All the Agents and Saints, Paperback Edition

by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

  3. This isn’t the only issue Mohawks have with Frozen River. Most upsetting seems to be the portrayal of Upham’s character, Lila Littlewolf, who aspires to take back her young child who got swiped away at birth by her mother-in-law for reasons never fully explained. Mohawks say such a scenario is impossible, due to the tribe’s powerful matriarchal structure. Even if a mother couldn’t care for her child (which Lila presumably could), the responsibility would be passed on to one of her female relatives, not to an in-law.

  4. This decision was likely also influenced by the fact that, after years of trying but failing to collect taxes from tribes for cigarette sales, New York State finally won a court ruling in 2011 allowing it to demand tax payments from the wholesalers that supply tribes with name-brand cigarettes. In response, tribes sent the Marlboro Man packing and started promoting their own brands in their stores instead. Lobbyists are now pushing the state to tax Indian brands as well, calling tribal manufacturing of the product a form of tax evasion.

  5. In his 2000 Los Angeles Times review of Ian Frazier’s travelogue On the Rez, Sherman Alexie said, “Many Indians, myself among them, believe that the concept of tribal sovereignty should logically extend to culture and religion.” In a later interview with Atlantic Monthly, he clarified: “Non-Indians should quit writing about us until we’ve established our voice—a completely voluntary moratorium. If non-Indians stop writing about us they’ll have to publish us instead.”

  13

  The War

  BEFORE ENTERING MO’ MONEY PAWNSHOP—A CINDER BLOCK building that stands alongside Lt. Dan’s Camo Gear & Accessories on Route 37 in Akwesasne—you must first contend with the sign taped to its door. BLACKLISTED, it reads in eye-chart E font size, followed by a dozen names. Mine isn’t among them, so I push through the door, causing bells to jingle.

  Pawnshops in the southern borderlands generally have fluorescent lighting that casts a greenish pallor over cases of wedding rings, rows of flat-screen TVs, and enough guitars and trumpets to equip a mariachi brigade. The attendants are invariably young Tejanas with slicked-back ponytails who follow you around, peppering you with questions, while the mustachioed Tejano behind the counter strong-arms clients into hocking heirlooms to pay off their electric bill.

  Mo’ Money feels homey by comparison, with its racks of DVDs and VHS tapes and a smattering of camping gear, lacrosse sticks, and vacuum cleaners. The table and chairs in the back of the room suggest democratic negotiations, while the artwork on the walls attests to cultural pride: dream catchers, beadwork, images of wolves and moons and ravens. The jewelry cases are light on diamonds but flush with turquoise, some stones the size of my fist.

  The manager seems to be in her mid-sixties and has a booming voice and a regal gait. Golden corncobs swing from her earlobes, and three strands of beads adorn her neck. Her eyeliner is thick as kohl. At the moment, she is assisting a middle-aged couple sorting through cocktail rings. The wife tries on a topaz number, and the manager sugars her up. It’s vintage, she purrs, 7.5 carats for just $250 with only 30 percent down. The husband jokes that they’ll have to stop at the casino first.

  “Don’t do that; I went to the Bingo Palace Friday night and they took all my money!” the manager says. “So I tells my friend I had no luck, and you know what he says? Take some antler bone and wrap it up in black silk with a pinch of tobacco and put it in your bra, on the left side next to your heart. Try that and your luck will turn around.”

  “Did it work?”

  “I don’t know, I’ve never done it.”

  Why is it that, of the many cities I’ve lived in—Austin, Seattle, Moscow, Beijing, Brooklyn, Querétaro, Princeton, Iowa City, and Washington, D.C., to name a few—I overhear conversations like this only in the borderlands? When you live a few miles away from an arbitrary line that places you in an entirely different consciousness with its own history and culture and references and rules, your mind must become more receptive to additional imaginative leaps.

  The telephone rings and the manager scoops it up. “Mo’ Money, this is Vera.” After a long pause, she says, “No, no, I have no place to put it,” and hangs up. A woman emerges from the back of the store, asking who it was, and Vera says it was so-and-so wanting to know if she could come hock her fridge so she can play bingo tonight.

  By this point, I have gravitated toward a case of dangly earrings fashioned out of beads and something I cannot identify. Sensing a sales opportunity, Vera strolls over and pulls out a pair for me to examine. “Porcupine quills,” she says, running a fingertip down their tubular length. “I made them myself.”

  I ask where she found the quills and she says all you have to do is sneak up and throw a blanket on one, and he’ll release a few for you.1 They’ve got upward of 30,000 quills apiece, and they grow back quick.2 Doesn’t even hurt them. Otherwise, you wait till you find one dead on the side of the road. “Their spirit then protects you.”

  When I admire her craftsmanship, she says she learned as a child from an elder next door. “She taught me that I needed to do some sort of craft so I would always be able to make something I could sell so I could eat. We would go to near Montreal and sell our crafts. My dad would say, ‘You’re learning all these backward ways.’ But if you live in a world where you don’t respect who you are, your spirit is not happy.”

  She opens another glass cabinet and removes a belt of rawhide strung with hundreds of purple and white beads. “This is a wampum. It’s what Natives used to write their treaties on while the white man used paper, which could be burned in fire.”

  I accept the wampum with both hands, impressed by its heft. The purple beads form the backdrop to four white rectangles engulfing a spade-shaped tree. I’ve seen this design on flags and billboards, bumper stickers and T-shirts, even tattooed around some guy’s bicep, but haven’t yet learned its meaning. Vera explains that it symbolizes the original five nations of the Haudenosaunee, or People of the Longhouse (also known as the Iroquois Confederacy). “This one represents the Mohawks,” she taps a white rectangle, “and this is the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Seneca. The Tuscarora didn’t join us till later.”

  The other woman strolls over and announces she is leaving for the island.

  “Watch yourself on that bridge,” Vera warns, then looks at me. “I hate it when those customs agents ask where I am from. I always say, ‘I am Mohawk, I am from here. Where are you from?’”

  “Do you go to Canada a lot?” I ask.

  “No, but I go to our island,” she says. “And we gotta drive clear to Cornwall for that.”

  Before I can clarify, the man by the cocktail rings intervenes: Does she take MasterCard?

  “Nope,” Vera sings out. “We are cash-only savages.”

  “Oh, okay,” he nods, then continues consulting with his wife.

  I can’t tell if he caught Vera’s joke or not, but I burst into laughter. A grin slides across her face. “So what else can I tell you?” she asks.

  After hearing I’m a writer, she offers her assistance. There is much to learn here, she says, about the border, the bridge, the casino, the war.

  “The war?”

  She looks at me with something like pity. “Oh yeah, every ten years, we buckle down for another little war here. My brother always said that, instead of the barbecue pit, we get out our AK-47s and hunker down for the summer.”

  I vow to do my research, and she promises to introduce me to her friends. “Just come on a day when there’s no bingo, like Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday,” she says. “We used to be razzle-dazzle, but now we’re old ladies, so we play bingo.”

  AFTER A FEW WEEKS AT THE LIBRARY, I see that Vera wasn’t kidding. The Mohawks have been a warring tribe throughout recorded history, not only battling other tribes but fighting in the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812 as well. Anthropologists like William Engelbrecht and Dean Snow depict their penchant for scalping or beheading enemies as a way of capturing their souls a
nd their eating enemies’ hearts as a way to absorb victims’ courage, displaying these trophies on poles that rose high above the village palisade. Yet according to the Seneca scholar John Mohawk, the Mohawks were also the first tribe to follow the great philosopher known as The Peacemaker. Disheartened by all the feuding between the clans of the northern woodlands, The Peacemaker pointed out that whatever life force had created the world surely didn’t intend its inhabitants to abuse one another. He united the Haudenosaunee Confederacy 3 under a constitution called the Great Law of Peace that later influenced many of the world’s participatory democracies, including our own.4

  There was, however, in the late 1980s a brief period when Akwesasne resembled Belfast, complete with street barricades, car chases, firebombs, evacuations in the middle of the night, and—before state troopers finally marched in—bloodshed. While any number of events might have sparked this violence, the rise of high-stakes gambling fully ignited it.

  No one knows for certain when Native Americans started playing games of chance, but early travelogues describe tribes throwing stones and bones until they literally lost their breechcloths (after first squandering away their wives and horses). The Apache warrior Geronimo gambled so relentlessly that the Dutch Reform Church expelled him to try to set an example. Mohawks disagree about their own tribe’s traditional stance on the issue. Some say that gambling was forbidden by a revered prophet named Handsome Lake 200 years ago, while others find its moral justification in teachings that supposedly date back even further.

  North America’s first tribally operated gaming venture opened its doors a few days before Christmas in 1979: Hollywood Seminole Bingo, located between Miami and Fort Lauderdale. At the time, the tribe’s annual operating budget was not even $2 million; three decades later, it was netting $600 million. In 2006, the Seminoles further stunned the business world by dressing in traditional patchwork and capes, scaling a marquee in New York’s Times Square, and announcing they had just acquired Hard Rock International for $965 million, the first tribal purchase of a major international corporation. “Our ancestors sold Manhattan for trinkets,” one Seminole declared. “Today, with the acquisition of the Hard Rock Café, we’re going to buy Manhattan back one hamburger at a time.” Within a single generation, gambling had granted tribal members the right to a free education, free health care, full care for their elders, and fat dividend checks.

  At least 240 tribes in twenty-eight states have since followed suit, opening more than 450 gaming establishments that range from a single slot machine in a trailer to the 9-million-square-foot Foxwoods Resort Casino owned by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation in Connecticut. All told, Indian gaming generates some $28 billion in gross revenue a year—so much, journalists have deemed it the “new buffalo.”

  The U.S. government didn’t start regulating Indian gaming until 1988, or three years after Akwesasne’s tribal council licensed its first bingo parlor. Before Albany and the tribal government could hammer out an agreement under the new federal policy, illegal slot machines started cropping up in the back rooms of truck stops and restaurants across Route 37. Then a Mohawk named Tony Laughing—who had amassed a small fortune in the cigarette trade—opened a full-blown casino called Tony’s Vegas International, regulations be damned. Canadians arrived by the busload to play his extensive selection of slots and tables, and Laughing boasted that he was grossing a million dollars a week.

  Reactions varied wildly. Some Mohawks interpreted Laughing’s antics as a defiance of the Great Law of Peace, which champions working together for the collective good. Others applauded his capitalist streak, arguing that gambling could be the path out of poverty the tribe had long been seeking. Meanwhile, more and more gambling joints opened along Route 37: Burns Casino, Lucky Knight, Silver Dollar, Hart’s Palace, Onkwe Bingo Jack, Golden Nugget, Billy’s Bingo Hall. State troopers and FBI agents began raiding the casinos in the early morning hours and confiscating all the slot machines they could carry, but the owners would replace them by nightfall. During a July 1989 raid, Laughing led his would-be captors on a thirty-minute high-speed chase before his car stalled on the railroad tracks and he darted into the forest. Police found $87,000 in his car, as well as a woman and a thirteen-year-old girl.

  This earned Laughing a twenty-seven-month prison sentence, but his fellow casino owners were not deterred. They simply hired (and armed) a strapping bunch of guards called “the Warrior Society.”5 The tribe thus splintered. Gambling opponents argued that casinos not only would bring drug trafficking, prostitution, corruption, and overall lawlessness to their nation but also would weaken their identity by luring so many outsiders into their community. Pro-gamblers countered that the tribe would grow so prosperous from casinos that they could fund cultural institutions like language schools and museums that would help preserve their identity, plus wean themselves off of federal aid and become more self-sustaining. Both sides deemed their line of thought “traditional” and the truest way to sovereignty.

  Failing to persuade casino owners to close their doors, opponents tried appealing to the gamblers themselves by picketing the casinos, first with signs, then with barricades. Enraged by this threat to their business, the owners—and moreover, the Warriors—responded with shouts and then fists. Clans, neighbors, friends, and families fractured over the issue, as did tribal leadership. When Akwesasne’s print media—the weekly Indian Time and the lauded national journal Akwesasne Notes—sided with gambling opponents, their building burned to the ground.6 The homes of prominent opponents got torched as well, including those of four subchiefs. Then someone set the Lucky Knight Casino aflame.

  Yet the gamblers kept arriving by the busload. By December 1989, Akwesasne’s unregulated casinos were grossing $200,000 a day. The following month, a Mohawk who won considerable fame carrying the Olympic torch during the 1980 Winter Games at Lake Placid burst through the doors of Tony’s Vegas International with his 12-gauge shotgun, ordered everyone to leave, and opened fire, obliterating video display terminals, the cashier window, the floor, some furniture, and the ceiling. Violence escalated as winter thawed to spring. Jaws broke, windows shattered, barns were incinerated, cars got blasted into rubble. Families began to evacuate. Traditional leaders repeatedly sought intervention from Albany, but Governor Mario Cuomo refused, deeming the problem internal. In mid-April, someone firebombed the North American Indian Traveling College, a twenty-year-old cultural institution. Later that week, the U.S. Postal Service stopped delivery to parts of Akwesasne. Then the elementary school shut down. Nearly half of the population had fled by month’s end.

  On the night of April 30, 1990, eleven gambling opponents and two Canadian reporters gathered at the home of David George for a showdown. Crouching behind a fieldstone wall, they exchanged thousands of rounds with the Warriors, who used the nearby home of Diane Lazore as their fort. The arsenal included hand grenades; AK-47, AR-15, and M16 assault rifles; 9mm Uzis; two .50-caliber heavy machine guns; a M72 light antitank weapon; and two speedboats named Pride and Joy. When dawn broke, the bullet-riddled bodies of two Mohawks were discovered: Matthew Pyke (who, at twenty-two, opposed gambling) and Harold Edwards Jr. (a thirty-two-year-old said to have supported it). Hours later, 500 troops descended upon Akwesasne and declared martial law. Doug George-Kanentiio, brother of David and editor of Akwesasne Notes, was arrested for the death of Edwards but got acquitted ten days later and moved off the nation soon after. Several Warriors got arrested too, albeit not for murder. To this day, no one has served time for either killing.

  The independent casinos folded after the standoff. Nine years later, with Albany’s blessing, the tribe opened the Akwesasne Mohawk Casino, which injected some $79 million into the tribal economy between 2003 and 2010 alone. While tribal members do not collect dividend checks from the casino, they do receive stipends for certain expenses like heating fuel during winter. Casino profits also fund community resources like the Akwesasne Boys and Girls Club, the senior center, the volunteer fire
department, and the local ambulance.

  Yet, given all the hate and ache, it’s hard not to wonder: was it worth the battle?

  VERA SUGGESTS MEETING FOR LUNCH at the Bear’s Den. Matriarch Theresa Bear opened the trading post in 1953 with two gas pumps and a souvenir stand, which her son later expanded to three outlets along an eight-mile stretch of highway. The flagship store still feels midcentury. The instant you drive up, white men in matching shirts dash out to fill your tank and wash your windows, while in the restaurant, a middle-aged woman with a name like Arlene escorts you to a booth, plunks down a laminated menu and a pot of hot coffee, and rattles off the pies of the day. Although the Bear’s Den is one of the nicest places to eat at Akwesasne, some Mohawks avoid it because of the owner’s politics. Among other things, he was the first to install slot machines in the eighties.

  Vera is already seated in a booth, stirring a mug of coffee. Several pounds of silver gleam from her neck, wrists, and fingers, but my eye is drawn to the turtle-shaped brooch hovering above her heart. “This represents my clan,” she says, tracing it with a manicured fingernail. She can track her lineage to 1704. Her forefather Silas Rice was playing in a flax field in Westborough, Massachusetts, when a band of Mohawks came barreling through. Having lost so many of their own children to smallpox and war, the tribe needed replacements and so swiped up Silas, his brother, and two of their cousins and brought them to their camp. His cousins eventually ran away, but Silas and his brother lived as Mohawks until the end of their days.7

  Vera’s father fought in World War II and then—like many Mohawk men of his generation—became an ironworker. Every Sunday, he drove 300 miles to a construction site in New York City or Philadelphia and did not return home until late Friday night. Mohawks have helped erect so many national landmarks—the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building—they’ve been deemed “skywalkers” for their purported immunity to acrophobia. Yet Vera says that her dad once told a National Geographic reporter that he pursued high steel not because of a cultural calling; rather, “If I had a college education, I wouldn’t be here.”