (the latter of which generally has not focused on Indian Country). I have been influenced by all three fields, but a goal of this book is to link Seminole gaming with America without subsuming American Indian projects and commitments to America. I consider this book to be part of a 210

larger effort to highlight the often-obscured constitutive role of indigenous peoples in the histories, theories, and politics of the United States and other settler societies. I acknowledge anthropology’s part in masking these roles insofar as anthropologists have written about American Indian lives as if they existed entirely apart from American cultural and historical processes—although of course there are important exceptions that would include Blu (1980) 2001 and Sturm 2002. Meanwhile, as an anthropologist trained in the study of the United States, I am eager to contribute to the project of analyzing American public culture but without relying upon the ethnographic “othering” of Seminoles and other Native peoples (i.e., by transferring anthropology’s colonial legacy to the study of “others” in the United States). Finally, my desire to place this work at the heart of America and in comparison with other indigenous peoples does not obviate the politically and intellectually important work of carving out a discreet space for American Indian studies; nor do I treat Seminole values and projects as essentially derivative of the settler context. 12. Although at least as prominent in public debate, tribal gaming generated less income than state-run lotteries or commercial gaming. Lotteries totaled $21.4 billion and commercial casinos grossed $30.6 billion (American Gaming Association 2006). 13. In this episode (no. 707), Chief Runs with Premise (in a suit with a Plains-style headdress) and his cronies buy up South Park, and while the adults are initially resigned to moving to the next town, Stan speaks for their children in disgust: “Oh, sure. Until the Native Americans decide they want that land, too! What if the Native Americans just keep building their casinos and their highways until we have nowhere else to go? We have to stand up to them now!” When the Indians come to bulldoze the town, the boys stand in the way, with Stan telling them: “Just because you have a piece of paper saying you own it doesn’t make it yours. We grew up here. Our parents grew up here. We shop at that Wal-Mart and eat at that Chili’s. We take fish from the streams and bread them and freeze them to make fish sticks. This is not just a town. It is our way of life.” The chief and his associates then infect blankets with SARS by rubbing them with naked Chinese men (reversing the historical narrative of smallpox-infected blankets distributed by colonizers to American Indi-

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ans). In the end, everyone—including the chief ’s son, who was infected—is saved by the “middle-class white” cure of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup, DayQuil, and Sprite. The episode’s many reversals (of Indians moving whites off their land to build transportation corridors, of curing, of greed and malice, of power, of the ability to use money wisely) simultaneously call attention to the colonization of Native America and problematically render this past as something of the past by drawing a historically equalizing parallel between it and Indian casino power over small-town white Americans. 14. Media coverage of Indian gaming is extensive. In order to extend this study’s reach into broader American public discussions of tribal gaming, I have reviewed over a thousand newspaper and magazine articles and news radio and television segments. I am grateful for the assistance of Laura-Zoe Humphreys in organizing this material. 15. The seminal analysis of white America’s imagination of American Indians was Robert Berkhofer Jr.’s The White Man’s Indian (1978). Rayna Green’s “Tribe Called Wannabe” (1988) explored the desire of nonindigenous Americans to appropriate Indian identity, while Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian (1998) examined how white Americans have deployed notions about Indians (and especially embodied imitations of them) to shape American national identity since the Boston Tea Party. Shari Huhndorf analyzed images of Indians in popular media (2001). American exceptionalism was founded in part on the images and appropriations of indigenous people, and luminaries from Thomas Jefferson to historian Frederick Jackson Turner (author of the 1893 “frontier thesis” about the significance of colonial expansion to American life) located America itself in the indigenous encounter. 16. Schwarzenegger ran a much-discussed television advertisement promising that he would seek the state’s “fair share” of casino revenues (downloaded in 2003 from the candidate’s Web site and in the author’s electronic files). The Abramoff scandal was covered extensively by mainstream media outlets. For a New York Times analysis of the political fallout in Washington, see Stolberg 2006; for a Washington Post account of Abramoff ’s connections to Indian gaming tribes, see Schmidt 2004. 17. Here and throughout this book unless otherwise noted, “recognition” refers to generalized processes of politically recognizing others (see Markell 2003; Povinelli 2002; Taylor et al. 1994), not only to the federal recognition of American Indian tribes by the U.S. government (e.g., through the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Branch of Acknowledgment and Research). 18. Courts ruled that certain forms of electronic gaming were classifiable as class II gaming (which requires no state agreement by compact) under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, and the gaming industry has produced machines tailormade to fit these legal specifications. Although many players call the machines at Seminole casinos “slot machines,” there are several details that distinguish them:

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Seminole machines give receipts instead of cash, they have predetermined winning patterns rather than operating purely by chance, and customers play against each other, never against the house. 19. Figures courtesy of the Seminole Tribe of Florida Legal Department. Gaming industry analyst Alan Meister estimated Florida’s 2005 Indian gaming gross revenues (including Seminoles and Miccosukees) to be $1.265 billion. Nongaming revenue at the casinos was $125.7 million (Meister 2006–7: 11). 20. The department’s director, Leah Minnick (Panther), noted that the word affairs often caused chuckles (August 22, 2005). 212

21. For a comprehensive bibliography of tribal gaming “impact studies,” see Gardner, Kalt, and Spilde 2005. 22. A few notes are necessary on why I think tribal sovereignty is so important and how this book speaks to an early 2000s surge of anthropological interest in sovereignty. When I first proposed research on tribal gaming and sovereignty, I met with a skeptical disciplinary audience. “Sovereignty” had become a familiar word in American Indian politics during the late twentieth century, but some advisers and reviewers suggested that investigating sovereignty was not an anthropological approach to gaming. Then, much to my surprise, sovereignty became a buzzword in anthropology, or what one reviewer of this manuscript called the “flavor of the day.” The 2003 meetings of the Society for Cultural Anthropology were organized around the theme of sovereignty, graduate research proposals deployed the term in their titles, and Giorgio Agamben’s book Homo Sacer (1998) grew increasingly prominent. President George W. Bush spoke of “giving” sovereignty to Iraq, American sovereignty came under scrutiny for its imperial dimensions, and scholars explored the relationship of sovereignty to subjectivity. While I hope that this book will speak to such conversations, I nonetheless have avoided framing it within their terms. Instead, I have maintained a focus on American Indian tribal sovereignty because I found that taking tribal sovereignty seriously as it is lived and spoken about by indigenous peoples enriches understandings of sovereignty more generally. Seminoles and other indigenous people have been thinking about the scope and nature of sovereignty for much longer, and with more specificity, than have most anthropologists. 23. Key texts on tribal sovereignty include Vine Deloria Jr.’s and Clifford Lytle’s The Nations Within (Deloria and Lytle 1984) and American Indians, American Justice (Deloria and Lytle 1983), Barsh and Henderson’s The Road (Barsh and Henderson 1980), Wilkins and Lomawaima’s Uneven Ground (Wilkins and Lomawaima 2001), and Barker’s edited volume Sovereignty Matters (2005c). An early and important piece on the history and scope of tribal sovereignty was V. Deloria’s “Self-Determination and the Concept of Sovereignty” (1979). The modern legal doctrine of tribal sovereignty was consolidated in Felix Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law (Cohen [1942] 1982), and treatments of the legal aspects of tribal sovereignty include Sidney Harring’s Crow

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Dog’s Case (1994), and David Wilkins’s American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court (1997). Robert Odawi Porter assembled a rich reader, Sovereignty, Colonialism and the Indigenous Nations (2005). As discussed in chapter 5, Taiaiake Alfred has argued against the indigenous deployment of the European-derived concept of sovereignty (2002), and while I part ways with his conclusion to abandon the term, I have been influenced by his and Deloria’s (1979) critiques of the narrowness of settler state conceptions of both indigenous and nation-state sovereignty. For a historical and legal history of the modern tribal sovereignty movement, see Charles Wilkinson’s Blood Struggle (2005). 24. Thanks to Danilyn Rutherford for pointing this out. 25. This tax structure results in the concentration of “vice” on Indian reservations. Anthropologist Richard Warren Perry contended that gaming was an example of how sovereignty became demarcated by differential spatial criminalization, with the result that Indian tribes risked joining offshore corporations in a race to the ethical bottom (R. Perry 2006). 26. Many Americans misunderstand American Indians’ tax obligations. For example, in a 2002 survey of 700 respondents in Santa Barbara, California, Eve Darian-Smith found that 40.2 percent believed that Native Americans do not pay taxes, 34.1 percent believe they do, and 25.7 percent were unsure (Darian-Smith 2003: 37). A persistent theme in South Florida press coverage of Seminole gaming is the nonpayment of taxes on gaming revenues, and state officials have at times joined with commercial gaming companies to complain of tribes’ resulting “unfair” competition (e.g., see the comments of Richard Burroughs, secretary of the state’s Department of Professional Regulation, cited in C. Gallagher 1986). Individual Seminoles pay federal taxes on casino dividends and other income. 27. There are many forms of individual and collective rights and claims, so it is crucial to underline that tribal gaming, and tribal sovereignty more generally, is based on the collective powers of Indian tribes as governments. That is, tribal gaming is neither a collective right based on past oppression (such as reparations for racial, ethnic, caste, or formerly enslaved groups) nor an individual right geared to equality. Rather, it is a governmental right. Thanks to Tim Duane for helping me to articulate this distinction. 28. For detailed descriptions of IGRA’s terms, see Light and Rand 2005 and Rand and Light 2006. 29. The relative invisibility of indigenous sovereignty or self-determination as a discourse in the United States distinguishes it from its counterparts in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, where multiculturalism and rhetorics of rights take different forms, and where indigenous people figure more prominently in national politics. For a discussion of New Zealand and Canada, see Maaka and Fleras 2005. For an analysis of Ojibwe fishing rights controversies in Wisconsin, see Larry Nesper’s The Walleye War (2002).

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30. Antisovereignty and/or antigaming groups in the U.S. as of 2006 included at least one with national scope, Citizens Equal Rights Alliance, along with many regional groups, such as the Connecticut Alliance Against Casino Expansion, whose past president and founding member was author Jeff Benedict (2001); upstate New York groups, including Upstate Citizens for Equality (UCE); and California organizations such as Stand Up for California. No such groups had formed in South Florida until a 2007 effort was made by Citizens Against Seminole Sovereignty (cass) to stop the expansion of the Coconut Creek Casino (www.stopseminoletribe.com, accessed September 6, 2007). Joanne Barker has begun to analyze gaming-related antisover214

eignty movements (Barker 2005b), but to date there is no ethnographic research with those groups. 31. Also see the tribal Web site at www.seminoletribe.com. The home page includes links to pages covering history and government, economic enterprises, the museum, and other tribal matters. A significant portion of the Web site text was developed by non-Seminole tribal employees, with approval by tribal officials. 32. Data on tribal population, acreage, employees, and other figures in this chapter are, unless otherwise noted, provided by the Seminole Tribe of Florida in memos from the legal department, real estate services, secretary/treasurer, human resources department, public and governmental relations coordinator, and director of education. Most memos date from 2001, with some from 2002, and are in the author’s possession. 33. An earlier reservation had been established by treaty in 1823, but many Seminoles did not recognize the terms of the treaty, and after they successfully pushed nonIndian settlers out of South Florida in the 1830s, most Seminoles moved off the landlocked reservation (Sturtevant and Cattelino 2004: 434). Various plots of land had been purchased for Seminoles during the early twentieth century, but the Dania (1920s), Big Cypress (1930s), and Brighton (1930s) reservations were the first to be settled. 34. Clan data are recorded but restricted from outside review by the tribal office of the secretary. According to LaVonne Kippenberger (Panther), tribal enrollment officer, the Panther clan is the largest, followed by individuals with no clan (sometimes called “clan X”), and then the other major clans (in alphabetical order: Bear, Big Town, Bird, Deer, Otter, Snake, Wind). The imbalance in clan size, which was exacerbated by the capture and removal or decimation of clan camps during the Seminole Wars, exerts pressure on clan exogamy. 35. Voting on the Tribal Council are one elected representative from each of the three major reservations (Hollywood, Big Cypress, and Brighton), each of whom serves a nonstaggered two-year term; a tribal chairman elected at large every four years; and the at-large elected president of the board of directors, who serves as council vice president for a four-year term. The smaller reservations are represented by officials from designated larger reservations, in a system of satellite representation remi-

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niscent of earlier Seminole and other Southeastern mother-and-daughter towns (S. Miller 2003; J. Jackson 2003: 42). Additionally, in recent years the chairman has appointed nonvoting liaison members from Immokalee, Tampa, Fort Pierce, Naples, the Tamiami Trail, and on behalf of nonresidents who live outside of reservation borders. The Seminole Tribe of Florida, Inc., is structured identically, with a president, ex officio vice president (the tribal chairman), three elected reservation representatives, and liaisons. Voting members and liaisons to each body draw salaries for their work. 36. In tribal elections the polling places are located on each reservation, and absentee ballots are sent by request to all nonresidents. Before the election, lists of eligible voters and campaign platforms are printed in the Seminole Tribune. There are usually multiple candidates running for any given position, sometimes as many as ten or twelve. Most candidates sponsor at least one campaign dinner, drawing crowds for buffet meals, entertainment, and speeches. Calculations of voter turnout are based on a comparison of tribal election results listed in the May 16 Miami Herald (Bolstad 2001a) with the list of eligible voters published in the April 13 Seminole Tribune (2001). 37. I am less convinced than Kersey and Bannan (1995) that reorganization augmented women’s power. It may have increased their formal power in structures of governance, and indeed some women have served on the council and board; one was tribal chairman. Many Seminole women, however, said that women had enjoyed more power before the “modern” government, when clans organized political life and when Seminoles lived in matrilocal settlements. 38. By contrast, many Indian reservations were partially or wholly divided into alienable plots and leased or sold to non-Indians after implementation of the 1887 General Allotment Act (Wagoner 1998). This left tribes with diminished territorial integrity. 39. For general histories of Seminoles, see Edwin McReynolds’s The Seminoles (1957), James Covington’s The Seminoles of Florida (1993), and the chapters about western and eastern Seminoles and maroons in the Handbook of North American Indians (Mulroy 2004; Sattler 2004; Sturtevant and Cattelino 2004). Most of my citations to Sturtevant and Cattelino (2004) refer to Sturtevant’s work. For discussions of Seminole colonial history, with a focus on ethnogenesis and cultural persistence, see William Sturtevant’s “Creek Into Seminole” (1971), Patricia Wickman’s The Tree That Bends (1999), and J. Leitch Wright’s Creeks and Seminoles (1986). Classical anthropological studies of Southeastern Indians that incorporate Seminole material from this period include John Swanton’s The Indians of the Southeastern United States ([1946] 1979) and Charles Hudson’s The Southeastern Indians (1976). For a romantic but informative firsthand account of Seminoles and their environs during this period, see naturalist W. Bartram’s The Travels of William Bartram ([1791] 1998). Harry Kersey Jr. wrote the authoritative trilogy of twentieth-century Seminole history (1975, 1989, 1996). Few anthropologists have completed ethnographic work with Florida Semi-

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noles. The leading figure is William Sturtevant, whose dissertation on medicine and ethnobotany (1954a) and many published articles on a variety of topics established the anthropological record. Alexander Spoehr’s dissertation on Seminole kinship (1940) and his paper on the Seminole camp (1944) contributed to understandings of social organization. Merwyn Garbarino’s brief ethnography of the Big Cypress Reservation (1972) addressed social change, and James O. Buswell III’s dissertation (1972) analyzed the relationship between Christian and “traditional” religions at the midcentury. 40. Claudio Saunt (1999) argues that the breakdown of Creek political and economic 216

control over the southern breakaway migrants who became known as Seminoles resulted from Seminole resistance to colonial-era shifts in indigenous regimes of property and power. J. Wright (1986) examines Seminole “ethnicity” during this period, showing how Muscogulge regional life was characterized by shifting ethnic identifications and political affiliations. 41. In keeping with recent trends in Native American studies, I do not italicize words in indigenous languages. 42. The status of escaped slaves and their descendants within Seminole communities has been a matter of legal, academic, and internal Seminole debate. Most academic historians and Seminoles with whom I discussed the issue agree that many “Black Seminoles,” as they were later called, labored in a modified relation of servitude and tribute to Seminoles, and that Black Seminoles were allied with Seminole Indians against the U.S. military during the Seminole Wars of the nineteenth century. The first important historian of Black Seminoles was Kenneth Porter, who highlighted the central roles of Black Seminole warriors during the Seminole Wars, and who noted the ambiguity of their status in relation to Seminole Indian communities and identities. Porter recorded intermarriage and cultural exchange, but he also documented that Black and Indian Seminoles generally retained distinct identities and kinship organization (K. Porter 1996). Kevin Mulroy (1993) and Susan Miller (2003) developed the concept of Seminole maroons both to link and to differentiate black and indigenous communities. It would not be overreaching to claim that the Seminole Wars were, in some part, wars over slavery at the intersection of American and indigenous systems of bondage (Mahon 1967; K. Porter 1996). For more on indigenous slavery and race in the Southeastern United States, see Tiya Miles’s work on Cherokee slavery (Miles 2005); for the Southwest, see James Brooks’s study of kinship and slavery (Brooks 2002). 43. As Sturtevant wrote, “The First Seminole War amounted to the American conquest of Spanish Florida” (1971: 107). 44. The classic, and most comprehensive, treatment of the wars is John Mahon’s History of the Second Seminole War, 1835–1842 (1967); a newer treatment is Missall and Missall 2004. For a historical and material culture analysis of the role of the famous Seminole military leader Osceola, see Patricia Wickman’s Osceola’s Legacy (1991).

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45. Most Black Seminoles were removed to Oklahoma with the soon-to-be-broken U.S. promise that they would remain free. Known by some as the Seminole Freedmen, their descendants are fighting a bitter legal and political struggle with the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma over their civil rights within the Nation (see, e.g., S. Miller 2005). A smaller group left Oklahoma and settled in Mexico and Texas, and some descendants remain in Texas (Mulroy 1993). Still others escaped Florida by boat and settled in the Bahamas, where their descendants retain knowledge of Seminole ancestry alongside their primary identification as Bahamian (Howard 2002). 46. The historian Ned Blackhawk (2006: 9) writes forcefully about “the violent deformations of Native communities,” showing them to have been “neither natural nor inevitable” and locating “these indigenous pasts within the broader field of European global colonialism.” It is too easy to underestimate the past impact and the ongoing significance of American violence on Seminole lives and communities. 47. Population according to the most recent figures posted on the tribal Web site (www .miccosukee.com/tribe.html, accessed March 10, 2007). 48. It is remarkable that a respected South Florida journalist could hold a March 2001 symposium on race and ethnicity at the Hollywood Seminole Education Building while calling the event “We Are All From Somewhere Else: Race and Change In South Florida” (capitalization in original). The resulting oral history book (Oliver 2000) contained no voices and little mention of Seminoles or other American Indians. 49. For a more general discussion of Seminole concerns about outside research, see Stans 2001. Seminole resistance to outsider inquiries is not new, and William Sturtevant reflected upon this in his 1959 field notes (WCSf Box 5, May 24, 1959). 50. I have taken his prompt seriously, not only in the ways I conduct and present research on gaming but also by planning future research on territoriality and citizenship in the Everglades. That project will investigate Seminole and non-Seminole claims and practices at their intersection. 51. The classic text on scholarly exploitation of reservation communities is Vine Deloria Jr.’s essay “Anthropologists and Other Friends” in Custer Died for Your Sins (Deloria [1969] 1988). For a reappraisal of this relationship, see the edited volume Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr. and the Critique of Anthropology (Biolsi and Zimmerman 1997). See also Natives and Academics (Mihesuah 1998). A methodological source, with emphasis on research with and by indigenous peoples, is Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies (1999). 52. The relationship of research to sovereignty was illustrated by my own efforts to secure research permission. When I approached a northeastern tribe about the possibility of conducting ethnographic research on tribal gaming, the designated gatekeeper for outside research refused all research that was not directed by the tribe, saying that part of sovereignty was being able to say no. Attempts to finalize written research permission from the Seminole Tribe were no less instructive. Despite encouraging meetings with several tribal leaders during my preliminary visit, no

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formal letter of permission was forthcoming. Meanwhile, I met Katherine Spilde, then the research director for the National Indian Gaming Association (NIGA), an advocacy group in Washington, D.C. Spilde forwarded my research proposal and her cover letter to an attorney and a lobbyist whom the Seminole Tribe retained on Capitol Hill. The attorney soon sent a letter of research support to the Seminole Tribe, and within days a permission letter from the tribal chairman arrived in my mailbox. 53. This research project, while attentive to ongoing power relations between nonNative scholars and Native communities, also faced questions of bureaucratic ac218

cess typically associated with studying corporate America or government agencies. As Jason Jackson once put it in personal communication, referring to Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s important book (1999) and to Laura Nader’s article on the anthropology of the powerful and elite (1982): “What happens when ‘decolonizing methodologies’ intersect with ‘studying up’?”

1. Casino R o ots Portions of this chapter were previously published in “Casino Roots: The Cultural Production of Twentieth-Century Seminole Economic Development,” in Native Pathways: Economic Development and American Indian Culture in the Twentieth Century, ed. B. Hosmer and C. O’Neill, 66–90. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2004. 1. Compare this to Marshall Sahlins’s criticism of the assumptions built into World Systems Theory, namely that there is a “physics of proportionate relationships between economic ‘impacts’ and cultural ‘reactions.’” Instead, Sahlins argues, “the specific effects of the global-material forces depend on the various ways they are mediated in local cultural schemes.” These schemes, in turn, shape global capitalism (Sahlins 1993: 414). 2. For a statement of moral and political opposition to gaming, see the Onondaga Nation’s Web site, www.onondaganation.org/govern.gambling.html (accessed December 6, 2006). 3. Gerald Vizenor has dismissed those who compare casinos with, for example, Anishinaabe moccasin games, arguing that this ignores how the latter enact morality, reference community, and gain meaning in song (Vizenor 1993). 4. For discussions of the representational strategies of Foxwoods Casino, see Bodinger de Uriarte 2007 and Lawlor 2005. 5. State fiscal structure also can be a matter of self-identified culture, as seen historically in debates about Florida’s determined resistance to desegregation, its cultivation of business-friendly development, and its anxious identity as a state of many migrants (Gannon 1996). 6. A disclaimer: I do not wish to imply that market integration cannot harm indigenous communities, or that indigenous groups should embrace capitalism. To the con-

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trary, land dispossession, state welfare dependency, market integration, and other imposed economic transitions have, too often, wreaked havoc on the physical, cultural, and spiritual health of indigenous peoples around the world. Yet this legacy should not blind us to the complexity of market integration. 7. Following anthropologists such as Louisa Schein (2000) and Fred Myers (2002), I find the cultural production framework useful both in its decentering of the essentialism of “culture” and in its focus on the processes whereby notions of culture are mobilized by institutions, individuals, and discourses. One of the benefits of a cultural production approach is that it does not reify culture. Another, just as important, is that it avoids debates about the “invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm 1983), which too often have been reduced in the American Indian context to allegations of inauthenticity (Clifton 1990). This is particularly damaging in cases where “tradition” becomes a measure of political status, for example in disputes over criteria for the federal recognition of American Indian tribes (Campisi 1991; Clifford 1988; Cramer 2005). 8. Such characterizations were common. For example, a 1972 Florida magazine author considered it self-evidently ironic that, at the Brighton Reservation, “Even the old medicine man, Frank Shore, is now a cattle rancher” (Amlong 1972: 18). 9. Archaeologist Brent Weisman has argued that the late-1700s development of Seminole plantations in northern Florida led to Seminoles’ demise because settlers wanted their lands (Weisman 1989: 78). In 1879, R. H. Pratt, an investigator sent by the Office of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., who later founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, estimated that in South Florida one-third of Seminoles’ annual income—$2,000 of a total $6,000—came from the sale of hogs and cattle (Pratt [1888] 1956). 10. For a comparative case on class, capital intensification, and Fort Berthold cattle ranching, see McLaughlin 1998. Cattle did not alter Seminole class formation in North Florida, according to Richard Sattler (1998: 86). 11. Figures from Richard Bowers (Panther), chairman of the Big Cypress cattle owners’ committee (August 20, 2002). 12. A humorous page in the event program, with the heading “Wrestling,” contrasted a picture of calf roping, with the caption “Cowboy Style,” to one of a Seminole alligator wrestler, with the caption “Seminole Indian Style” (program in author’s collection). 13. In a 1956 National Geographic article about “Florida’s ‘Wild’ Indians, the Seminole,” a caption beneath a photograph of Seminole boys wearing Seminole patchwork shirts and cowboy boots reads: “Cowboy Boots Say American Boy; Shirts Bespeak the Seminole” (Capron 1956: 835). This typical midcentury logic contrasted the cowboy with the Indian, but for decades Seminole men have worn cowboy boots, jeans, and hats. See also Jason Jackson’s (2003: 66) description of Western wear in Yuchi ceremonial dress.

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14. Before moving onto the Dania (now Hollywood) Reservation in 1928, Ada Tiger (Snake), for example, owned a herd of approximately seventy-five head of cattle, which, according to her daughter, Betty Mae Jumper (Snake), was the largest Florida Seminole herd at the time (Jumper and West 2001: 36–37). 15. First, a caveat about my use of the term craft: although I want to resist the pattern of designating objects produced by indigenous people as “crafts,” as opposed to Western “art,” I use the word craft nonetheless. I do so mostly because Seminoles generally refer to these objects as crafts, and because this term more accurately reflects their market circulation. In the summer of 2007 I first heard a few Seminoles 220

use a new term to describe patchwork clothing: “wearable art.” 16. Jay Mechling takes a critical approach to Seminoles’ self-representations in cultural tourism, emphasizing their “invented” history in Seminole-white commercial relations (Mechling 1996). His analysis attempts to sideline authenticity debates in order to focus on representation, but his evidentiary strategies participate in a politics of authenticity nonetheless, one that fails to account for Seminole agency and the local meanings of cultural representation. More productively, Fred Myers (2002) has analyzed ways that Aboriginal Australians produce and reflect upon themselves as individuals and collectives through the objectification of culture and labor in market relations. 17. Sturtevant’s informant William McKinley Osceola (Big Town, b. 1895) believed that Indians began selling patchwork at the Musa Isle tourist village, when white tourists asked if they could buy Seminoles’ clothes (Sturtevant 1951–52). This suggests that labor and capital blurred in white-owned villages. 18. In 1940, school instructors William and Edith Boehmer established the Seminole Crafts Guild, a small-scale cooperative at Brighton, with the assistance of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board in Washington. The Arts and Crafts Board had been established in 1935 as part of Indian Commissioner John Collier’s Indian New Deal, which emphasized cultural preservation and economic self-sufficiency. Mrs. Boehmer worked closely with Seminole women to select design elements and institute standards in materials and sewing methods. In 1960, the organization was sold to the Seminole Tribe of Florida for $25,000 (spohp 3ab). On the Tamiami Trail, Deaconess Harriet Bedell, an Episcopal missionary, led a similar project beginning in 1933, selling Indian crafts at her Glade Cross Mission (West 1984). These women’s tastes, along with those of consumers, structured craft production and sales. 19. According to a 1962 tribal document, the village employed approximately fifteen tribal members, served as an outlet for Seminole craft producers (who obtained their materials from the Tribe at wholesale prices), and offered crafts produced by other Indian tribes (Osceola and Tiger 1962). Mary Parker Bowers (Snake), who managed the village shop for thirteen years, recalled learning from home agent Edith Boehmer how to examine workmanship and enforce standards among producers (August 21, 2002).

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20. The animals’ future is unclear. Gloria Wilson (Snake), Hollywood Representative on the Board of Directors, said in 2005 that she would like to remove the animals because she considered caging clan totems to be a sign of disrespect, and because she was concerned for the health of Seminoles working near the animals (some workers observe rules against interacting with particular animals under certain conditions, such as pregnancy, and they risk their health by disregarding those prohibitions; August 17, 2005). 21. In a 1931 report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Roy Nash observed that men generated most Seminole household income from trading skins, while “the women make a few dollars from the sale of Seminole dolls and a little very indifferent beadwork” (Nash 1931: 10). The scant household economics statistics available suggest otherwise. Government documents show that by a conservative estimate over 25 percent of all Seminoles were selling crafts by 1937 (Scott 1937: 11), and a Works Project Administration study found that 1939 craft sales of $11,900 followed only New Deal job program wage earnings ($26,558) and sale of animals and fowl ($15,000) as income sources (Workers of the Writers’ Program 1940). The maximum gross income earned by a craft producer in 1964 was $1,000 (Seminole Tribe of Florida 1966a: 9). In 1963, 99 out of 175 total Seminole families earned $500 or less annually, and only 37 families earned more than $1,500, so craft income may have played a significant role in household economies (Mertz 1970: 9–10). In the early 1950s, Sturtevant had calculated the profits for two patchwork makers at $0.93/hour (Sturtevant 1951–52). Master’s student Stephen Palmer estimated return to be $1 per hour in 1973 (Palmer 1973: 52). In the same year, the federal minimum wage was $1.60/hour (U.S. Census 2007). Nonetheless, in the early 1970s, tribal officials did not consider craft production to count as “employment” for the purposes of calculating income (Palmer 1973), and this could only have reflected a blindness to non–wage-based labor and to women’s labor. In 1954, Sturtevant observed that “a steady source of income for nearly every family is the production of items for the tourist trade. A few men carve spoons, boat models, and miniature tomahawks, but the principal salable items are made by the women” (Sturtevant 1954a: 75). 22. SPOHP #259, 37. 23. One day I observed Linda Frank (Otter) weaving a basket she planned to sell for $600. 24. I spent an agonizing hour assigned to the registration desk of the 2001 Tribal Fair clothing contest. My task as a volunteer was to determine the category in which each entry belonged, but contestants often disagreed with each other and with the registration table workers about the designations. By the 2007 Tribal Fair, organizers had stipulated new rules, with clearer requirements for clothing construction and materials, additional age categories, and new restrictions on the age of the clothing. The categories had changed to Old Traditional, Traditional, Contemporary, Jackets, and Modern Day Fashion. Contests last for hours, and prize monies have grown,

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but the vibrant sociality of clothing contests defies any instrumentalist analysis that would focus on the prize money alone. 25. In his field notes, Sturtevant cites the Indian agent Lucian Spencer as reporting in 1913 that at least 75 percent of Seminoles’ income had derived from selling alligator hides, but beginning in 1912 most tanneries stopped buying the hides, throwing Seminoles into economic crisis (WCSF, Box 2). For more on the trade in alligator pelts, see Kersey 1975. 26. A subsequent made-for-media event recast alligator wrestling as broadly Floridian, not only Seminole, when a white wrestler employed by Okalee Village traveled to 222

New York City’s Central Park to rescue an “alligator” (it turned out to be a small caiman) swimming around a lake. The Florida press took glee in New York City’s purported helplessness when faced with a loose reptile, and the public relations staff at the Okalee Village milked the story (Cabral 2001; Huriash 2001). 27. For example, while many Seminoles worked in the vegetable, fruit, and flower fields of South Florida, their labor never became an advertised cultural performance. By contrast, Paige Raibmon documents the cultural elaboration and tourist spectacle of Northwest Coast Indian labor in hops fields (Raibmon 2005). 28. For more on conflicts between labor time and other temporalities and moralities of economic distribution in Indian Country, see the work of Tressa Berman (2003: 59–79) and Kathleen Pickering (Pickering 2000). 29. Of these workers, 39 percent worked in Hollywood, 31 percent in Big Cypress, and 21 percent in Brighton, with smaller numbers in Immokalee and Tampa. Data courtesy of the Seminole Tribe of Florida Human Resources Department (memorandum, August 5, 2002). 30. Data courtesy of the Seminole Tribe of Florida Legal Department (memorandum, October 17, 2002). The number of gaming employees increased dramatically with the subsequent opening of the Hard Rock casinos. 31. Forty-one Seminoles held an associate’s degree or higher, seven had master’s degrees, at least two held JDs, and two held honorary doctoral degrees (neither of these had attended graduate school). Data on all but JD degrees is courtesy of the Seminole Tribe of Florida Education Department (undated memorandum, 2002). 32. For a description of casinos’ causing tribal members to return to the Lac du Flambeau reservation in Wisconsin, see Johnson 1999. 33. The Tribal Council operated two shops, and the board of directors operated eight shops and the vending machines. 34. See Susan Stans’s dissertation for a study of alcohol use on the Brighton Reservation. Stans found that residents tended to be either nondrinkers or heavy drinkers, with high rates of both but few moderate drinkers (1996: 94). Eighty-two percent of her interview respondents (n=112) believed that “Indians have a problem with alcohol” (1996: 156).

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35. This resonates with discussions of structural inequality by Puerto Rican crack dealers in Philippe Bourgois’s 1995 study. 36. For instance, the Miami Herald reported that during the early smoke-shop days, tribal officials created a so-called nickel fund (so named because they collected a $.05 tax on each carton of cigarettes sold) to finance litigation in defense of smoke shops, but once cigarette operations were secure they began to siphon off the funds for unauthorized and possibly illegal uses. These included loans to tribal members and hidden political contributions to elected officials (Strasser and MacCormack 1983). 37. For published versions of this legend, see B. Jumper (1994: 23–25) and hear James Billie’s album Seminole Fire (SOAR, 2000).

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38. In the end, the Tribe successfully negotiated moving the remains onto a new plot of land, which was put into federal trust and which now is the site of the Tampa Hard Rock and a smoke shop. The remains are fenced off with a sign warning people to stay away. Meanwhile, the Tribe undertook a joint venture with the City of Tampa to build a memorial at Fort Brooke, near where the remains were unearthed. This former fort, now in downtown Tampa, was the site where Seminoles boarded ships to Indian Territory during the nineteenth-century removals. 39. Losses in 1978 were estimated at $2 million annually for city and county governments in Broward County and $1 million for the state (McGuinness 1978).

2. Cultural Currencies 1. One often hears that “money is the root of all evil,” and this is a common phrase in arguments against gambling. The biblical source for the phrase says instead that “the love of money is the root of all evil” (Timothy 6:10). Tellingly, there has been slippage from criticizing people’s love of money (which locates the problem in misplaced human desire) to money itself (which implies that the problem inheres in the money form). 2. Similarly, a WBUR radio and Internet documentary, after describing the Mashantucket Pequot Foxwoods casino, noted: “It’s difficult to resist the question, what does all this have to do with reclaiming a lost culture?” Tribal spokesman Cedric Woods is paraphrased as being tired of answering this common question, and as saying that Pequot wealth “conflicts with the image that mainstream America expects of Native Americans, which is that they are poor, powerless and stoic, accepting their centuries of mistreatment as just part of being Indian. But the truth, declares Woods, is that ‘native people weren’t poor and impoverished until they were colonized’” (A. Brooks 2003). 3. The Makah whaling controversy of the late 1990s, in which critics accused Makah people of inauthenticity because they employed “modern” technology, and in which Makah people supported their cultural and historical claims to whaling through the institution of a museum and cultural center (Erikson 1999), illustrates how con-

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troversies over indigenous authenticity catalyze new forms of indigenous cultural production. 4. My use of both cultural production and social reproduction in this chapter is not intended to inscribe (artificial and tired) distinctions between culture and society, on the one hand, and production and reproduction, on the other. To some extent, the two terms are accidents of the intellectual influences from which I draw, namely Bourdieu and Weiner. But it cannot be coincidental that both authors (and others who have deployed them) are keenly interested in value, economy, and the temporal extension of meaningful collectivity. Bourdieu focuses attention on self-designated cultural in224

stitutions, on how something becomes valued as culture, while Weiner points to the flows of everyday exchange through which value is generated and collective futures are enabled. 5. Alan Klima, in an ethnography of exchange with the dead, political violence, and neoliberalism in Thailand, similarly calls for attention to the ethnographic specificity of gambling. Even in the context of market interactions and neoliberal reforms, Klima argues against presuming the economic logics of gambling and capital at their intersection. Rejecting criticisms of gambling that take it to represent all that is wrong with capitalism, Klima (2002: 260) counters that “such a critique employs something of a heuristic code-book which assumes that gambling has an essential nature and that social relations embodied in gambling are necessarily the epitome of what is dark in the heart of capitalism, and that the ‘fetishism’ of value reproducing itself is inherently inimical to rendering social relations present to consciousness—when precisely the opposite can be the case.” 6. Marc Shell (1995) has written compellingly on how the realms of art and money are both bound together and driven apart in Western thought and commerce. Both art and money are matters of mediation and objectification, and monetary logics, he argues, pervade artistic debates about representation and value. In both money and art, people contemplate the relationship between symbols and things. This is a historical process: “How art and commerce came habitually to be regarded as symmetrical or commensurate involves both the aesthetic anxiety (linked with beliefs about God) that monetary form is intrinsic to art and the economic anxiety (linked with theories of adequation and representation) that aesthetic form is intrinsic to money” (133). 7. This algebra, not coincidentally, applies to the blood quantum logics whereby indigenous citizenship is often reckoned. See Patrick Wolfe’s fascinating argument about the logics of Indian blood (as always being lost, and therefore leading to land expropriation) in relation to the “one-drop rule” and African American blood (as difficult to lose, thereby guaranteeing a post-slavery subordinated laboring class; Wolfe 2001). 8. See also R. H. Pratt’s report (Pratt [1888] 1956) and Alanson Skinner’s “Notes on the Florida Seminole” (1913).

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9. Older Seminoles sometimes connect cultural loss to the 1930s, when they moved to reservations and entered wage labor. Carol Cypress (Panther) interviewed elders for the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum’s exhibits and oral history project. She was surprised to learn that many men committed suicide in the 1930s. She considered this to have been a result of “culture shock” linked to the necessity of earning an income (July 11, 2001). 10. Betty Mae Jumper (Snake) wrote a personalized account of the arrival of Christianity among Seminoles (Jumper 2000). 11. “Indian medicine” or “traditional medicine” is commonly used for everything from everyday ailments to life-threatening illness, prevention to cure, psychological health to danger avoidance. Herbal expert Alice Snow (Bird) and anthropologist Susan Stans coauthored a book about Seminole medicine plants (Snow and Stans 2001), and Stans (1996: 97) noted the frequent use of “on the wagon” medicine to treat heavy drinking. Sturtevant’s dissertation (1954a) remains the most comprehensive published account of Seminole medicine. 12. The Seminole Tribune had a circulation of 6,000 in 2001. It is a government-run newspaper, and coverage tends to highlight governmental successes while not reporting political controversies and unfavorable news such as fines by the federal government against tribal gaming for improper casino management agreements. Several non-Indian Tribune staff members were fired by the Tribal Council in 2001 after they were seen to be too close to the tribal chairman, who himself would soon thereafter be suspended from office. In the late 1990s, Seminole Tribune staff and outside consultants developed a tribal Web site, www.seminoletribe.com, which was one of the most elaborate Web sites in Indian Country. Each of these media forms participates in a nationalist media mode of “constituting modern citizens and consumers” within the Tribe, even as it also advances minority and indigenous values and aesthetics for consumption by a broader public (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin, 2002a: 7). 13. For a discussion of Seminole medicine school, see Sturtevant (1954a: 92–103). Sturtevant was told in the early 1950s that the schools were no longer held, but as of 2001 they were being held each winter, and there were a number of Seminole men at different stages of training. Medicine school is organized by religious leaders, not the tribal government. 14. Indian agent Lucian Spencer’s weekly reports in 1915 and 1916 detailed his efforts to convince Seminoles to learn English and go to school. By tribal law, he explained, a Seminole who learned English would get his ears cropped (Spencer in NARG75, Box 1: 00–1916, 032; see also Spencer in WCSF, Box 2; Sturtevant and Cattelino 2004: 440). Sturtevant attended the Creek Green Corn Dance in 1952, where he recorded discussion about various legal issues, including murder, sleeping with white people, and learning to read or write (WCSF, Box 3). 15. Preschool and kindergarten language instructors at Hollywood and Big Cypress re-

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port that very few children each year—perhaps one or two at Big Cypress, but none at Hollywood—enter school speaking fluent Mikasuki. According to Brighton Cultural Education instructors, no school-age children speak Creek fluently (Stans and Gopher 2004). On the Tamiami Trail, several Miccosukee families speak Mikasuki at home, some children speak Mikasuki as a first language, and the Miccosukee tribal school offers bilingual Mikasuki and English instruction. 16. West’s small pamphlet on the language is sold at the main Miccosukee gift shop along the Tamiami Trail (West and Smith 1978). 17. For examples of the dangers of writing, in particular, see the mi:kili discussion later 226

in this chapter. Another example is Peter Gallagher’s account of artist Paul Billie’s (clan unknown) refusal to illustrate Betty Mae Jumper’s (Snake) book of Seminole legends because he objected to writing legends, especially in English, as bad medicine (in B. Jumper 1994: 18). Thanks to Jason Jackson for reminding me of this example. 18. For this and other reasons, I would not count Seminoles’ casino-era commitment to cultural and language programs as an example of what Michael Silverstein has called “elite re-ethnicization,” whereby the relationship between class and ethnicity is inverted in part through language projects (2003). 19. It is unclear to me whether the concern about outsiders’ making money off the language is rooted in a resistance to the commodification of language per se, or whether it is more about the scandal of outsiders making money off of language. As Jane Hill has observed (2002), indigenous peoples’ discourses of language as property may be grounded in a historically based resistance to the expropriation of indigenous resources or in a notion of language as intellectual property, or both. A more careful analysis of Seminole “language communities” in relation to “speech communities” (Silverstein 1996) is beyond the scope of this study, except to note the complexity of an indigenous community in which language preservation is valued even as people identify with different languages via descent and, frequently, geography (i.e., at Brighton for Creek/Muskogee or at Big Cypress for Mikasuki). Language politics are further complicated by the shift from Creek/Muskogee to English as the lingua franca, the prominence of Creek/Muskogee in ceremonial usage (including among Mikasuki speakers), and complex political and historical relationships to Seminoles and Muskogees in Oklahoma, on the one hand, and Miccosukees in Florida, on the other. 20. Joseph Errington has usefully mapped three kinds of language preservation claims: place-based claims to the linguistic “life” of a particular locale; broad appeals to the value of human diversity as represented by linguistic difference; and rights-based claims to ownership and identity of language (Errington 2003). The last of these is certainly present in Seminoles’ property-like claims to—and restriction of—indigenous language use. To a certain extent, the first is also evident in some Seminoles’

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moral claims to the specific cosmological value of their language(s), as briefly discussed below, but this blurs Errington’s categories because Seminoles’ particularist claims are inextricably tied to their responsibility for all humans. Seminoles’ restriction of language classes to Seminole people is an example of indigenous resistance to the potential of expropriation implied by the “theme of universal ownership” (whereby endangered languages are all of ours to preserve) that pervades some language preservation efforts (J. Hill 2002). Peter Whitely (2003) criticizes “language rights” for inscribing a “logocentric” approach to language that overlooks tribally specific reasons why indigenous peoples (his example is Hopi) might want to limit the distribution and use of their languages. He argues that “language rights” are anathema to Hopi, and more generally Pueblo, values that “emphasize linguistic privacy as a technique of sociopolitical autonomy” (2003: 716). 21. Not coincidentally, the same interplay of autonomy and interdependency characterizes Seminole approaches to sovereignty, as discussed in chapters 4 and 5, and it resembles ideas of money as able to separate or conjoin people. 22. The frequent use of Mikasuki or Muskogee in public blessings that open tribal events (meetings, ceremonies, celebrations) appeared to serve the dual function of calling attention to the elder status of the speaker (elders were almost always asked to give blessings, and elderly people disproportionately speak one or both of the Seminole languages, so there is mutual reinforcement of language- and age-based authority) and performing the “Seminoleness” of the event for all in attendance. This was achieved despite the fact that fluent Mikasuki speakers often could not understand Muskogee, and vice versa, not to mention that many Seminoles understand neither language. While it was uncommon for nonfluent speakers to deploy native language, fluent speakers often did so. I have found helpful Jocelyn Ahlers’s analysis (2006) of nonfluent speakers’ use of indigenous languages in intertribal contexts, where Native language use performs Indianness in shared opposition to English, even though speakers gather in intertribal contexts wherein they speak English but cannot understand one another’s indigenous languages. 23. Here it is interesting to consider that Seminole political differentiation has not tracked linguistic communities. In the 1950s, when conflicts over reorganization threatened Seminole unity, many observers predicted that the group would split along linguistic lines, with Muskogee/Creek and Mikasuki speakers each forming one tribe. Yet it did not work out that way. Seminoles, Miccosukees, and Independents split along political, not linguistic, lines, confounding ethnological assumptions about the relationship of language to nation. 24. Mi:kili also has been written mig-il-ishi or Mingilishee. 25. Snow eventually convinced her relatives to let her go to school, but she did not finish second grade. As an adult she went back to school, earning her GED in 1972, and in 2000–2001 she was enrolled in anthropology courses at Florida Gulf Coast Univer-

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sity and completing a collaborative book project with anthropologist Susan Stans (Snow and Stans 2001). Snow’s pluralization of mother likely reflects the common practice of applying the term to one’s biological mother and her sisters. 26. In a 1972 University of Florida interview, Mary Frances Johns (Panther) said that in the 1950s, “They said if you are educated and the Communists came into the United States, they would cut off your tongue to keep you from speaking, voicing your opinions, or speaking of other people. If you didn’t speak nothing but your own language, and your language was not written, then they wouldn’t worry about it.” She told the interviewer that the word was mig-il-ishi as he wrote it, and that it could 228

mean any foreigner, not just Communists (SPOHP #58A: 4–5). The interviewer, Tom King, then asked Billy L. Cypress (Bear), later museum executive director, for his interpretation. Cypress said that young people were told that Americans were conquerors, “but they won’t be conquerors too long . . . Mingilishee is coming back.” Cypress explained that Micci or Micco means king, and the rest of the word means English. Some, he said, thought they meant Soviets, but for certain it referred to friends who would come and line up Indians and hurt the ones who spoke English or wore pants (rather than Seminole long shirts). “So the only people who are going to be spared when these liberators come back are going to be people who have been unacculturated, who have remained as they are” (SPOHP #61A: 15). 27. Seminoles play a single-pole stickball game in which men compete with sticks and women use their hands, with the goal of hitting a central pole above a certain mark (that day each team began with four points, and the first to reach zero won, with each point deleted after a pole strike). No breaks in play are allowed, though substitutions are permitted. The spirit of the game is quite competitive and jocular, with much teasing and flirtation between the players (see Fogelson 1962). That day, many people jokingly compared the game to the XFL extreme football league, which would have its opening game the same night. Museum executive director Billy L. Cypress (Bear) commented to me that this game offered a nice opportunity for tribal members who do not attend Green Corn Dance (where stickball is played) to be able to participate (February 3, 2001). Still, a few people expressed discomfort that the game was being played in front of a mostly non-Seminole audience. 28. Here Billie refers to the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, not an earlier and more questionable museum (both in its purpose and in its practice) established at Tampa to house human remains unearthed during downtown construction. 29. Billy L. Cypress (Bear), executive director, implicitly rejected the accusation that the museum was merely a justification for casinos by comparing the museum’s mission and strengths to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. While he admired the Pequot Museum on many levels, he noted that its displays relied primarily on archaeological, linguistic, and historical data, whereas Seminoles were able to use their own languages and the knowledge of their elders to represent a “living culture” (August 24, 2000).

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30. The relationship between multiculturalism and sovereignty is complicated. Multiculturalist claims are grounded in ideas of cultural, not political, difference, whereas sovereignty claims are based on political status. Casino controversies blur these differences, especially in “special rights” debates. Povinelli highlights the central role of indigenous cultural performance and proof in structuring the relations of recognition demanded under liberal multiculturalism. Moreover, she emphasizes the constraints imposed on indigenous peoples and their cultural forms by the demand that they make their “traditions” recognizable (but recognizable as different) and palatable to settler state juridical logics and institutions (Povinelli 2002). Terence Turner (1993: 424) has identified a significant shift in the role of culture within indigenous and other social movements, in which “culture, as distinct from nationality, is a source or locus of collective rights to self-determination.” For indigenous groups, the cleaving off of culture from nation as the basis for rights claims in contemporary multiculturalism has mixed consequences. On the one hand, it affords them new opportunities to demand recognition and rights. On the other hand, it frames those demands in culturalist terms that obscure the basis of indigenous rights in relations of sovereignty. M. Annette Jaimes Guerrero, for example, worries that multiculturalism undermines indigenous sovereignty claims by overlooking indigenous political status: “Multiculturalism favors treating American Indians as ethnic minorities, rather than as descendants of indigenous peoples and members of tribal nations” (Jaimes Guerrero 1996: 56; see also Barker 2005a, 2005b). 31. For a comparative case, see Jessica Winegar’s (2006) discussion of cultural sovereignty in her analysis of Egyptian cultural policy and global art markets. 32. Weiner moved away from reciprocity as the privileged model for exchange, arguing instead that focusing on reproduction and regeneration enables anthropologists to see larger-scale temporal and spatial flows through which value is constituted, maintained, and displayed. Her research in the Trobriand Islands foregrounded mortuary rituals as nodes of reproduction and regeneration, differing significantly from the casino context of this study. Nonetheless, I share her interest in exploring the large-scale consequences and strategies of social reproduction that are enacted through everyday exchange. 33. A Sun-Sentinel article exemplifies South Florida concerns about Seminoles’ shifting relative wealth. With the title “As Seminole Casino Emerges in Davie, Impoverished Neighbors Try to Get By,” it alternates paragraph-by-paragraph descriptions of the struggles to survive in “Broward County’s poorest neighborhood” (which is said early in the article to be “all white, except for one Native American”), on the one hand, and the wealth and consumption patterns (especially luxury cars) of neighboring Seminoles, who “freely spread tens of millions in cash among tribal councilmen” (Benedick 2003). Nowhere did the article explain the governmental basis for Seminole wealth or the history of Seminole poverty. The article’s coherence relied on the racial shock value of side-by-side Indian wealth and white poverty.

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34. For example, Paul Pasquaretta, in his insightful analysis of the relationship between “Indianness” and gaming (1994: 700), wrote: “Insofar as casino gambling fosters materialism, acquisitiveness, and self-interest divested of group interest, it might also represent the last phase in the complete assimilation of indigenous North American peoples.” 35. Seminoles often identify parasitic outsiders, most often African American or Mexican men, as the source of tribal youth drug problems, even in the face of evidence that there are several Seminole drug dealers. This racialized attribution of social conflict to outsider greed is also a theme in discussions of intermarriage and tribal 230

employment policies. 36. For a comparison, see the Los Angeles Times feature on Chumash gaming and spending problems in the wake of a rapid transition from poverty to wealth (Bunting 2004). 37. As Daniel Miller has argued (1998: 18, 35), provisioning through consumption can be “a major form in which . . . love is manifested and reproduced” and “an expression of kinship and other relationships.” The widespread celebration of birthdays is a late-twentieth-century phenomenon. Gift exchanges at holidays are also relatively new. Some disapprove of all the consumption and celebration, but others value the expansion of holidays as one more way to bring people together as a community. The four-lunar-month marker is important in baby Seminoles’ lives, and this is often when children obtain “Indian names” (see also Sturtevant 1954a). In general, the number four is privileged, with many medical and ceremonial restrictions lasting for four weeks or lunar months; there are four medicine colors, the four cardinal directions orienting aspects of life, and many other manifestations. 38. For a sympathetic South Florida Sun-Sentinel article about the alleviation of poverty by gaming, see John Holland’s (2004b) “Seminoles Recount Long Road from Hard Times to Hard Rock.” 39. Whenever possible, I refer to indigenous people by the tribal designation they use in printed materials. Sometimes this leads to ambiguity, for example when listing Secola as Ojibwe in one sentence and Northrup as Anishinaabe in the next—the two terms refer to the same indigenous group. 40. As discussed in chapter 3, dividends are distributed on a per capita basis, including to minors through their parents or guardians. Wilson was criticizing people who spend their children’s dividends rather than saving them. 41. Interestingly, no one remarked upon this being a foreign car, and in recent years Seminoles had begun to purchase more foreign vehicles, including on the rural reservations. Thus, I escaped the kind of class-inflected teasing about owning a foreign car that I had grown accustomed to in my own family and rural community of origin. 42. Just as important to social reproduction as children are elders. The Seminole Tribe spends massive funds on elder programs, and talk about the importance of taking

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care of elders pervades Seminoles’ discourse about casinos and, more generally, about what matters in life. Elders enjoy economic comfort and a vibrant social life through tribal programs, from daily Hot Meals to holiday celebrations, group travel to recreation programs. There is debate about whether to build a nursing home: on the one hand, it is a mechanism for taking care of people and providing them with a social environment; on the other hand, it breaks apart multigenerational households and threatens cultural and linguistic transmission from elders to children. The bureaucratization of elder status during the casino era has generated both jokes and gratitude. Every Seminole citizen qualifies as an elder when he or she reaches the age of fifty-five. Respondents struggled to answer how being an elder had been recognized before this rule, generally deflecting the question by saying that they appreciated hitting fifty-five because of the money, but that everyone knows that being an elder requires more than that. 43. Billie’s clan is according to the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, which in turn consulted tribal genealogist Geneva Shore (Bird). 44. Alex Johns (no clan), former board representative from Brighton, considered his mixed ancestry to improve his political efficacy, because “I can see both sides and I think I can be more progressive in that sense. I can do business with a white person because I know what it’s like to be a white person. I can do business on the Indian side—I know what it’s like to be an Indian.” A rancher, Johns liked to think of himself as “a hybrid,” and spoke of “hybrid vigor” in animal species (February 7, 2001). 45. One could argue that these anxieties would be absent or reduced without casinos, but that would overlook historical antecedents, including infanticide in cases of mixed parentage, the split of Seminoles into distinct political communities with different citizenship criteria, and the longstanding Miccosukee practice of requiring men who marry non-Indians to move off reservation lands. Leah Minnick (Panther), born in 1939, had been told that Seminoles who married outside the tribe were not permitted to live on reservations. So she lived in Okeechobee with her non-Seminole husband until she observed that no one else seemed to be following the rule, at which point she returned to the Brighton Reservation (August 22, 2005).

3. The P olitics of Casino Money 1. Maureen Myers (2000) noted a similar indifference to the source of casino revenues among Saginaw Chippewa, but because she interviewed only twelve individuals, her results are inconclusive. 2. Wonder Johns (Panther), a Seminole pastor of the First Baptist Indian Church on the Brighton Reservation, told a newspaper reporter that he blamed casino dividends for eroding Seminoles’ religious faith: “Everybody gets dividends,” he said. “Everybody thinks that’s more important than God. That’s why I say we ought to be thankful for

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our blessings. Before we never had nothing” (Clarke 2002). Here the moral threat of gaming is that it will allow money to supersede God. Johns considers the money to be a blessing, but he criticizes the failure to recognize God as its ultimate source. I only found one person who criticized gaming as contradictory to non-Christian Seminole religious values. He noted that in the past Indians did not believe in gambling or the other harmful activities that he considered to be part of “the white man’s way.” 3. Elsewhere, Southern Baptists have opposed tribal gaming more vigorously, for example among the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, where Christopher Oakley 232

(2001) reports that Baptists and “cultural conservatives” fought the tribal government’s effort to open a casino. 4. Town oaks, as historian John Stilgoe notes, were popular civic markers in turn-ofthe-twentieth-century East Coast anglophone towns (Stilgoe 1988). There are other Council Oaks on Indian reservations in the East, including the Creek Council Oak in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Many Council Oaks reference American Indians. The University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire library has an online exhibit about its campus Council Oak, which is commemorated as a place where Native Americans had met (www.uwec. edu/Library/archives/exhibits/oak.htm, accessed November 2, 2006) and which is depicted on the university’s seal. There was a Council Oak in South Bend, Indiana, under which Miami treaties were signed and after which a public school is named. The Daughters of the American Revolution chapter in Council Grove, Kansas, is named “Council Oak,” after a tree under which treaties were made between Osages and the United States (kansasdar.org/counciloak, accessed November 2, 2006). Another treaty Council Oak (under which a treaty ceding Indian lands is said to have been signed) stands in present-day Bound Brook, in Somerset County, New York (www.stockton.edu/forestry/council.htm, accessed November 2, 2006). I have not learned how the tree in Hollywood was named “Council Oak,” but it is notable that the majesty and balance of giant oaks often has been transposed to politics, whether in the demarcation of the American town public, the commemoration of treaties, or the recognition of Seminole political organization. 5. Simmel found money to transform personalities into impersonal functions: “Such a personality is almost completely destroyed under the conditions of the money economy. The delivery man, the money-lender, the worker, upon whom we are dependent, do not operate as personalities because they enter into a relationship only by virtue of a single activity such as the delivery of goods, the lending of money, and because their other qualities, which alone would give them a personality, are missing” ([1907] 1990: 296). Money was the best example of the more general phenomenon of objectification that interested Simmel, whether in economy, art, philosophy, urban living, or other aspects of social life. Such an ongoing tendency toward abstraction and depersonalization certainly creates pain and longing, Simmel recognized, but

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he also found it to be the condition for the greatest of human cultural achievements and for the freedoms attendant to the modern form of life (see also Simmel 1971). 6. These ideologies persist despite the fact that people must actively work to create and maintain monetary boundaries between intimacy and “market reason,” as Caitlin Zaloom (2006) showed in her ethnography of Chicago derivatives traders. 7. Anthropology long has been interested in the relationship between exchange and sociality, building upon the foundations of Malinowski’s classic study of the kula exchange (Malinowski [1922] 1984) and Mauss’s analysis of the social relations of gift exchange (Mauss [1950] 1990). These early texts were based on a fundamental opposition between “traditional” exchange and Western market-based economies. In the concluding chapter of The Gift, however, Mauss empirically and normatively undermined this distinction by observing the role of giftlike exchange and social obligation in “modern” life and calling for its expansion. Another important tradition in theorizing “primitive economies” has been a Marxist one, built from the work of Lewis Henry Morgan (especially his Iroquois research) and carrying through Engels and Marx. 8. For example, Webb Keane (2001: 66), in a discussion of Sumbanese (Indonesia) money and its relationship to modernity, emphasizes that local ideologies that oppose money to ceremonial exchange must be understood as ways of talking about “relations among materiality and abstraction, the values of persons and things, and the imagining of ‘modernity.’” As Keane shows, the value and meaning of objects are underdetermined, and I would emphasize that this is also true for the value and meaning of forms of exchange. 9. As Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (1989: 21) argued, “the meanings with which money is invested are quite as much a product of the cultural matrix into which it is incorporated as of the economic functions it performs.” Bloch and Parry accuse anthropologists of bringing into cross-cultural analysis their own situated assumptions about money’s moral cost and transformative power. They suggest that accounting for local symbols, embedded exchange processes, and moral discourses about money will refocus anthropological debates away from money’s singular force and toward an analysis of short- and long-term exchanges as focal points for the structural tensions between individual and collective desires and reproduction. 10. Understanding the cultural dimensions of money cannot be a matter of positing a real culture or society that lies “out there,” and in which economy or money is “embedded.” Thus, my position is somewhat different from economic sociologists who analyze embeddedness. Marc Shell’s (1982) work takes us in a promising direction, when he shows how money has been a matter of thought in the postclassical era, in a “tropic interaction between economic and linguistic symbolization and production” that has generated a great deal of anxiety among philosophers, theologians, and politicians who are concerned to maintain a correspondence between

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materiality and meaning, to tease out the differences between the ideal and the real (4). Shell brilliantly traces the history of Western philosophy and theology’s moneylinked concern with adequation, where truth came to equal the agreement of knowledge with its object, of proposition with thing. For Shell, money is neither a simple tool nor an autonomous force. Drawing in part on Shell, Bill Maurer (2005) directs anthropological attention away from adequation to the variety of normative and epistemological projects that people undertake with money. 11. See Harry Kersey’s (1996) analysis of termination, the unexpected inclusion of Seminoles among slated tribes, and Seminoles’ successful efforts to resist termination. 234

12. In Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma v. Manufacturing Technologies, Inc. (118 S.Ct. 1700 [1998]), the Supreme Court upheld sovereign immunity, but Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion viewed sovereign immunity, although enshrined in law, as questionable both historically and as public policy. He singled out indigenous economic enterprises as incompatible with sovereignty: “In our interdependent and mobile society, however, tribal immunity extends beyond what is needed to safeguard tribal self-governance. This is evident when tribes take part in the Nation’s commerce. Tribal enterprises now include ski resorts, gambling, and sales of cigarettes to non-Indians. . . . In this economic context, immunity can harm those who are unaware that they are dealing with a Tribe.” These considerations, he added, “might suggest the need to abrogate tribal immunity, at least as an overarching rule” (cited in Wilkins and Lomawaima 2001: 230). Commenting on this opinion, Wilkins and Lomawaima wrote: “Apparently active participation in modern economic life and, worse yet, economic success are felt to be grounds to abrogate tribal sovereignty. It is beyond irony that the tenets of two centuries of federal Indian policy—purportedly, to ‘civilize,’ assimilate, and integrate Indians particularly into the nation’s economic life—are here perversely twisted by the Court in its justification for stripping tribes of inherent rights” (Wilkins and Lomawaima 2001: 231). 13. Writings about Mashantucket Pequots have consistently emphasized their wealth and their mixed racial ancestry. For journalistic book-length accounts, see Benedict 2001, Eisler 2001, and Fromson 2003. It is notable that almost all serious journalistic research on gaming has been about Pequots, and this no doubt has focused gaming debates on issues of racialized indigenous legitimacy and federal recognition (see Cramer 2005, 2006) that are less relevant for Seminoles and many other gaming tribes. 14. Renée Cramer (2006) has analyzed the link between race and casino-based stereotypes of the rich Indian in the context of Mashantucket Pequots. Gaming discourse is much less racialized in the Seminole context. 15. Gelder and Jacobs are interested in a form of postcolonial racism that takes Aborigines to have too much (too much sacredness, too much land, too much power, too large a role in a democracy that is supposed to be based on equality). Analyzing the

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relationship between guilt and resentment, giving back and giving up, minority and majority, center and margin, they consider Aboriginal claims to sacredness to be unsettling of the Australian nation. Late-twentieth-century Aboriginal land claims, they argue, were “crucial in the recasting of Australia’s sense of itself ” (Gelder and Jacobs 1998: xi). Although less prominent in national consciousness, the casino debates in the United States similarly are a social field in which Americans struggle to define equal citizenship, “special rights,” and difference in democratic settler society. 16. I thank Andrea Smith for asking me to clarify this point. 17. I am preparing a longer and more theoretically oriented analysis of dividends, provisionally titled “Fungibility: Florida Seminole Casino Dividends and the Fiscal Politics of Indigeneity.” 18. For more information of common American misconceptions of American Indians’ tax obligations, see note 26 of the introduction. 19. Here it is productive to compare Fred Myers’s (1991) analysis of authority and autonomy among Pintupi people in Aboriginal Australia. Myers shows the tensions between a Pintupi emphasis on the individual on the one hand, and forms of authority reckoned as nurturance on the other. Autonomy, he determines, is realized through relations with others. Although the material constraints and potentials shaping Seminole and Pintupi life are quite different, Myers’s analysis usefully points to the political and sociological conditions wherein small communities simultaneously forge collectivity and privilege individual autonomy without relying upon a liberal conceptualization of disinterested individualism. 20. Perhaps this partly results from the absence of treaty rights as a basis for Seminole entitlement, since Seminoles often claim with pride that they never signed a treaty with the United States and thus remain “unconquered.” For many Seminoles, there is a close relationship between being conquered and being economically dependent. 21. “Green Corn Dance” is somewhat of a misnomer for the multiple-day ritual, and this is its name only in English. The Green Corn Dance itself is one part of the overall event. 22. For a published version of this legend, see B. Jumper 1994: 31. I cite only stories that are published and/or that were told in public to audiences that included nonSeminoles. Telling legends or stories (both English terms are used) in public is a tricky proposition, and my gloss on these legends is not intended to be a “telling” of them. Carol Cypress (Panther), for example, declines to tell stories unless she is sure she has everything exactly right, and she does not tell stories in public that are intended only for women or only for adults. Once, when she could not get a story and its accompanying song right, she was told to wait until her wisdom had matured (July 11, 2001). There is often grumbling when a public rendition is deemed

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inaccurate. Several issues are at stake, often in combination: accuracy, contextual appropriateness (especially for restricted knowledge), identity of the speaker (some frown upon non-Seminoles telling these stories, as occurs occasionally at tribally sponsored public events), form and style (Seminole children responded well to nonSeminole children’s performers’ animated tellings, but some adults disapproved of the performative excess, emphasizing that stories should be told in a reserved manner), and resistance to grandstanding or self-promotion. 23. Canadian and U.S. late-nineteenth-century measures to outlaw Northwest Coast potlatches and Plains tribes’ giveaways suggest that settler governments recognized 236

the centrality of redistribution to indigenous political organization. 24. Generally, alcohol is not served at community gatherings (see also Stans 1996: 83). One exception was the 2000 tribal Christmas party, and this sparked criticism. 25. One Sun-Sentinel article reported that a single council representative had spent more than $57 million from discretionary funds in less than four years (Holland 2004a). 26. She spoke in a mix of English and Mikasuki; her words were translated for me by Jacob Osceola. For more on the political and symbolic significance of chickees, see chapter 4. 27. Federal agents investigating tax irregularities regularly sat in on Tribal Council meetings at the time, though tax evasion bothered Seminoles much less than failed redistribution. Needless to say, I was the butt of several jokes from Seminoles about the fact that the agents and I would sit at opposite ends of the auditorium, each dutifully taking notes during council meetings. The embezzlement, conspiracy, and money-laundering charges centered on wire transfers to Belize and Nicaragua linked to establishing an Internet casino. The case against the employees unraveled when it became clear that Billie had often authorized their business deals without consulting the Legal Department or the Tribal Council. 28. A typical non-Indian newspaper account begins with “tales of uncontrolled spending, lavish lifestyles, allegations of kickbacks and dozens of luxury cars paid for with casino profits” (Holland 2002). Another reported on “the free-wheeling spending habits of the Seminole Tribe of Florida,” conflating the practices of individual elected officials with the entire government and community (Cabral 2002c). Of the dozens of articles published about excessive spending in the early 2000s, very few (e.g., Bierman 2004) included justifications like the use of council representatives’ discretionary accounts to assist poorer and unemployed tribal members. More typical was dismissal of representatives’ justifications, for example: “‘What some people call discretionary, others call necessary,’ [Max] Osceola said, with a touch of nostalgia in his voice, already missing those halcyon days of Lexuses and Harleys” (Grimm 2004, emphasis added). 29. Cobell v. Kempthorne (96CV01285 [D.D.C.], formerly Cobell v. Norton) was filed in 1996 by Eloise Cobell, cofounder of the Blackfeet National Bank and then-treasurer of the

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Blackfeet Nation. This class-action lawsuit, which is supported by the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), challenges BIA management of reservation and individual trusts. The suit seeks release of BIA accounting for trust funds from leases on Indian lands. NARF estimates the amount of missing funds—income from leases that was supposed to be paid out to tribal members—to be $175 billion. Funds have been diverted not only for BIA administrative expenses, but also for other Department of the Interior expenses such as dam and highway construction (Barker 2005b: 149–53). 30. See also Sidney Mintz’s historical examination of sugar, especially the chapter on production where he tracks the development of colonial dependency through commodity exclusivism (Mintz 1985: chapter 2). Sandra Faiman-Silva’s (1997b) study of Choctaw logging and Joseph Jorgensen’s (1990) account of oil production in Eskimo towns also outline the dangers of dependency on single-commodity production by structurally disadvantaged indigenous communities. Richard White’s (1983) analysis of indigenous dependency, subsistence, and social change locates the cause of dependency in market integration itself. 31. The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development has held symposia for tribal leaders to discuss diversification, and intertribal meetings often address the subject. For an overview of diversification, with emphasis on Coeur d’Alene, see Claiborne 1998. 32. The plan was to use this firm in part for the Tribe’s internal financial services (e.g., employee benefits packages), and therefore to reduce processing fees paid to outside firms. 33. Mitchell (2002) emphasizes the colonial roots and implications of this segmentation of governance and life into an economy, arguing that the very idea of the economy emerged in the crucible of European colonialism. 34. Credible rumors circulated about the possible Mafia connections of some of the management partners, and a suspicion of organized crime involvement, in part, drove local law enforcement campaigns against Seminole casinos (Kersey 1996: 124–27; Nickell 1994). 35. Eve Darian-Smith’s (2002: 117) survey of Californians’ attitudes about tribal sovereignty and gaming found widespread confusion about whether Indians are subject to law. 36. According to figures provided by the Tribe, Seminoles assumed responsibility for management of daily casino operations on the following dates: Hollywood, June 1997; Immokalee, August 1999; Coconut Creek, February 2000; Tampa, June 2000; and Brighton, September 2000 (Jim Shore to Cattelino, informational memo, 2002, in the author’s possession). In 2002, the Tribe ceased sending lease payments and subsequently settled a contract dispute with the partnership that built the Coconut Creek Casino. 37. Seminoles refinanced these bonds after the IRS finding, in a $730 million deal. The

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Seminole Tribe is among few tribes with a bond rating. Newspapers have reported bond analysts to be somewhat wary of tribal investments because of tribal sovereignty (e.g., Sullivan 2005). 38. The article addressed sovereign immunity, noting that Seminoles determine the validity of injury cases against them on a case-by-case basis and settle the cases directly. 39. In debates about federal recognition, the presence of big finance has become a symbol for all that is wrong with casinos. Renée Cramer (2005) has shown that gaming has played a much less prominent role in efforts by groups to gain federal recogni238

tion than has been alleged, but she documents that the relationship between tribes and their financial backers remains a lightning-rod issue in the context of a backlash against Indian gaming. 40. In this context, new Indian-owned venture-capital and casino consulting firms aspire to keep economic expertise and capital within Indian Country, circumventing outside investment. 41. For a comparison, see Thomas Williamson’s 2002 discussion of Malaysian economic nationalism. 42. This is especially confusing in Seminole Country because of the bipartite tribal governance system, wherein the Tribal Council is responsible for the welfare of the tribe and its citizens, and the board of directors of the corporation is chartered to manage economic affairs. Because the Tribal Council controls gaming, however, it also controls most of the budget, and the board frequently seeks grants from the council. Some Seminoles thought that the division of labor between the two bodies prevented individual politicians from acquiring too much power, and they thus viewed the separation favorably, but many critics cited the redundancy of the system and its incoherence in light of the council’s control of gaming enterprises. This dual structure has its origins in recommendations by BIA agent Rex Quinn and other federal officials who assisted with the 1957 tribal reorganization and helped draft the founding governing documents. 43. This understanding of the analytical purchase of fungibility resonates with Appadurai’s (1986) focus on the sites and moments of transition among “regimes of value.” It also draws from Jane Guyer’s (2004: 12) careful study of Atlantic African economies, where “quantity was a form of quality” and where order creation took place across multiple scales of value.

4 . Rebuilding S overeignty Portions of this chapter were previously published in Jessica R. Cattelino, “Florida Seminole Housing and the Social Meanings of Sovereignty,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, 3 (2006): 699–726. 1. The board of directors flag is similar, but with a canoe instead of a chickee. The

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colored horizontal panels are in the four directional/medicine colors. I do not know how the decision was made to include the stock phrase “In God We Trust.” 2. See Foucault’s discussion of sovereignty, power, and methodology in the “Two Lectures” (Foucault 1980, especially 104–6), in his lecture “Governmentality” (Foucault 1991), in his discussion of sovereignty near the end of the first volume of The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1990), and in “Society Must Be Defended” (Foucault 2003). By focusing the theory of sovereignty on the monarchy (and on rights and obedience), Foucault highlights its unitary nature and its concern for the limits of power (2003). These are apt characterizations of Euro-American sovereign formations, but they cannot fully account for the kind of collective sovereignty asserted by indigenous peoples. One of the interesting distinctions Foucault draws between sovereignty and governmentality is that the former is exercised on territories and the subjects therein, whereas governmentality is the disposition of things, particularly figured through “economy” (Foucault 1991: 92–93). Foucault criticized “economism” in liberal and Marxist theories of power, respectively, where there is “in one case a political power which finds its formal model in the process of exchange, in the economy of the circulation of goods; and in the other case, political power finds its historical raison d’être, the principle of its concrete form and of its actual workings in the economy” (2003: 14). Even as I depict the materiality of Seminole sovereignty, I seek to avoid such an “economism.” Tribal gaming and the forms of economic nationalism it fuels in Seminole Country rest in the awkward but productive space of overlap between territorial indigeneity and collective economy. 3. Although this chapter focuses on housing, the story is at least as dramatic in health care and education. In the 1990s, the Tribe revamped its Ahfachkee School, a public K–12 school on the Big Cypress Reservation, where they developed a culturally specific Seminole curriculum that is taught alongside a standard state curriculum. Although the BIA long sought to develop adequate educational facilities on this geographically remote reservation, only after gaming could the Tribe afford to offer competitive teacher salaries, build an adequate physical plant (a bright, cheery facility chock full of computers and other educational tools), and subscribe to distance learning services that make possible a full high-school curriculum. Each classroom includes a teacher (usually non-Seminole) and a Seminole teaching aide. Recognizing the importance of early-childhood development, the Tribe now offers preschool programs on several reservations, and the Education Department is working to augment Native-language instruction in all tribal classrooms. A charter school recently opened at Brighton. The story is similar in health care. The Health Department budget, funded at 100 percent by the federal Indian Health Service in the 1970s, was funded in 2000–2001 at over 75 percent by the Seminole Tribe, which contributed $13 million to the department’s annual budget of $17.2 million (figures provided by the Health Department). Tribal funding has radically expanded and

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customized health-care delivery. Before gaming, Seminoles were hard pressed to receive treatment for any but their most dire health needs. By the early 2000s, the Health Department ran three clinics on the larger reservations, comprehensively insured all tribal members, provided home health care, ran extensive substanceabuse prevention and treatment programs, and offered a vast array of other medical services and benefits. Natural-resource management is discussed in my dissertation (Cattelino 2004). 4. Generally, I refer to “sovereignty” and “self-determination” interchangeably, though in some portions of this chapter “self-determination” refers to specific federal poli240

cies and administrative structures. 5. As Thomas Biolsi (1992: 127) has argued in the Lakota context, tribal reorganization under the Indian Reorganization Act engendered federal “administrative technologies of power,” which took hold in technical assistance, budgetary oversight, personnel management, and other tasks of bureaucratic administration. 6. Twenty-one Seminoles out of an estimated population of 500 voted to accept the IRA, with no dissenting votes. Although voter participation fell well below 30 percent, the threshold stipulated by federal law for adoption of the act, the federal government ratified the vote (Kersey 1989: 80–82). The legality of ratification was questionable, but it was not challenged. 7. This commitment to the political and personal stance of being unconquered resonates with Blu’s ([1980] 2001) account of Lumbee “meanness,” as exemplified by their defeat of the Ku Klux Klan and other obstacles to community and individual pride and survival. 8. The land claim would not be settled until 1990, when monies were divided among Seminoles in Oklahoma and Seminoles and Miccosukees in Florida. A group of “Independent Seminoles” in Florida refused to participate in the settlement, and the Miccosukee Tribe has not distributed its funds. 9. Buffalo Tiger (Bird), longtime Miccosukee chairman, describes this period in his autobiography, written with Harry Kersey (Tiger and Kersey 2002). See Kersey 2001 for an account of the fascinating role of Cuba in recognizing Miccosukees. Faced with Florida and U.S. resistance to their recognition as a separate tribal nation, Miccosukees (with the help of left-leaning lawyer Morton Silver and Jane Reno, a Miami journalist and mother of Janet Reno, who later became U.S. attorney general) secured recognition by Cuba and a state visit to Havana. At this pitched Cold War moment, Miccosukees brilliantly positioned themselves as necessary to the U.S. ­national-security project, and they secured federal recognition shortly thereafter. 10. While some Miccosukees and Independents consider themselves to be different from Seminoles, others blame the U.S. government for splitting up their people into several groups. Richard Henry (Panther), for example, grew up Independent but later joined the Seminole Tribe, which he considered to be the same: “We never

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knew the difference between Seminoles, Miccosukees, and Independents when we were growing up. Because basically when you come down to it we are one and the same people, all three the same people. The only reason it was split up three different ways was because of the government” (August 25, 2005). Victor Billie (Bird), an Independent Seminole who often works for the Seminole Tribe as a cultural educator and alligator wrestler, explained the relationship between Independents and the Tribe to a Miami Herald reporter: “I am part of them and they are part of me. Of all the trouble we’ve got, we’re still a tribe. When the smoke clears, we still have to call each other brother” (Cabral 2003a). The obligations of kinship outlast the vicissitudes of politics.

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11. The tribal ambassador was a relatively new appointed position in 2000–2001, and Osceola was the only individual to have held the title. He was appointed by the chairman, and his duties were largely ceremonial. 12. The Miccosukee Tribe was a trailblazer, as the first tribe to buy out all BIA services and to fully disband their BIA agency (Kersey 2005). 13. Also see Tressa Berman’s (2003) account of commodity foods and bureaucratized lives on the Fort Berthold Reservation. 14. Among some tribes, the Reagan-era cuts, which generally have not been restored, caused deep and widespread suffering. George Pierre Castile (2006) showed the Reagan administration’s block grants and support for tribal economic development to have bolstered an ideological commitment to small government and enterprise without acknowledging trust obligations. Jeanne Morin, principal and founding partner of Jefferson Government Relations, LLC, a lobbying firm retained by the Seminole Tribe in Washington, worried that widespread public perceptions of gaming as supporting increased tribal self-reliance had led some policymakers on Capitol Hill to argue that the United States no longer had an obligation to Indian people. She was committed to the principle that the federal government had a trust obligation to tribes, even as she supported increased economic and political autonomy for those same tribes (May 9, 2001). Seminoles were lucky that gaming income could compensate for 1980s federal cuts, making the transition from federal to tribal administration less a matter of federal abandonment of Indian affairs than a result of indigenous action. Larry Frank (Otter), then general manager of the Hollywood casino, recalled that federal cuts hit hard, but gaming allowed Seminoles to “pick up the slack and then do more.” Moreover, with gaming the “tribe had more say-so in how resources would be distributed.” Thus, services not only expanded but also were tailored to Seminoles’ needs (October 11, 2000). But for other tribes, as Loretta Fowler showed for Cheyenne-Arapahos, the federal government’s failure to come through with funding for contracted programs has gravely limited the scope and power of tribal sovereignty (Fowler 2002). 15. Wilkins and Lomawaima view plenary power, or the complete power of a governing

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body, as the Constitutionally based exclusive power of Congress (not the judicial or executive branches); even so, they do not believe it should be unlimited or absolute. Because the United States recognizes tribal sovereignty, they argue, plenary power is partial, and they explain that the relationship between federal plenary power and tribal sovereignty has been termed a relationship of “irreconcilability” in Indian law and policy (Wilkins and Lomawaima 2001). 16. I have developed this discussion more fully elsewhere (Cattelino 2006). 17. For a description of nineteenth-century Seminole chickee camps, see MacCauley’s 1887 account ([1887] 2000: 499–505). Spoehr’s (1944) thorough description of Cow 242

Creek Seminole camps around and on the Brighton reservation dates from fieldwork conducted in 1939. 18. Although evidence suggests that most camps adhered to these rules of residence, there certainly was some variation. It may have been especially common for inmarrying males’ clan relatives to reside at camps, at least temporarily. 19. Government officials and white philanthropists had made several late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century efforts to convince Seminoles to move onto reservations that were periodically purchased for Seminoles but then abandoned (Covington 1993: chapter 9). In 1827, Florida territorial legislation had forbidden Seminoles from crossing the boundaries of their ill-fated reservation (61). 20. Some of the ceremonial grounds are on private lands, but it is interesting that the Big Cypress ceremonial site is located within the federal Big Cypress Reserve. The tribal government obtained permission to hold it there beginning in the 1990s, apparently differentiating between federal reservation land and the federal preserve as acceptable sites. One man linked the prohibition to Seminoles’ association of reservations with Christianity, since Christian families moved to the reservations first and in larger numbers and since each of the major reservations has two Baptist churches. In the early years after reorganization, Kersey (1996: 92) states, reservation Baptists had forced the Green Corn Dance off of reservations onto private lands. Others said that the Corn Dance is held off the reservation in order to keep it separate from federal and “modern” tribal governments. 21. Among the Indian agent Lucian Spencer’s 1915–16 correspondence, there is mention that whites would wait until Seminoles improved a piece of land in South Florida, and then would kick them off it and take advantage of the improvements to establish residence (NARG75, Box 1: 00–1916, 032). 22. As explained in a 1956 pre-reorganization letter from H. Rex Lee, acting commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, to Paul G. Rogers, a U.S. congressman from Florida, the BIA could not release funds for Seminole housing because Florida Seminoles had not yet attained full recognition by the United States (RQP, Box 2). 23. Some Seminoles continued to live in chickees: at Big Cypress, many families lived in camps until the 1980s, some by choice but many by economic necessity. Other Seminoles lived in camps at tourist attractions during the winter tourist season (P. West

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1998). Some Miccosukees and Independent Seminoles continue to live in modified chickee camps. 24. Povinelli has pointed to anthropology’s role in constructing indigenous peoples as “kinship societies” with “descent principles,” all within a “genealogical grid” that reckons not only attachments among people, but also attachments to tradition, to land, to governance, and to claims within settler states. She draws a contrast to “intimacy grids” as constitutive of modern liberal life, in which “state, public and personal worth of a family should be based on the intimate recognition that occurs between two people, on the choice to love and the love that circulates through this choice” (Povinelli 2002b: 228). This difference holds not only for the family, but also for the figuring of the national as a relationship of love and choice (as against descent). It is not that intimacy grids replaced genealogical grids (“The genealogical imaginary did not die when the sovereign’s head tumbled” [235]), but rather that these grids are differentially distributed. It is not surprising, therefore, that federal government and private philanthropic efforts to make citizens out of Seminole subjects involved kinship work. 25. A complex example has been Canada’s Indian Act, which until recently recognized in law the Indian status of Indian men, their wives (regardless of race), and their children, but which disenfranchised Indian women who married non-Indian men (along with the children of those unions). Audra Simpson’s (2003) work on Mohawk nationalism analyzes the complex intersections of indigenous citizenship, kinship, law, and gender in the context of the Indian Act and Canada–U.S. border-crossing laws and practices. See also Emberley 2001. 26. Palmer (1973: 48) reported that in the early 1970s the state of Florida recognized “Indian unions as a legal form of common law marriage,” but state and federal officials were undertaking a “push towards legal civil ceremonies of both marriage and divorce.” Many of his informants seemed confused when asked the date of their marriage, and the social recognition of married status did not correspond to staterecognized civil marriage. According to Palmer, non-Indian men could not live on reservations, but while this remains true on Miccosukee reservations I have not determined when the rule became obsolete on Seminole reservations. 27. Seminole Agency, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Memorandum on Domestic Relations. July 13, 1967. RQP. 28. Keith Basso’s (1996) important study of space, wisdom, and language among the Western Apache demonstrates the need for more careful attention to the normative and epistemological dimensions of place among indigenous peoples. I have not undertaken such a task, though by foregrounding Seminole housing I can at least point to dimensions of place that were not the focus of Basso’s account: the built environment, the neocolonial politics of spatial reordering, and gendered domestic space. See also Blu’s analysis of Lumbee homeplace (1996). 29. The seeming paradox of American Indians deploying technology has been a promi-

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nent trope in twentieth-century images of Native peoples, as Philip Deloria (2004) has shown. 30. As Tsianina Lomawaima (1994) has discussed for federal Indian boarding schools, training in domesticity long had been a highly gendered, embodied, and disciplinary tactic of assimilation. The difference in this case was that Seminole women were being (re)trained to run their own reservation households rather than to work for wages as domestic servants. 31. When amateur anthropologist Ethel Cutler Freeman visited the few frame houses at Dania back in 1946, she found them to be poorly climate-controlled by comparison 244

to chickees, and much dirtier than chickees. She admired chickee housekeeping, noting her own difficulty in maintaining a comparable level of cleanliness in her Big Cypress chickee (ECFP, Box 40). 32. See www.fanniemae.com, accessed May 7, 2005. 33. There had been some Seminole involvement in housing policy prior to casinos. In 1964, the Tribal Council passed an ordinance to create the Tribal Housing Authority, a public corporation charged with building and improving Seminole housing (Seminole Tribe of Florida 1964, [RQP]). Housing Authority members, though appointed by the Tribal Council, had a direct relationship with federal agencies, and in practice the BIA Seminole Agency staff exercised significant control over housing policies and administration. In 1996 the Tribe replaced the Housing Authority with a tribally controlled Housing Department. 34. Figures provided by the Seminole Tribe of Florida Housing Department. Some of Seminoles’ decreased reliance on federal grants is by necessity: because tribal gaming dividends have augmented individual and household incomes, most Seminoles no longer qualify for HIP or Section 8 low-income housing benefits. 35. That said, there were tensions between tribal members’ desired dwelling practices and tribal policy, for example when individuals were denied housing leases on commercial pasture lands. This has led some tribal members to move off of reservations, which disenfranchises them from elections for (reservation-based) Tribal Council and Board of Directors representatives. A proposed Constitutional amendment, under consideration in 2007, would enable tribal members living within thirty miles of their “home” reservations to vote for reservation representatives. 36. Osceola considered himself to be among the more expensive builders, saying that he prioritized quality. In 2000 he charged about $25 per square foot, meaning that a 10' × 10' chickee would cost $2,500. Now that casino revenues have raised Seminoles’ personal incomes, chickee business owners complain of a labor shortage, since they cannot find enough Seminoles who are willing to perform the hard work for modest wages. Osceola and others reluctantly have begun to hire non-Indians. 37. Klima (2002: 7) characterizes his book on political violence and neoliberalism in Thailand as being about “the politics of telling history under obligation, an attempt

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to write The Gift into history.” His analysis of the fusion of funerals and markets “offers a critique of the neoliberal economy by which a new world order can appear to sever its connection to an old order that has given it its life.” The importance of his project is not only as a critique of the neoliberal economy, but also, I think, as a reappraisal of scholarship that takes neoliberalism at its own word (i.e., as really severing historical connections and obligations).

5. S overeign Interdependencies 1. Most genealogies of sovereignty identify its modern conception with the sixteenthcentury writings of Jean Bodin, who introduced the conception of “indivisible” sovereignty and conceived of sovereignty as located in a sovereign ruler and as implemented through law. A royalist, Bodin signaled a shift from earlier notions that grounded sovereignty in the Christian body politic and papal rule (Bodin [1576] 1992). Many writers since Bodin, including Harold Laski (Laski 1917, [1921] 1931), have criticized his monist theory of the state, arguing that pluralism is consistent with, and even intrinsic to, sovereignty, especially popular sovereignty of the people as imagined by Rousseau and others. 2. Even those recent theories that highlight the role of the “exception” in structuring sovereignty—that is, the notion that the sovereign is simultaneously outside and inside the juridical order, as Giorgio Agamben suggests (1998)—take unitary sovereign orders as their unit of analysis. Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty has been productive, but perhaps does more to account for U.S. sovereignty than for indigenous sovereignty. This is not just an empirical limitation. Rather, it indicates limits to Agamben’s theorization of sovereignty. 3. Partial exceptions are legal scholar T. Alexander Aleinikoff ’s (2002) constitutional analysis of tribal sovereignty, the U.S. territories, and immigration and Thomas Biolsi’s (2005) discussion of sovereignty and spatiality. Roger Maaka and Angie Fleras (2005) also emphasize indigenous and nation-state interconnection. 4. While Young held to the term self-determination rather than sovereignty, I will reverse the terms here, since there is no reason that her relational interpretation of selfdetermination cannot also apply to sovereignty, and since sovereignty is the legal and political framework through which American Indian rights and struggles are often framed. 5. Young (2001: 33) contended that the “concept of self-determination as noninterference values independence and thereby devalues any persons not deemed independent by its account. Historically, this meant that only property-holding heads of household could expect to have their freedom recognized.” However, this was a “dangerous fiction,” as feminist theorists have shown: “Feminist criticism holds that in fact the male head of household is no more independent than the women or the workers he rules. The appearance of his independence is produced by a system

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of domination in which he is able to command and benefit from the labor of others” (34). Similarly, I suggest that it is dangerous and politically unimaginative to take settler sovereignty for granted, since to do so mistakes domination for sovereignty (see also Foucault 2003: 46). 6. Sioux Harvey (2000: 14) has argued, “Since World War II American Indians have built sovereignty through political, economic, and cultural incorporation.” Her analysis helpfully directs understandings of sovereignty to tribal engagements with larger political and economic systems. Harvey privileges autonomy as a measure of sovereignty, even as she argues that it is achieved through incorporation, whereas I am 246

trying to hold autonomy and dependency in constant tension. 7. Political scientist W. Dale Mason (2000) has argued that, in the context of Indian gaming, tribes increasingly act both as sovereign governments and as political interest groups. What Mason does not probe are the meanings of on-the-ground political engagements. This causes him to maintain a false opposition between sovereignty and political-interest-group activity. Rather than understand Seminole political participation in extratribal politics as simple interest-group instrumentalism, I take it to reflect the multiple axes of citizenship along which indigenous peoples forge their sovereignty. Like Katherine Spilde (1998), I am concerned to understand tribal gaming-related sovereignty assertions less as a question of interests than as a process—what she calls “acts of sovereignty”—in which tribes negotiate relationships with other sovereigns. 8. Richard Bowers (Panther), the Intertribal Agriculture Council president in 2001, felt that the tribes had to get together because the BIA and other federal agencies were “not living up to their trust responsibility” when it came to tribal-land management. It has been the casino tribes with more money, he said, who have been able to take care of their lands and fight for their legal entitlements, such as water rights (April 13, 2001). 9. Some Seminoles attributed this to their (imposed and chosen) isolation. For example, in 1972 Billy L. Cypress (Bear), later the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum executive director, answered interviewer Tom King’s question about pan-Indianism by saying that it had not taken root in South Florida: “We have been isolated for a long time, and we’ve been away from the mainstream of national Indian thinking. The vast majority [of Seminoles] are pretty conservative in their thinking and pro-Seminole” (SPOHP #61A: 10). 10. Means testing was proposed by Senator Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) in the FY 1999 Interior Appropriations Bill, but was defeated. Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) raised the issue again in 2005, saying “I think it’s time to look at perhaps a new formula that gives those who don’t have the benefit of casinos a larger share of the government’s assistance” (quoted in NCAI 2005: 1). The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and other Indian rights groups have consistently opposed meanstesting proposals.

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11. One partial exception was the proposal for an urban casino in Minneapolis–St. Paul, to be owned jointly by poorer Minnesota tribes whose reservations were too far from urban centers to generate significant casino revenues. The proposal was opposed by many, though not all, nearby tribes that had lucrative casinos (Ragsdale 2004). Offreservation gaming (or “reservation shopping,” as described by critics) has become a hot-button issue, as tribes claim ancestral lands near population centers and place casinos on them (for a New York Times overview, see Butterfield 2005). Disputes over off-reservation gaming have cast a shadow of suspicion over tribal efforts to buy back their lands and to secure federal trust status for those lands. 12. Focusing on the federal government and “federal Indian policy” ignores the ways that local and regional alliances and identities can be meaningful social fields for indigenous action, as Paula Wagoner (2002) has illustrated in her study of Lakota and white relations in Bennett County, South Dakota, and as Karen Blu ([1980] 2001, 2001) suggested for Lumbees in Robeson County, North Carolina. Only recently has more attention been devoted to tribal-state relations as sites of sovereignty (Bays and Fouberg 2002) and to the internal tribal politics that shape sovereignty movements (Fowler 2002). I have discussed this more extensively elsewhere (Cattelino 2007). 13. Such critiques fail to recognize that foreign nation-states also retain lobbyists who (in their case only indirectly) exert financial influence over American politics. 14. South Florida Sun-Sentinel columnist Michael Mayo (2006), among others, called for incoming Governor Charlie Crist to negotiate with Seminoles, in order to capture state revenues from tribal gaming. He noted that Seminoles had positioned themselves well to negotiate directly with the federal government and cut the state out of the process. Sticking points in negotiations included whether Seminoles could install unlimited numbers of slot machines, how much they would pay the state, and whether they could operate a casino at Big Cypress (Burstein and Fleshler 2006). Crist signed a compact in November 2007. It took effect in 2008, as this book went to press. 15. The mascot issue is too complex for adequate treatment here. While Florida Seminoles overwhelmingly but not unanimously support the mascot, many Oklahoma Seminoles oppose it. Florida Seminoles generally emphasize their pride in being unconquered, the appropriateness of honoring this legacy, and good relations with FSU. Still, this should not be confused with an across-the-board support for Indian mascots. While some Seminoles consider the mascot issue to be overblown and unimportant, others oppose many Indian mascots. One difference is whether teams are accountable to a particular tribe that exercises influence over its representation. 16. In Connecticut, the opening and expansion of Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun were credited with dramatically reducing unemployment. According to the Norwich Bulletin, a decline in manufacturing and defense contracts had led to 7.3 percent regional unemployment in 1991, with projections into the low 20 percents, but then the casi-

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nos’ vast labor demand (Mohegan Sun alone employed more than 10,000 people in 2006) by 1999 reduced unemployment to 2.1 percent, half the national rate (Wallheimer 2006). 17. Similarly, Douglas Foley (2005) found that the Mesquaki casino both strained and strengthened relations with local whites in Iowa. 18. Brighton residents often tell the story of being unwelcome at Moore Haven until the 1960s, when Moore Haven officials realized that they were losing federal dollars by pushing Indian students into attending another school. As a result, Moore Haven sought Seminole pupils’ return and prohibited Okeechobee buses from crossing 248

county lines to pick up Seminole students. This forced Seminoles to attend Moore Haven. Many were outraged, and in the late 1970s and early 1980s they devoted early gaming revenues to purchasing their own buses. Students returned to Okeechobee, and more enroll there today. Brighton residents often recounted this story as an example of their commitment to education, the discrimination they have endured, and the often-overlooked benefits of gaming. 19. Classic anthropological analyses of power and gift-giving include Mauss (1950) 1990 and Godelier 1999. 20. Not surprisingly, trust relations are breached. The ongoing lawsuit over staggering federal mismanagement of Indian trust funds, Cobell v. Kempthorne, is a searing indictment of federal trust obligation, while its relative obscurity in contemporary political discourse is a grim reminder of indigenous invisibility in American political consciousness. 21. Data are from the Center for Responsive Politics’ Web site, www.opensecrets.org (accessed June 27, 2006, and December 24, 2006). The Web site also tracks total Indian-gaming-industry contributions, which had increased to a peak of $7.4 million in 2004 but then declined, presumably in the wake of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandals. 22. There is a heated debate about Iroquois and U.S. constitutionalism, upon which I am not qualified to comment (Landsman and Ciborski 1992), but for my purposes it was most interesting that some Seminoles cited the issue. 23. This tension was raised in the wake of Chairman James Billie’s suspension, when he took the Tribe to court on allegations that the Tribal Council had violated its own procedures. Some tribal members sympathized with Billie’s lack of recourse within tribal law, while others criticized him for undermining tribal authority by turning to the American courts. Billie himself told me that he almost hoped to lose on jurisdictional grounds, since this would reinforce Seminole sovereignty (June 7, 2001). 24. Unlike participants in the Coast Salish tribal justice systems analyzed by Bruce Miller (2001), Seminoles openly acknowledged internal differences and conflict in considering how best to structure legal systems, and they worried about how to avoid interfering in one another’s lives while also administering justice.

Notes to Chap ter 5

25. For a variety of perspectives on the political negotiations that led to IGRA’s passage, see Eadington 1998 and Harvey 2000. 26. The ruling was a heavy blow to tribal sovereignty. As Wilkins and Lomawaima (2001: 187) put it: “When the Rehnquist Court, in Seminole Tribe, disallowed federal dispute resolution, the justices shifted the balance of power between the states and federal government toward the states. Since the historic nation-to-nation relation for nearly all tribes has been at the federal level, this redefinition of federalism does not bode well for the retention of indigenous rights. Through its ruling in Seminole Tribe, the Supreme Court has effectively stated its intention to disregard or sever the tribes’ constitutional linkage to the federal government via the commerce clause.” 27. In discussions of indigenous peoples and Quebec, Harvey Feit (1982) and Russel Barsh (1997) remind us that in federalism the relationships between state/provincial and national governments often are negotiated in part through policies toward indigenous peoples. 28. Voting based on clan was less an abstract principle than a normalized practice. Some felt that certain clans (especially Bird and Panther) were natural leaders. Others disagreed, sometimes claiming that their own clans (especially for speakers who were Snake, who are referred to as kings, or Wind) were the proper leaders. The interdependency of clans is not without a competitive edge. This can be seen in everything from students’ jokes and cheers during clan roll calls at school events to clanbased differences in Seminoles’ tellings of which clan totem first broke out of the hole from the underworld and entered this world. The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum’s introductory film masterfully handled the politics of the origin story by having narrators from different clans make a shared joke out of their conflicting renditions. 29. Sturtevant identified the primary functions of the event as enabling males to eat the new corn crop without becoming sick, renewing the minds and bodies of men, maintaining the strength of the medicine bundle (from which medicinal power derives), conducting judicial and political duties at a council, and “not the least the exercise and renewal of the social ties which accompany the religious rationale binding together the scattered camps of the busk group into the largest structured grounding of Seminole society” (Sturtevant 1954b: 410–11). For regional comparisons, see Witthoft 1949. 30. Thanks to David Aftandilian for urging me to consider the relationship between reciprocity and renewal. This also reflects some of the dynamics of social reproduction and regeneration discussed by Annette Weiner (1980), who sought a way out of the stasis often presumed by theories of reciprocity. 31. Victor Billie’s statement was not picked up by that Seminole Tribune reporter, but he was quoted in a 2003 Miami Herald article as describing the Green Corn Dance to be “a ‘school, a church and a courthouse’ rolled into one” (Cabral 2003a). Corn Dance rules and ways are separated from the elected tribal government, for example by

Notes to Chap ter 5

249

the prohibition against locating Corn Dance grounds on reservation land, yet the Corn Dance coexists with other structures of tribal governance. In contrast to many other tribes, Seminoles do not divide themselves into groups according to whether they attend Corn Dance or not, and attendance is fluid. Since the height of Christian missionization in the 1960–70s the distinction has decreased between Corn Dance and Baptist religious affiliation. 32. Osceola also spoke for Billie, since medicine leaders often designate students to speak for them in public. 33. Osceola locates the origin of sovereignty in the Corn Dance yet credits Congress 250

with giving sovereignty to Indians. Subsequent conversation clarified that Osceola considered Congress to have given recognition within U.S. law of Seminoles’ preexisting sovereignty. 34. Editors of the 1982 edition of Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law ([1942] 1982: 322–23) wrote (with partial quotation from United States v. Wheeler, 435 U.S. 313): “Perhaps the most basic principle of all Indian law, supported by a host of decisions, is that those powers which are lawfully vested in an Indian tribe are not, in general, delegated powers granted by express acts of Congress, but rather ‘inherent powers of a limited sovereignty which has never been extinguished.’” Although indigenous groups’ growing dependence on the young United States limited their political and economic power during colonization, it did not extinguish their sovereign status, as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1832 case Worcester v. Georgia when it applied principles of international law to tribal sovereignty to hold that treaty-based dependency in no way entailed a loss of “national character” for the tribes (31 U.S. [6 Pet.], 555). 35. Sally Merry (2000) documented a related phenomenon in nineteenth-century Hawai’i, when leaders staked claims to sovereignty and civilization by asserting the legitimacy of their own legal system. The comparison is interesting both because Hawai’i was a monarchy (in which the “sovereign” was differently configured) and because indigenous Hawaiians do not have tribal status within U.S. federal law and are intermittently treated like Indians for federal purposes. For an analysis of Hawaiian blood and sovereignty, see J. Kehaulani Kauanui 2005. 36. Here I would modify Biolsi’s argument that the law as a system of order primarily functions in modern Indian-white relations to channel and limit—to regulate— indigenous politics and struggle (Biolsi 1995). 37. In this sense, Seminole sovereignty is more complicated than the kind of sovereign decision that Carl Schmitt ([1922] 1985) theorized. 38. Feminist philosophers have pointed to the limitations of privileging autonomy in accounts of care, kinship, and politics; they have instead called for recognizing the constitutive role of dependency in subjectivity and polity (Fineman 2004; Kittay 1999; Tronto 1993).

Notes to Chap ter 5

39. Similarly, Taiaiake Alfred (2002: 458) contended that “mythic narratives and legal understandings of state sovereignty in North America have consciously obscured justice in the service of the colonial project,” as “the actual history of our [indigenous and nonindigenous] plural existence has been erased by the narrow fictions of a single sovereignty.” 40. Nor is it primarily a modular or comparative logic of nationhood, of the sort Benedict Anderson (1998) analyzed.

C onclusion: Betting on the House 1. The first Hard Rock Café, in London, was established in 1971 by Peter Morton and Isaac Tigrett; they began expanding to other countries in 1982. Hard Rock Cafés are known for their collector’s merchandise (especially T-shirts), their rock memorabilia, and, as the corporate biography puts it, their “spirit of rock music” (Seminole Hard Rock Entertainment 2006b). Hard Rock started its leading collection of rock memorabilia when a regular customer, Eric Clapton, hung his guitar on the London café wall to mark “his” spot. Not to be outdone, The Who’s Pete Townshend arrived the next week with his own guitar. 2. Untitled video at www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald, accessed December 7, 2006. The video was not available for download, but a transcript is in the author’s possession. 3. Untitled video at www.sun-sentinel.com, accessed December 7, 2006. 4. Untitled audio interview with reporter Christina Hoag at www.miami.com/mld/ miamiherald, accessed December 7, 2006. 5. Coastal tribes were depopulated by disease and warfare, and the lack of reservation lands anchoring tribal communities contributed to individuals’ residential and economic integration into the larger settler population.

Notes to the C onclusion

251

References

Ar chi val S our ces (and Abbreviations) Ethel Cutler Freeman Papers, National Anthropological Archives, Suitland, Md. (ECFP) National Archives, Record Group 75, Central Classified Files, 1907–1939, Seminole (NARG75) University of Florida Archives, Florida Cooperative Extension Service Annual Reports, 1949–1960, Series 91b, Gainesville, Fla. (FCESAR) University of Florida Archives, Florida Cooperative Extension Service; Home Demonstration Records, 1912–1986, Series 158, Gainesville, Fla. (FCESHD) University of Florida Archives, Rex Quinn Papers, Gainesville, Fla. (RQP) University of Florida Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, Seminole Indian Collection, Gainesville, Fla. (SPOHP) William C. Sturtevant Field Notes, Private Collections, Washington, D.C. (WCSF)

Cases Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. (5 Pet.) 1 (1831) Cobell v. Kempthorne (formerly Cobell v. Norton) (96CV01285 [D.D.C.]) Florida v. Seminole Tribe of Florida, 181 F.3d 1237 (11th Cir. 1999) Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma v. Manufacturing Technologies, Inc., 118 S.Ct. 1700 (1998) Morton v. Mancari, 417 U.S. 535 (1974) Northwestern Bands of Shoshone Indians v. United States, 324 U.S. 335 (1945) Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Butterworth, 658 F.2d 310 (former 5th Cir. 1981) Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida, 517 U.S. 44 (1996) United States v. Wheeler, 435 U.S. 313 (1978) Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. (6 Pet.) 515 (1832)

Statu tes Housing Act of 1949, Pub. L. No. 81–171, 63 Stat. 413 (1949) (codified at 42 U.S.C. § 1441 et seq.) Indian Claims Commission Act, Pub. L. No. 79–726, 60 Stat. 1049 (1946) (codified at 25 U.S.C. § 70) Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), Pub. L. No. 100–97, 102 Stat. 2467 (1988) (codified at 25 U.S.C. §§ 2701–21) Indian General Allotment (Dawes) Act, ch. 119, 24 Stat. 388 (1887) (codified as amended 254

in scattered sections of 25 U.S.C.) Indian Reorganization Act (Wheeler-Howard Act), 25 U.S.C. §§ 461–79 (1934) Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (ISDEAA), Pub. L. No. 93–638, 88 Stat. 2203 (1975) (codified as amended at 25 U.S.C. §§ 450–58bbb-1) Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (nagpra), Pub. L. No. 101–01, 104 Stat. 3048 (1990) (codified at 25 U.S.C. § 3001) Public Law 280, Pub. L. No. 83–280, 67 Stat. 588–90 (1953) (codified at 18 U.S.C. § 1162, 28 U.S.C. § 1360, and 25 U.S.C. §§ 1321–1326) Smith-Lever Act (Agricultural Extension Work Acts), ch. 79, 38 Stat. 372 (1914) (codified as amended at 7 U.S.C. §§ 341–49)

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Aboriginal Australians, 7, 60, 77, 102, 178, 220n16, 234n15, 235n19

Australia, 7, 77, 102, 177–78, 220n16, 234n15, 235n19

Agamben, Giorgio, 212n22, 245n2 Aguilar, Elaine, 41, 108, 160, 171

Baptists: on fatherhood, 146; on gaming,

Ahfachkee School, 62, 239n3

96, 231n2, 232n3; on reservations,

Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, 75; community

64–65, 242n20; Southern, 20, 23, 146;

outreach through, 76–77; craft village

in tribal government, 64

at, 41; as expression of sovereignty,

Barker, Joanne, 15, 160, 214n30

76–78; Green Corn Dance exhibit of,

Barsh, Russel Lawrence, 159, 249n27

187; as justification for casinos, 77,

Bedell, Harriet, 220n18

228n29; layout of, 75; nationhood

Benedict, Jeff, 101, 214n30

and, 78; transmission of culture and,

BIA. See Bureau of Indian Affairs

66–67; We Seminoles (introductory

Big Cypress Reservation: Ahfachkee

film), 74, 113, 249n28

School, 62, 239n3; Billie Swamp

Aleinikoff, T. Alexander, 101, 245n3

Safari, 114–15; casino on, 209n9;

Alfred, Taiaiake, 129, 251n39

cattle ownership on, 33–34; chickees

Allen, Jim, 119, 195–96, 198

on, 242n23; cultural programming

Alligator wrestling, 40–41, 44–47,

on, 62; demographics of, 17–18; elec-

222n26 American Indian Movement (AIM), 14, 143, 160, 166 Antigaming activism, 59–60, 80, 101, 117,

tion of representatives and, 214n35; housing development on, 149; Junior Cypress Cattle Drive on, 36. See also Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum

181–82, 213–14n30, 237n34

Billie, Carolyn, 54

Appadurai, Arjun, 123, 238n43

Billie, George, 41

Billie, James (Jim): on alligator wrestling, 46; on the beginning of Seminole

ship on, 33–34, 219n8; cultural pro-

gaming, 15, 96; corruption charges

gramming on, 62; demographics of,

against, 109–10, 236n27; on language

18; election of representatives and,

and cultural identity, 69, 71; Micco

214n35; employment patterns on, 51;

Airlines and, 204; on relocation to

housing projects on, 145, 147; indige-

reservations, 142; on tribal leadership,

nous language instruction on, 69–70,

20

225n15; Pemayetv Emahakv Charter

Billie, Mrs. Henry, 153 282

231n2; casino on, 5; cattle owner-

Billie, Noah, 89–90 Billie, Sonny, 20, 68, 187

School, 62, 69, 239n3; rodeo on, 36; Seminole Crafts Guild, 220n18 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA): admin-

Billie, Suzie Jim, 49

istrative control by, 20, 133, 241n12;

Billie, Victor, 187, 241n10, 249n31

Cobell v. Kempthorne and, 111, 237n29,

Billie-Hiers, Charles, 142

248n20; housing programs of, 140,

Billie Swamp Safari, 114–15

143, 145–47, 152, 156, 243n22,

Bingo operations, 1, 2, 96, 117, 180–81, 194

244n33; presence on reservations

Biolsi, Thomas, 142, 240n5, 245n3,

of, 134–35; Seminole employment

250n36

opportunities through, 49; Seminole

Bitner, Gary, 195

Tribe relations with, 40, 133–34; tribal

Black Seminoles, 21–22, 216n42, 217n45

reorganization and, 132

Blood quantum, 64, 91, 93, 224n7

Buster, Helene Johns, 147

Blu, Karen, 91, 162, 247n12

Buster, Paul, 37, 73, 149–50

Board of Directors, Seminole Tribe of

Buswell, James O., III, 152, 216n39

Florida, Inc.: cigarette shops and, 54–57, 223n36; election of, 244n35;

Canada, 7, 177, 243n25

establishment of, 19, 132; per capita

Capitalism, 7, 11–12, 102, 146–47, 200,

dividend distribution by, 105; tourist

224n5

village development by, 40; on waiving

Cars, 80, 84–86

of tribal immunity, 179–80. See also

Casinos: bingo operations, 1, 2, 96, 117,

Tribal government

180–81, 194; contracts with outside

Boehmer, Edith, 220n18–19

partners and, 179–80; cultural events

Boehmer, William, 220n18

funded by, 62–63; decor of, 30; eco-

Bourdieu, Pierre, 31–32, 224n4

nomic control of, 117–23; financing

Bowers, Andrew, Jr., 87, 115–16, 154, 184,

of, 121–22, 194; geographic locations

196, 204

of, 4–5; profitability of, 3–5, 209n8;

Bowers, Elsie, 46, 56–57, 146

relations with local communities and,

Bowers, Mary Parker, 150–52, 220n19

170–73. See also Gaming; Hard Rock

Bowers, Paul, 35, 37

International acquisition; Revenues,

Bowers, Richard, 62–63, 246n8 Bowers, Stephen, 138 Brighton Reservation: Baptist church on,

Index

gaming Cattle ownership: as diversification venture, 114; economic aspects of,

34, 219n9; gender and, 33–34, 37–38;

146, 245n5; names reflecting, 208n4;

history of, 32–33; Latin American

organizations of, 20, 155–56, 215n37;

operations and, 34–35; as relocation

property ownership and, 158; Semi-

incentive, 33–34

nole legal system and, 186; uncles’

CBS houses, 140, 143, 147 Charitable donations by Seminoles, 166, 173–74 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 189 Chickees, 128; construction of, 158–59, 244n36; as expression of cultural

roles in, 83, 146; voting patterns of, 20, 186, 249n28. See also Kinship Cobell v. Kempthorne, 111, 236–37n29, 248n20 Coconut Creek: casino, 5, 119, 209n9, 213–14n30; trust land, 18

283

pride, 156–57; family dynamics

Coffey, Wallace, 60, 78

in, 140; housekeeping in, 151–52,

Colonialism: coastal, 198, 251n5; Euro-

244n31; indigeneity identified with,

pean colonization, 21; family struc-

109; organization of, 141–42; past

ture and, 146; impact on indigenous

poverty symbolized by, 127; preser-

action of, 178; indigenous legal

vation of, 152, 155; primitivism and,

systems and, 185–86, 188, 250n34;

148, 156; removal from, 143, 242n23

internal, 58; reliance on intimacy and

Children. See Youth

kinship by, 144, 243n24; settler state

Cigarette shops, 54–57, 223n36

sovereignty as, 175, 177–78; spatial

Citizens Against Seminole Sovereignty

projects of, 147–48, 243n28; strate-

(CASS), 214n30 Citizens Equal Rights Alliance, 214n30 Citizenship: home ownership and, 147–

gic alliances in colonial period, 164; welfare, 146 Commercial gaming, 7, 202, 210n12

48, 152–53; land ownership and, 100,

Commodity foods, 136, 241n13

111; modernization projects and, 147–

Communists, 73, 228n26

48; nation-state relations and, 153;

Concrete block structure (CBS) houses,

political participation and, 246n7; of Seminoles, 22; Seminoles as Floridians, 169–70; tribal enrollment, 92–93 Clans: animals as representing, 41,

140, 143, 147 Congress, U.S.: Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) of, 15, 103, 105, 181– 83; on means testing, 166, 246n10;

221n20; authority of, 180, 186–87;

plenary power of, 136, 175, 241–

cattle ownership in, 38, 220n14;

42n15; tribal sovereignty termination

cultural production of, 66–68;

hearings of, 101

Green Corn Dance and, 20, 186–87;

Connecticut: Mashantucket Pequot

households and, 140–41, 157–58;

Indians in, 102, 194, 223n2, 228n29,

housing programs’ impact on, 144–

234n13; tribal gaming in, 4, 101, 121,

45, 147–48; identification with, 20, 93, 204, 208n4; interdependency of, 186, 249n28; marriage and, 91, 94, 142, 145, 158–59, 204, 231n45, 243n25–26; men’s roles in, 83, 140,

168, 213–14n30, 223n2, 247n16 Conspicuous consumption, 80–87, 229n33 Constitutional Committee meetings (1950s), 97

Index

Coppedge, Mary Jene, 145

284

Culture: accuracy in representations of,

Cordish Company, 118, 120

30; chickee construction and, 156–

Council Oak, 97–98, 136, 204, 205, 232n4

57; clans and production of, 66–68;

Country music, 37

cultural educators, 34, 68, 70, 73;

Court cases: Cherokee Nation v. Georgia,

“cultural production” (use of term),

189; Cobell v. Kempthorne, 111, 237n29,

31–32, 219n7; currency of, 12; edu-

248n20; Florida v. Seminole Tribe of

cational programs in, 34, 36, 42, 62,

Florida, 179, 182–83, 249n26; Kiowa

68, 70, 73, 156–57, 239–40n3; holiday

Tribe of Oklahoma v. Manufacturing Tech-

celebrations and production of, 83;

nologies, Inc., 234n12; Morton v. Mancari,

legends as, 67, 107, 236n22; market-

52; Northwestern Bands of Shoshone Indi-

ing of, 39–40, 220n16; non-Native

ans v. United States, 100; Seminole Tribe of

Americans and Native, 42–43, 67–

Florida v. Butterworth, 15, 180–81; United

68; self-determination as, 229n30;

States v. Wheeler, 250n34; Worcester v.

tourism of, 39, 47–49, 115, 220n16,

Georgia, 250n34

222n27. See also Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Mu-

Covington, James, 207n2

seum; Craft production; Green Corn

Cowboys, 32, 33, 36–37, 219n12–13

Dance

Craft production: baskets, 38, 42; beaded jewelry, 38, 42–43; cultural authenticity of, 39–44; dolls, 38; in economic development initiatives, 40–42,

Cypress, Billy L., 66–67, 228n26–27, 228n29, 246n9 Cypress, Carol, 42–43, 70, 107, 225n9, 236n22

220n18–19; income from, 41, 221n21;

Cypress, David, 204

marketing of, 104; outsider produc-

Cypress, Jeannette, 138, 188

tion of, 42–43; use of term, 220n15;

Cypress, Mitchell, 115, 204

valuation of women’s crafts, 41–42, 220n18, 221n21; youth and, 41–42. See

Dania. See Hollywood Reservation

also Patchwork clothing

Darian-Smith, Eve, 208n5, 213n26,

Cramer, Renée, 92, 234n14, 238n39 Creek/Muskogee language, 21, 70, 73, 92, 207n3, 226n19, 227n23

237n35 Dawes Act, 100, 215n38 Deloria, Philip, 85, 211n15

Cuba, 133, 167, 240n9

Deloria, Vine, Jr., 129, 139, 175, 189–90

Cultural preservation: cultural loss and,

Disney Corporation, 83, 111–12, 181

12–13, 59–60, 63–65, 71–72, 93,

Diversification, 5–6, 111–16

211n15, 223n2–3; of language, 69–73,

Dividend babies, 91, 94

226n17, 226n20; money and, 59–60,

Dividends, per capita, 103–8, 198–99

63, 224n6; non-Seminoles on, 12–13,

Domesticity, training in, 150–51, 244n30

59–60, 211n15, 223n2–3; periods of

Doney, Kyle, 169

cultural debasement (1930s, 1960s,

Drug dealing, 82, 104, 230n35

and 1970s), 42–43, 64–65, 225n9. See also Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum; Education; Youth

Index

Economic development initiatives: capital acquisitions, 114; chickee con-

struction, 158–59, 244n36; crafts, 40–42, 220n18–19; financing of, 34, 119–20, 194, 237–38n37, 241n14; Micco airlines, 204; smoke shops, 54–57, 223n36. See also Casinos; Cattle

214n35, 215n36; voter turnout, 19–20, 215n36, 249n28 Emahakv Vpelofv (Learning Hammock), 157 Employment: absenteeism and, 49–50,

ownership; Hard Rock International

57; in craft production, 41, 221n21;

acquisition; Tourism

gaming’s impact on, 50–51, 247n16;

Economic nationalism: control of

Indian New Deal employment, 49,

casinos in, 117–23; diversification

142, 220n18; Indian preference in

projects and, 5–6, 112–16; financial

hiring, 49, 51–52, 56–57; of non-

competence and, 111–12; fungibility

Seminoles, 51–52, 56–57, 85, 119,

of money and, 2–3, 99, 102–5, 107,

225n12; promotion opportunities,

123, 198–200, 238n43; globalization

52; shortages in certain sectors, 51;

compared with, 197; Indian Gaming

social ties promoted through, 52–53;

Regulatory Act (IGRA) and, 15, 103,

in tourism, 23; in tribal government,

105, 181–83; per capita dividends and,

50–51, 222n29; tribal-sector employ-

103–8, 198–99

ment, 50–51; wage labor, 41, 47–49,

Education: Ahfachkee School, 62, 239n3; chickee construction in, 156–67; college, 51, 169, 186, 222n31; cultural impact of American education, 147; cultural programming for, 34, 36, 42, 62–63, 68, 70, 73; discrimination

50, 52–53, 222n27; of women, 41–42, 119, 147, 220n18, 221n21; of youth, 51 English language, 37, 64, 69, 72–73, 225n14, 226n19, 228n26 Entitlements, 89, 106, 144, 176–77, 243n24

against Seminoles in, 174, 248n18;

Erikson, Patricia, 73–74

Emahakv Vpelofv enrichment pro-

Everglades, 23, 46, 177

gram, 157; English language instruction, 64, 72–73; family members’

Fabian, Ann, 61

roles in, 146, 150–51; in financial

Family. See Kinship; Marriage

management, 83; gaming revenues

Federal government: audits of tax ir-

and, 47, 50, 130, 239n3; in govern-

regularities, 110, 236n27; contract

ment, 133; indigenous language in-

programs, 134, 241n14; housing

struction, 69–70, 73–74, 225–26n15;

programs, 140, 143, 145–47, 152, 156,

Pemayetv Emahakv Charter School

243n22; Indian Gaming Regulatory

(Brighton Reservation), 62, 69, 240n3;

Act (IGRA) of, 15, 103, 105, 181–83;

preschool programs, 239n3; Seminole

Indian trust relationship with, 111,

children’s curricula, 22; Seminoles’

133, 175–76, 237n29, 241n14, 248n20;

formal rates of, 50–51, 133

indigenous money management and,

Elders, 88, 144, 227n22; services for, 9, 230–31n42 Elections: clan affiliation, 186, 249n28; of Tribal Council and Board, 19–20,

111, 236n27; land allocations, 20, 100, 111, 130–32, 215n38, 240n8; means testing for Indian programs of, 166, 246n10; National Indian Gaming

Index

285

Federal government (continued)

286

as governmental right, 14, 213n27;

Commission (NIGC), 3–4, 103, 181;

historical background of, 30; litiga-

political involvement of Seminoles in,

tion in support of, 179, 181–84; lotter-

54, 168, 176, 183, 241n14; recognition

ies, 167, 202, 210n12; media coverage

of indigenous groups by, 92, 133;

of, 7, 118, 210n13, 211n14; multi-

revenue sharing mandated by, 166;

national corporations and, 121; non-

Seminoles as unconquered by, 22, 106,

Indians and, 118–19, 171; opposition

117, 131, 175, 235n20; social services

to, 29, 59–60, 80, 101, 117, 181–82,

funding, 136, 241n14; termination of

213–14n30, 231n2, 237n34; organized

tribal sovereignty by, 36, 101, 131–32,

crime and, 117–19, 237n34; political

234n11. See also Reorganization of

involvement of Seminoles and, 164,

tribal government (1957)

168, 172, 176, 246n7; regulation of,

Feminist theory, 163, 189, 245n5, 250n38

15, 103, 105, 180–83, 211n18; Semi-

Flag, tribal, 62, 128, 141–42

nole employment in, 50–51, 247n16;

Florida: antigambling forces in, 181–82;

slot machines, 182, 211n18; taxa-

development of, 23–25; negotiation of

tion of, 14, 104, 213n16, 213n25–26,

gaming compact, 15–16, 168, 181–82;

235n18. See also Casinos; Hard Rock

Seminole political influence in, 54,

International acquisition; Revenues,

168–71; Seminoles as citizens of, 169–

gaming

70; Seminole Wars commemorated by,

Garbarino, Merwyn, 64, 69, 216n39

22; tourism in, 40

Gelder, Ken, 102, 178, 234n15

Florida State University, 168–69, 247n15 Florida v. Seminole Tribe of Florida, 179, 182– 83, 249n26

Gender: cattle ownership and, 33–34, 36– 38: craft production and, 41, 221n21; domestic space and, 145–47, 243n28;

Fontana, John, 119, 122

federal employment initiatives and,

Fort Pierce Reservation, 18

49; household roles and, 140, 145–46,

Foucault, Michel, 129, 239n2

245n5; property ownership and, 158.

Foxwoods casino, 4, 223n2, 247n16 Frank, Joe, 138–39 Frank, Joel, 145, 155

See also Men; Women General Allotment (Dawes) Act of 1887, 100, 215n38

Frank, Larry, 51, 173, 241n14

Glade Cross Mission, 220n18

Fraser, Nancy, 189

Gopher, Lorene, 68, 70–71

Freeman, Ethel Cutler, 107, 244n31

Gopher, Louise, 38, 77

Fulton, May Ola, 150–51

Gopher Burgess, Charlotte, 89

Fungibility of money, 2–3, 99, 102–5, 107,

Gordon, Jack, 101

123, 198–200, 238n43

Gordon, Linda, 189 Green Corn Dance: attendance at, 52–53,

Gaming: artistic renditions of, 124,

228n27; Baptists and, 64–65, 242n20,

125–26; classes of games, 15–16, 168,

250n31; ceremonial distribution

181–82; commercial, 7, 202, 210n12;

of meat and, 106–7; clans and, 20,

Index

186–87; as court of law, 180; as gov-

157; financing of, 143, 146–47, 151,

ernment, 187–88; location of, 142,

153; handicap accessibility in, 157;

242n20, 250n31; patchwork clothing

history of, 140–41, 154, 244n33; hy-

at, 40; as religious rite, 20, 23; Semi-

giene in, 148, 152; reorganization of

nole legal system in, 186; as source of

tribal government (1957) and, 143;

sovereignty, 187–88; stickball games

space-use in, 151–53; tribal housing

at, 228n27

programs, 154–57, 244n33. See also Chickees

Hard Rock International acquisition, 204; as diversification venture, 112–13; financing of, 194–95; media coverage

Housing Department, 154–55, 157, 244n33

287

Hurston, Zora Neale, 23

of, 119–20, 195–97, 199; reaction to, 194–95 Harmon, Alexandra, 100 Hart, Keith, 88, 99 Health care services, 9, 65, 68, 71–72, 130, 136–38, 225n11, 225n13, 239–40n3

Immokalee Reservation, 5, 18, 173 Immunity, sovereign, 101, 179–80, 182, 234n12 Independent Seminoles, 24, 133, 187, 240n8, 240–41n10, 243n23

Henderson, James Youngblood, 159

Indian Act (Canada), 243n25

Henry, Bobby, 195, 196

Indian Claims Commission Act (1946),

Henry, Richard, 41, 93, 240n10 Hollywood Reservation: BIA Seminole Agency on, 134–35; bingo on, 1, 2,

132 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), 15, 103, 105, 181–83

96, 117, 194; CBS houses at, 143, 152;

Indian mascots, 168–69, 247n15

chickees on, 155; demographics of,

Indian New Deal, 49, 142, 220n18

18; election of representatives and,

Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), 131–32,

214n35; employment initiatives on, 49; Hard Rock casino on, 5, 30, 97– 98, 121, 172, 209n9; Seminole Okalee

240n5–6 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (1975), 134

Indian Village and Arts and Crafts

Ingram, Billie, Jr., 50

Center on, 40–41, 47, 121, 220n19

Interdependency: casinos and, 164; Chero-

Home economics movement, 150, 154

kee Nation v. Georgia and, 189; of clans,

Hosmer, Brian, 58

186, 249n28; Green Corn Dance and,

House Concurrent Resolution 108, 36,

187; through relations with municipal

101, 131–32, 234n11 Housing, Seminole: as assimilation project, 143–44; BIA restrictions on, 146–47, 149–50; casino revenues and, 154, 157; CBS houses, 140, 143, 147; construction choices in, 155–58, 244n35; families and, 144–45, 147,

governments, 17; sovereignty as, 163– 65, 188–89, 199–200; of sovereignty and materiality, 199–200; in tribalstate relations, 167–68, 247n14 Intergenerational cultural transmission, 89–90, 146, 230n42 Intertribalism, 165–66, 184, 246n8

Index

Jackson, Jason, 65, 218n53 Jacobs, Jane, 102, 178, 234n15 Jefferson Government Relations, 176, 241n14

288

Land allocations, 20, 23, 33, 100, 111, 132, 215n38, 240n8, 325n38 Language: country music lyrics and, 37; Creek/Muskogee, 21, 70, 73, 92,

Johns, Alex, 116, 231n44

207n3, 226n19, 227n23; curricu-

Johns, Mary Frances, 228n26

lum for, 69–70, 73–74, 225–26n15;

Johns, Stanlo, 34, 51, 137

English, 37, 64, 69, 72–73, 225n14,

Johns, Willie, 56, 179–80

226n19, 228n26; impact of housing

Johns, Wonder, 231–32n2

relocations on, 145; linguistic com-

Johns Buster, Helene, 82

munities, 71, 226n19, 227n22–23;

Jones, Happy, 138, 139

Mikasuki (Seminole language), 67–71,

Jumper, Betty Mae, 91, 135–36, 205,

73, 225–26n15, 227n22; politics of,

220n14, 225n10, 226n17 Jumper, Danny, 65 Jumper, Desiree, 41, 171 Jumper, Harley, 142

70, 72, 226n19, 227n23; preservation of, 69–73, 226n17, 226n20; written, 70–71, 226n17 Law: gaming litigation and American

Jumper, John, 141

law, 179, 181–83; General Allotment

Jumper, Moses, Jr., 36, 44–45, 47, 85,

(Dawes) Act of 1887, 100, 215n38;

88, 97

Green Corn Dance as, 180; Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), 15,

Kahnawake Mohawk, 93–94

103, 105, 181–83, 211n18; law enforce-

Kersey, Harry, Jr., 133, 234n11, 240n9,

ment agencies, 172, 180; sovereignty

242n20 Kinship: as basis of Seminole legal system, 186; children’s roles in, 147; cultural education through, 66–67; divisions in Seminole tribe, 240n10; elders and, 230–31n42; gender roles in, 140, 145–46; housing program’s

and, 15, 101, 128–29, 179–80, 184–88, 234n12, 250n34–35. See also Court cases Lawyers, Seminole, 179, 181–83. See also Shore, Jim Legends, telling of, 67–68, 107, 235– 36n22

impact on, 144–45; impact of wealth

Light, Steven, 208n5

on, 88–89; marriage and, 91, 94, 145,

Lobbyists, 54, 168, 176, 183, 241n14

158–59, 204, 231n45, 243n25–26; net-

Lomawaima, K. Tsianina, 190, 234n12,

works of, 24; of nuclear families, 145, 147, 243n26; personalized exchanges

241n15, 244n30 Lotteries, 167, 202, 210n12

in, 99; in Seminole political discourse, 186. See also Clans Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma v. Manufacturing Technologies, Inc., 234n12

MacCauley, Clay, 63–64 Makah whaling controversy, 223n3 Managua, tribal holdings in, 35, 113

Kippenberger, LaVonne, 92

Maroons, Seminole, 22, 216n42

Kischenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 41, 78

Marriage, 91, 94, 142, 145, 158–59, 204,

Klima, Alan, 224n5, 244n37

Index

231n45, 243n25–26

Martin, Jack, 69–70

drawn with, 71; orthography, 69–70;

Marx, Karl, 12, 53, 98

teaching of, 69–70, 73, 225–26n15;

Mascots, Indian, 168–69, 247n15

translations into, 73; use in public

Mashantucket Pequot Indians, 102, 194,

blessings, 227n22

223n2, 228n29, 234n13 Mason, W. Dale, 183, 208n5, 246n7 Mauldin, Margaret, 70

Mi:kili people, 73, 228n26 Military service of Seminoles, 176–77, 205

Maurer, Bill, 88, 234n10

Minnick, Leah, 231n45

Means testing, 166, 246n10

Missionaries, 23, 70, 220n18

Media coverage: authenticity in, 198–

Mitchell, Timothy, 117, 147, 237n33

99; of financing of casinos, 121; of

Mixed ancestry, 91, 231n44, 234n13

gaming, 7, 118, 210n13, 211n14; of

Modernity: capitalism and, 7, 11–12, 102,

Hard Rock International acquisition,

146–47, 200, 224n5; kinship and,

120, 199; of housing transitions, 148;

140, 144–48, 243n24, 243n26; media

of Indian casinos, 164; of Indian po-

resources and, 225n12; monetary

litical influence, 164

exchange and, 12, 98–100, 232n5;

Medicine, 65, 68, 71–72, 225n11, 225n13

progress and, 138; reorganization of

Men: alligator wrestling by, 44–47; cattle

tribal government (1957) and, 20, 24,

ownership by, 33–34, 37–38; cultural

64, 238n42; technology and, 8, 88–

production of, 44; familial roles of,

89, 148–49, 211n18, 223n3

83, 146, 245n5; as heads of house-

Modernization projects: cultural loss

holds, 146, 245n5; masculinity, 35,

and, 12–13, 59–60, 63–65, 71–72, 93,

38, 44–47; uncles’ roles in matrilineal

211n15, 223n2–3; home economics

clans, 83, 146

movement, 150–51, 244n30. See also

Merry, Sally, 184, 250n35

Housing

Micco, Howard, 96

Mohegan Sun casino, 4, 121, 168, 247n16

Micco Airlines, 204

Money: cultural dimensions of, 99, 233–

Miccosukees: casino dividend distribu-

34n10; cultural loss and, 59–60, 63,

tion of, 107; Castro-era Cuba and, 133,

224n6; dividends distribution, 91, 94,

240n9; chickee housing of, 243n23;

103–8, 198–99; fungibility of, 2–3, 12,

founding of, 24, 132–33; intertribal

99, 102–5, 107, 123, 198–200, 238n43;

political activism by, 165; language

impact on social life of, 12; as imper-

knowledge of, 226n15; reorganization

sonal, 12, 99–100, 232n5; as means of

opposed by, 133–34, 240n10; as vic-

remembering, 99; model of Seminole

tims of settler-generated environmen-

leadership and, 107; modernity and,

tal destruction, 177

12, 98–100, 232n5; social reproduc-

Migrations of indigenous peoples, 21–22, 130, 142, 217n45 Mikasuki (Seminole language): creation

tion and, 79; sovereignty as source of, 187; valuation of, 12, 199–200. See also Revenues, gaming

histories of, 67–68; dictionary, 70;

Moore, Robert, 70

elders and, 227n22; group boundaries

Moore Haven, 174, 248n18

Index

289

290

Morin, Jeanne, 241n14

158–59, 244n36; cultural production

Morton v. Mancari, 52

and, 42–43, 67–68; on economic

Motlow, Bonnie, 72

control of casinos, 121; employed in

Motlow, David, 116–17

tribal enterprises, 51–52, 56–57, 85,

Multiculturalism, 77–78, 229n30

119, 180, 225n12; gaming opposed

Museums: casino revenues and, 73–

by, 59–60, 80, 101, 117, 181–82, 213–

74, 76–77, 228n39; Mashantucket

14n30, 237n34; indigenous language

Pequot Museum and Research Center,

knowledge and, 70, 226n19; research

228n29; Smithsonian National Mu-

on Seminoles by, 25–27, 217n49,

seum of the American Indian, 67, 166.

217n52, 218n53; on Seminole cultural

See also Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum

loss, 12–13, 59–60, 211n15, 223n2–3;

Muskogee language, 21, 70, 73, 92, 207n3, 226n19, 227n23 Myers, Fred: on Aboriginal Australians,

on Seminole relocation to reservations, 142; on Seminoles as anachronisms, 64, 202–3; telling of legends

77, 220n16, 235n19; on cars, 85; on

to, 67–68, 236n22; tribal courts and,

cultural production, 31, 219n7; on

180. See also Stereotypes of indigenous

value, 209n6

peoples North, Josephine, 120

Names, personal, 22, 208n3, 230n37

Northrup, Jim, 84

Nash, Roy, 64, 202–4, 221n21

Northwestern Bands of Shoshone Indians v.

National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), 246n10

United States, 100 Nuclear families, 145, 147, 243n26

National Gambling Impact Study Commission (NGISC), 59 National Indian Gaming Association (NIGA), 3, 66, 103, 165, 217–18n52 National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC), 3–4, 103, 181 National Museum of the American Indian, 67, 166 Native American Rights Fund (NARF), 184, 237n29 Navajo nation, 29, 198

Obligation (Seminole value), 2, 20, 138– 39, 186, 190, 233n7 Okalee Indian Village and Arts and Crafts Center, 40–41, 47, 121, 220n19 Oklahoma, 22, 142, 207n3, 234n12 Onondaga nation, 29, 218n2 Organized crime, 117–19, 237n34 Osceola, Charles, 108 Osceola, Jacob, 89, 106–7, 145, 187, 250n33

Nicaragua: tribal holdings in, 35, 113

Osceola, Joe Dan, 133, 159, 166

No Casinos (casino opposition group), 80

Osceola, Jo-Lin, 119

Noninterference (Seminole value), 105–6,

Osceola, Laura Mae, 101

163, 245n5, 248n24 Non-Native Americans: on casino wealth,

Osceola, Max, Jr., 63, 105, 140, 173, 186, 196–97, 204, 236n28

91; cattle ownership program and,

Osceola, Moses, 204

35–36; chickee construction and,

Osceola, William, 155–56

Index

O’Toole Osceola, Jimmie, 41–42, 50

Raibmon, Paige, 60, 222n27 Rand, Kathryn, 208n5

Palmer, Stephen, 133, 243n26

Reagan-era economics, 136, 241n14

Pan-Indianism, 166, 246n9

Reciprocity, 27, 176–77, 187–88, 190

Paredes, J. Anthony, 31

Redding Rancheria, 92

Pasquaretta, Paul, 102, 230n34

“Red Man’s Greed” (South Park episode),

Patchwork clothing, 173; clothing con-

7, 210n13

tests, 36, 42–43, 221n24; at Green

Red Power movement, 14, 143, 160, 166

Corn Dance, 40; Seminole cowboys

Religion. See Baptists; Green Corn Dance

and, 219n13; tourists’ purchases of,

Reorganization of Seminole tribal gov-

220n17 Pechanga Band of Luiseño Mission Indians, 92 Pemayetv Emahakv Charter School, 62, 69, 239n3

ernment (1957): cattle ownership programs and, 34; creation of separate tribes as result of, 24; federal oversight and, 20, 24, 133; housing programs after, 143; Indian Reorgani-

Per capita dividends, 103–8, 198–99

zation Act (IRA) and, 131–32, 240n5–

Philanthropy, 143, 148, 150, 166, 173–74

6; opposition to, 132–33, 240n8;

Phillips, Marie, 41

relocation to reservations after, 133;

Pintupi people, 235n19

as alternative to termination, 131–32,

Plenary power, congressional, 136, 175,

234n11

242n15 Polanyi, Karl, 117 Police Department, Seminole, 172, 180 Poverty: consumption as triumph over,

Research methods, 25–28, 70, 208n4, 217n49, 217n52, 218n53, 243n24 Reservations: Baptists on, 64–65, 242n20; cattle ownership as resi-

84; cultural loss linked to, 63, 65;

dency incentives, 33–34; demograph-

financial independence vs., 106;

ics and, 17–19, 214n33; location of

housing and, 127; indigenous people

Green Corn Dance and, 142, 242n20;

and, 10–11, 100–101; “rich Indian”

relocations to, 130–31, 133, 142–43,

stereotype and, 7, 101–2, 171; statis-

145–47, 151. See also names of specific

tics on, 209n10

reservations

Povinelli, Elizabeth, 8, 31, 144, 190, 229n30, 243n24 Property ownership, 100, 158

Revenues, gaming: charitable donations by Seminoles and, 166, 173–74, 177; cultural programming and production impacted by, 43–44, 62–63; education

Race: blood quantum and racial identity,

and, 47, 50–51, 130, 239n3; housing

64, 91, 93, 224n7; mixed ancestry

programs funded by, 154–58; Indian

and, 91, 231n44, 234n13; racial dis-

Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) and,

crimination against Seminoles, 25, 91,

15, 103, 105, 181–83; management

216n42, 217n48; images of modernity

of, 112, 117, 119, 237n34; museums

and, 102; wealth and, 7, 101–2, 106

funded by, 73–74, 76–77, 228n29;

Index

291

Revenues, gaming (continued)

292

240n8, 240–41n10, 243n23; inter-

per capita dividends, 91, 94, 103–8,

national relations of, 167; intertribal

198–99; philanthropy from, 166, 173–

political activism of, 165–66, 184,

74; Reagan-era cuts and, 241n14; taxa-

246n8; language of (Mikasuki), 67–

tion of, 14, 104, 213n25–26, 235n18;

71, 73, 225–26n15, 227n22; military

Tribal-State compacts and, 181–83;

service of Seminoles, 176–77, 205;

tribal-state revenue sharing agree-

politics of, 70, 72, 226n19, 227n23;

ments, 164–68, 172, 246n10, 247n14

resistance to outsider inquiries by,

Rodeos, 36

25–27, 217n52; settlement of, 17–18,

Rogow, Bruce, 183

214n33; on tribal-federal relationship,

Romero, Mateo, 124, 125–26

176–77; as unconquered, 22, 106, 117, 131, 175, 235n20; U.S. military re-

Safari, The. See Billie Swamp Safari

sisted by, 21, 216n42. See also Casinos;

Sahlins, Marshall, 81, 218n1

Clans; Economic development ini-

Sattler, Richard, 32–33

tiatives; Education; Hard Rock Inter-

Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 9, 164, 211n16

national acquisition; Miccosukees;

Secola, Keith, 84

Sovereignty; Tribal Council; Tribal

Self-determination: control of health care services and, 136–38; culture and, 229n30; as noninterference, 163, 245n5; obligations of, 138–39; as sovereignty, 60, 139–40, 163; tribal

government Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Butterworth, 15, 180–81 Seminole Tribune, 65, 165, 169–70, 215n36, 225n12

administrative control and, 134–37,

Seminole Wars, 21–23, 140, 142, 216n42

241n14

Settler states: indigenous sovereignty

Seminole Broadcasting (WSBC), 65

and, 163, 175, 177–78, 183; political

Seminole Hard Rock, Hollywood, 5, 30,

involvement of Seminoles in, 54,

97–98, 172, 209n9 Seminole Management Associates Ltd., 117 Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, 22, 142, 207n3 Seminole Tribe of Florida: Black Semi-

176, 183, 241n14; social reproduction and, 130; spatial projects of, 147–48, 243n28 Shakopee Mdewankanton Sioux, 30, 103–4 Sharing (Seminole value), 106–7, 110

noles and, 21–22, 216n42, 217n45;

Shell, Marc, 224n6, 233n10

charitable donations by, 166, 173–74;

Shore, Frank, 219n8

decision making by, 114, 121; de-

Shore, Geneva, 231n43

mographics of, 17–18, 204, 214n33;

Shore, Jim: on the clan system, 186; on

derivation of name, 21; Florida State

Hard Rock International acquisition,

University relations with, 168–69;

194; honorary Florida State University

governing structure of, 19; as gov-

degree of, 169; legal career of, 25–26;

ernmental entity, 207n3, 213n27;

on period of cultural loss, 64–65; on

Independent Seminoles, 24, 133, 187,

relations with non-Indian local gov-

Index

ernments, 171; on self-determination,

217–18n52, 217n49, 218n53; revenue

137; on Seminole sovereignty, 184–85,

sharing as violation of, 166–67; self-

194

government, 155, 160, 187; of settler

Silver, Morton, 240n9

states, 175, 177–78; termination of,

Simmel, Georg, 12, 79, 98–99, 232n5

36, 101, 131–32, 234n11; treaties and,

Simpson, Audra, 15, 93–94, 243n25

22, 106, 117, 131, 134, 175, 235n20,

Slavery, 21, 164, 216n42

250n34; tribal administrative control

Smithsonian National Museum of the

and, 134, 136–37; tribal housing pro-

American Indian, 67, 166

grams and, 154–57, 244n33; uncanny

Smoke shops, 54–57, 223n36

sovereignty, 178; unconquered status

Snow, Alice, 73, 225n11, 227n25

and, 22, 106, 117, 131, 175, 235n2. See

Social services: for elders, 9, 88, 227n22,

also Court cases; Noninterference;

230n42; health care services, 9, 130,

Self-determination; Taxation

136–38, 239–40n3, 239n3; Indian

Spilde, Katherine, 102, 218n52, 246n7

Self-Determination and Education

Spoehr, Alexander, 37, 216n39

Assistance Act (1975) and, 134;

Stans, Susan, 38, 222n34, 225n11

Reagan-era cuts in, 136, 241n14; tribal

Stereotypes of indigenous peoples:

administrative control of, 136. See also

American national identity and,

Education; Housing

211n15; inability to manage funds, 111;

Sovereignty: autonomy and, 17, 162,

in the media, 7–8, 33, 210n13; “rich

164–65, 177, 245n1, 246n6; cultural

Indian,” 7, 101–2, 171; the “selling” of

identity and, 59–60, 223n2; cultural

Manhattan and, 197, 199; Seminole as

sovereignty, 60, 78; genealogies of,

college mascot, 168–69, 247n15

162, 245n1; governmental rights and,

Stickball games, 76, 228n27

14, 133, 213n27; immunity and, 101,

Straus, Jerry, 179, 181–82

179–80, 182, 234n12; Indian Gaming

Sturtevant, William, 21, 44–45, 131, 142,

Regulatory Act (IGRA) and, 15, 103, 105, 181–83; interdependency and, 17, 162–65, 177, 188–90, 199–200;

215–16n39, 249n29 Substance abuse, 55, 82, 104, 222n34, 230n35

legal system and, 15, 128–29, 179–80, 184–88, 234n12, 250n34–35; Michel

Tamiami Trail, 40, 155, 156, 220n18

Foucault on, 129, 239n2; multicultur-

Tampa, 5, 6, 30, 56, 223n38

alism vs., as basis for rights, 77–78,

Tampa Reservation, 18

229n30; obligation and, 162–63, 177;

Taxation: audits of tax irregularities,

opposition to, 16, 213–14n30; phi-

110, 236n27; of casino revenues, 14,

lanthropy and, 166, 173–74; plenary

104, 213n25–26, 235n18; of cigarette

power and, 136, 175, 242n15; property

shops, 54–55, 57, 223n36; congres-

ownership and, 100–101; reciprocity

sional representation and, 14; Indian

and, 176–77, 187–88, 190; relations

enterprises as not taxed, 14, 57,

with South Florida governments,

213n25–26; of non-Indian enterprises,

172; research on, 25–27, 212n22,

57; payment by Native Americans, 14,

Index

293

Taxation (continued) 213n26; of per capita dividends, 104,

monetary distributions, 104–6, 108;

235n18; tribal-state revenue sharing

Tribal Housing Authority created by,

agreements and, 164–68, 172, 246n10,

244n33; on waiver of tribal immunity,

24714

179–80; women on, 108. See also Billie,

Technology, 8, 88–89, 148–49, 211n18, 223n3, 243n29 Termination of tribal sovereignty, 36, 101, 131–32, 234n11 294

244n35; language used by, 72; on

Thomas, Michele, 90–91, 102

James; Reorganization of tribal government (1957); Tribal government Tribal courts, 179–80, 248n24 Tribal flag, 62, 127–28, 141–42 Tribal government: Baptists in, 64;

Tiger, Ada, 220n14

changing nature of, 135–36; clan

Tiger, Buffalo, 240n9

councils, 20; courts in, 179–80,

Tiger, Mary, 39

248n24; dividend payments from,

Tiger, Mike, 132

106, 235n20; employment by, 50–51,

Tiger, Mondo, 52, 71–72

222n29; governmental rights of,

Tiger, Naha, 37

13–14, 213n27; non-Seminole pro-

Tobacco: cigarette and smoke shops,

fessionals in, 67–68; office space for,

54–57, 223n36

134–35; organization of, 238n42; rela-

Tommie, Howard, 15, 117

tions with local communities, 167–68,

Tongkeamha, Madeline, 62

170–73. See also Board of Directors;

Tourism: alligator wrestling and, 44–

Reorganization of Seminole tribal

45; cultural tourism, 39–40, 47–49, 220n16, 222n27; ecotourism, 114–15; patchwork clothing production for,

government (1957); Tribal Council Tribal-state revenue sharing agreements, 164–68, 172, 181–83, 246n10, 247n14

220n17; Seminole employment in,

Tribe. See Seminole Tribe of Florida

23; tourist villages, 40–42, 47, 121,

Trust relationships, 111, 134, 175–76,

220n19. See also Craft production Traditional medicine, 65, 68, 71–72,

237n29, 241n14, 248n20 Tsosie, Rebecca, 60, 78

225n11, 225n13 Traditions (Noah Billie), 89–90 Trail Indians. See Miccosukees Treaties, 22, 106, 117, 131, 134, 175, 235n20, 250n34 Tribal ambassador, 133, 167, 241n11 Tribal Council: conspicuous consumption considered in, 82; on control of gaming, 120, 238n42; corruption

Unconquered status of Seminoles, 22, 106, 117, 131, 175, 235n20 United South and Eastern Tribes (USET)/ United Southeastern Tribes (USET), 83, 166 United States v. Wheeler, 250n34 Upstate Citizens for Equality (UCE), 214n30

charges against, 109–11, 117–18, 236n25, 236n28; diversification

Value: fungibility of money and, 2–3, 99,

projects considered by, 114, 120;

102–5, 107, 123, 198–200, 238n43;

election of, 19–20, 214n35, 215n36,

of internal difference, 19; of non-

Index

disclosure of dividend income, 104–

221n21; dependency and, 189; edu-

5; of noninterference, 105–6, 163,

cation of, 73, 227n25; as heads of

245n5, 248n24; of obligation, 2, 20,

households, 49; home economics

138–39, 186, 233n7; politics as link

movement and, 150–51, 244n30;

between exchange and, 123; sharing,

housing transitions and, 146–47;

106–8, 110; use of term, 3, 209n6; of

matrilineal clan organizations, 20,

work, 51, 88, 204

155–56, 215n37; matrilocal resi-

Vizenor, Gerald, 218n3

dences, 23, 147, 157; in nuclear families, 145; in political office, 20, 82–83,

Wage labor, 41, 47–50, 52–53, 222n27. See also Employment Wagoner, Paula, 247n12

109, 135–36, 138; property ownership by, 158; sexism and, 145; valuation of work done by, 41

Wars, Seminole, 21, 23, 140, 142, 216n42

Worcester v. Georgia, 250n34

Wealth: anti-Indian racism and, 7, 101–2,

WSBC (Seminole Broadcasting), 65

106, 171, 229n33; conspicuous consumption as, 80–87, 229n33; favorit-

Young, Iris Marion, 163, 175, 245n4–5

ism and, 110; luxury vehicles and, 80,

Youth: agency of, 147; Americanization

84–87, 110–11; philanthropy and, 166,

of, 41–42, 65; consumption by, 81–83,

173–74; political power through, 107–

88–89; cultural education of, 62, 65;

8; revenue sharing and, 166–67

intergenerational cultural transmis-

Weiner, Annette, 79, 224n4, 229n32,

sion, 89–90, 146, 230n42; language

249n30

knowledge of, 71, 73, 225n15; les-

West, David, 69–70

sons on sovereignty for, 139, 187; of

West, Patsy, 40

mixed parentage, 91; movement away

Whidden, Connie, 136–37

from craft production by, 41–42; self-

Wilkins, David, 190, 234n12, 241n15

reliance and, 84, 106, 138–39; work

Wilson, Gloria, 82–83, 85–86, 221n20

ethic of, 51, 88, 204; without clan

Wilson, Naomi, 46

membership, 93

Women: alligator wrestling by, 46; as casino managers, 119; cattle owner-

Zelizer, Viviana, 99

ship and, 33–34, 37–38, 220n14;

Zepeda, Brian, 67, 76–77

craft production and, 41–42, 220n18,

Index

295

Jessica R. Cattelino is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cattelino, Jessica R. High stakes : Florida Seminole gaming and sovereignty / Jessica R. Cattelino. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8223-4209-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8223-4227-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Seminole Tribe of Florida. 2. Seminole Indians—Florida—Government relations. 3. Seminole Indians—Florida—Economic conditions. 4. Gambling on Indian reservations—Florida. 5. Indians of North America—Gambling—Florida. 6. Tribal government—Florida. 7. Self-determination, National—Florida. I. Title. E99.S28C37 2008 975.9004′973859—dc22  2008011051