Country of Exiles
Page 11
And how was it that Americans could play roulette at such unlikely places as Indian reservations? The answer to this question boils down to one thing: the rehabilitation of Indian sovereignty that has taken place step by step over the past thirty years. During that time, Indian sovereignty has been rebuilt, first politically and culturally, and then, for some tribes, economically.
Before the 1960s the United States—except for a brief time between the world wars—had worked to destroy Indian sovereignty and to compel Indian assimilation into the American mainstream. After the late 1960s, however, the United States worked to promote Indian sovereignty and tribalism and rejected assimilation.30 The government granted the Indian tribes new claims to sovereign status, indeed to such an extent that, as Richard White, an historian of the West, has written, it “ironically made tribes more important than they have ever been in Indian history.”31
In 1968 Congress passed the Indian Civil Rights Act, which forbade the states from exercising civil or criminal jurisdiction on Indian reservations. Two years later, Richard Nixon, in an executive order, announced that “Indian acts and Indian decisions” would, from that time forward, determine all federal policy regarding the Indians.32 This order was followed by a remarkable body of legislation and Supreme Court decisions that, altogether, “served as the vehicle for preserving tribalism in numerous Indian groups.”33 From the seventies to the present, moreover, both federal and state governments recognized the sovereignty of Indian groups. Indeed, it was ironic that at a time when many Americans were beginning to question (and even attack) the very idea of American sovereignty, they seemed sure that Indian nationhood should be reawakened and strengthened.34
This shift in government policy was in part animated by the collapse of Western imperialism and the rise of independent Third World countries; by the American civil rights movement; and by the spiritual needs of many middle-class white Americans who were estranged from established religion and looked to some outside source for spiritual renewal and insight. Indian cultures, after years of being ignored or ridiculed by many people, were now elevated, even idolized by mainstream Americans as the source of cultural vitality (as they still are today).35
In the early 1970s, as part of this rehabilitation of cultural sovereignty, Richard Nixon also signed a law that restored to the Taos Pueblos in New Mexico 50,000 acres in the Carson National Forest, which contained the tribe’s sacred Blue Lake, the “heart of their culture and site of their secret August pilgrimage.”36 Twenty years later, Congress was still midwifing the cultural rebirth of the tribes. In 1989 Congress passed a law to establish an Indian museum in the Washington Mall, a fitting symbol of the Indian renaissance on the national scene. The act also mandated that the Smithsonian Institution survey all its Indian artifacts, with the aim of returning them—“repatriating” them as Native American leaders called it—to those tribes that owned them originally.37 A year later, Congress extended this law to nearly all other museums, stipulating that upon request they must return all “sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony” to the relevant Indian descendants.38
It was in the context of this cultural-political rearmament of the Indian tribes that the federal and state governments also attempted to foster Indian economic sovereignty, so that the Indians—as presidents from Nixon to Clinton hoped—would get off the welfare rolls and “privatize” themselves.39 Since the 1960s, the federal government provided the reservations with financial assistance, including the granting of water and fishing rights, designed to stimulate their economies along traditional lines.40 But the biggest boon by far to many reservations turned out to be gambling, which Washington facilitated through the passage of the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), a radical act ushered through Congress by Representative Stewart Udall and acclaimed by Ronald Reagan, who, perhaps more than any other president, wanted to terminate Indian programs (but not the tribes) and launch privatization.41
The IGRA allowed any Indian tribe that could prove itself to be a tribe the right to operate tax-free on their own any form of gambling going on in its state. It also stated that any tribe that wished to conduct casino-type gambling had first to request negotiations for compacts with their respective states and, second, they had the right to sue those states in federal district court, if the states refused to negotiate (this right, however, the Supreme Court withdrew in 1996).
Given the current of revitalization set loose to promote Indian sovereignty, coupled with the existence of chronic Indian poverty and the experience many tribes already had in conducting low-stakes gambling since the 1970s (mainly bingo), the law seemed almost inevitable. But it had results that no one could have foreseen. Without consenting referenda or input of any kind from those local non-Indians who would have been affected the most by it, this federal law brought casino gambling to states that had never before had such activity. It unified American tribes (or at least their enriched elites) into one cohesive unit in a way that no other event or law had ever done, complete with Washington lobbyists, organizations, and magazines. It transformed some tiny tribes into little Kuwaits, governed by their own rules but able to shape the world around them.42 To put it another way, this law—along with the whole effort to reempower Indian sovereignty—helped remake the American political landscape by adding yet another semisovereign entity to a growing community of such entities. Like the country’s giant semi-sovereign port authorities (the ports of Long Beach, Los Angeles, Elizabeth, and so forth), and like its equally giant semi-sovereign research universities (discussed in the next chapter), these Indian casino empires belonged to a nearly autonomous and unaccountable institutional world, unique to this fluid, global age.
Perhaps equally as striking, the quest for Indian sovereignty brought to life a breed of non-Indian developers who cared nothing about Indians but saw in their supposedly nowhere homelands the perfect sites to house slot machines and crap tables. They included Lyle Berman of Minnesota whose Grand Casinos Corporation built, opened, and managed the profitable Mille Lacs and Hinckley casinos for the Chippewa Indians of Minnesota; also Solomon Kerzner, CEO of Sun International Hotels and a resourceful developer who, in 1998, owned more than thirty casinos in Europe, Africa, America, and the Bahamas.43
A native South African, Kerzner started his gambling empire in his own country during the heyday of apartheid, taking full advantage of the government’s system of homelands. Kerzner focused on the homelands because their laws allowed gambling, while the rest of South Africa banned it. Moreover, the homelands were ideal places for casinos because they were not the products of actual black African history but the inventions of the white-controlled government bent on finding a way to segregate blacks from white society (except as reserves of cheap labor). In a way that eerily mirrored the resurgence of tribal sovereignty in America, the South African government urged the blacks to “return” to these “homelands” where they might reclaim their “tribal” pasts and cultures. It set up eight homelands (formed from hundreds of native reserves), each with its own constitution, its own legislature and cabinet, and its own system of education to transmit tribal culture. The desire, of course, was not to restore sovereignty (as in the American case) but to destroy it, and to ensure that the strategy worked, the government (especially during the 1980s) herded millions of blacks into the homelands, many of whom had long forgotten their tribal histories.44 The outcome was not only worse poverty for blacks but the formation of corrupt tribal elites answerable to Pretoria and willing to enter into lucrative compacts with such gambling entrepreneurs as Solomon Kerzner.45
Kerzner drew up compacts with several tribes, granting him exclusive gambling rights, most notably in Bophuthatswana, just outside Johannesburg, where he built Sun City, the casino-hotel that billed such performers as Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli. In 1985 he was alleged to have bribed officials in the Transkei homeland, demanding similar exclusive rights to run a hotel-casino resort (the Wild Coast Sun) in Umtata, the Transkei capital, wi
thin reach of rich international tourists. In 1990 the attorney general of the Transkei, Christo Nel, charged Kerzner with criminal fraud, bribery, and corruption, and giving false witness before an investigative commission. Nevertheless, Kerzner was never convicted of any crime.46
Kerzner’s South African casinos flourished until the early 1990s when anti-apartheid forces took over the government, dissolving the tribal homelands. In 1994, moreover, the South African government required that Sun International reduce the number of its casinos from seventeen to nine.47 Kerzner shifted gears. He turned to America, where another system of homelands existed, many conjured up out of thin air by the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. He set his sights, in particular, on the Mohegan tribe in Uncasville, Connecticut. Until the 1980s, this tribe had been defunct, having long ago (in 1861) voluntarily asked the state to break up the reservation by selling individual parcels of land to tribal members, thereby converting the Indians into American citizens and residents of Uncasville.48 But the tribe—or the rump that still remained—resurfaced after Congress passed the 1988 law and, in 1994, with help from lawyers paid for by Kerzner, successfully got recognition from the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a legitimate tribe. Soon thereafter the Mohegans signed a deal with a developer, Trading Cove Associates (50 percent owned by Kerzner’s Sun International), which developed and managed the casino and got 40 percent of all the profits. Kerzner’s money hired the builders, the designers, the fantasists. The place was called Mohegan Sun. By the late nineties, it was the third-biggest casino in the country, with nearly 3,000 slot machines, hundreds of table games, a parking lot for nearly 7,500 cars, and a four-lane highway built for the tribe that allowed direct access from Interstate 395. The casino included twenty bars and restaurants and a big entertainment complex for children.49
The success of Mohegan Sun fed Kerzner’s ambitions to become the preeminent casino player on the East Coast. In 1997 the New Jersey Gaming Commission approved his application for a license to operate the Resorts International Hotel in Atlantic City, which he had purchased earlier from entertainer Merv Griffin. No one on the New Jersey Commission seemed upset by his behavior in South Africa. One commissioner shook his hand after the proceedings and said, “Thanks again for investing in Atlantic City.” Kerzner himself observed that “this allows us to expand even faster.”50
TRAVEL AND TOURISM
Resourceful men like Kerzner and Costner, then, along with the reassertion of Indian sovereignty, and, above all, the reliance of Americans on services for employment and income, have given new status to the tourism/gambling industry. And they have so changed the dimension and nature of that industry as to make it into a threat to the sense of place.
Years ago, historian Daniel Boorstin in his book The Image discussed the difference between travel and tourism. Travel, he said, was an activity that almost compelled people to face the places they visited. People traveled on their own terms, followed their own passions and quirks, and accepted whatever distress came their way as the price paid for the pleasure gained. Modern tourism, on the other hand, insulated people from experiencing and knowing the world; through an elaborate set of protections (from arranged tours to air conditioning), it transformed travelers into passive consumers of painless adventure.51
This distinction has remained a sound one. At its best, tourism (especially when it approaches travel) can open people up to the unexpected and unknown. At its worst, however, it diminishes place, or the sense of place, by making it nearly risk-free to get where you want to go and—as part of the package—to feel entirely safe there (usually in chain hotels or motels of unrelieved sameness). Previously, when it was harder to get somewhere, the reward was usually more satisfying, the goal more desirable. In our time, however, “travel has become so easy that even the sedentary can reach just about any destination,” to quote Lee Lescaze, writing in the Wall Street Journal.52
Worst of all, the “marketing of place” (as specialists in tourism call it), the selling of “brand U.S.A.,” has trivialized countries and places. Disney president Judson Green said at the 1995 White House Conference on Travel and Tourism, that cities with “historic culture” will lose out unless they “sell this culture.” “Dayton, Ohio,” Green observed, “is blessed with the Lincoln-Douglas debates,” but “the town is doing nothing to market those debates.” But what will happen, Green asked, to the Lincoln-Douglas debates if the town decides to “sell” them aggressively? What will happen, indeed? Will Dayton cease to remember because it will not or cannot market its past? Or, if Dayton does choose to sell Lincoln-Douglas, what parts of the debates will it sell to mass markets? Will there be the usual trade-off between selling and understanding?
For all this, however, tourism, especially when respectfully and cautiously pursued, has often had a benign effect, even to the point of saving some endangered wilderness (e.g., Yellowstone Park) from the ashbin of history.53 In some parts of the country, as well as elsewhere in the world, it has become a means for saving much unused farmland (as rural heritage) which would otherwise be sold off to developers.54 However, when seen in relation to gambling, or when combined with gambling, the benign potential of tourism vanishes, as in the case of Las Vegas.
LAS VEGAS BLIGHT
For the past twenty years, most permanent well-off residents of Las Vegas have either taken refuge in self-contained residential subdivisions or fled to the sunny paradise of nearby Henderson. Most have made a trade-off, having come to Las Vegas to escape taxes elsewhere (the Nevada constitution bans income and corporate taxes) and with full knowledge that casino money ruled everything (the taxes from which also paid for whatever public services there were). Nevertheless, most residents have tried to act and live as if the city did not exist, although ironically they have never been able visually to escape the casinos (because the Las Vegas Strip can be seen from virtually any point on the compass).55 The concrete reasons for this denial were no mysteries: Las Vegas is, for a city its size, among the most crime-ridden in America, its urban core suffering from terminal neglect, a condition fostered by the selfishness of Las Vegans who detest taxation.56
But Las Vegans, the rich as well as the poor who lived mostly in dilapidated North Las Vegas, have felt little attraction to the city proper for other reasons. Las Vegas is an American city in extremis, “the heart of the American dream,” as Hunter Thompson described it, a metropolis where money stands out in all its naked glory.57 It is a city that has pushed the placeless side of American life to its limits. For one thing, Las Vegas flouts nature. Without the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead—both only twenty miles away, both in their own rights interventions to defeat nature—it would vanish in a dry land that would soon overtake it.58
This sense of coming out of nowhere forms the backdrop for the other features of Las Vegas that make it inhospitable to people seeking stable communities: Las Vegas not only flouts nature, it flouts place and the past. Las Vegas flouts place because it serves only people on the move—transients, tourists. It is truly a cosmopolitan city, which people visit from all over the world, enticed in part by its nonjudgmental openness, which their own transiency facilitates and which the casinos, for obvious reasons, encourage.
Las Vegas also flouts the past (place). Here facades have more meaning than reality itself, the past existing as myth-fragments wrenched out of context—from imperial Rome and ancient Egypt to medieval Europe and New York City circa 1960. Here the casinos enlist the past to arouse the feeling of belonging to another world, of being swept up by some jet stream of fantasy. Gambling requires the freeing of impulse, and that freeing is sustained by a culture that says “Give in, don’t hold back, let go.”
In some ways, such a world is perfect for immigrants, because it says that no pasts matter and that anyone can be an American. From another viewpoint, it endangers immigrants (thousands of whom work in the Las Vegas casinos and hotels) or all those who want to build new bonds. How can people connect with a world that has no past, or that treats the past a
s fantasy and entertainment?
Las Vegas is a supremely democratic city, made so by money. The casinos exclude no one; the whole spectrum of human life walks Las Vegas Boulevard—the elderly, children, the crippled, all races, immigrants and tourists from every country, anyone who can pay the airfare to get into the city. That is why a replica of the Statue of Liberty, however absurd it may seem on first sight, belongs in this place. Las Vegas even contains a new Ellis Island Casino! Yet, at the same time, this democracy has nothing to do with political citizenship: it is a people’s (a child’s) playground, every bauble the contrivance of sharp managerial minds.
At the gold-lined Mirage, the city’s most luxurious casino-hotel, Steve Wynn, the CEO, in 1997, put in an exclusive room called “the Salon Privé” for high rollers, precursor to his Gallery of Art in the Bellagio. Decorated with the finest European art (real Picassos, Monets, Manets, Matisses, Renoirs, Modiglianis) and with elegant dining spaces and golden toilet seats, it was accessible only to the richest gamblers.59 Rooms like this one have been built in America for at least one hundred years, and all have captured the essence of capitalist culture—the hierarchy of wealth at the heart of the democracy of desire. Anyone might enter them so long as they paid. With enough money in America anyone could be king or queen (or senator); but for the losers, such rooms were locked shut, and Las Vegas reverted to the desert it really was.
A new generation of casino managers armed with MBAs from Harvard have tried, since the 1980s, to make Las Vegas family-friendly, an effort symbolized in Wynn’s Mirage by an aquarium full of “endangered dolphins,” as well as by a zoo full of “endangered cats.”60 In May of 1997 a little girl, left alone by her gambling father to play in the video arcade of one of the Las Vegas casinos, was raped and murdered at 3 A.M. in the casino’s lavatory. Three months later, Steve Wynn opened his hotel to a conference of the nation’s governors: the subject was—of all things—the care and development of children. Wynn’s apostles were there, including Governor Christine Todd Whitman; but no mention was made of the child’s death, overshadowed as her murder was by the attempt to link the casinos—Las Vegas—to a noble, moral cause.