Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (29 page)

Still at Pechanga, we went for dinner at the Great Oak Steakhouse, one of the nine restaurants inside the casino. We were told it was good. We were told that the steakhouse raises its own cattle. We were told that the cattle eat organic feed and are kept on the lot twice as long as most prime cattle are. We were told we’d never taste anything like the steaks we ordered. We were told right—I had the best steak of my life.

There are all sorts of unintended effects of Indian gaming. Great steak is only one of them. Casino profits have helped fund a dramatic renaissance in Indian culture and language. Powwows like the ones held at Foxwoods, Oneida nation, Lac Courte Oreilles, and Gathering of
Nations in New Mexico offer such large purses for singing and dancing contests that a whole generation of Indian performers has made a living on the contest circuit. The result—a growing richness and complexity of Indian pop culture. Several tribes—such as the Blackfeet, the Leech Lake Ojibwe, and the Cherokee—started language immersion schools without tribal funding, but have begun to support these schools with their newfound wealth. Others, like Mille Lacs, have the best elder care in the state, funded almost entirely with casino profits. The area director for the Indian Health Service in Bemidji told me that 80 percent of new hospitals and clinics are tribally funded. This is astounding, considering the dearth of health care on reservations fifty years ago.

One popular conception about Indian life and Indian tribes is that we would be nothing without help from the federal government. That is sometimes true. About one-third of the 500 tribes in the United States have casinos, and only a very small fraction of those turn any kind of useful, sustained profit. But communities such as Pechanga and Morongo, the Seminole in Florida, and the Mashantucket Pequots in Connecticut make a lot of money and do not depend on the government; rather, the government often depends on them. The Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians employs 5,162 people directly and 24,422 indirectly. It has given $82 million in funding for local government and nongaming tribes and has paid $60 million in payroll taxes since 2004. In Florida, the Seminole are regularly called on to bail out the state when it experiences a budget crisis. In 2009 the state of Florida began negotiating new gaming compacts with the Seminole—in exchange for expanded gaming operations, the Seminole would contribute millions in revenue that would be tagged for education and thereby save the Florida school system.

The Seminole are interesting. They have long had an entrepreneurial spirit. To put it another way, they’ve been ass kickers and name takers for a long time. One Seminole I interviewed told me: “We fought the Spanish and won. We fought the British and won. We
fought the Americans three times and won. We are the fightingest, winningest tribe in American history.” He was right. The Seminole have held on to their land and their ways under enormous pressure, the like of which few of us will ever experience. They’re also cowboys (and cowgirls—both men and women ride and tend herds) and have been raising and killing cattle and eating steak for a lot longer than the Pechanga Band. During the time of the dust bowl, when pasture was drying up and blowing away, the U.S. cattle industry shipped its remaining herds east to Florida and inadvertently brought ranching to the Seminole. The Seminole began raising their own herds, riding horses, and joining rodeos. With the advent of gaming, they expanded their cattle business. According to Seminole cowboy and elder Willie Johns, the Seminole are the third largest beef producer in the entire United States.

As we strolled back to our room at Pechanga, it was clear that rather than living uninspected lives at the margins of American society, Indians have become part of the American fabric in ways no one could have guessed when gaming as we know it emerged in the 1980s. I was feeling proud of the Pechanga Band, the Morongo Band, the Seminole, and the others—proud of what they made against all odds. No one is untouched by Indian lives. I thought of what the tribal member told me about the golf course: it is good to look back at where you’ve been; you get some beautiful views.

You also get some strange ones.

In late August the drive from Minneapolis to Shakopee, Minnesota, takes you past the kind of humdrum success that marked much of the 1990s and early 2000s in America. Strip malls, Subways, Starbucks, Caribou Coffee, Mail Boxes Etc., Holiday Station, QuikTrip, Kum & Go, interspersed with big-box retailers such as Best Buy and Home Depot. As Highway 13 twists and turns these stores disappear behind cornfields where the corn is already brown and rattles against itself. The road reappears in small towns transformed into suburbs and studded with whorled concentrations of spec homes, housing developments, and golf courses. These settlements resemble each other so much that it is hard to say where you are when you’re there. The developments—sometimes half-finished, with many of the homes empty these days—resemble the corn. The houses are planted in rows that twist and turn around the rising and falling land; there are acres and acres of suburban sprawl, identical, evenly spaced, and placid. This is wealth of the usual variety. And this is America of the usual variety. It changes as soon as you pull into Mystic Lake Casino Resort just outside Shakopee.

The casino complex is visible for miles. It is really the only thing, other than the Mall of America, fifteen miles to the northeast, that you can see and identify by shape and scale. It’s huge. The hotel has 600 rooms, seven restaurants, and a spa, all looking out over a premier golf course tamped into the wetlands that once defined the landscape. (As I was sitting outside drinking an espresso I got from the espresso bar in the lobby, an Indian man with a bag of golf clubs bigger than his grandson, who sat down next to him, told me:
It’s the best golf course in the world, I tell you. The best. And cheap. Only a hundred dollars for a full round including the cart. You’ve got to
use a cart. Mandatory
.) The casino—with more than 4,000 slot machines and ninety-six blackjack tables—is equally visible: though the building is low to the ground, floodlights set around the perimeter come together in a laser-show tepee. All in all, the casino is as visible, as powerful, and as delightfully menacing as the Mdewakanton Sioux were ignored, pushed aside, and disenfranchised in the 200 years before gaming became recognized in 1988 as a legal enterprise (it had always been an unrecognized right of Indian tribes). The drive curves around under a massive timbered portico lined with limestone quarried from the Mississippi basin near Little Falls. A waterfall and a gurgling brook surround a statue of an elk. Indian kids are throwing change into the water and making wishes. Two of them, having used up all their change, are sending bits of torn Styrofoam down the water chase. It is late August, time for the Shakopee powwow. The place is alive with activity. Cars line up, unload, pull ahead. The bellhops hand out chits for parking, get in, and zoom off. Luggage carts fill up with suitcases, pillows, duffel bags, and golf clubs. The revolving doors spin at a dizzying rate.

Everything is pleasantly backward. The cars that pull up spit out three, four, five, six Indians and hail from Saskatchewan, South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Montana, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Alaska. The white bellhops load the luggage carts with Indian luggage and bring it to a reception area staffed by white people. It is truly a strange sight to see rubbed brass and chrome wheeled luggage racks loaded with suitcases, garment bags, beaded buckskin, and velvet, and, balanced on the top, enormous bustles made with the feathers of bald eagles. A long line of Indians waits to check in; each Indian is given a magnetic key; and up they go into one of the rooms at the Mystic Lake hotel. Almost every room in the hotel was filled with Indians, so there were more Indians in the hotel than were enrolled members of the Mdewakanton Dakota Tribe: actually twice as many, since that tribe has fewer than 300 enrollees. Indians are giving white people money; from brown hands to white it goes. Most of the time the Indians don’t tip. Or if they do it is usually one or two dollars.

The impression, the strange impression of Indian wealth, is heightened when you go to the powwow itself: the parking lot reserved for tribal members was filled with (I counted) twelve Lincoln Navigators, seven Hummers, three 2008 Mustangs, and four Dodge Chargers with “HEMI” stenciled on the side. A few minivans, sadly out of place, decorated the lot as well as six Harley-Davidson motorcycles and one Indian motorcycle. All in all, most of the cars cost double the average household income for most Indians in the United States. Navigators and Hummers cost upwards of $50,000 apiece while the median household income for Indian families is $17,000. The Mdewakanton Band, which used to be a small band of Dakota Indians with little land and no money, is growing. The number of households has grown from 229 in 1990 to more than 360 today. Of those households, the proportion making more than $200,000 a year went from zero to over 50 percent in ten years. The houses are growing, too. Thirty-eight percent of the houses on the rez are in the supersize category: that is, they contain nine bedrooms or more. The only figures not growing rapidly are high school graduation rates (still below 50 percent) and Indians with college degrees (a terrible 5 percent).

But then the strangeness recedes. Except for frybread burgers and Indian tacos priced at $7.50 and fresh-squeezed lemonade at $5, everything about the powwow is the same as most other large contest powwows. The emcee, having exhausted or seeming to have exhausted his store of jokes, announces the grand entry, the host drum starts the song, and the dancers dance into the arbor between the bleachers. Only minutes before, many were taking last-minute puffs on Marlboros, joking with friends, flirting, or telling dirty jokes, but now they bend to the music, duck into the arbor, straighten with the song, and begin dancing in styles both old and new. First the color guard carrying the American flag, the POW/MIA staff, the flag of the Mdewakanton Dakota Nation, and an Eagle staff dance in. They are followed by the rest of the dancers, by category. The regalia is beautiful, some of the best. Huge bustles. Silky, fantastically colored grass-dance outfits. Head roaches with the eagle feathers supported on springs so they spin, dip, and shake with each step the dancer takes. Beaded yokes on the traditional women dancers that must weigh at least twenty-five pounds. All of the dancers, from the youngest to oldest, no matter the category, have numbers taped or pinned to their outfits, like the kind worn by runners in a race. Judges and powwow officials with clipboards begin scoring the contests. They judge the dancers by category—the dancers get points for the completeness and aesthetics of their regalia, their bearing, their energy, and their moves. (Do the fringes of the traditional women dancers swing evenly in time with the drumbeat? Do the grass-dancers complete clockwise and counterclockwise movements? Etc.) And then the flag song. And then the invocation, delivered in Dakota. And then the crow hop. And after that a sneak-up. And then intertribal dancing.

By the time the dancers are all in and the first intertribal is ratcheted up by “The Boys”—with singers drawn from Minnesota, Utah, Wyoming, Wisconsin, and elsewhere—with the most amazing and inspiring intensity, the lead wavering, floating, high over the crowd, and the rest jumping in on the tail, all of them hammering it down at the end of the first push-up, pausing, and the lead emerging from the silence to once again coast above, beyond, somehow out of reach but then reached by the rest of the singers—by this time the sun is beginning to set.

From the top of the metal bleachers crowded with spectators (most of them Indian) sitting on fleece and colorful geometric Pendleton blankets, the dancers lose their individuality. Instead of single people, among whom you might recognize a lot of friends, what you see is a snake. A mass of color snakes around the arbor. The speakers amplify the singing and the jingling of ankle bells. Outside the arbor, down on the grass already collecting dew, people walk back and forth with baby strollers and children race each other through the crowds. Some people carry paper cartons of french fries to wooden picnic tables. Above and beyond the dancers, lit now by floodlights, and the spectators, and the scores of RVs, minivans, and campers, across a small valley hidden from sight, rises the reservation itself, or part of it. On a tall hill rising from the opposite side of the valley the houses of the Mdewakanton are circled like tepees of old. This is their housing tract, their “track.” Rez housing like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Each house glares back across the valley defiantly, fronted with Low-E antiglare windows (windows that cost about $3,000 to $4,000 each) behind which lurk houses many of which boast more than 5,000 square feet of living space (twenty times bigger than the sixteen-by-twenty shack my mother grew up in). Housing is provided for all the members of the tribe, with each house, even at an average of $120 per square foot, costing about $600,000. The tribal members themselves receive about $84,000 per month in per capita payments—payments made to them because they are Indian and because they are enrolled at the Mdewakanton Sioux Community. One million dollars a year for each and every tribal member over the age of eighteen. They pay federal income tax, but if they are living on the rez they are exempt from state income tax. There is no local income tax in Minnesota. This money is considered a marital asset in divorce court. Most Mdewakanton Dakota live on the reservation. Unemployment at Shakopee is very high. I think the divorce rate is high, too. They possess a kind of wealth that no Indian could have imagined twenty-five years ago at the dawn of Indian gaming and that few Indians can still get their minds around. They possess a kind of wealth most Americans can’t grasp.

Staring out over the dancers, proud in their regalia and proud to be dancing at this powwow, and over the Navigators and Hummers and Harley-Davidsons, over to the mansions of the Indians where stood, just 100 years ago, nothing at all, it is easy to see that Indian casinos are the single biggest change on the reservation—even on reservations where there are no casinos or where casinos just barely exist—since the reservations were themselves established in the nineteenth century.