The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (22 page)

At the time of the Hampton Bays development, Gumbs and the two other Shinnecock trustees took out a series of full-page ads in the local papers, trying to drum up enthusiasm for a casino. They hired a public relations firm and started a website. ("FAQ: Traffic is a big problem in our region. Won't this add more traffic congestion? A: Any Indian gaming facility would be part of the traffic solution, not part of the problem.") On March 5, 2003, they held a press conference in the woods, alongside a phalanx of bulldozers. "This is about the preservation of our people," a trustee named Charles Smith announced. Then the Shinnecocks held a "turtle walk," a procession through the forest to relocate box turtles so that they wouldn't be crushed. The machines rumbled after them.

When they were finished, a five-acre chunk had been denuded, and many people in Southampton—and on the reservation—were horrified. "That was ridiculous—you don't make a political statement with a bulldozer," Pastor Mike Smith told me. "You don't go desecrating one of the most pristine pieces of property on the East End of the island out of pure greed, which is all that was, because then you lose all credibility and integrity about being, quote unquote, stewards of the land." Several environmental groups sprang up to oppose the project, and Patrick Heaney, the town supervisor at the time, accused the tribe of trying to "absolutely destroy the community character not only of Hampton Bays but of all of Southampton."

Gumbs was irate. "Nobody asked us anything as to whether we wanted the big mansions around us, whether we wanted these big roads, the traffic!" he told me. "Now, all of a sudden, when we want to do something that's economically viable for our community to help sustain the people, you're saying no?"

The town and, eventually, the state sued for an injunction and forced the tribe to cease construction. Ivy Ong vanished, leaving the Shinnecocks in debt—as, it turned out, was his habit. Not long after the Hampton Bays debacle, the Seminole tribe submitted a statement to the BIA, claiming that its partnership with Ong had cost nearly $20 million in fines and lost income. Ong was sentenced to more than three years in federal prison.

But in Gumbs's view Ong was never the antagonist; his neighbors were. "The elders thought, Well, we have a good relationship with the town and they're our friends," Gumbs said. "I said, 'You don't understand! This is the new Southampton. You've got new money, new people. They don't give two craps about the Shinnecock Indian Nation.'" He added, "The old Southampton, yes, there was probably a lot of mutual respect and understanding there—even though we were the housemaids and the dishwashers and the lawn-cutters. Of course you're going to have a nice relationship if you're the servants. Yes, suh, mastuh." In any case, Southampton's opposition to a casino in Hampton Bays galvanized the Shinnecocks, which some members of the tribe think was Gumbs's intention all along.

 

The acquisitive ethos of the Hamptons, where even the purchase of a copper faucet is an opportunity for self-expression, does not extend to the reservation. The Shinnecocks' professed values are communal and anti-materialist, and "for the benefit of the tribe" is a kind of mantra. The Shinnecocks could sell even a small piece of their reservation for millions of dollars, but to do so would be unthinkable. Every decision the tribe makes is meant to be in the service of the collective and the land.

"We don't separate ourselves from our surroundings," the trustee Gordell Wright told me. "That's a connection that native people have to the land itself. It's just, like, you." Wright, who is thirty-eight, was brought up in New York City and in Germany and did not move to the reservation until he was an adult, yet his passion for the place is his primary qualification for leadership. The trusteeships are volunteer positions; Wright is currently unemployed, having left his job as a deliveryman for Home Depot.

The Shinnecocks' group-mindedness has been reinforced by the process of applying for federal recognition, which entails an exhaustive inquiry into who belongs to the tribe. The BIA requires proof that every person listed as a tribe member is the direct de- scendant of someone who lived on the reservation in 1865. According to the tribe's own policy, babies born to Shinnecock mothers are automatically included on the tribal roll. But if a baby's parents are unmarried and only the father is Shinnecock, the child is ineligible for enrollment. "There's a saying," Fred Bess told me. "Mama's baby, Papa's maybe."

The question of legitimacy has been particularly vexed, because most members of the tribe do not look the way American Indians are expected to look. "That's what this whole federal-recognition process has been about," Roberta O. Hunter, a Shinnecock lawyer, told me. "Are you who you say you are? Are you really authentic?" Hunter majored in anthropology at Bennington, and she said that in the twenties scholars got "interested in the 'red man' and the 'vanishing race,' and everybody raced out West." The academics, she suggested, were in pursuit of motion picture Indians. "Those stereotypes of who's an Indian and who isn't an Indian, those were based on all those groups west of the Mississippi. I don't look anything like that," Hunter, who has dark skin and kinky hair, said.

Anxiety about being perceived as insufficiently Indian was one of the reasons why it took the Shinnecocks so long to gain federal recognition. The BIA's history of the tribe's efforts at recognition is shot through with allusions to its ambivalence. "I don't think the Shinnecocks are much interested in petitioning," the executive director of the Indian Rights Association wrote to the Office of Federal Acknowledgment in 1984. "I think they believe they've managed all right so far, and they're not anxious to diddle around with a system that is working." Some tribe members were fearful of submitting to the process. "You had people who were older that were just, like, 'Be quiet. Don't make any waves,'" Hunter told me. "There was a voice that said, If you step up, you're going to get knocked down, because you know they just think we're a bunch of niggers."

Long Island's Native Americans have been marrying African Americans since the seventeenth century, when the Dutch started bringing slaves into New York. John Strong, the premier historian of Native Americans on Long Island, told me, "Slave status was defined by law in terms of the woman—a child becomes the property of the mother's owner. If you're a slave and you want to make sure your children are free, you marry an Indian woman."

But if slave status was defined by maternity, racial status was defined by color. "If the father was black and the mother was Indian, or vice versa, and the child comes forward with a claim to Native American identity, the white arbiters say, 'Oh, no, you can't jump up a notch in the hierarchy—you're black,'" Strong said. "When I came here, in '65, you'd go in any of the local bars and they would talk about the Shinnecocks as 'monigs': more nigger than Indian." It's a slur that you still sometimes hear in the Hamptons.

Hunter and Lance Gumbs represent a generation of Shinnecocks who came of age in the sixties. College-educated and influenced by the era's movements for social justice, they started to question what the tribe was entitled to. "I really had such a vision about being able to come back to this community," Hunter told me. "I said, How perfect is this? Because you've got a landmass, which is what so many other groups"—the Black Panthers, lesbian separatists, certain passionate vegetarians—"wanted: a place to really infuse with whatever those cultural values were."

But Hunter feels that that kind of idealism has not prevailed. She calls Gumbs a "real exploiter," and says that the procession of cigarette shops on Montauk Highway is the result of unregulated greed. "Nicotine, the most addictive substance that we've got going on—this is what we want to hold up as our sovereign right?" she said. Though she has no objection to the idea of a casino, she feels that the way Gumbs and others have pursued their objective has been unethical. "What I am always focused on is process," she told me. "Are you having full participation of our membership? Do you have accountability and transparency? No."

Every major decision that the Shinnecocks make is put to a vote before the entire tribe. But elections can be compromised. For many years, the annual votes for tribal trustees were public, and, many Shinnecocks told me, there was retribution for the wrong vote and bribery for the right one. "All of this to me is so connected to why things are still so screwy here, and you can have someone get elected like Lance Gumbs," Hunter said. In 1992, Hunter was elected to the Southampton Town Board, and is the only nonwhite person to hold elected office in the town. She has also run for the office of tribal trustee three times, but no woman has ever been elected.

Gumbs believes that he is putting his tribe first, too. He thinks that the profits from the casino should be used to develop infrastructure and improve education; his priority, he told me, is avoiding the creation of a welfare state. "You cannot take vast sums of money and put it in somebody's hands who's never had money and expect them to know what to do with it," he said.

Some tribes pay out casino profits in per capita disbursements, which can be substantial; the Chumash Indians of California, for example, reportedly received $428,969 apiece in 2005. As the prospect of a casino has become increasingly bright on the Shinnecock reservation, an unusual number of people have been contacting the enrollment office. "Everyone is coming out of the woodwork," Winonah Warren, the seventy-one-year-old president of the board of directors at the Shinnecock museum, told me. "Oh, everybody wants to be Shinnecock now."

One night in August, Pastor Mike Smith sat shirtless in denim cut-offs in a sweat lodge in the woods behind a cousin's house. Twenty people, most of whom were drumming and chanting with ferocious abandon, were packed in tight around a pit of red-hot rocks under a frame of branches draped with heavy blankets. Though Pastor Mike, as everyone calls him, is a Christian, he comes to these traditional ceremonies once a month. He does not join in the chanting or the drumming, just the sweating and, silently, the praying. He prays that he will stay sober, as he has for the past twenty-four years. He prays that the young people in his tribe will resist the drugs being sold down at Cuffee's Beach. And he prays for the men selling the drugs, who, after all, are Shinnecock, too.

Pastor Mike is against gaming. "We're already dealing with alcohol and drugs, and we're dealing with it over pennies," he said, when the ceremony was fini shed. "Can you imagine what would happen with the influx of cash?" Organization and discipline, he believes, are what's missing from his community, not money. "If you look at Mashantucket, if you look at Mohegan, if you look at anyplace that has a casino, the only thing you hear about is the glorification of the wealth," he said. "They don't talk about the social upheaval that comes as a consequence."

Pastor Mike is a traditionalist. When the women of Shinnecock gained the right to vote in tribal elections, in 1992, he was one of only four men to vote against it. Smith, who is sixty-one, is nostalgic for the reservation that he grew up on. He remembers "sleeping out in the woods as kids," and a sense of absolute freedom, safety, and belonging. "Look out there," he said, motioning toward the green expanse in the moonlight. "What more do you need?"

But Gumbs is not alone in thinking that the tribe has more to lose by remaining poor than it does by risking radical transformation. Robin Weeks, who for many years sat with Hunter, Gumbs, and Bess on the Shinnecock Economic Development Committee, has been a strong proponent of gaming. He grew up with his mother, who is blind, and five siblings, in a house on the reservation that had no running water. "We had an old potbelly stove with coal and wood and whatever else we could burn—newspapers, old clothing," he told me. "Sometimes it would get so cold in the house the water would freeze and we'd have to put it on the stove to heat it up so we could wash for school." Weeks was born in 1955. "I tell people, 'You can see all of these things—the pump, the outhouse—in old movies. This is what I grew up in.'"

Weeks is now a senior admissions adviser at Stony Brook University. While completing a graduate degree in education, at Hofstra, he studied abroad, and the experience was transformative: "I got to travel all over Europe, and it just opened up the world to me. I could always see it from a distance in terms of looking across the water at all the millionaires in their mansions—I always saw a glimpse of it, but I was never a part of it. I wanted to bring this back to my community; there's more to life than we saw growing up, than struggle and sadness and violence." Weeks attended public schools in Southampton—as most Shinnecocks have since their one-room schoolhouse closed, in 1951—and he worked as a janitor at lunchtime and after school. "I saw that there was unfairness," he said. "I saw that there was inequality. And, in fact, by the time I was fourteen I got involved in some very negative, destructive things. Looking back now, it seems like a rite of passage: the more you could drink and the more you could fight, the more of a man you were."

Today, the words "rez mob" are scratched into chairs and bathroom stalls at Southampton High School. In 2006, a group of college students who were home for the summer in Southampton were assaulted in one of their families' back yards. One of them told me, "A group of guys, thirty of them from the reservation, walked into the yard and started attacking everyone. They had a problem with some white kid who wasn't even there." Though the attackers wore bandanas over their faces, he recognized one of them as someone he had known since childhood. "The first thing I did was say, 'What's going on, man, what are you doing?' And he just started swinging at me."

In 2007, in the largest coordinated law enforcement effort in the history of Suffolk County, state troopers and DEA agents raided the reservation and arrested fourteen people for possessing guns and selling heroin, marijuana, and cocaine. One of the young men incarcerated after the raid was Awan Gumbs, Lance Gumbs's son, who had been conducting at least part of his business from his father's deli. This past August, a seventeen-month-old baby named Roy Jones was punched to death on the reservation, allegedly by his mother's boyfriend, who explained, "I was trying to make him act like a little boy instead of a little girl."