Copyright by John Joseph Bodinger de Uriarte 2003 The Dissertation Committee for John Joseph Bodinger de Uriarte Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation The Casino and the Museum: Imagining the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation in Representational Space Committee: Pauline Turner Strong, Supervisor Kathleen Stewart James Brow Doug Foley Dennis Darling Kevin McBride The Casino and the Museum: Imagining the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation in Representational Space by John Joseph Bodinger de Uriarte, M.A., B.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2003 Dedication To my family--especially Anne, Jacob, and Leah. Thank you for your love, faith, and patience. Acknowledgements I owe thanks to many people for the successful completion of this dissertation. First and foremost, I would like to thank Design Division, Inc., the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, and the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation for allowing me to work on the museum project. Lauri Halderman and Mike Hanke of DDI were very supportive of my work, and I owe particular thanks to Lauri for her frankness, sense of humor, warm friendship, and help. At the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, I am particularly grateful to Steve Dennin for offering me work, to Kevin McBride for moral support and the free exchange of ideas about the museum and the various archaeological and ethnohistorical projects on the reservation, to David Holahan for his friendship and his inability to be annoyed by rafts of questions, and to Jack Campisi for providing my first introduction to the museum project. I thank the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation for approving the grant-proposal writing contracts that originally made it possible for me to do my fieldwork. Photographer David Neel has been extremely generous and helpful in answering questions and supplying images for use in this dissertation. I am very v glad to have had the opportunity to speak and correspond with him and I thank him for his generosity with his images and the time he spent with me by mail. I am grateful to my dissertation advisor, Pauline Turner Strong, for her support, encouragement, understanding, and her tireless efforts to challenge my thinking and writing. I would also like to thank Katie Stewart for her encouragement and ideas, James Brow for being my introduction to the department and for his consistent and considered support, and Doug Foley for his thinking and his comments. Dennis Darling allowed me to have access to resources in the photojournalism department throughout my coursework, and has helped me to continue thinking and seeing photographs. Thanks also to Robert Fernea for a significant conversation we had about photography during my first semester in graduate school. The University of Texas has been a source of financial support throughout my academic career and I especially appreciate the Graduate Opportunity Fellowship Program, the College of Liberal Arts, the Department of Anthropology, the Center for Mexican American Studies, and the Thematic Fellowship Program for funds and positions made available to me. My colleagues have been a source of encouragement, support, and good humor throughout my career at the University, and I especially thank Guha Shankar and Melissa Biggs for their friendship, sharp wit, helpful criticism, and generosity. I could not have done it without you. My friends outside of academia have been a consistent source of joy, distraction, and support without which my process would not have been vi possible--special thanks to Howard Lutz, Ken Kobayashi, Wende West, Mel Martin, Claire Van Ens, Brian Sprouse, James and Dulce Wechsler, Katherine Spilde, and Stuart Schwartz. Finally, but by no means least, I thank my mother and my sister for their examples, love, and support; my extended family for their belief, patience, and love; and Anne, Jacob, and Leah for making it worthwhile. vii The Casino and the Museum: Imagining the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation in Representational Space Publication No._____________ John Joseph Bodinger de Uriarte, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2003 Supervisor: Pauline Turner Strong This dissertation investigates the articulation of cultural identity in two specific spaces of representation in Mashantucket, Connecticut. The Mashantucket Pequots, a federally recognized Indian tribal nation, own and operate Foxwoods, the largest and most profitable casino in the Western Hemisphere. My research focuses on the two main structures and industries at the Mashantucket Reservation: the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center (MPMRC) and the Foxwoods casino. I explore these enterprises as selfrepresentational industries that use display; photographs; narratives of the exotic, the essential, and the real; geographic location; and architectural design to powerfully present and articulate representations of Native American and Mashantucket Pequot identities. viii My academic and professional interests and strengths combine anthropology, photography, theories of imagining the nation and the creation of tradition, and issues of representational practice, particularly in museum exhibitions. My research investigates self-representational practices, the formation of viable and vibrant reservation communities, and the presentation of historical narratives that support cultural continuity and renaissance. These practices are experienced most vividly in the public sphere through tribal museums and casinos and the popular press and public relations materials associated with them. These industries also mobilize many of the same strategies, narratives, and artifacts. A close examination of these sites and materials affords a further analytical appreciation of issues surrounding the public politics and poetics of cultural self-representation as well as issues of national and community identity. ix Table of Contents List of Illustrations............................................................................................xiv List of Photographs ............................................................................................xv Introduction .........................................................................................................1 An overview of the following chapters ........................................................9 Chapter 1: Coming to Ground ............................................................................13 Vignette 1: the state of Connecticut ...........................................................13 On the road................................................................................................14 Key background understandings: mapping the site as legislated location ...19 The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and its Implications ...................19 Self-reflection, self-construction................................................................27 Working in Native America, working at Mashantucket..............................31 The vagaries of fieldwork: the subject community as gated community.....36 Yankee Fieldwork: alternate and dominant histories..................................44 Perspectives for analysis: Identity--representational order, adaptive practice............................46 Mashantucket as ethnographic dilemma ....................................................49 The "Indian" as hegemonic locus ..............................................................53 Vignette 2: Indians in the attic ...................................................................59 Authenticating industries ...........................................................................61 Chapter 2: Tribal Renaissance ............................................................................65 A History of the Mashantucket Pequots: death and rebirth.........................65 Of Englishmen and "savage" acts ..............................................................69 x Claim, settlement, and Indian gaming........................................................82 Identity: politics and poetics ......................................................................91 Phenotype: the Mashantucket Pequots and "Black Indians".....................103 Passing the blood test: blood quantum, Indian Law, and authenticity.......106 Domestic (in)dependents .........................................................................107 Casinos as Industry: tribal and pan-tribal opportunities............................108 Identity dialectics ....................................................................................111 The "Invented Indian": A reconsideration................................................113 Chapter 3: Foxwoods Resort Casino--The Wonder of it AllTM.........................119 Vignette 1: Foxwoods, first encounter--The Rainmaker..........................119 The casino as cultural allegory: saturation and separation ........................128 The evolution of the casino: Las Vegas as archetype ...............................129 Foxwoods Resort Casino: from "Gaming in its Natural State"TM to "The Wonder of it All"TM ...............................................................138 Navigating Foxwoods..............................................................................143 Vignette 2: Yankees in the concourse ......................................................145 Captain John...................................................................................148 Abby Wilson, Tavern Keeper..........................................................149 Father Tom .....................................................................................149 From below .............................................................................................158 Foxwoods as authenticating register ........................................................169 Vignette 3: further down the concourse timeline......................................173 The museum in Foxwoods Resort Casino ................................................180 Chapter 4: The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center ................186 At the site................................................................................................187 xi Mashantucket as archaeological site ........................................................188 The Museum: Site of negotiation, space for contemplation ......................190 Mashantucket as exhibition site ...............................................................195 The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation gallery ......................................198 Vignette 1: Symbolic capital, museumization, white gloves.....................198 Big and small ..........................................................................................202 Navigating the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation: Poetics, politics, time, and space ...............................................................................206 Ice, escalators, and time...........................................................................217 The MPMRC and the "Department of the Interior"..................................227 The arrival of "the people" ......................................................................230 Vignette 2: Life in the Pequot Village......................................................234 Life on the reservation.............................................................................249 Vignette 3: Through the looking glass .....................................................254 Where to go and how to get there ............................................................260 Aurality: distracted gazing meets distracted listening...............................268 Chapter 5: A Tribal Portrait..............................................................................272 Overview.................................................................................................272 A Tribal Portrait I....................................................................................275 David Neel: background and foreground .................................................282 A short history of photography ................................................................291 Photographs--what and how they mean ..................................................293 Edward S. Curtis and the American Indian ..............................................295 Curtis and the formation of record ...........................................................306 Photography and the formation of the American Indian Subject ..............310 xii A Benjaminian consideration...................................................................313 What photographs are and how they are mediated ...................................320 Knowledge, normalization, and the theft of souls ....................................322 Photographs--what and how they document ...........................................325 Evocation and Evidence: The photograph as document of memory, sensual experience, and power ........................................................335 A Tribal Portrait II...................................................................................341 Chapter 6: Conclusions--On Evidence and Evocation .....................................359 Appendices ......................................................................................................367 Appendix I: .............................................................................................367 Mashantucket Pequot Photo Project Proposal ..........................................367 Appendix II: 60 minutes--"Wampum Wonderland," 1994 ......................370 Appendix III: 60 minutes--"Wampum Wonderland," 2000.....................382 Appendix IV: The Massacre at Mystic Fort--Final Audio Script.............393 Appendix V: Narrative of the Permanent Exhibit at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, February 1998.....................398 Bibliography ....................................................................................................413 Vita ................................................................................................................437 xiii List of Illustrations Illustration 3.1: Lower and Mezzanine Levels of the Foxwoods Resort Casino. Illustrations from Foxwoods promotional materials......................156 Illustration 3.2: Casino Level of the Foxwoods Resort Casino..........................157 Illustration 3.3: The Mashantucket Pequot logo. Illustration from Foxwoods promotional materials. .................................................................163 Illustration 4.1: Map of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center public spaces. Illustrations from Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center promotional materials. ..................194 Illustration 4.2: Captain John Underhill's portrayal of the attack on the Pequot Fort at Mystic, 1637. Photo from Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center promotional materials..................................196 xiv List of Photographs Photograph 1.1: View of the Grand Pequot Tower, completed in 1998. A portion of the older hotel is at the left. Photo from Foxwoods promotional materials...............................................................15 Photograph 1.2: View of the Grand Pequot Tower including the earlier phases of the Foxwoods Resort Casino. Photo from Foxwoods promotional materials...............................................................16 Photograph 1.3: View of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center from the Foxwoods Resort Casino's Grand Pequot Tower. From the left: the observation tower, the Gathering Space, the administrative offices in the upper level, and then gallery space. The farmstead's fields are at the right end of the building. Photo from MPMRC promotional materials.........24 Photograph 3.1: The Grand Pequot Tower. Photo from Foxwoods promotional materials. ...............................................................................119 Photograph 3.2: The Rainmaker. Photo courtesy New England Design. ...........123 Photograph 3.3: View of the Concourse. The two-story Victorian façade is on the left. To the right, behind the retail displays, are windows looking onto Mashantucket. Photo by Thorney Leiberman. ....145 Photograph 3.4: In the earlier phase of the casino the gaming rooms featured walls of glass that looked out onto the Great Cedar Swamp. Photo from Foxwoods promotional materials. ........................160 xv Photograph 3.5: The bar at the twenty-fourth floor Paragon Restaurant. Photo from Foxwoods promotional materials. ..................................177 Photograph 3.6: The waterfall in the atrium by the main entrance. The casino's museum is down the stairs in the foreground. Photo courtesy New England Design................................................179 Photographs 3.7 and 3.8: Photomural showing an image from the wooded reservation, and including an inset photo of Elizabeth George Plouffe. Photos from Foxwoods promotional materials. .........180 Photograph 3.9: From the casino's museum. The text panel to the right is against a background featuring Captain John Underhill's portrayal of the attack on the Pequot fortified village in 1637. Photo from Foxwoods promotional materials. ........................181 Photograph 4.1: The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center observation tower. Photo by author. .......................................186 Photograph 4.2: Side view of the Gathering Space exterior; the observation tower is in the background. Photo from Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center promotional materials. ............195 Photograph 4.3: Entrance to the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation gallery. Photo by author......................................................................197 Photograph 4.4: The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation Gallery. Photo by author.....................................................................................203 Photograph 4.5: The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation Gallery. Photo by author.....................................................................................206 xvi Photograph 4.6: The "Dream Catcher." Photo by author...................................209 Photograph 4.7: Escalator into the glacial crevasse. Photo by author. ...............217 Photograph 4.8: The bottom of the glacial escalator. Photo by author...............218 Photograph 4.9: Globe from "A World of Ice." Photo from Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center promotional materials..219 Photograph 4.10: The Arrival of the People gallery. Photo by author................221 Photograph 4.11: Scene from the Pequot Village. Photo by author. ..................229 Photograph 4.12: From the caribou hunt diorama. Photo from Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center promotional materials..230 Photograph 4.13: Caribou hunter. Photo by author. ..........................................231 Photograph 4.14: A group of lifecast figures being finished for the MPMRC. Photo from Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center promotional materials. ................................................232 Photograph 4.15: Lifecasts from the four seasons dioramas. Photo by author. ..233 Photograph 4.16: Visitor at one of the computer interactive stations. Photo by author.....................................................................................234 Photograph 4.17: Figures harvesting in the cornfield. Photo by author. ............235 Photograph 4.18: Scene from the Pequot Village. Photo by author. ..................236 Photograph: 4.19: Cut-away wigwam with visitor. Photo by author..................237 Photograph 4.20: Figures working on the palisade. Photo by author. ................239 Photograph 4.21: Pequot Austin George--Union soldier in the Civil War. Photo by author......................................................................251 xvii Photograph 4.22: Pequot Peter George--whaler rendering blubber. Photo by author.....................................................................................251 Photograph 4.23: The Mashpee Meetinghouse. Photomural and photo by author.....................................................................................253 Photograph 4.24: The farmstead in the gallery. Photo by author. ......................254 Photograph 4.25: Farmstead interior. Photo by author. .....................................255 Photograph 4.26: The trailer home in the gallery. Photo by author....................267 Photograph 5.1: The end of Bringing the People Home. Photo by author..........275 Photograph 5.2: The final gallery: "A Tribal Portrait. Photo by author. ............277 Photograph 5.3: The exit at the end of Bringing the People Home. Photo by author.....................................................................................280 Photograph 5.4: A Tribal Portrait. Photo by author...........................................281 Photograph 5.6: Chief Nathan Young--from Our Chiefs and Elders. Photo by David Neel.............................................................................283 Photograph 5.7: Chief Nathan Young--from Our Chiefs and Elders. Photo by David Neel.............................................................................284 Photograph 5.8: Alice R. Kirchner. Photo by David Neel. ................................289 Photograph 5.9: "The Pool ­ Apache." Northwestern University Library, Edward S. Curtis's `The North American Indian': the Photographic Images, 2001. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iencurt.ct01002...........................297 Photograph 5.10, "http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iencurt.cp08001; "Invocation­Sioux,' and.........................................................303 xviii Photograph 5.11, "Prayer to the Mystery" http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iencurt.cp03016..........................303 ;Photograph 5.12, "The Vanishing Race," http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iencurt.cp01001..........................304 Photograph 5.13, "Bear's Belly­Arikara" http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iencurt.cp05003, and ..................305 Photograph 5.14, "Chief Joseph­Nez Perce" http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iencurt.cp03034..........................305 Photograph 5.15, "A Son of the Desert­Navaho" http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iencurt.cp01032, and ..................306 Photograph 5.16, Kalispel Type" http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iencurt.cp07018;.........................306 Photograph 5.17: "Before the White Man Came--Palm Cañon." Northwestern University Library, Edward S. Curtis's `The North American Indian': the Photographic Images, 2001. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iencurt.cp15001..........................316 Photograph 5.18: Photograph 5.19: From A Tribal Portrait. Photo by David Neel.................331 From A Tribal Portrait. Photo by David Neel.................334 Photograph 5.20: Sisters Arline Phelmetta and Eunice Mitchell. Photo by David Neel.............................................................................341 Photograph 5.21: Photograph 5.22: Photograph 5.23: From A Tribal Portrait. Photo by David Neel.................344 From A Tribal Portrait. Photo by David Neel.................345 From A Tribal Portrait. Photo by David Neel.................346 xix Photograph 5.24: Photograph 5.25: From A Tribal Portrait. Photo by David Neel.................347 From A Tribal Portrait. Photo by David Neel.................348 xx Introduction Foxwoods Resort Casino, the main business enterprise of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, is located at Mashantucket near Ledyard, Connecticut. An enormous structure--it is the largest casino in the Western Hemisphere--Foxwoods offers a densely scripted public site where Las Vegas­style narratives mix with those concerned with Native American and Mashantucket Pequot self-representation. The tribal nation is also home to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center (MPMRC), a "state-of-theart," $193-million densely scripted public facility constructed to present the history and contemporary community of the Mashantucket Pequots. The two structures are located almost next to each other on the reservation, but share no common access or parking. There is a shuttle service offered for those casino patrons interested in viewing the museum. This dissertation focuses on the play between the referential "fact" of the Mashantucket Pequots as a federally recognized and identified tribal nation, and the publicly performed "experience" of that identity as represented in displays and historical narratives constructed on the reservation. It sets out to investigate the productive space between reference and performance, and the articulation and strategic use of this space at the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. The following strategies are critical to this project's investigation. As the first strategy, the narrative of this dissertation is joined to a series of photographs taken at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. 1 The photographs are not merely illustrations for the text, but offer their own experience of immersion in the environments at Mashantucket. Neither purely referential nor interpretive, the photographs are used as a method for exploration and for making spatial and formal "sense" of the museum exhibitions and the experience of navigating the museum's galleries and public spaces. My own photographs are joined with a selection supplied by David Neel, the photographer whose work is the focus of the museum's final gallery. The dissertation also uses Edward S. Curtis photographs from the Library of Congress collections, and images from advertising, informational brochures, and public relations materials for Foxwoods and the MPMRC. Photographs offer a critical introduction and insight into the practices at Mashantucket. At once evidential and evocative, photographs offer powerful illustrations of the productive zone between reference and performance. As documents, they also present infinite possibilities for engagement and analysis. In this dissertation, photographs are both method of and focus for investigation. As the second strategy, I couple the observing and visual "reading" perspective of the photographer with the ambulatory perspective of a museum visitor, using my own experiences to serve as a general template of possibility. Future references to "the visitor" as a point of reference or navigation are made with this understanding. What is key to any understanding of the Foxwoods Resort Casino and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, is that they offer parallel and complementary immersive public spaces with representation as a principal product. The casino and (especially) the museum are 2 rich display environments--"physical space[s] in which material elements have been selected and arranged primarily for the purpose of being looked at" (Dorst 1999: 119). The display environments at Mashantucket speak, record, and categorize while simultaneously acting, producing, and institutionalizing. The idea of "looking at" is critical for an exploration of Mashantucket. What unites all of the public representational efforts (and, indeed, what is the source of many of the public challenges) is found in the practice of looking. The public spaces of the museum, and the exhibitions and displays, are constructed for looking at, even as potential spaces for navigation through or participation in. The twin towers (the Grand Pequot Tower of the Foxwoods Resort Casino and the observation tower of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center) speak powerfully to the idea of looking, to scanning the surround and to noticing the size of the host's footprints inscribed thereon. Indeed, the entire structure of a museum is concerned with a narrativized "looking at," where the act of looking is directed by narrative and exhibition design. The museum's closing gallery, with its collection of contemporary portraits of tribal members taken by David Neel, presents one of the more powerful locations for looking in the museum. Photographs are products of a particularly mechanized looking, of a formal apparatus for looking and capturing for the gaze--the portrait subjects in the gallery are arranged so that they "look through" the photographs, back to the imagined audiences of the museum, and the photographs are hung for this imagined audience to traverse by gaze. 3 In the casino, looking is part of a larger order of consumption--the spaces are meant to serve as intensified areas of display but, as in other casinos, the looking is meant to spark engagement. The patron oscillates between a viewing role and a participating role and the lines between casinos as a place to look and a place to be looked at are purposefully blurred. (In many ways, casinos present the ultimate performance space of consumer culture, where the lines between symbolic capital and material capital blur, as does the distinction between audience and actor. Note the casino brochures where the pictures' focus is on other patrons winning jackpots, or enjoying fine dining in one of the glass-walled restaurants off the main concourse.) The third strategy focuses on how the Mashantucket Pequots use the casino and the museum as public theatres to mount narratives that are oppositional (Chambers 1991) to existing hegemonic discourses of Native American identity, and that are expressed in the registers of race, ethnicity, capital success, and New England history. While the representational structures at Mashantucket are too dependent on traditional casino and museum industry design and effect to be considered clearly as counter-hegemonic or resistant, different texts and displays are skillfully and tactically mobilized to counter master narratives of "Indianness" extant in the public imaginary. While examples of these representational tactics can be found throughout the casino and the museum, the final gallery of the museum houses a uniquely powerful display of oppositional discourse. The gallery offers a composite portrait of the tribal nation, an exhibition in which all parts are integral to the whole of the pictured community. It is in this gallery that 4 the Mashantucket Pequots concentrate and present their contemporary public "face," and here where they cement their projection as a coherent tribal nation with a coherent tribal identity, a tribal identity that rebuts challenges made in popular understandings of race and ethnicity. The portrait project is ongoing and the density of the group's representation changes as new photographs are added. The representational project at Mashantucket is realized in a number of different levels; the Mashantucket Pequots create and mobilize selfrepresentations in several key spaces and these spaces offer infinite points for focus and understanding. I move between these different levels as a strategy for understanding poetic expression as a means of self-identification and selfrepresentation. Mashantucket offers a number of immersive environments, and each environment uses a variety of representational methods and technologies. The dissertation navigates and inhabits that tense landscape between the evidential and the experiential at Mashantucket, and pays close attention to the density of the display environments at the casino and the museum. As a form of mimesis, the dissertation offers its own kind of experiential immersion, thickly accreting data and mixing ideology with sensory experience in the focus of the final chapter--the images in the closing gallery. John Berger's concept of a "radial system of presentation" for photographs, which would allow for the photograph-as-artifact to be seen "in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday, and historic" (Berger 1980: 62­63), is critical in understanding the final chapter. 5 This understanding of a radial system for presentation also provides a means for approaching the whole practice of representation at Mashantucket. Each artifact, building, representation, and industry offer a complex set of interconnected influences and understandings. It is here that the casino and the museum share the largest porous boundary of mutual influence. The dissertation traverses three different fields of experience. The first field explores the relationship between the referential meaning of "Indian" and the performative meaning of "Indian." The first distinction refers to the practical struggle for federal recognition, for formal and legal category. The second refers to how Indianness is performed for public consumption in the representational spaces of the reservation. This relationship can be understood in terms of a dialectic between meaning as an assembly of evidential data and meaning as felt through the use of this data as foundational for the experience of sensual immersion. The casino is a particularly rich site for this kind of interplay, but the relationship made obvious there is no less foundational than that in use at the museum. The casino uses the relationship between interior and exterior as a major thematic element; the museum uses this relationship as fundamental to its entire narrative. Exhibitions blur the distinctions between inside and outside, both thematically and materially. Museum exhibitions are also a significant arena of active play between poetic performance and referential significance. As the second field, the dissertation recognizes that the Mashantucket Pequots' skillful use of tactical opposition and appropriation is crucial to 6 understanding the interplay between the evidential and the evocative on the reservation. In many ways, both the casino and the museum--as representational spaces--appropriate industries, technologies, knowledges, and existing archives and genres for re-reading and incorporation. Appropriation can be understood as a type of poetic shift, a way of generating new performative meaning in referential relationships by shifts in position, emphasis, and performance. At Mashantucket, appropriation can be understood as a powerful means of production. The practice of appropriation speaks to the relationship between the hegemonic and the oppositional, between a stabilization of tradition and tactical engagement designed to destabilize traditional practices by taking advantage of fissures or tensions in the discursive structure. "[O]ppositional behavior, particularly discursive, has particular potential for changing states of affairs by changing states of mentalities" (Chambers 1991: 47). The entire project of identity politics and identity representation at Mashantucket inhabits the tense plain between the hegemonic and the oppositional. While this may seem most obvious in the public spaces of museum and casino, it is no less true in the politics of Mashantucket. Enormous fundamental stress is placed on achieved federal recognition--as key to identity confirmation and as providing the opportunity to participate in the gaming industry. Some Native activists argue that federal recognition and state gaming compacts compromise the ideal of Native sovereignty. Others see an opportunity provided, within the existing political and legal structure, for material and political advantage. 7 Finally, Mashantucket offers a unique space to explore the concept of "imagining the nation" (Anderson 1983). Benedict Anderson's original theory on the birth of the modern nation state depended on the advent of print capitalism (particularly newspapers) as a key condition for the formation of a collective (national) imagination. Newspapers provided a national, referential forum for burgeoning ideas of nationhood. If newspapers provided the referential framework for nationality, then the lived experience of being a national citizen was an act of imagination, an in-filling of this framework with a performance of belonging. The museum and the casino offer a prime site for understanding the revitalized formation of a national community, and how public spaces of representation--both formal and vernacular--are mobilized to support the parameters of community as both an inclusive and an exclusive construct. The use of public terrain for cultural representation is a major issue across Native America, and Native self-representation is a powerful vehicle to challenge the effect of centuries of images and understandings of Indianness forged in the public sphere. The recent Indian gaming industry has provided a new source of capital for accelerated and energized participation in this contest. Gaming depends on a large patron base, and physically open (constructed) spaces for gambling and for the immediate concerns that support the gambling "experience"--restaurants, shops, and entertainment. These spaces are new public forums for self-representation in Indian country. Museums, as a more traditional space for the representation of "authentic" historical narratives, have become a key parallel enterprise for many tribal nations. Museums and casinos are both 8 late-twentieth century growth industries in the US and in Native America. Understanding the complex institutional spaces at Mashantucket provides awareness and raises questions that extend beyond the reservation. The industries and relationships at Mashantucket exemplify the ongoing interplay between the politics and poetics of self-representation. AN OVERVIEW OF THE CHAPTERS Chapter 1, "Coming to Ground," contextualizes the research project of the dissertation in time and space, and provides reflexive information about the anthropologist and the field site experience. It establishes the use of ethnohistorical research for past and future projects, and opens discussions on Indianness, museum practice, and Indian gaming. Chapter 2, "Tribal Renaissance" explores the re-population of the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation community, including early industry, and means for authenticating tribal membership. It also investigates the processes of federal recognition and the different strategies and tactics used by the Mashantucket Pequots in establishing and mobilizing a tribal identity. Finally, this chapter investigates popular discourses that contest Mashantucket Pequot identity and authenticity in terms of race, ethnicity, and business acumen--the ability of Indians to participate in casino gaming. Chapter 3, "Foxwoods Resort Casino--The Wonder of it AllTM," introduces and analyzes the casino as a space of representation. This section 9 discusses the representational strategies in use at the casino, and examines design elements that emphasize the natural and local. This chapter discusses different narratives of "Indianness" mobilized in the trade and popular presses during the construction of Foxwoods. It also introduces the history of thematics in casino design, using Las Vegas as the crucible example. The Rainmaker statue and fountain--one of the best-recognized images from the casino--provides an entry from Las Vegas thematics to the Foxwoods Resort Casino. It borrows from established representational narratives and participates in an ongoing sampling of the popular imaginary concerning Indianness in the United States. This section also explores the casino as a site for nostalgic desire (Stewart 1993), and as a confirming, simulacric structure (Baudrillard 1994). Chapter 4, "Mashantucket Museum and Research Center," performs close readings of key exhibitions, exhibition strategies, gallery and building design, location, and the overarching narrative of the museum. It also explores the overall strategy of the museum and research center as a structure sited on and involved in the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation, and connected to an essentialized and naturalized historical presence. The chapter investigates the context of the interaction between the display environment and the display object--both its localized setting and the narratives of use, ownership, and placement that intersect through it. The poetics of the museum at Mashantucket support and participate in a number of ongoing dialogues, not the least of which centers on and rises from a 10 growing national presence of Native museums created and operated by Native peoples. The MPMRC straddles the roles of national, anthropological, and natural history museums as well as striving to be part of a regional community of historic sites organized and run for the lucrative tourist market. Chapter 5, "A Tribal Portrait," offers a microanalysis of certain representational strategies and methods, focusing particularly on photography and its role as an integral part of the history of constructing and representing Indianness. This chapter explores the problematics of photographs of American Indians and how these issues are addressed at the MPMRC. In the museum this is most clearly experienced in the final gallery, "A Tribal Portrait." Here, contemporary portraits of Mashantucket Pequot Tribal members, shot by Kwagiutl1 photographer David Neel, offer a kind of personal introduction to the Mashantucket community. Neel poses his work as a counter-effort to the legacy and work of Edward S. Curtis, and as an affirmation of contemporary Indianness. These large-format images embody a unique moment in representations of "Indianness" and offer a key site for exploring the use of photography in the museum. The grouped photos also offer one of the museum's most powerful statements about Mashantucket Pequot community, racial, and tribal identity. There are a number of elements that run through the body of Neel's work as a whole and that can be discussed through a close reading of individual photographs, as a way to understand their structure and strategies. For the purposes of this dissertation, I will choose two Neel photographs from an earlier 1 My spelling of Kwagiutl follows Neel's own. 11 project (photographs 5.6 and 5.7, from Our Chiefs and Elders), and two from "A Tribal Portrait" (photographs 5.8, 5.18) as points for close analytical focus. Close readings can provide a wealth of specific information and representational hypotheses, but such readings also raise the danger of understanding the photographs as a kind of image-by-image visual punctuation, rather than as a dynamic composite narrative. To truly appreciate the force of the exhibition, the photographs have to be apprehended as a whole--"A Tribal Portrait" is a multiple project that uses photographs of individual members to make a corporate portrait of the community. Read separately, for example, the photographs would not yield the clear effort made to make a statement about Mashantucket Pequot racial cultural identity. The force of such a statement is only revealed as one "reads" the entire gallery of work, looking at the individual features, environment, and objects included in the array of images. To this end, a small number of portraits from the gallery are presented without exegesis, in an attempt to mimic a fragment of the overall impact of the exhibition. 12 Chapter 1: Coming to Ground VIGNETTE 1: THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT To the non-native, there is something strange about Connecticut. Part of it is the feeling that one not indigenous to New England experiences upon discovering wide rolling farmlands, deep forests, and hours of highway travel along seemingly undeveloped or lightly developed areas. With New England as one leading edge for the European invasion and settlement of America, it is startling to see that there are still wide-open areas and that the northeast is not all part of the Boston-to-Washington urban corridor. In Connecticut the lessdeveloped areas are relatively close to the major cities. On leaving Hartford or New Haven, you can soon find yourself winding along small, two-lane highways bordered by dry stonewalls, farmland, second-growth forests, riding academies, and outcroppings of blasted stone ledge. Connecticut currently boasts "richest state" status,2 with the highest percapita income in the United States. But much of the riches that find their home in Connecticut find their origins elsewhere; the richest part of the state is within easy commuting distance to New York City. Connecticut fell on increasingly hard times through the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries and shifted from a 2Newman, Anne, "Connecticut Fights to Halt Worst Rate of Job Losses in US," Wall Street Journal, Feb. 10, 1993, p. A2. In 1992, the state's gross domestic product had dropped almost 1.4 per cent, the steepest decline for any state in the country. In 1993, Connecticut measured the highest rate of job losses in the nation. 13 shipbuilding and industrial mill-town center as its major industries were compromised or shut down entirely. Cheaper labor and the increasing role of foreign-based manufacture cut the heart out of the state's industrial base. While I was in college in the late 1970s, a trip from the mid-Hudson Valley to Boston involved driving on highways marked with Connecticut Governor Ella Grasso's warning to motorists to use the state's highways at their own risk. There simply wasn't enough money in the state budget to keep the roads in good repair (or to afford potentially expensive litigation). Increasing unemployment during the 1970s and 1980s was capped by large-scale lay-offs in the submarine and ship industries of New London, which brought Connecticut to its economic knees by 1993. The state, often seen as a nearby scenic getaway for the metropolitans of Gotham, became more and more frayed about the edges. Recent expansions in software, pharmaceutical, and tourist-related businesses have given Connecticut's economy a healthy and muchneeded boost. But the road to economic recovery has been long. ON THE ROAD Route 2 runs from Hartford to Norwich and traces a path through wooded rolling valleys, running alongside working farms as well as the stables and riding academies of the well to do. From Norwich one drops south on I-395. The highway is now marked with an occasional brown highway sign, signifying the approaching exits for the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan Reservations. The route to Mashantucket passes the off ramp for the Mohegan Sun Casino and cuts 14 above the towns of Mohegan and Uncasville. It is a pleasant drive on a small, two-lane road with rivers, marshlands, and gently rolling hills and woods. Stoplights, followed by a millpond in front of an abandoned brick-built factory. Then, as one tops a low incline, the Grand Pequot Tower rises from the woods: 25 gleaming stories of tinted glass and concrete topped with different sections of bright turquoise roof.3 Photograph 1.1: View of the Grand Pequot Tower, completed in 1998. A portion of the older hotel is at the left. Photo from Foxwoods promotional materials. Set in the Connecticut woodlands, it is an enormous structure. Adjacent, lower rooflines are marked by a series of white dish antennae aligned like phototropic blossoms, facing invisible satellites and linking betting rooms with 3 This is the reservation's most-recent expansion to its casino. Completed in early 1998, it offers 800 additional guestrooms and suites, plus gaming, conference, and dining areas. The second hotel at Foxwoods, the Great Cedar Hotel, has 312 rooms, spa and salon, plus meeting and dining space. The original hotel at Mashantucket, the Two Trees Inn, has 280 rooms, a restaurant and bar, and a courtesy shuttle. The Grand Pequot Tower is described as "elegant" on the Foxwoods homepage, the Two Trees as "quaint." 15 simulcast sports events from across the country and around the world. At the edge of the highway, a large multi-colored and lighted sign marks the entrance to the Foxwoods Resort Casino, the main industry of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. Photograph 1.2: View of the Grand Pequot Tower including the earlier phases of the Foxwoods Resort Casino. Photo from Foxwoods promotional materials. My dissertation investigates the articulation of cultural identity in two specific spaces of representation in Mashantucket, Connecticut, playing close attention to the field between reference and performance. The Mashantucket Pequots, a federally recognized Indian tribal nation, own and operate the Foxwoods Resort Casino, the largest and most profitable casino in the Western Hemisphere. The dissertation focuses on the two main structures and industries at the Mashantucket Reservation: the Foxwoods Resort Casino and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center (MPMRC). I explore these enterprises, in part, as self-representational and authenticating industries that use 16 display; photographs; narratives of the exotic, the essential, and the real; geographic location; and architectural design to present and articulate representations of Native American and Mashantucket Pequot identities. Key to my exploration and understanding is the sensual experience that the casino and the museum and research center offer. Or, rather, the productive mix of the sensual and the material, the evocative and the evidential. Both of the structures on the reservation offer immersive environments designed to attract and appeal to an extensive public audience. The dissertation explores the ways in which the poetics of museum spaces and spectacular public displays--and historical and contemporary discourses surrounding Native American cultural practices and economic pursuits--contribute to the contested construction and emergence of an "authentic" "Indian" subject. Academic and professional perspectives combined in this dissertation include anthropology, photography, theories of imagining the nation and the creation of tradition, and issues of representational practice, particularly in museum exhibitions. The field research includes work with the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. It is also informed by curatorial experience at the nearby Connecticut River Museum, which provides a contrasting example of traditionally dominant local history. The dissertation contributes to scholarship on the investigation of selfrepresentational practices, the formation of viable and vibrant reservation communities, and the presentation of historical narratives that support cultural 17 continuity and renaissance. In Native America, these self-representational practices are experienced most vividly in the public sphere through tribal museums and casinos, public relations materials associated with them, and articles in the popular press. Tribal museums and casinos also mobilize many of the same strategies, narratives, and artifacts. A close examination of these sites and materials in one tribal context affords a further analytical appreciation of issues surrounding the public politics and poetics of cultural self-representation as well as issues of national and community identity. In the specific context of the MPMRC and Foxwoods Resort Casino, this dissertation will attempt to clarify the following issues: (1) How do the museum, the casino, and other activities at Mashantucket powerfully present and articulate representations of Native American and Mashantucket Pequot identities, and what elements of the past do the Mashantucket Pequots creatively appropriate and transform in this ongoing project? (2) How is this identity differentially utilized (or not) in spaces traditionally associated with historical and factual representation, as in the museum and research center? And how are these representations integral to cultural revitalization? (3) How is space, form, and content in these two different structures--the museum and the casino--constituted and marked as a reflection of Indian identity and aesthetics? (4) How do the museum and the casino skillfully combine documentary (ethnographic, archaeological, ethnohistorical, and photographic) evidence with exhibition and entertainment designs geared to providing a visceral or sensory experience in a public display environment? (5) In what ways are Mashantucket 18 Pequot practices skillful oppositional maneuvers within a hegemonic notion of the "Indian" or "Indianness," and in what ways do these practices directly confront and actively resist such notions? KEY BACKGROUND UNDERSTANDINGS: MAPPING THE SITE AS LEGISLATED LOCATION The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and its Implications The last few decades have seen the renaissance of several Native American communities in the US that have managed to revitalize marginal or depressed reservation economies and social infrastructures. They have done so by mounting successful legal challenges resulting in the return of reservation lands to Indian nations, and the repatriation of ceremonial objects and burial remains from national museums to their native communities. Indian peoples have agitated for and won federal and state guarantees for the control of fishing and hunting rights on their ancestral lands, and have also tapped into the lucrative consumer market for Indian art and images. The operation of high-stakes bingo concerns on reservations, following the decision of Seminole Tribe of Florida v Butterworth in 1983, opened up new and potentially lucrative industries for Native Americans. The California v Cabazon Band of Mission Indians decision in 19874 effectively expanded the possible scope of gaming offered by federally recognized tribal 4 Cabazon established that once a state has legalized any form of gambling, Indian tribes within that state can offer the same game on trust land without any state interference or restriction. What IGRA served to do was create rules about how to go about offering those games and making compacts with the states. 19 nations. With the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) on October 17, 1988, casino-style gambling became the latest and most profitable economic enterprise on many Indian reservations. As defined under its declaration of policy the purpose of the act is: (1) to provide a statutory basis for the operation of gaming by Indian tribes as a means of promoting tribal economic development, self-sufficiency, and strong tribal governments; (2) to provide a statutory basis for the regulation of gaming by an Indian tribe adequate to shield it from organized crime and other corrupting influences, to ensure that the Indian tribe is the primary beneficiary of the gaming operation, and to assure that gaming is conducted fairly and honestly by both the operator and players, and (3) to declare that the establishment of independent Federal regulatory authority for gaming on Indian lands, and the establishment of a National Indian Gaming Commission, are necessary to meet congressional concerns regarding gaming and to protect such gaming as a means of generating tribal revenue. [Public Law 100-497: 7­9] The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed, in large part, to provide avenues of economic stimulus and development for many Indian nations without adequate resources to support other industries. The effects of forced removal, colonization, dispossession, and marginalization have left the overwhelming majority of Indian reservation communities with a significant lack of resources and economic control. The virtual absence of vibrant economies on reservations, and dependence on federal aid programs, has led to Native Americans being among the poorest people in the United States. When IGRA was passed, the 350 recognized reservation tribes in the United States were living in conditions of 20 harsh poverty and despair, with an alcoholism rate 663% greater than the general population, a suicide rate 95% higher, and an unemployment rate twice the national average. Indians had the lowest per capita income of any population group in the US, the lowest level of educational attainment, and the highest rates of malnutrition, plague disease, death by exposure, and infant mortality (La Duke 1984, "Federal Indian Identification Policy: A Usurpation of Indigenous Sovereignty in North America," in M. Jaimes 1996: 128).5 The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was seen by both Congress and many Native Americans as opening possibilities for new avenues of economic development, with a hope for a reduced need for federal aid and an increased ability for self-sufficiency. This self-sufficiency was not without its price. The Act was drafted and passed during the Reagan Administration and promoted entrepreneurship while reducing federal support for Indian people.6 IGRA was also a reaction to the gains made by both the Seminole and the Cabazon cases. Indian gaming, as an industry, was a growing concern and the issue of regulation was increasing in importance. Rather than having Indian gaming legislation consist of the outcomes of various court cases, the administration decided to create an overarching act of legislation. As part of this legislation, three classes of regulated gaming were created: 5 From a presentation for International Women's Week University of Colorado at Boulder, March 13, 1984. 6 Reagan Indian policy has been referred to as "termination by accountants." See C. Patrick Morris, "Termination by Accountants: The Reagan Indian Policy," in Native Americans and Public Policy, Fremont J. Lyden and Lyman H. Lagters, eds. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992). 21 Class I­social games solely for prizes of minimal value or traditional forms of Indian gaming as part of tribal ceremonies or celebrations; Class II­bingo and related games, including pulltabs, lotto, punch boards, tip jars, instant bingo and some card games, excluding house banking games such as blackjack and baccarat; and Class III­all forms of gaming that are not Class I or Class II, including slot machines and blackjack. [Public Law 100-497: 11] The efforts over the Indian gaming industry provide an interesting parallel to and possible consequence of nineteenth-century efforts to bring "the Indian" into what Merrill E. Gates, president of Amherst College and the Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian in 1896, called the "intelligent selfishness" of capitalism and citizenship (as cited in Berkhofer 1979: 173). IGRA presents a new strategy incorporating some of these earlier views, this time with some phenomenal successes. Indian gaming has become the fundamental economic development initiative for Indian nations in the United States. By December 20, 1994, 97 tribes had a total of 113 gaming compacts with 22 states.7 The most recent count finds that 201 federally recognized tribes participate in either Class II or Class III gaming; there are 249 tribal-state gaming compacts with 29 states.8 Foxwoods, and the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, provide the most remarkable realization of this gaming policy. In 1995, Foxwoods grossed over an 7 Johnson, Tim, The Dealer's Edge: Gaming in the Path of Native America," in Native Americas, Akwe:kon's Journal of Indigenous Issues, Spring/Summer Issue 1995, 12(1&2), 24. 8 Taken from the National Indian Gaming Institute's website, www.indiangaming.org, updated March 2002. 22 estimated $800 million; in 1996, that figure grew to over $1 billion and revenues continue to increase. The entire complex--gaming and public areas, hotels, and restaurants--includes 4.7 million square feet, 315,310 of which are devoted to gambling. Foxwoods employs over 11,000 people, placing it among the top five employers in Connecticut.9 In 1995, through its negotiated deal for the monopoly right to operate slot machines in the state, the casino paid Connecticut $134 million. It also donated an extra $15 million to balance the state's budget. The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation is second only to the federal government in direct financial contributions to the state. The Mashantucket Pequot most visibly exemplify Indian peoples who have negotiated and overcome legal, logistical, and other hurdles to establish themselves as a potent economic, cultural, and political force, not only in the local economy of New England but also in the larger nationally imagined and real spaces of "Indian country." A key component of this effort, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, was completed on the reservation in 1998. This $193 million museum was almost entirely funded by Foxwoods profits. The MPMRC is the largest native-owned and operated museum facility in the Americas. The two main commercial structures of the reservation, the museum and the casino complex, overlap in their articulation of representational space. While the casino is crucial as an economic generator, the museum is an important site 9 Radding, Alan, "Casino Takes a Gamble on Cashless Transactions," Infoworld magazine, 16(25), 70. 23 wherein the Mashantucket Pequots display self-representations of their identity, history, and culture. Further, the MPMRC's significant independent funding ensures their ability to successfully enact the scope of their vision and projects. Photograph 1.3: View of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center from the Foxwoods Resort Casino's Grand Pequot Tower. From the left: the observation tower, the Gathering Space, the administrative offices in the upper level, and then gallery space. The farmstead's fields are at the right end of the building. Photo from MPMRC promotional materials. While the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center is part of an amusement complex (the destination resort that includes Foxwoods), it is also an important museum and a scholarly research center (the library has capacity for 150,000 volumes). The MPMRC illustrates how the Mashantucket Pequot appropriate the discourses and practices of museum curatorship and 24 science--including those of anthropology and archaeology--to further substantiate their claims to a historical continuity with both Mashantucket Pequot ancestors and the larger community of Indian peoples in the Americas. Accordingly, the scientific research and entertainment industries of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation provide key sites at which to analyze the articulation, representation, and materialization of Native American identity--racial and national, individual and collective--within the local community, and the corresponding resonance of these constructions with popular understandings of "Indianness" in the national imaginary. "Identity" is understood here as an ongoing, dynamic social process with the goal of self-awareness and not as a pre-given thing. Crucially, Indian identity in Mashantucket involves the presentation of self and group to the reservation community, the local community, and the world beyond as the cohesive, yet contingent, projection of an imagined "belonging together" (Weber 1976: see also Brow 1988, 1990, 1996). As noted above for Indian gaming more generally, the success of the Mashantucket Pequots has come at a significant price. This emerging Indian nation has become a lightning rod for a number of volatile issues in the larger Indian community, the political economy of the region, and the US at large. The legitimacy of the Mashantucket Pequot's self-identification as an American Indian tribal nation has been challenged by Anglo-Americans and other Indian tribal peoples on grounds including cultural practices, phenotypical appearance, and blood-quantum reckoning. More specifically, the "racial identity" of the 25 current Mashantucket Pequots endures as a key issue for public discourse surrounding the tribal nation's claims to Indian legitimacy. Paradoxically these external and often pejorative constructions, particularly blood quantum reckoning, have provided the Mashantucket Pequot and other Native Americans with the means of asserting claims to federal recognition and tribal sovereignty. Such reckoning makes accessible certain resources not available to other marginalized and subjugated groups in the US. In a larger context, therefore, Mashantucket Pequot attempts at self-definition and autonomy must be understood as often antagonistic--but always related--processes of contestation between local definitions and discourses of self, and the dominant narratives of racial essences and cultural stereotypes that pervade the historical encounters between a majority "America" and this America's Indian "other." This dissertation contends that the politics and poetics of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center and Foxwoods reflect both the Mashantucket Pequots' engagement with making history, and particular manifestations of history-making industries on the reservation. As such, the representative spaces of the museum and the casino are products of an intersection of strategic planning and emplacement and the pressures of "circumstance." Mashantucket provides an important and high profile example--due, in part, to the rapidity of its community establishment--for comprehending the dynamics of local community formation and for understanding the entangled and continually transforming histories of the United States and Indian nations-in-the-making. 26 SELF-REFLECTION, SELF-CONSTRUCTION My interest in this subject is threefold. First: identity politics, or the formation of self-represented identity in the face of opposition or challenge--especially where this challenge is articulated in terms of appearance and a conformity with long-held public notions of ethnicity, race, or nationality. Second: the practice of representation--how representational structures are designed and what strategies they employ to present their narratives to the public. Third: the practice of self-representation--specifically individual, ethnic, racial, or national identity--in the public spaces of casinos and entertainment complexes. Critical to these issues is the means in which they are formulated and presented to the public. Museums and casinos offer intensified registers for mixing the factual and material with the fantastic. I am a white Mexican American. While many of the cultural practices I was raised with were particularly marked as Mexican American--both selfconstructed and by language, family, and an understanding of the national histories of Mexico and the United States--the environment for my formative years was primarily white, lower middle class. When my father was part of our nuclear family, we lived in a predominantly white suburb in Orange County, California. Following my parents' divorce and my mother's return to college, we lived in the same area with reduced finances. Academic poverty is different from many other strains of poverty, perhaps because the language one uses to describe it is differently informed, and perhaps 27 because the historic and social processes that play a part in an individual's location in the larger socio-economic scheme of things are differently understood. Also, academic community and comradeship place a certain value on ironic distance. After the change in our family structure, we dropped in our economic bracket at the same time that we entered a long period of immersion in the academic sphere. Part of any such immersion in the late 1960s and 1970s necessarily included an awareness of, and in my mother's case an active participation in, student-based political activism. The focus of such activism included civil rights, women's rights, the war in Vietnam, and the rights of minorities (primarily Blacks, Chicanos, and Indians). I grew up being made aware of these different and overlapping communities of activism and being able to navigate between some of them and the rest of my life as a suburban adolescent. In large part, this was due to my ability to "pass," to construct my identity as necessary to either hang out with the Chicano activists or with my cronies trading Hot Wheels in the playground of an overwhelmingly white middle school. While I learned to appreciate this somewhat chameleon ability, this "voluntaristic attitude of identity" (Blu 1980: 209), I also found myself defending one or another self-identification depending on the sphere of challenge and my own investment in making a statement. My ability to engage in such statements involved navigating the contradictions of a racial-as-biological v. ethnicity-ascultural argument of identity. Sometimes the arguments I made simply did not matter because I did not have the other credentials deemed necessary for a 28 complete marginalized identity--I lacked the phenotypical features that would (popularly) mark me as Mexican American from a distance. As I continued in college, I moved farther away from marking this identity as a public statement. My college studies centered on anthropology, sociology, and English, and I used these perspectives to explore the practices of textual representation. My reading worked to combine and compare anthropological, historical, and fictional literatures focused on and by American Indians. I was particularly intrigued in tensions and contradictions between my own "popular cultural" understandings, and anthropological and historical accounts of Native America. I moved to San Francisco after college and began a career in photography, first as a self-funded documentary photographer. I soon found work in commercial photography. The work was demanding and the amount of effort necessary to create a photograph for advertising was surprising at first. I worked in advertising photography in the ten years prior to the advent of digital imaging and image-manipulating software. All lighting effects had to be made at the time of the film's exposure, and all errors corrected or special effects created through retouching by hand. Since hand retouching was an expensive process, the professional emphasis was on creating an ideally exposed sheet of film either in the studio or on location. I worked for a number of years producing car photography for dealer brochures--large, "perfect" images of spotless gleaming cars parked against mostly natural and dramatic backgrounds. 29 Both commercial and documentary photography trained my visual acuity and instilled in me a keen sense of the image, both as an artifact and as a form of highly selective representation. The interface between an advertising image and its consuming public represents a complex and highly negotiated intersection of technology, social, cultural, and political influences, personalized aesthetics, and individual agencies. This complexity persists even when the intersection between the photographer and the consuming public becomes more obvious, as in a gallery exhibition or photo documentary. While it is seductive to imagine the action of a visitor alone in a gallery full of photographs as an unproblematic relationship between viewer and image, the issues of unstated mediation are still present and critically important. Perhaps even more so because the act of public display suggests a certain relationship made obvious. The apparent removal of mediating layers implies the removal of all levels of mediation. The beguiling "clarity" of a gallery experience elides contextualizing or additional nuances of the relationship between the photographer and the photographic subjects; the gallery itself; the presented work as an element of the photographer's overall work; the complex relationships between presenting photographer and gallery; the technological mediations of film, camera, optics, and printing; and the imagining of a projected audience. One of the questions in my own documentary photographic work centered on how to present a group of images as something that revealed more about the subjects and their collaborative relationship with the camera. Questions key to this 30 investigation concerned the role of photographic "subject," and included the following. How could the collaborative relationship of photo making be made plain in a final image? At what point, if any, could a photograph of another person be a realization of the subject's self-representational desires or parameters? What would the shape of a truly collaborative photographic project that had selfrepresentation as a goal take and how would it work? What were the controls necessary and what the freedoms? It is imagining these processes of negotiation and navigation, and my experiences in commercial and documentary photographic work, which were partly responsible for my return to anthropology and graduate school. My key investigative interest is in the practice of representation and self-representation; this interest is informed by my experience. WORKING IN NATIVE AMERICA, WORKING AT MASHANTUCKET When I chose Mashantucket as a field site, I also chose to participate in a long and contested history between Native Americans and those who would make them the object of study or representation. Of course, anthropologists are not alone in this relationship with Native America. "Indian photographers"--a term used here to describe photographers with Native America and Native Americans as their subjects of concentration--are also implicated as others "speaking for" a historically marginalized people in an industry that grew out of, and in many ways continued to depend on, the power/knowledge relationships of colonialism in North America. As Murray L. Wax notes: 31 Frequently, the exotic peoples had become accessible for study because they had been subjugated by a European power and were enveloped within systems of colonial administration and market economics. Without political or military power, or the competencies needed for confronting government bureaucrats, they were easy targets for manipulation. [Wax 1997: 55] Vine Deloria raised these issues, as they related specifically to the relationship between Native Americans and anthropologists, in Custer Died for Your Sins: an Indian Manifesto in 1969. A scathing critique of the anthropological community for its objectified treatment of Native Americans, and the implications of a Native American­focused anthropology in "real-world" and academic politics, Custer focused on the power differential between Indians and "anthros." The critique was fundamental for changing the anthropology practiced in Native America. Years later, Gerald Vizenor also examined relationships between Indians and "anthros" and the power that anthropologists hold in defining and explaining "culture," particularly Indian culture. Everything in anthropology is an invention and an extension of the cultural colonialism of Western expansion. ... Culture doesn't exist, they [anthropologists] invented it. They need culture so that they can get Ph.D.s and gain power in the universities. And the people who have that kind of power control culture, because they control the definitions, the symbols, and the masks that they've constructed about culture. [Vizenor 1990: 161] Key to a critique of the relationship between Indians and "anthros" was and is the ability to create representations about others--and the privileged, and sometimes arrogant, position that anthropologists took in speaking for their Indian "subjects." 32 There are a number of elements at Mashantucket that powerfully subvert this traditional "Indian-anthro" paradigm. First and foremost, the financial resources available to the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation have allowed the Mashantucket Pequots to create a secure, gated, and affluent community. This includes staffed or remote guard kiosks for all approaches into the reservation and its residential neighborhoods and Child Development Center--access to the community is strictly controlled by the community. Financial security also means that the tribal nation can hire and control its own public relations staff, and staff and maintain a powerful lobbying office in Washington, DC. The Mashantucket Pequots are not dependent on others to create, promote, or disseminate their public story. Second, the community at Mashantucket is remarkably diverse and has assembled or re-assembled in response to two important factors. 1) The current Mashantucket community can trace its roots to the reservation repopulation effort initiated by Richard "Skip" Hayward in the early 1970s. Hayward, the grandson of one of the last two tribal members living on the reservation, wanted to establish a self-sufficient community that would secure the reservation for future generations. The return of members from the existing diasporic network of tribal members and potential tribal members reflects clear decisions to participate in distinct projects of community renewal, self-sufficiency, and economic growth. The historically dispersed Mashantucket Pequots have, over time, intermarried and mixed with other people. Thus, the current population presents an ethnically, culturally, and racially diverse public face. Understanding race--as a location for 33 challenges to authenticity or as rebuttal to such challenges--is fundamental to any understanding of the Mashantucket Pequots. 2) This initial call to the reservation eventually became an offered opportunity for tribal members to participate in the business opportunities created by the rapidly expanding casino and hotel complex at Foxwoods. These conditions significantly affect the relationship between anthropologists and the reservation tribal community: Mashantucket presents neither a clear, geo-politically located community, nor a traditionally powerless one. Third, from almost the very beginning of the tribal nation's renaissance, the authenticity of their tribal and Indian identities have been challenged, primarily as a means to contest their right to either self-representation or the ability to operate a casino. This challenge has been mobilized by competing casino operators, politicians from nearby villages and towns, and different local activists from surrounding communities. Thus, many of the identity assertions or self-representations at Mashantucket are fairly recent and strongly counteroppositional. And it is a challenge that continues to be made. The most recent high-profile attack came in a book titled Without Reservation, published in 2000. Written by Jeff Benedict, the book attempts to establish that Mashantucket Pequot claims to tribal identity are fraudulent and finishes with a call for the revocation of federal recognition.10 In coming to Mashantucket to do field research in 1997, I knew that I was entering a highly contested arena of self-representation and identity assertion. The 10 Benedict is currently pursuing a political career in southeastern Connecticut. 34 following analysis is not meant to provide a definitive discussion of the Mashantucket Pequots, their identity as a tribal nation, or the validity of their ethnicity or national identity claims. What it does aim to do is to provide a critical analysis of how the Mashantucket Pequots construct their self-representation in the public sphere--in this instance this includes not only their considerable pool of casino and museum clientele, but also the discursive arenas of regional, state, pan-Indian, and national identity. Accordingly, much of the material from which I work is public material made freely available by the Mashantucket Pequots: public relations and press materials, brochures and appeals for corporate sponsorship, and information from the Foxwoods and Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center's extensive websites. In addition to how selfrepresentations are conducted at Mashantucket, I focus on the experience of immersion in the reservation's different display environments. My research paid close attention to public representations and selfrepresentation with observation in the museum and casino, recordings transcribed in these spaces, and informal conversations in these spaces and in the workspaces of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. I combined this attention with participant observation in three roles at the MPMRC: first, I began as an unpaid intern performing research for the exhibitions in August 1997. I was later hired as a contract consultant and grant proposal writer for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation (September 1997­January 1998). Soon after I took this position, I was hired as a contract consultant researcher, writer, and photographer for the museum's exhibition designers--Design Division, Inc. (DDI)--and as 35 liaison between DDI and the MPMRC (October 1997­May 1998). Below, I provide a synopsis of my field experiences at Mashantucket. While my field experiences and their challenges mark my rite of passage as an anthropologist, they also illustrate recent shifts in the ethnographic equation or relationship between anthropologists and Native America. THE VAGARIES OF FIELDWORK: THE SUBJECT COMMUNITY AS GATED COMMUNITY My fieldwork strategy for doing research at Mashantucket, principally in the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, seemed sound at the beginning. When I first visited the site, the future MPMRC was being coordinated from a collection of trailers linked together in a dirt lot near the Fire and Rescue Center, but beyond the guard kiosk for the reservation proper. The actual construction site was across the road, behind a short stand of trees. Original administration for the museum project was headed by the Museum Liaison Team (MLT) comprised of Theresa Bell, tribal member and sister to Tribal Chairman Skip Hayward; archaeologist Kevin McBride, a faculty member at the University of Connecticut who has worked in and around Mashantucket since 1983; and Jack Campisi, an associate professor of anthropology at Wellesley College. Though perhaps better known for his work 36 with the Mashpee during their unsuccessful bid for federal recognition,11 Campisi has been working at Mashantucket since 1978. In preparing for fieldwork, I contacted the MLT, outlining my research interests. I first approached the MPMRC in 1994, through Jack Campisi, with a proposal for a collaborative photo project involving tribal members. I met McBride through my repeated visits to the reservation, and he had been supportive of my work and my projected future research. Building on this foundation, I sought to work as an unpaid intern until a paying position might open with the museum staff. I hoped to slowly become a part of the museum staff, then to work with the museum's education department to offer a photography class to tribal youth. This class would become the foundation for a tribal photo project documenting and creating portraits of tribal members augmented by reactive text--text that would be inscribed on the portrait's paper, by the photo's subject, in reaction to the image or the project. These collaborative documents would then be collected for a group exhibition for the community where more reactions and statements would be collected.12 (See Appendix I for a more complete description of this project.) The negative archives and prints would become part of the MPMRC collections; I would retain one set for my dissertation research. Campisi, Jack, The Mashpee Indians: tribe on trial, (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991). 12 See Bodinger de Uriarte, John, "About Face: Approaching a Dialogue of Images and Display" Museum Anthropology 25(1), 2001, for an example of a pilot project based in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. 11 See 37 In the initial phases of fieldwork I was accepted as a volunteer intern and turned loose to research aboriginal dog "types" of pre-contact America. Combining archaeological research with informed supposition, I provided the necessary information for three simulated dogs to be created for the museum's walk-through village. I went on to research alternative supply sources for synthetic fruits, nuts, and vegetables for different tableaux in the village. I combined some of my professional experience with photographic "prop" houses, with growing knowledge of the museum-exhibition corollaries to such sources. Halfway through this project Steve Dennin, the head of marketing for the MPMRC, asked if I would consider writing three grant proposals for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation (MPTN) as a contract consultant. I accepted. Two of the proposals were for the National Park Service's Historic Preservation Fund Grants to Indian Tribes, Alaskan Natives, and Native Hawaiian Organizations. One was for research-related funding to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).13 The proposals were based on research and planned archaeological project themes created by Kevin McBride, and my work occasionally brought us into close contact. The National Park Service proposals were for two different projects. The first, "Indiantown: Survey and Inventory of a Transitional Community," proposed to initiate a program of archaeological investigations and ethnohistorical research at a late eighteenth-century community on the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation. Indiantown inhabitants used adoptions and adaptations of Euro-American style 13 This last proposal, resubmitted after I left Mashantucket, was granted. 38 farmhouses and farming techniques, and were influenced by Christian Indian missionary movements.14 The second proposal, "The Fort at Mashantucket: Second Phase," was for funding to initiate a new phase of archaeological and historical research at the Fort at Mashantucket site with the purpose of assessing food ways and food production technologies, and domestic, spatial, and social organization. The Fort site had been discovered in 1992 and a National Park Service grant had provided support for archaeological research in 1995­96. The Fort at Mashantucket reflected European design--square with corner bastions--and was probably built in 1670 and abandoned in 1675.15 The NAGPRA proposal, titled "Assessing NAGPRA-Related Inventories: Toward a New Methodology," looked to expand the base of relevant information for public inventory searches for objects and remains relevant to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The project proposed the use Brotherton Movement followed the eighteenth-century's revitalizing Great Awakening, and was marked by an emphasis on Native missionaries and teachers. Most influential among these was Mohegan minister Samson Occom, who envisioned Christian Indian farming communities in the wilderness, removed from white society, and combining the best elements of Native and European society. These elements included Christianity, education, sobriety, a strong work ethic, and the adoption of English agricultural technologies. Occum's teachings had a tremendous influence among Native communities throughout New York and southern New England, and eventually resulted in the immigration of hundreds of Natives from the Northeast to Oneida Indian Territory in New York, where they formed the Brotherton Indian Tribe. Large-scale immigration to Brotherton began in 1784, and continued for more than 47 years, with the most intensive period of immigration occurring between 1785 and 1810. 15 The Pequots were developing an alliance relationship with the English during this time, which came to fruition in King Philip's War (1675­1677), and the Fort reflects elements of this relationship. The fort had a forge for gunsmithing and the manufacture of musket shot, as well as a site dedicated to the production of wampum. 14 The 39 of supplemental information collected from a thorough researching of primary documents--newspaper and journal accounts, for example--to extend the information contained in public museum inventories. The proposed projects offer a quick thumbnail for the kind of research and ethnohistorical work important for the tribal nation--projects combining a thorough grounding in archaeological and ethnohistorical method dedicated to examining and firmly establishing both the history of place and the role of dynamic cultural adaptation. Each historical moment focused on in the proposals illustrates a different Mashantucket Pequot interaction with existing dominant cultural, spiritual, and governmental structures and each also shows a particular Mashantucket Pequot adaptation of those structures. The research projects themselves illustrate a powerful attribute of the Mashantucket Pequot Nation--the appropriation of elements of dominant discourses, of archaeology and ethnohistory for example, to meet Mashantucket Pequot ends. Soon after I began working for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, I was approached by Design Division, Inc. (DDI) to work on panel text for the museum's opening gallery. Titled "Mashantucket Pequot Nation Today," the gallery was designed to provide the museum visitor with an introduction to the contemporary reservation, its industries, and its community services. My tasks for Design Division, Inc. also included shooting a number of photographs for the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, including inset photos for panel text in the Mashantucket Pequot Nation Today gallery, images of the contemporary evidence of glacial effects on the reservation for the World of Ice 40 gallery, and wall-size panoramas for the Arrival of the Europeans and Life on the Reservation galleries. These involvements exposed me to a number of different hierarchies at Mashantucket, including the tribal government, the museum and research center's administration, and the independently contracted exhibition design team. My multiple and overlapping responsibilities provided ideal vantage points for carrying on my intended fieldwork. My long-term goal, however, remained the creation and execution of a tribal nation­wide reactive photo portrait project, hopefully to be begun under the aegis of the museum. I understood that my imagined project would probably need to go through revisions once begun--initial project designs often serve more as catalyst or initial impetus than strictly followed roadmaps. The politics of tribal communities--or any relatively small communities, for that matter--are often tension-filled, with potential sources of conflict often mapping against political and familial structures, especially where they intersect with other structures and hierarchies, other ways of doing. The overlaps are often uncomfortable and the politics of ethnic identity, demarcation between "traditionals" and "progressives," and participation in the tribal political structure can create a system of power exchange that is difficult for an outsider to parse. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center's internal political structure was no exception. Political tensions within the museum project trailers can be understood as involving six different layers of "authentic" credentials, knowledge, and power: 1) Mashantucket Pequot Tribal members, 2) other Native 41 American tribal members, 3) Native Americans without formal tribal affiliation, 4) knowledgeable administrative or museum professionals, 5) academics--particularly those certified in anthropology or archaeology--and their students working as interns or assistants, and 6) those with a substantial history of working with or for the Mashantucket Pequots, regardless of credentials or training. The categories were not discrete, and shifting alliance strategy was often in play. In addition, as the body of the elected tribal council changed often over the course of the museum project, support for the project as a budget line item was often difficult to secure. And having a popular and charismatic tribal council chairman as your brother was an asset to the museum's director until that popularity began to wane. In the later stages of the museum project, approval for the yearly budget was often delayed until well past the beginning of the fiscal year. The effects of budget-approval delays were felt everywhere--from the ability to hire personnel to the ability to fill a vitrine with the objects and narratives necessary to conform to an approved exhibition design. Anthropology has a mixed history. The "crisis" that was revealed in the 1960s and 1970s was, in part, due to the discipline's realization of its own complicity in the colonial project. Part of what anthropology carries forward, particularly in its reception by oft-visited field sites and cultures, is that it often represents a negatively "marked" affiliation, an origin "place" with its own dark history. Native America has provided subject fodder for anthropology and anthropology's antecedents since European colonial contact. Often hand in hand with the forces of territorial expansion and relocation, anthropology carries a 42 legacy of suspicion and dis-ease. In contemporary Native America, relationships between anthropologists and Native communities are often subjected to harsh scrutiny and entered into with an amount of skeptical apprehension. My experience at Mashantucket participated in this tradition, and I attempted to navigate a variety of conflicting expectations and responsibilities, not the least of which derived from my academic discipline. Although my initial contact with the museum project had been through Dr. Campisi, I was initially attached to Dr. McBride as an intern. While working as a grants-proposal writer, I depended on McBride for project research information for the grant proposals. Researching and writing for tribal grant proposals occupied about one-third of my time. The rest of my time was devoted to working for Design Division, Inc. I offer this account as a way to make sense of my ethnographic field experience at Mashantucket, and as background for the work that follows. When I originally became aware of plans for a Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, I was deeply intrigued to see what sort of shape such an ambitious project of self-representation would take. As I learned more about the resources and information that were being brought to bear on the museum, I was determined to understand more about the following points: 1) the design of the exhibitions, 2) the mix of dominant historical and anthropological discourses and methods with counter-historical or oppositional narratives, and 3) the interface between the museum's architecture and the surround of the reservation. I was also increasingly committed to contributing to the final museum. 43 I was fortunate to be able to work on the museum project, and to be offered multiple contract employment. While I had hoped to secure ongoing work as a staff member for the museum, I was not completely surprised that I was not able to do so. Fortunately, my various duties introduced me to a number of different people and perspectives at work in Mashantucket. When my contracts ran out and no position at the museum was available, I accepted a position as curator at the nearby Connecticut River Museum. YANKEE FIELDWORK: ALTERNATE AND DOMINANT HISTORIES The Connecticut River Museum (CRM) is in the riverside town of Essex, about 30 miles from Mashantucket. It was within easy traveling distance from Mashantucket and provided a more dominant "Yankee" perspective on local history. Essex prides itself on being one of the "100 best small towns in America"16 and, like many small towns in New England, it forefronts its connections and contributions to colonial and post-colonial New England history as a source of community identity and touristic attraction. The town and its buildings are well preserved. Essex has an active yacht club and small boat harbor and the majority of the population are white Euro Americans (many of whom fled the higher property prices and taxes of the Connecticut closer to New York City to find a new home town with similar amenities but less overhead). 16 As ranked by Norman Crampton, The 100 Best Small Towns in America, (Old Tappan, NJ: Prentice Hall Books, 1992). Each town is ranked according to scenic location, viable economic base, population diversity, high education level, good schools, readily available health care, low crime rate, description of town histories, job possibilities, and recreational opportunities. 44 Although part of the Connecticut River Museum's mission is "the collection, preservation and interpretation of materials related to human history in the Connecticut River Valley," the museum presents a primarily Yankee, Colonial, and maritime narrative of the area's history. While the museum's mission is dedicated to creating an all-inclusive narrative of the "river valley and its people," a small horizontal vitrine contains the entire Native presence in the permanent collection's narrative. The case displays a few trade beads and a variety of stone point reproductions. The panel text for this case identifies the points by archaeological period and gives a quick overview of the contact period and the Pequot War. The closing paragraph reads: Those of the small remnant native population who had neither relocated nor been assimilated into the European settlements, withdrew to the shadows, inhabiting small, inconspicuous back-country sites, living as best they could. The permanent exhibition's wholesale erasure of Natives in the Connecticut River Valley following the Pequot War reflects a dominant discourse in New England history: the Natives were here, they died in large numbers for a variety of reasons, they disappeared. All tangible effects of Native presence are transferred to a narrative of the past, a historicized connection that cements or supports a larger common narrative of disappearance through history. My experience at the Connecticut River Museum informs my reading of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center--the CRM can be understood as one node in a larger, linked exhibition space that the MPMRC counter-narrative speaks back to. Like the shadow archive that Allen Sekula 45 describes as a product of the taking and storing of photographs for centralized police force identity files (Sekula 1989), the Connecticut River Museum exhibitions participate in a larger connected but segmented narrative of colonial history. In this understanding, the CRM celebrates the same story as one of a number of nearby historic places including the Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, or the Plimouth Plantation in Massachusetts. These two "living history" sites are nodes of a larger cast network of localized history and touristic attraction. For the purposes of this study, the CRM is emblematic of a particular kind of dominant Colonial discourse. As in the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, the Connecticut River Museum's affect--what Roland Barthes (1981) identifies as the power to move the viewer, to create a deeply felt response--also depends on its location, on its site within a well-preserved colonial town, backed against a fairly pristine stretch of the Connecticut River. From this location, the museum participates in a more general touristic understanding of an imagined New England and its history. PERSPECTIVES FOR ANALYSIS: IDENTITY--REPRESENTATIONAL ORDER, ADAPTIVE PRACTICE This ethnographic project links an analysis of representation in public spaces with concepts of cultural and ethnic identity as self-representational practices by examining the different methods and poetics of museum and casino representation at Mashantucket. Critical focus is paid to theoretical approaches including imagining the nation, ideas of national and ethnic identification, and the 46 uses of the past in the creation of community. These three perspectives use the invention of tradition as a foundational concept. Invented traditions serve three associated purposes: (1) to establish or symbolize social cohesion or group membership [identity]; (2) to establish or legitimize institutions, or authority relations [community]; and (3) to socialize, or inculcate beliefs, values, or conventions of behavior [tradition] (Hobsbawm 1983). The invention of tradition is critical for the formation and maintenance of the nation-state, and for the ratification of a present order (Williams 1977). This paradigm has provided a significant, contemporary direction for anthropological inquiry, which challenges the concept of tradition as unbroken cultural continuity with an analysis that stresses the constructed aspects of the concept of continuity itself as part of the processes of contemporary cultural practice. A critical engagement with tradition, as "the most evident expression of the dominant and hegemonic pressures and limits" (Williams 1977: 115), is key to understanding self-representational efforts that participate in or act in opposition to hegemonic representational orders. Identity changes throughout the life course; culture is more animated than any static `snapshot' of history...individuals and collectives adapt, adopt, discard, and change continually, according to the needs and vagaries of history and of the world around them. [Nagel 1996: 63] The public identity of the Mashantucket Pequots as Indians and as a recognized tribal nation is a key element in the practices of the reservation community and its industries. Understanding the history of this identification is critical to understanding its manifestations in the casino and the museum. As in all 47 Native American tribes, the current understandings of "tribes" and "tribal nations" as discrete political entities are the product of a long processual relationship with colonial and post-colonial powers. Like many Native peoples whose first experiences with Europeans were largely based on the fur trade, the need for a political organization recognizable to Europeans was not initially paramount. The Pequots understood themselves by their place of origin, ties of kinship, trade relationships, and shared language. And their communities existed as fairly broad entities that had multiple points of contact and relationships with other neighboring and nearby peoples. Fundamental to this relational existence was the ability to negotiate between different communities and peoples for trade, political alliance, or simple sociability. The need for the kind of political organization that could be mapped onto European understanding grew as the bases for relationships with the Europeans changed from the fur trade to colonization and settlement. This change marked a shift from an understanding of frontier as a space for social and cultural relationships to one of legal relationships between governments. The increased demand for land and other resources mandated treaty relationships, the ability for one person to speak for an identified group of people to make binding agreements. The process of identity formation is the process of creating and maintaining boundaries. The identity "Pequot" and later, "Mashantucket Pequot," is a permeable social and political construct that developed and adapted over time in relationship to the dominant social and political structures of the US. While its 48 mutability is part of its complex dynamic, the demand from outsiders for a fixed Mashantucket Pequot identity, for the purposes of legal and government-togovernment relationships, is powerful. The tension between Mashantucket Pequot understandings and reckonings of identity, and those of the federal government or the popular imaginary, is palpable in the representational efforts at Mashantucket. MASHANTUCKET AS ETHNOGRAPHIC DILEMMA Mashantucket presents a particular kind of ethnographic dilemma (Dorst 1989). It is difficult to discretely site the site that is Mashantucket, to contain it as a discrete and bounded place (geographically, thematically, ideologically, politically, culturally, and socially, for example). Divining what the community of Mashantucket is and who it includes, what mix of the reservation residents, tribal nation members, or the vast transient population of first-timers and repeat customers is a complex and multi-directional exercise. One important question for approaching Mashantucket as a public space is how the sphere of experience for the Mashantucket visitor overlays and overlaps other independent and contingent communities and identities. These possible overlays and overlaps begin with the initial billboards along the highways from New York and Massachusetts and include the highway markers in Connecticut on the main autoroutes into Mashantucket, and the changing services provided thereon. In this way, at the level of surrounding community, Foxwoods can be experienced as a rise in traffic, a corresponding accelerated erosion of highways, the ever-present view of shuttle 49 and charter buses, or the permanent homesteading of everyday discourse in the surrounding area. Discover a nation in your own back yard. [Text used on commuter train station posters and magazine advertisements for the opening of the MPMRC.] Ideas of the postmodern site as vague or indeterminate help to explain some of the ethnographic difficulty in fully explicating the multiple site of Mashantucket. And much of the ethnographic difficulty must also be understood as part of the dilemma that faces anthropology at the beginning of the 21st century. Not only is the containability of a site, particularly one in the ethnographer's homeland, difficult to transcribe but the modes of resistance able to be employed by the "ethnographees" have become much more powerful. In many ways, the Mashantucket Reservation presents an exclusive community as its public face. Some of this is common sense for any kind of contemporary ethnographic work carried out in the United States. Advanced consumer capitalism--or the post-modern effects of flattened boundaries, depthless and infinitely reproduced images--and the processes of self-inscription and self-identification have effectively muddied both cultural distinctions and the belief in niche sites. As such, the ongoing practice of cultural self-texting or text generation--perhaps most pervasive and accessible in Mashantucket brochure text, architecture, and exhibition or interior design--helps to create an environment of jostling and elbowing perspectives. All have voices to be heard and all display overlapping 50 and intertexting to such an extent that the project of unraveling such a multisourced skein seems impossibly complex. In part, my dissertation appreciates the difficulty in understanding the ethnographic dilemmas of the site, and recognizes that these dilemmas are facing the entire discipline and practice of anthropology. To put it in a formula, the culture of advanced consumer capitalism or, less acceptable but more fashionable, postmodernity, consists largely in the processes of self-inscription, indigenous self-documentation and endlessly reflexive simulation. Theorists of ethnographic representation have for some time now acknowledged that all cultures generate texts about themselves (taking `text' in an expanded sense),17 but postmodernity virtually consists of this activity. [Dorst 1989: 2] The self-referential processes of the modern suburban development and those of places in-filled with historical significance stretch between the landscape as historic canvas and the creation and establishment of museums on the landscape as intensified markers of this same ahistoricity. The parallels with Mashantucket are many, but the gated suburb of Mashantucket also realizes its borders as a contingent geopolitical unit, a sovereign tribal nation with its own complex government-to-government relationships between itself, the state of Connecticut, and the federal government. Mashantucket also occupies a powerful location as host to the single most successful "Indian casino" in the United States. Mashantucket thus enters the map of Native America as a unique entity and an is the basic premise in the wholesale rethinking of ethnographic writing currently under way. Most of the relevant issues are raised in the volume Writing Culture: the Poetics of Ethnography, Clifford and Marcus, eds., (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986). See especially the essays by Clifford (98­121) and Rabinow (234­261). 17 This 51 exemplar of the highest success possible in that industry so far. Also, the processes of reassembling a reservation community from the descendents of the original Mashantucket Pequot Reservation community and tribal members yielded an ethnically and racially diverse community core. Thus, Mashantucket also entered the map of contested ethnicity and racial and national designation as a white-hot spot of contestation and challenge. Here the diversity of the community presents a point of challenge given the popular imaginary concerning "Indian" identity. Given the above, and the multiple pressures and limits of the bounded and uncontained elements of the communities at Mashantucket, the site that is Mashantucket is profoundly multiple. For the purposes of this study, I concentrate on the two main representational industries at Mashantucket: the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center and the Foxwoods Resort Casino. I work from textual and visual artifacts created at the sites--brochures, the tribal newspaper, and the museum's panel texts, for example--adding my own created textual and visual artifacts (notes, observations, descriptions, photographs). The photographs do not occupy the text as illustrations of the text; what they offer is a parallel journey made with a methodological difference. Inherent in this strategy is the recognition that the narrative technologies at Mashantucket are constantly in a state of becoming and that no representation enjoys any more (or less) the role of being the ultimate word on the subject. Photography is used as a means of exploring the public spaces and framing different subject positions at Mashantucket. As an integral part of the project, the photographs register 52 exhibition space and the overlaps between building, exhibitions, and audience, or the display environment of the museum and research center. The photographs offer their own kind of immersion for the reader, and are mimetic of the kind of looking-centered created by both the casino and the museum. These "souvenir" artifacts will be woven through the text that follows, providing different sites for exegesis, observation, and multiple reflexivities. THE "INDIAN" AS HEGEMONIC LOCUS The designation "Indian" is part of a hegemonic descriptive order. As an identity category, "Indian" occupies popular discourse at a deep, commonsensical level. As such, it participates in a variety of mechanisms of representation--legal, ethnic, racial, and cultural. As part of this descriptive order, "Indian" is also a powerfully exclusionary category. As Berkhofer, following Roy Harvey Pearce, succinctly states: "The Indian is what the White is not."18 And the term "Indian" reflects an ongoing relationship between Europeans, Euro-Americans, and Native peoples, a relationship that necessarily increased in intensity over history and was subject to the pressures and limits of trade, colonization, warfare, legislation, relocation, and revitalization. However, while "the increasing association of Indians and non-Indian threatened to reduce the difference between them, it also Turner Strong also explores this proscriptive category as essential to the Colonial project of the North American northeastern seaboard, critiquing the shifting roles and categories of self and other, Native and European or Euro-American; see Captive Selves, Captivating Others, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999). See also Alexandra Harmon's Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 18 Pauline 53 focused attention on these differences" (Harmon 2000: 72). Indian museums and casinos are powerful performative spaces for the poetics of these differences. They are also the tangible results and ratification of the politics of identity. While a "generalized" Indian plays a key role in the design and thematics of Foxwoods, this same popular notion is challenged at key points and, in part, by the very scale of the complex. As a thematic site, Foxwoods experiences its own pressures and limits in self-representation and in engagement with both practiced and negotiated popular notions of Indianness. While the "traditional" is often mobilized to ratify an existing order, here such an order both parallels and comes in conflict with efforts and industries interested in establishing a new order. By engaging in the Indian gaming industry the Mashantucket Pequots are, by virtue, coming in conflict with an existing order, particularly an existing representational order. Mashantucket is not a clearly counter-hegemonic site; to say the least, the success of the Mashantucket Pequots is clearly won and measured through an active participation in hegemonic structures of business and politics. Reaction to an existing hegemonic order can be manifested in a number of ways. There is little room to argue that the productive spaces of Mashantucket are engaged in a counter-hegemonic battle of resistance. It is useful, however, to consider the Mashantucket projects of self-representation and industry as oppositional or tactical responses to existing hegemonic structures (Chambers 1991). The ongoing self-representational industry at Mashantucket mobilizes local, national, and pan-Indian dialogues on the meaning and use of tradition and how tradition is recruited as confirmation (or contestation) of contemporary 54 projects. The pivotal point for the reservation, the casino, and the museum is the definition, use, or practice of tradition as a ratification of the present. As Raymond Williams asserts: "[Tradition] is a version of the past which is intended to connect with and ratify the present. What it offers in practice is a sense of predisposed continuity" (Williams 1977: 116). The measure of this continuity is integral for the federal recognition process, and such recognition is key for participation in the Indian gaming industry. It is also a keystone for a museumized history of a reservation--a historic people in a historicized and located place. Further, discourses of tradition and continuity are important in the understanding, projection, and representation of a racialized identity, an identity that conflates natural and cultural spheres of classification. At the same time, the ratification that a museum offers is sometimes appreciated as only another interpretive level for something already deeply understood. As MPMRC director Theresa Bell recently stated following historical information confirmed by an archaeological dig: "We don't need an archeological site to learn a lot of this... [o]utside people have to have proof to change the history books" (Dobrzynski 1997: B4). Understanding tradition as a selective version of the past, as part of sustaining a hegemonic order in the present, is both a powerful and a vulnerable practice. One element of the tension at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center is that the narrative representing the Mashantucket Pequots in the past and in the ongoing present is the project of a "domestic dependent" tribal 55 nation. Tribal nations have enjoyed a long-standing and unclear, yet proprietary, relationship with the federal government.19 Tribal sovereignty is limited by historical practice and legal decision and is important as a site of contemporary struggle. While the concept of sovereignty has suffered different advances and restrictions over time, it is a crucial resource for Native resistance and selfdetermination. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center is a national project at one remove from the larger (US) national project of similar museums operating under the auspices of the dominant culture (the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and its contested Native American exhibition galleries, for example). Both the museum and casino at Mashantucket walk a line between presenting a particularized narrative of Mashantucket Pequot national formation and identity, and participating in and speaking to a larger national museum discourse involving the portrayal of American Indians in non-Native owned and operated museums in the United States. Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin suggest that "that there is no essential, bounded tradition; tradition is a model of the past and is inseparable from the interpretation of tradition in the present" (Handler and Linnekin 1984: 26.) Care must be taken, however, in assessing the role of tradition as resource. As in Karl Marx's assertion that "[t]he tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" (Marx [1852], in R. Tucker, The phrase "domestic dependent nation" was introduced in the Supreme Court decisions Cherokee Nation v. Georgia in 1831 in an attempt to describe and circumscribe the particularities of Native sovereignty. 19 The 56 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1978: 594), tradition must also be realized as a tangible force, one both shaped by and responsive to historical and contemporary pressures and limits. The power of selective tradition as a practice lies in the making of active selective connections, and disregarding those elements that do not support created thesis or historical and foundational narrative. It is significant that much of the most accessible and influential work of the counter-hegemony is historical: the recovery of discarded areas, or the redress of selective and reductive interpretations. [Williams 1977: 116] Part of what makes the MPMRC an engaging site is its ability to make its selections matter. Simply put, the Mashantucket Pequots have the resources available to create and support a state-of-the-art museum and research center devoted to presenting a Native American perspective on local and US history, one that redresses popular interpretations. Hegemony is created, maintained, and reinforced through a multitude of taught cultural and ideological knowledges. The reinforcement of the dominant legal, educational, or even "logical" structures must be understood in this light. The representation of a national past is critical to perpetuating and legitimizing the hegemony of the nation-state and the members of groups and classes--of the state and of "civil" society--that control it. As Benedict Anderson states, "nations loom out of an immemorial past and . . . glide into a limitless future" (Anderson 1983: 12­13). Dominant histories seek to smooth over dissension and alternative readings, to build a gliding linear descriptive narrative, a historical progression that always culminates in the present as an unavoidable outcome. 57 Historical description, `what really happened,' is not the result of selfevidences which we gather and string together but instead, the product of a complex interpretive process which, like any practice, is inflected by broader social projects, by relations of domination which seep into the private sphere of even the most `civil' of societies. [Alonso 1988: 37] Educational and interpretive structures are integral elements of consensus building, and museums are a particular manifestation of both state and civil structures of knowledge. Indeed museums, in their mobilization of history and tradition as key foundations for their narrative, are often a focus of social contestation; the designations and the attendant meanings of the past define both the stakes of the present as well as the terms in which it is understood. State and civil structures of knowledge are intimately involved with structures of political and social power. As Pierre Bourdieu recognizes: a theory of knowledge is necessarily a dimension of political theory because the specifically symbolic power to impose the principles of a construction of reality--in particular, social reality--is a major dimension of political power. [Bourdieu 1977: 165] Hegemony's consensual "common sense" then, is the naturalized arbitrariness of any given established order that embraces, directs, and enforces a field of common assumptions, or "what goes without saying because it comes without saying" (Bourdieu 1977: 167). This is hegemony's active field, expanding and contracting, in constant dynamic motion and incorporation, not a structure but an evolving process that defines cultural practices through on-going enactments. Here ways of knowing, of making "common sense," are asserted and transformed, 58 reflecting a dominant group's desire for control and the exercise of power without exercising coercion. The constructions of reasoned history and ethnography that attempt to invoke an essential definition of the "Indian," without reckoning both the political history of the categorization and its asserted contemporary use, fail to further analyze this theory of knowledge. Through the cultural reinforcements of everyday life (manifestations of popular culture, education, government and commerce), popular assertions and conceptions of the present and of the past are reasserted and extended. VIGNETTE 2: INDIANS IN THE ATTIC The curator's office at the Connecticut River Museum was on the third floor of the warehouse building. Non-insulated and partially unfinished, the floor also housed the museum's collection, records, backstock for the museum store, bits and pieces of exhibition hardware, and the office of the director of education. There were no partitions on this floor, and the elevator opened onto an uninterrupted but partially organized mass of augers, ships models, sextants, quadrants, flat files, stuffed animals, and maritime hardware. At one end, a large window overlooked the river. At the other, a smaller window overlooked the gravel parking lot. During the first month of my employment I was taking stock of just how the third floor was organized and what materials were stored there. In the merchandise backstock area I came face to face with two life-size back-lit 59 transparencies of a man and a woman dressed in elaborate buckskin. The images were about six feet tall and three feet wide, and the figures were shot in a full frontal view. The eyes met the lens straight on and the finished photograph conveyed the sense that the viewer and the subject were looking at one another. In one of the pictures, I recognized the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Historic Preservation Program Officer that I had shared an office with on the MPMRC museum project. The man pictured was her husband. Later that day I was speaking with one of the CRM board members in my office and I asked about the history of the images. I was told that they had been created as part of the museum's 1997 "Before New England" exhibition, which explored local history before English colonization, when Dutch traders and Native peoples were establishing a relationship based on trading furs. When I mentioned that I recognized one of the subjects, the board member made a disapproving sound and asked: "Did you see her hands?" I had not noticed them, and the two of us went back to look at the image. The tribal member's hands were held low, clasped in front of her. "At least she could have done something about her fingernails." I looked again. Her nails were long and glossy with bright polish. I defended the contemporaneity of the nail polish by suggesting that the woman was, after all, a contemporary citizen of Connecticut and subject to the same fashion opportunities and range of choices that the board member was. "That's not the point. The point is that she is supposed to be depicting someone from the 1600s. She could have at least removed the polish." It was an 60 uncomfortable moment when "playing Indian" (Deloria 1998) was made particularly problematic for a tribal member who failed to pass a check for anachronism. This check, in turn, was carried out by a board member for a local history museum that displayed its own intensely selective narrative and perspective as unmarked. The fingernails offer a moment of arrest, a "shock of recognition." The glossy nails vibrate against this image of the Indian, they unsettle this simulacra and draw all of the evidential parts of the image--the clothing and the identity of the subject--into question (or at least into a heightened sense of apprehension). Was the presence of nail polish any more or less anachronistic than the figure's gleaming white teeth? The pristine quality of the buckskin? Or the museum's continued narrative of the Native as doomed to "the shadows" of history? AUTHENTICATING INDUSTRIES My use of the concept "authenticating industries" is one way to grapple with the poetics and politics of representation. In Native America, the practice of self-representation is potentially tension-filled and reflects ongoing conflicts concerning sovereignty, identity politics, access to resources, and the perception of a generalized American Indian figure or icon in the public sphere. Large spaces for popular intersection between Native and non-Native peoples are critically important theaters for self-representation. With the introduction and dynamic expansion of Indian gaming, Indian casinos have 61 become one of the largest and most public of these intersections. It is here where a large segment of non-Native clients or customers come into mediated contact with an element of Native America. It is here, too, where popular conceptions of Native Americans may brush uncomfortably against--or be used oppositionally by--contemporary Native practice, industry, and self-representation. Museums and cultural centers created and controlled by Native Americans, like other museums in the US, have recently experienced a period of expansion and construction--over 200 tribal museums were established in 1998 (Sutton 2000: 364). This is due, in part, to the return of cultural artifacts through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It is also due to the funds necessary for some of these ventures being newly available through profits from Indian gaming. Native-owned museums provide another important Native and non-Native intersection, where visitors experience another mediated and intensified contact point. Self-representations in Native-owned museums often offer counter-histories and cultural narratives that challenge widely held public notions about Indians. Museums and casinos, as industries able to appeal to a wide customer base, rely on different strategies of visual, narrative, aural, and architectural representation to support and authenticate public claims to national, ethnic, and cultural identities. The process of authentication suggested here often responds to specific identity challenges from outside the reservation or community. Such challenges may be in response to land claims, the pursuit of federal recognition, or the desire to open or operate casinos or other potentially lucrative businesses. 62 As a general rule, the intensity of the authenticity challenge relates directly to the resources at stake. With this in mind, the counter or authenticating narrative is most acute in areas where the stakes are felt to be the highest. The Foxwoods Casino Resort presents perhaps the highest profile arena for such contestation. It has drawn some of the heaviest fire on issues of authenticity--challenges to the legitimacy of a recognized Mashantucket Pequot identity--over the last 25 years. While Foxwoods easily enjoys the larger number of yearly visitors, the historical and cultural narratives offered by the museum and research center are more deeply nuanced and saturated. These narratives experience part of their representational power through the theater of their display, and through the popular role that museums play as vehicles for narratives of the rarified and the authentic or, in Stephen Greenblatt's terms, the wondrous and the resonant (Greenblatt 1991). The casino's narratives follow two directions. The first involves an overall thematic that projects or affirms the public space as both natural and Native American. The second offers more subtle placements of artifacts asserting both a general Native American and a specific Mashantucket Pequot identity through the inclusion of a small museum exhibition space, various museum-style display cases in the main public areas, displayed group portraits of the tribal council, and the building-to-reservation relationship of the gaming complex. The museum and research center derives some of its strength and effect from its bold architecture the relationship between the building and the reservation surround. Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center 63 narratives participate in contemporary and highly technological exhibition features, including touch-screen interactive displays and immersive exhibition soundscapes. But much of the museum's affect comes from its role as a museum: a powerful and traditional source, supporter, and didactic structure designed to explain and present factual or authentic historical narratives. The very existence of Mashantucket as a site for successful and contemporary industry also supports a different and dynamic set of identity construction and affirmation. The material consequences of maintaining a recognized Mashantucket Pequot identity are obvious. It is the legal cornerstone for an economy that affects the reservation, the state, and, through active lobbying and example, US policymaking concerning Native America. The site requires an analysis that blends an image-oriented economy critique with the grounded analysis of a material economy critique, locating the points of tension and the points of mutual support. The continuing ability to participate in the gaming industry is founded on a practical and legal demonstration of claims of historical continuity. Such demonstrations also reflect a sincere desire for the reclaiming of a traditional presence and heritage, both as Pequots at Mashantucket as well as American Indians. The Mashantucket Pequots continue to develop a narrative of cultural continuity and belonging, both for a reinforced sense of community on the reservation and as a counter to critiques of their cultural legitimacy. 64 Chapter 2: Tribal Renaissance A HISTORY OF THE MASHANTUCKET PEQUOTS: DEATH AND REBIRTH The views from Foxwoods contain elements that resonate historically and geographically. Looking through the windows, these views are framed, contained, and inter-dependent. The vistas offered from the different windows and walls of glass depend on the positioning of the building, on the plot and purpose of the structure's design. More specifically, Foxwoods is located along axes of history, cultural presence, space, and time. The Great Cedar Swamp, and its inclusion in the Foxwoods vista, resonates with historical significance. It was to this Mashantucket swamp that a band of survivors from the 1637 Pequot War sought refuge. Tracked by soldiers from the Connecticut and Massachusetts colonies and their allies, these Pequots were hunted down and killed. The swamp's unique white rhododendrons with deep red centers, figure in the tribe's history. The white flower with reddish detailing blooms about the same time of the year the massacre took place. Oral tradition holds the budding flower with the red center represents the blood of the hundreds of men, women and children killed at the fort in May 1637. [From an advance brochure for the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, 1997.] The deaths in the swamp marked the bloody and brutal end of a bloody and brutal war, instigated by colonial powers and carried out with English soldiers, Colonial volunteers, and Indian allies (primarily Narragansetts and Mohegans). It culminated a long period of increasing interaction and hostility with a quantum shift in power relations and new restrictions on freedoms. 65 The history of the European colonization and conquest of the "New World" is a complex one. The Puritan settling of New England, what would become the foundational fiction for a United States historical self-understanding, was marked by violence, duplicity, betrayal, and profound misunderstandings (on the part of the Natives) of the scale and stakes of settlers' demands. The Puritans, for all their inter-colonial disagreements and antagonisms, held one viewpoint in common--that there was a very clear division between civilization and savagery and that savages, literally and figuratively, were beyond the pale of civilization. Foundational to the city on the hill's self-definition was an image of righteousness under threat from savagery (Jennings 1975). Partial confirmation for this righteousness was the perception of the New World as fertile but unpopulated wilderness, bestowed in "discovery" as a deserved gift from God. The reasons for this depopulation can be traced to pathogens introduced during the period of fur trade to a population without resistance to European diseases (Salisbury 1982). By the time that the means of production shifted to an emphasis on settlement and conquest, the colonists found many areas already cleared for agriculture and settlement empty of their host communities. The American land was more like a widow than a virgin. ... The so-called settlement of America was a resettlement, a reoccupation of a land made waste by the diseases and demoralization introduced by the newcomers. [Jennings 1975: 30] What disease did not claim, the English, tutored in Ireland in the ways of violent conquest, took. The invasion and conquest of America was an exercise 66 and enlargement of power, and the beginning of what Edward Spicer refers to as the establishment of a "conquest state ... a political organization with an established territorial boundary that has, by means of military power, incorporated other peoples under the control of the conquering people (Spicer 1994: 34). Necessary to accumulate such control was the concurrent and dependent creation and extension of ways of knowing and describing. Structures of knowledge, as Michel Foucault would remind us, are integral components of structures of power (Foucalt 1973). And the American wars of conquest were instrumental in and dependent upon such processes of designation. The arrangement of instrumental dichotomies--savage/civilized, dark/white, heathen/god-fearing, primitive/modern--was not only integral to justifying the aftermath of occupation and subjugation, but was also a necessary pre-condition. In other words, "[n]aming ... is a form of production" (Kovel 1992: 51). To assess current historical narratives, it is paramount to understand that history is something produced in the present. This interpretive process is one that exists within other (past) historical moments. Histories, necessarily including narratives of the "other," must be located within the productive space of such recounting. Indeed, histories must always be narratives of the "other" removed in space and time, either sympathetic or antagonistic. Histories are created within ongoing and unfolding systems of power and, as such, are reflections and extensions of narratives of power; dominant histories are written by dominant peoples. The "other" serves as a category not only of difference but enforced and 67 continued marginalization, a removal from spheres of discourse as part of the removal from spheres of power.20 Such narratives of history rely on the creation and tracing of interactions between designated fields and individuals. This process of designation implies production within a structure of knowledge. Knowledge and naming describe arenas of discourse that, in turn, map fields of power. Discourses are not only fields of assertive power, actively shaping or extending hierarchical relationships through what can be named, they are also fields of limiting power, attempting to control what cannot be named. Designation and naming, the opening and limiting of fields of discourse, are the counter-indicative processes of normalization where the category not only includes, it excludes, it not only describes what can be discussed or named, but also what is outside the field of discussion and, thus, outside the field of possible recognition (Foucault 1977). The above dichotomies are not only useful in describing conflict between the powers of Europe and the inhabitants of the New World, they are also notable because they describe the limits of contention and the shape of contest. Tension acted out between a pole of "civilization" and a pole of "savagery" accepts that structure of tension, its attendant perimeters and parameters. Alternative ways of conceptualizing this same tension are possibilities removed from this discursive knowledge structure. Tdorov, Tzvetan, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992); Wolf, Eric, Europe and the People Without History, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). 20See 68 OF ENGLISHMEN AND "SAVAGE" ACTS At the time of first colonial contact in the beginning of the seventeenth century, Pequot territory--for travel, trading, hunting, gathering, and agriculture--included most of the Connecticut Valley. It extended from what is now New London, on the coast, along the Connecticut River, to near the current boundaries of Massachusetts and Rhode Island--a total area of about two thousand square miles. As elsewhere in the United States and among Native Americans, what are currently understood as "tribes" and "tribal nations" are the identifying products of a long and complex relationship between the original inhabitants of the "New World" and the Europeans who came to trade, settle, and conquer. Like other Native peoples of this time, the Pequots identified themselves through language, kinship ties, shared trading and social relations, territories used for hunting and residence, and strategic oppositions and alliances. The Pequots practiced agriculture, fishing, shellfishing, and hunting. They lived in sometimes palisaded villages and produced and traded wampum (beads made from clam shell) and other products with neighboring and nearby groups. Their pre-contact population is estimated at 13,000 (Starna 1990: 46). Following the introduction of new diseases by the Europeans, most notably smallpox and tuberculosis, the Pequot population was reduced to approximately 3,000 before the Pequot War of 1637. The origin stories for the 69 Pequot War are varied and often contradictory. In a number of accounts,21 the beginning of the Pequot War has been attributed to the murder of Captain John Stone and his bark's crew on the Connecticut River in 1634. Stone was a trader who has variously been depicted as the victim of Pequot "savagery," or a justifiably killed Indian abuser. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, under the leadership of John Winthrop, Sr., set the responsibility for these murders on the Pequots and demanded that they turn over those responsible. Stone was most likely killed by Western Niantics, a small tribe that paid tribute to the Pequots and were under their protection (Jennings 1975; Salisbury 1982, 1990; Hauptman 1990). Thus, although it was not specifically a Pequot crime, there was a particular kind of Pequot responsibility. The Pequots refused to surrender those Western Niantics responsible. They did, however, offer to make restitution, according to custom, from the murderers' families to the families of the victims. This form of jurisprudence was not what the colonial governments were willing to accept. On the one hand, it did not fit with their established courts of law. On the other, the crimes unanswered would better serve as a precursor to a "justifiable" declaration of war. Such a war would secure the Connecticut Valley for Massachusetts and Hartford in the face of both Dutch and other English Puritan encroachment. Jennings, Francis, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest, (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); Clifton, James A., selections from the 1994 Grollier Encyclopedia; and Cave, Alfred A., "Who Killed John Stone?" William and Mary Quarterly, July 1992, 49(3). 21See: 70 The Pequots attempted to redress the crimes following their own system of justice; recognizing that the criminals were outside of their group, they find them still under their sphere of influence and offer to make restitution. Rebuffed, they still attempt to keep their relationship with the colonial forces in some formal sense, both in continued trading and continued negotiations. They sent a delegation to Boston in 1634, with wampum and furs, in exchange for friendship and trade. In 1636, Boston again pressed for the delivery of Stone's murderers or, barring that, a fine of one thousand fathoms of wampum, an astronomical amount in that currency,22 and child hostages as insurance and indicators of good faith. In this same year, a force led by John Endicott led punitive attacks on Pequot settlements at Pequot Harbor. In April of 1637, Pequots attacked Wethersfield in retaliation for Endicott's attacks, and in retribution for the settlers' breaking of a land purchase agreement (Salisbury 1982: 292). The Pequots kill nine settlers and take two girls hostage (Hauptman 1990). The Wethersfield attack became justification for a full-scale reprisal. On May 10, 1637 Captains John Mason and John Underhill sailed from Hartford with a combined force of English soldiers and colonist volunteers, and Mohegans under Uncas, to attack a Pequot fort (palisaded village) on Pequot Harbor. The fort was being occupied by Pequot sachem Sassacus and a group of Pequots, mostly warriors. En route, Underhill and Mason collected Narragansett a discussion of the significance of wampum in the fur trade of New England, see Lynn Ceci's article; "Native Wampum as a Peripheral resource in the Seventeenth-Century WorldSystem," in The Pequots in Southern Connecticut: the Rise and Fall of an American Indian Nation, (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 48-64. 22For 71 and Niantic allies.23 On approaching Pequot Harbor on May 25, the combined forces decided to attack the fort at nearby Mystic instead. One possible reason for this change in plans was because the English decided to have a massacre instead of a battle. (Jennings 1976). They arrive in Mystic later that day. On May 26, 1637, the Pequot War culminated in a predawn assault on a fortified village near the Mystic River in which hundreds of Indian noncombatants were deliberately burned alive. At war's end, the English executed scores of Pequot warriors, enslaved Pequot women and children, and terminated Pequot sovereignty. Puritan chroniclers of the Pequot War defended these draconian measures on the grounds that the Pequots had plotted the extermination of the English and thus deserved to be treated as `the Devil's instruments.' [Cave 1992: 509] Estimates of the dead at Fort Mystic vary from 300 to 700, mostly noncombatants. The majority of the Pequot warriors were over five miles away at Pequot Harbor. Following the massacre at Mystic, Pequot survivors were hunted down and killed, captured and sold into slavery and sent to Bermuda and the West Indies, or given over to the protection of other tribal leaders (Mohegan, Narragansett, and Eastern Niantic), in many instances reversing pre-existing tributary relationships. Soon after the attack at Mystic, Pequot population was estimated at between 2,000 and 2,500 (Hauptman and Wherry 1990: 104). were rivals with the Pequots for the domination of territory and trade with the Europeans, and Eastern Niantics were allied with the Narragansetts (Cave 1992: 512). The Mohegans, led by Uncas, were a group that splintered from the Sassacus-led Pequots in a struggle over political power. 23 Narragansetts 72 The actual effect of tribal protection was varied. The 200 Pequots who surrendered themselves to the Narragansetts could have expected humane treatment in accordance with customs of warfare amongst the tribes of New England. However, these Pequot captives were taken from the Narragansetts by a company of Massachusetts troops. The men were slaughtered, the women and children sold into slavery. The majority of the surviving Pequots found refuge among the Mohegans, a splinter group of the Pequots led by Uncas. This faction split off in the early 1600s when Uncas attempted to wrest power away from Sassacus. In many accounts, this political struggle is given as the reason for the separation between Mohegan and Pequot at the time of the Pequot War, as well as some hostility between the two groups, a condition that the English took advantage of when seeking allies. Indeed, the Mohegans under Uncas became staunch allies of the English, not only supporting them in the Pequot War but also in later wars against the French and other Indians. The incorporation of Pequot survivors into the Mohegan group reflects existing ties of kinship and social relations as well as reversals in established tributary relationships. Since the newly incorporated Pequots had existing social, cultural, and familial associations, it was difficult for colonists to assess the actual number of former Pequots incorporated into the Mohegan group (without information from the Mohegans).24 Individually and as a group, like other Native Americans, the Pequots self-identification was strategically elastic. "Like other 24See Jennings. 73 humans, Indians have had multiple loyalties and multiple ways of situating themselves or conceiving of themselves in relation to other people" (Harmon 2002: 254). It is precisely this strategic conception and use of self-identification that creates tension in existing and popular notions of the authenticity of Indian identity as guaranteed by a fixed adherence to past ways of being. Of course, the incorporation of Pequots amongst the Mohegans was only part of the story of the survivors of the Pequot War and its aftermath. The categories of slave, incorporated member, captive, and adopted individual are remarkably complex and multivalent. The relationship between each Pequot survivor and his or her new community is an individual tale of social and cultural structures and contracts (see Strong 2002, 2001, and 1999). What is key here is that Indianness, as Harmon asserts (and Pequotness, as I would particularize) is an ongoing creation (Harmon 2002: 261). The identification strategies used in the seventeenth century are indicative of an ongoing history of positional and selfidentifying survival strategies evident to the present day. The above historical narrative is only one assemblage of the events and consequences surrounding the Pequot War. Other histories are built from the same events. How the events are interpreted and utilized reveals distinctly different intents in the telling, different realizations of desire for, and configurations of, power. This is not to imply that such structures and interactions of power are realized at only a discursive level, or that discourse introduces and influences power. The two relationships exist together, enmeshed and inter-dependent. 74 The Pequot were not only depicted as "savage" by the civil and military leaders of Massachusetts, they were also "the Devil's instruments." The designation between savage and civilized, on a variety of levels, bears further consideration. As a marker of the colonial experience, the creation of a category of "savage" or "primitive," as a backdrop against which to place the categories of "civilized," is well documented.25 The designation of savage follows an assessment of civilization, which parallels a corresponding measure of authenticity. "Savage" peoples and cultures, measured against a white backdrop, do not exhibit the markers of "authentic" civilization. While "savage" effectively removes a people categorized as such from "standard" or "normal" structures of politics and civilization, the "heathen" implied by a servitude to Satan removes them from the domain of moral law. Rather, it places them squarely within a particular role, a role that demands the aggressive application of such law. Captain John Underhill, one of the leaders of the English soldiers at the attack on the village at Mystic, had this to say about the massacre of Pequots: Great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of young soldiers that had never been in war, to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground, so thick, in some places, that you could hardly pass along. It may be demanded, Why should you be so furious? (as some have said). Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion? But I would refer you to David's war. When a people is grown to such a height of blood, and sin Strong, Captive Selves, Captivating Others; Comaroff, Jean and John, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992); Dirks, Nicholson, Colonialism and Culture, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Salisbury, Neal, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the making of New England, 1500-1643, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); and Jennings. 25See: 75 against God and man, and all confederates in the action, there he hath no respect to persons, but harrows them, and saws them, and puts them to the sword, and the most terriblest death that may be. Sometimes the Scripture declareth that women and children must perish with their parents. Sometimes the case alters; but we will not dispute it now. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings. [Underhill, [1837] in Hauptman 1990: 74] Between God and the sword, there is no cause to dispute the use of "most terriblest death" upon those declared sinners and they are summarily removed from the domains of mercy and compassion assumed part of the Christian motive. Following defeat, not only were the organization and power base of the Pequots disrupted, and their lands appropriated under the tenets of "justifiable war," but also their formal identity was erased. The 1638 Treaty of Hartford declared, "the Pequots shall no more be called Pequots, but Narragansetts and Mohegans"; the Pequots became North America's first "terminated" tribe. The Pequot Reservation was not created until 1651, fully 13 years after the Treaty of Hartford had officially disbanded the Pequot Nation. Robin Cassacinamon, the leader of a group of surviving Pequots that lived near Nameag (present-day New London), was key in its creation. Cassacinamon enjoyed a good relationship with John Winthrop, Jr., a powerful Connecticut "merchant-gentry trader" (Salisbury 1990: 90). Winthrop helped the Nameag Pequots receive 500 acres of land near Noank. Here the Pequots were able to practice self-government and to live within the sphere of their original lands. The conditions of this recaptured identity, however, marked the people with drastic changes. The Pequots 76 would not be able to receive the return of their original lands. Their original sphere of influence, commerce, and power was shattered. The reservation was expanded in 1658 upon petition by surviving Pequots to include land near Mashantucket. The request was made because the land and resources at Noank were exhausted. In 1665, the General Court of Connecticut granted 3,000 acres for the use of the Pequots. Following increasing demands by Connecticut settlers for more land, the Pequots quit-claimed26 the land at Noank for survey and clear title to Mashantucket (McBride 1990: 105­106). The Mashantucket reservation lands and resources were managed by overseers appointed by the colony (and later, the state).27 The Pequots had been reincorporated into the discursive sphere of the colonists--they reclaimed their name and identity--at a price. They were severely diminished as a people, with a significant loss of influence amongst the neighboring tribes, and with a radically different political and property relationship with the colonial powers as reservation Indians. The Pequot had been shifted from a nation-to-nation relationship with colonial representatives of royal government, able to make trade agreements and control large areas of resources and to sell or cede land. They had become a people contained within a space--geographic, political and discursive--fixed to a bounded reservation site on the land and within an "other," dominant structure of power. all rights of usage. vestiges of this system of overseers continued until the early 1970's. See Hauptman, Lawrence M., "The Pequot War and its Legacies," in The Pequots in Southern Connecticut: the Rise and Fall of an American Indian Nation, 76. 27Indeed, 26Relinquished 77 Following the establishment of the reservation at Mashantucket, the reservation and its population consistently decreased over the following three hundred years. From 1658 to 1855, tribal members left the reservation to seek employment and other opportunities elsewhere. Many were indentured in white households or farms, and some moved to Oneida Indian country and Brothertown during the Great Awakening.28 The land base also shrank. In 1720, a 500-acre parcel called Mashantucket South Hill was lost to white settler encroachment. In 1774, a census identified 151 tribal members in residence. The Mashantucket reservation was reduced to 989 acres by 1855, in response to further demands for land. In that same year, the State of Connecticut auctioned off all but 204 acres of the Mashantucket reservation.29 By 1858 the reservation population had dropped to 22. In 1935, the land holdings were listed at 178 acres, with three houses and nine residents.30 Much of the population decline was due to lack of adequate housing, loss of skills, the absence of community infrastructure, and the poor quality of the reservation lands for practicing agriculture. In 1972 the Mashantucket Pequot reservation had two residents: Elizabeth George Plouffe and her half-sister, Martha Langevin Ellal. After their deaths, the State of Connecticut planned to turn the Mashantucket Reservation into a state park. When Plouffe passed away in 1973, her grandson Skip Hayward quit his job 1720 and 1750, Calvinistic Methodism swept through New England and many Indians left to join religious communities elsewhere. 29 This reduction of reservation land through state auction was to become a pivotal point in the later 1975 suits for return of land and for federal recognition. 30Campisi, Jack, "The Emergence of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe, 1637­1975," in The Pequots in Southern Connecticut, 117-140. 28Between 78 at a nearby New London submarine facility to take up full-time residency on the reservation. (Unbroken occupation of reservation lands is one of the most important criteria for federal recognition.) He also set the goal of repopulating Mashantucket by encouraging the return of active and potential tribal members. By 1974 the tribal government was re-organized, and there were 55 members listed on the tribal rolls. Hayward was elected leader of the tribal council at the first annual meeting in 1975; it is a position he was consistently re-elected to until November 1998. Currently Hayward is Vice Chairman. Following the tribal government's re-organization, Hayward and the tribal council began researching and defining tribal membership. One of the requirements for membership was blood quantum, a concept of American Indian identification introduced with the General Allotment Act of 1877. The Act was designed to transfer reservation lands from communal property to private property and, in so doing, to decrease both tribal land holdings and recognized tribal populations.31 Blood quantum reckoning became a major factor in figuring eligibility for inclusion under the federal management of Indian affairs. Currently, one-sixteenth is the minimum blood quantum considered by the federal government to make a legitimate claim of tribal belonging. Individual tribes set the Act, tribal members had to prove blood heritage to be eligible for individually deeded 160-acre land parcels the federal government was carving out of reservation lands. Ability to prove a quantum of one-half or more "Indian blood" was necessary. Following this act (between 1887 and 1934) Native American land holdings fell nationally from 138 million to 48 million acres. See Annette Jaimes, "Federal Indian Identification Policy: A Usurpation of Indigenous Sovereignty in North America," in The State of Native America, Annette Jaimes, Ed., (Boston: South End Press, 1996). 31Under 79 their own limits, either at this level (like the Mashantucket Pequots32) or greater. The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Council decided to recognize members able to prove descent from the tribal rolls recorded in the Indian Supplement to the 1900­1910 Census.33 Tribal members were granted two-acre house lots on the reservation and opportunities in possible tribal businesses. The council found, as it contacted potential tribal members, that many were living elsewhere and were sometimes identified with other tribes. Individuals with strong ties of kinship to other tribes, and whose sense of belonging was involved in other communities, were among those asked to change communal and legal designations in an effort to create a reinforced population-base. The Mashantucket Pequots explored a number of different commercial enterprises to achieve financial independence and stability for the community. Maple syrup manufacturing, hog farming, and cutting and selling cordwood were some of the reservation's first business projects. Although these efforts were initially funded by a mixture of small grants from state, federal, and local sources, none were successful enough to provide the community a secure financial base. Hayward also began to research possible legal action for the return of tribal lands, and for federal recognition as an Indian tribe. Thomas Tureen, attorney with the the Mashantucket Pequots' most aggressive repopulation efforts, tribal membership was decided using the one-sixteenth standard. In 1996 the tribal council voted to change the parameters for membership and recognized all existing members as fully Mashantucket Pequot, in part to ensure that the tribe would not marry itself out of existence. 33These rolls listed about thirty-five names. See Hileman, Maria, "Rebirth of a Nation," New London Day, December 12, 1993, p. B4. 32During 80 Native Americans Rights Fund, had recently won Passamaquoddy Tribe v. Morton (1975), a land-claim case for the Passamaquoddy Tribe, the Penobscot Indian Nation, and the Houlton Band of Maliseets. The case was landmark as it was the first to successfully apply the tenets of the Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts (1790­1834) on behalf of Eastern tribes.34 The 1834 Act regulated land transactions in Indian country (Act of June 30, 1834, 4 Stat. 738, 25 U.S.C.). Under the Acts, tribal lands could not be sold without the express consent of Congress. Many tribal lands in the United States, and particularly in the northeast, were whittled away by appointed overseers and tax assessments. Before Passamaquoddy, tribes in the "Thirteen Original States," by virtue of their treaty relationships pre-dating the foundation of the United States (and thus also pre-dating federal recognition), had often been ruled to be outside of the jurisdiction of certain legal protections. The significant question in Passamaquoddy was: Was there a federal trust relationship between these tribes and the government? The case was also significant for the size of the land claim--the tribe, nation, and band were suing for restoration of their traditional hunting grounds, an area that encompassed 60% of the State of Maine (Scully 1995). In 1980, the Maine Indians settled for $81.5 million, most of which was used to purchase 305,000 acres of land. Indian Trade and Intercourse Act was first used in challenge for Eastern tribes by the Oneida Indian Nation in 1970. The Oneida Indian Nation of New York and the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin brought suit against the counties of Oneida and Madison, New York. The suit filed for return of 250,000 acres sold by the Oneidas to New York state without the approval of Congress. In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled the case could be heard in federal court and, in 1985, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Oneidas. For a more detailed timeline, see: www.oneida ­nation.net/TIME.html. 34 The 81 Tureen reviewed the Mashantucket Pequot claims against Connecticut, and decided to represent the tribe. The Mashantucket Pequots filed suit for recovery of lands in 1976. CLAIM, SETTLEMENT, AND INDIAN GAMING To bring him out of savagery and into citizenship we must make the Indian more intelligently selfish before we can make him selfishly intelligent. We need to awaken in him wants . . . . Discontent with the teepee and the starving rations of the Indian camp in winter is needed to get the Indian out of the blanket and into trousers--and trousers with a pocket in them, and a pocket that aches to be filled with dollars! [Merrill E. Gates, president of Amherst College and the Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian, 189635] I'm against it because gambling feeds the get-rich-quick illusion that debilitates society; because gambling causes individual ruin, despair and suicide, and corrupts a state that seeks a piece of its action. I'm against it because I respect American Indians, and do not want to see them isolated and despised as America's new class of professional croupiers on tax-free islands of false dreams. [William Safire, New York Times, 30 May 1991] In filing suit on behalf of the Mashantucket Pequots, Tureen followed a strategy that had proved successful in the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy landrecovery cases--the land cited for return was legally owned by others.36 The Robert F., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to Present, (New York: Knopf, 1978), 173. 36 The Maine Indian cases paved the way for a number of similar suits, beginning in the mid 1970s. See Campisi, The Mashpee Indians; Deloria, Vine, and Clifford Lytle, The Nations Within: 35 Berkhofer, 82 added pressure of resolving new doubt on existing deeds and titles contributed to the case's settlement. The 1983 Mashantucket Pequot Indian Claims Settlement Act (Public Law 98-134, Title 25 U.S.C.A. 1751-1760) combined the Pequots' federal recognition with the settlement of the 1976 suit, awarding $900,000, in part to buy back tribal lands. There was still the question of what the tribe would do with funds remaining after the land purchase, and how to ensure their future self-sufficiency. Hayward and the council used the settlement money to buy land, a local restaurant, and to make housing improvements on the reservation; Hayward also looked into other ways to generate sustainable capital for the tribal nation. He traveled to Florida in the early 1980s to meet with Seminole Chief James Billy. Billy had recently brought a case to court to establish high-stakes bingo on Seminole land. There are two key court cases leading to the enactment of the 1988 Indian Gaming Rights Act (IGRA): the Seminole Tribe of Florida v Butterfield (1983) and the California v Cabazon Band of Mission Indians (1987). The decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Seminole established that bingo fell under state statutes classed as regulatory rather than prohibitory. The State of Florida had tried to close a high-stakes bingo parlor operating on the Seminole Reservation (by state law, any bingo jackpot in excess of $100 was illegal; the Seminole's prize was set at $10,000). The regulatory/prohibitory distinction made The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); Jaimes; and Sutton, Imre, ed., Irredeemable America: The Indians' Estate and Land Claims, (Alburquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1985), for examples. 83 by the court meant that gambling on the Seminole Reservation fell outside the criminal provisions of Public Law 280 and could not be prohibited by the state. The Seminole bingo operation was the first such gambling establishment in the United States. The precedent-setting case opened the door to high-stakes bingo on reservations across the country. The Seminole decision was challenged in the US Supreme Court. In 1987, the Court ruled that the states' interest in regulating these games was outweighed by the tribes' interest in promoting tribal gaming for the economic good of the tribe. Therefore, the states could not enforce any gaming laws or regulations on Indian reservations. During this year, the Court also ruled on California v Cabazon Band of Mission Indians. The Cabazon ruling established that once a state has legalized any form of gambling, Indian tribes within that state may offer the same game on trust land without any state interference or restriction. IGRA created rules about how tribes could offer gaming and how to make the necessary compacts with the states. Following his meeting with Billy, Hayward returned to Connecticut to pursue opening a high-stakes bingo operation at Mashantucket. Unable to find financial backers in Connecticut's depressed economy, Hayward finally found Arab bankers willing to put up $5 million for the project. The bingo hall, Foxwoods, opened in 1986. Following its quick success (an estimated gross of $6 million in the first year), and the passage of IGRA two years later, plans were made to extend the operation to include casino-style gambling. This time the 84 investment money, $65 million, came from Malaysian-based Chinese casino-hotel developer, Lim Goh Tong. The casino was completed in 1990, but its opening was delayed until February 1992 due to court battles with the state. As per the Cabazon (1987) decision, the state could not prohibit gambling and precedent established the types of gambling allowed. Since the State of Connecticut held a once-a-year fundraiser with a "Casino Night" theme, the state could not restrict the Pequots from operating the same games. These included all types of gaming except slot machines (which were not part of Casino Nights and are any casino's biggest moneymaker). In 1993, the Mashantucket Pequot Gaming Enterprise (the casino corporate entity of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation) negotiated a compact with the state that not only allowed Class III gaming (which includes bingo, table games, and slot machines), but also secured a monopoly on slot machine operation in Connecticut. The initial Foxwoods' manager, Michael "Mickey" Brown, was a key figure in these negotiations. Brown was well known for his past career as a tough federal prosecutor and gambling lawyer from Atlantic City, and his hiring as manager sent a clear signal of professional legitimacy for Foxwoods. In exchange for the monopoly, the tribal nation agreed to give the State 25% of the slots' take or a minimum of $100 million per year. In 1994, the first year of the Mashantucket Pequots­Connecticut agreement, Foxwoods paid the 85 state $113 million for the exclusive right to operate slot machines.37 The state compact was won in the face of public opposition and the scrutiny and open challenge of a number of public and private figures. Businessman and Atlantic City casino developer Donald Trump was one of its more public opponents. `Go up to Connecticut,' Donald Trump told a House subcommittee and its overflow audience Tuesday, `and you look' at the Mashantucket Pequots.' `They don't look like Indians to me.' `...Look,' he said, `nobody likes Indians as much as Donald Trump, but the Indians are being had by the mobsters. There is no way the Indians are going to protect themselves from the mob,' he insisted. `This is gonna blow.' `... They don't look like Indians to me,' he said. `They don't look like Indians to Indians.' ... After the hearing, he was asked to explain what an Indian looked like. `You know,' he said. `You know.' [The Hartford Courant, 6 October 1993.38] Part of Trump's critique was based on his perception of race as integral to cultural integrity, to the authenticity of the Mashantucket Pequot claims to "Indianness." Elsewhere Trump has referred to the Mashantucket Pequots as "Michael Jordan Indians." In the above mentioned article, Trump also adds his 1995 the Mohegans were granted federal recognition and began planning the opening of their own casino, with financial help from the Pequots. The Mashantucket Pequots and the Mohegans currently split the exclusive right to operate slot machines in the state, and the yearly payment to Connecticut. 38 Lightman, David. "Trump Criticizes Pequots, Casino; Trump Says Indian Gaming Vulnerable to the Mob." The Hartford Courant, October 6, 1993. 37In 86 business insights to his analysis of phenotype and insists that Indians would not be able to defend themselves against organized crime: `It will be the biggest scandal ever,' Trump warned, `the biggest since Al Capone. . . . An Indian chief is going to tell Joey Killer to please get off his reservation? It's unbelievable to me.' [ibid.] The recent efforts to both encourage and regulate the Indian gaming industry provide a parallel to and possible consequence of nineteenth-century efforts to bring "the Indian" into the "intelligent selfishness" of capitalism and citizenship. The Indian Gaming Rights Act presents a new strategy incorporating some of these earlier views, with some phenomenal successes. Indian gaming has become the fundamental economic development initiative for Indian nations in the United States. By the end of 1994, 97 tribes had a total of 113 gaming compacts with 22 states (Johnson 1995; see also McCullock 1994). By 1998, there were a total of 223 Indian gaming operations in the United Sates (Sinclair 1998: 8). Foxwoods, and the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, provide the most remarkable example of the potential success of Indian gaming. Located within approximately three hours' driving distance for over 22 million people, Foxwoods grossed an estimated over $800 million in 1995; in 1996, that figure grew to over $1 billion--almost one-fifth of that year's total Indian Gaming Gross Revenue in the United States ($5.39 billion).39 By 2000, the total tribal governmental gaming Foxwoods was the only gambling site in Connecticut until 1996 when the Mohegan Sun opened. By 1997 the two casinos were generating nearly $1.5 billion dollars in revenue. For comparison, this represents roughly 38% of what the twelve Atlantic City casinos posted for revenues in the same year. See Sinclair, Sebastian, "Go-Go Times Roll On For Foxwoods, 39ibid. 87 revenue had climbed to $10.6 billion--still less than 10% of the total national gaming industry (Foxwoods and the nearby Mohegan Sun account for 20 percent of this figure).40 Indian gaming provides approximately 250,000 jobs nationally (75% of which are held by non-Indians).41 The entire Foxwoods complex--gaming and public areas, hotels, and restaurants--includes 4.7 million square feet, 315,310 of which are given over to gambling. It employs over 11,000 people, placing it within the top five employers in Connecticut. By January 2000, the tribal nation had contributed over $1.07 billion to Connecticut under the terms of its agreement with the state.42 The Mashantucket Pequots' payment ranks second only to the federal government in direct financial contributions to the state. While the growth in Indian Gaming is nothing short of phenomenal, it must be contextualized as part of a national explosion in the industry. The most recent wave of the gambling business in this country began with the legalization of gambling in the State of Nevada in 1931. State-sanctioned lotteries began in the US, at least in the twentieth century, in New Hampshire in 1964. In 1977, legal gambling was extended to Atlantic City, New Jersey. Between 1989 and 1998, Mohegan Sun," Indian Gaming Business: A Quarterly Supplement to International Gaming & Wagering Business, May 1998, 8. 40 Chen, David W. and Charlie Le Duff. "Bad Blood in Battle Over Casinos," New York Times, October 28, 2001. 41 From www.niga.org, the website for the National Indian Gaming Association, 42 Greenberg, Brigitte. "Connecticut Indians Win Big At Gambling," The San Francisco Chronicle, November 18, 1997, p. A7. 88 eight states authorized commercial casino gaming43 and, by July 1998, some form of gambling was legal in 48 of the 50 United States. In the most recent comprehensive figures available (those for 1996), the Gross Annual Wager--the amount wagered on all forms of regulated gambling--was $586.5 billion. The gross revenue for that year was $47.6 billion. At Mashantucket this source for significant independent funding affects the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation's ability to successfully enact the scope of their vision and projects for the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. While the MPMRC serves as part of the resort's attraction base, it also functions as an important museum and a scholarly research center. The two main commercial structures on the reservation, the museum and the casino complex, overlap in their articulation of representative and representational space, and act as key production centers for the reservation community and for the tribe's complex public identities. The Indian gaming industry can be understood as an oppositional industry, in Ross Chambers's sense--a displayed behavior of survival tactics that do not challenge the power in place, but make use of the opportunities and circumstances set up by that power for its own purposes. Here opposition plays a delicate balance with established power, challenging in subtle and sometimes substantial ways, without becoming a resistant (and fixed) struggle with the existing power structure. Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, and South Dakota. See State of the States: The AGA Survey of Casino Entertainment, Washington, D.C.: American Gaming Association, 1999, 6. 43Colorado, 89 Oppositional behavior consists of individual or group survival tactics that do not challenge the power in place, but make use of circumstances set up by that power for purposes the power may ignore or deny. [Chambers 1991: 72] While describing the Mashantucket Pequots as tactical oppositionalists may at first seem facetious, their participation in the Indian gaming industry depends on accepting the concept "domestic dependent nation," the legitimacy of the Federal government to oversee and control many aspects of their tribal nation, and the parameters of blood reckoning, to say the least. It is obvious that many of the aspirations of the Mashantucket Pequots, and the means for achieving them, are not significantly different from those of the existing hegemonic order. And the appropriation of dominant discourses at Mashantucket is a potent practice. As Michael Brown put it during a 1994 interview with 60 Minutes reporter Steve Kroft, for a segment eventually titled "Wampum Wonderland":44 KROFT: You have a very small number of Native Americans with maybe 1/16th Indian blood... Mr. BROWN: Mm-hmm. KROFT: ...who, through good fortune and good legal advice and good business sense... Mr. BROWN: Mm-hmm. KROFT: ...and the hiring of the right people, have lucked into a multibillion-dollar business. a full transcript of the 60 Minutes 1994 story on the Mashantucket Pequots, and a follow-up story completed in 2000, please see Appendices II and III. 44 For 90 Mr. BROWN: God bless America. That's the American way. [60 MINUTES, CBS News, September 18, 1994] But tactical considerations provide only one theoretical tool for approaching the Mashantucket Pequots, not a complete means of analysis. Cultural hegemony is an evolving process that defines cultural practices through ongoing enactments (Bourdieu 1977, Gramsci 1971). At Mashantucket, the dynamics of such practices include a combination of economic power and the reassembly of community, and the assertion of a Mashantucket Pequot identity as active and vital. "Community" defines a group that shares a subjective sense of belonging together and a process of self-identification.45 This identification can further be recognized as a contested field supporting a number of active fronts. In Mashantucket these fronts include arenas of public image presented to the community surrounding the reservation, the national community, the national pan-Indian community, and the community of the reservation itself. IDENTITY: POLITICS AND POETICS Much of the profits from Foxwoods have been spent building a new community center, a fire and medical complex, a childcare facility and other community services. The Mashantucket Pequots have also diversified their holdings and now own a sand and gravel company, a state-designated historical Benedict, Imagined Communities (London: Verso Editions, 1983); Brow, James, Demons and Development, (Tucson, AZ: Tucson University Press, 1996), "Notes on Community, Hegemony, and the Uses of the Past." Anthropological Quarterly (January) 1990; and Weber, Max, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by C. Wright Mills and translated by Hans H. Gerth, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), among others. 45 Anderson, 91 inn and restaurant in nearby North Stonington, a pharmaceutical distribution company, a golf course, and real estate (their land holdings have increased from 180 acres in 1979 to a current 5,000+ acres). The tribal nation also owns and operates the Pequot River Shipworks in New London, which manufactures highspeed trimaran ferries for a national and international market. But the Mashantucket Pequots are not only asserting themselves in terms of material capital, by amassing property and industry. They are also expanding an expressive ability in terms of symbolic capital. They host Schemitzun, the Festival of Green Corn, a pan-Indian dance competition with the largest prize purse in the United States. Mashantucket Pequots have made significant financial contributions to the Smithsonian's Museum of the American Indian ($10 million) and the National Democratic Party. The Mashantucket Pequots are busy researching and expanding their cultural repertoire by adapting forms of language, dance, and music, drawing from the expressive cultures of other tribes as well as their own, and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center is a significant resource on things Indian and things Pequot. To reach this point, the Pequot had to pursue the government for federal recognition as a tribal nation. This depended on being verified as the continuation of the people that first colonial Hartford, and later the United States, recognized as the Pequots. The current criteria to pass federal guidelines for recognition include the existence of a reservation or tribally-owned property that reflects a legal relationship with the government, a continuous occupation of that 92 reservation or property, and a demonstrable quantum of Indian blood that falls within federally-set limits. After passing or fulfilling these criteria in the 1983 court decision, the Mashantucket Pequot eventually parlayed this recognition into the world's most successful casino-based reservation economy. But the establishment of a legally authenticated Indian identity was not enough to stave off a number of protests over the authenticity of the Mashantucket Pequot identity, located mostly in popular discourse and based on ambiguous concepts of Indianness and race. Trump's arguments (cited earlier) are similar to others concerning Indian authenticity and the gambling industry. On the one hand, the Pequots are judged "inauthentic" Indians by their appearance, by their dress, or by their participation in "non-traditional" industries. They don't match a popular cultural image generated, in part, by the industries of nostalgia. Such an image is centered on maintaining difference, on maintaining a sense of the "other." As Berkhofer asserts: the very attraction of the Indian to the White imagination rests upon the contrast that lies at the core of the idea. Thus the debate over `realism' [or authenticity] will always be framed in terms of White values and needs, White ideologies and creative uses. [Berkhofer 1979: 68] On the other hand, if they really are authentic Indians, this same contrast must render them unable to deal with such contemporary and familiarized problems as murderous gangsters and capital accumulation. The success of their capital accumulation is one key reason that their enterprise and identity come under fire. 93 Jeff Benedict, author of Without Reservation, was interviewed in a 60 Minutes follow-up piece to "Wampum Wonderland." The show segment was made with reporter Steve Kroft in 2000. Mr. BENEDICT: It's fraudulent. I mean, frankly, to go to the Congress of the United States and to portray yourself as something that you're not and to get benefits, dollars, as a result of it--status--is fraudulent. KROFT: I think you would have to admit also that if Skip Hayward were up there growing vegetables, nobody would care. Mr. BENEDICT: Right now? KROFT: Yeah. Mr. BENEDICT: I would agree with that. I think what makes this an issue, though, is that he's not up there growing vegetables. He's up there bringing in a billion dollars a year, changing the face of three communities in southeastern Connecticut forever. [60 MINUTES II, CBS News, May 23, 2000] Jeff Benedict and Donald Trump are not the only ones to voice concerns over the authenticity of Mashantucket Pequot cultural identity. In the face of growing financial power, many of the surrounding townspeople are also angry that the Pequots will not stay within a limited and marginalized sphere, sliding irrevocably toward a "noble" absence. In April of 1993, following the Mashantucket Pequots purchase of the 1,214-acre Lake of Isles Boy Scout camp, 400 local townspeople met in North Stonington, near the reservation.46 At the Penelope, "Tribe's Non-Indian Neighbors Feel Threatened," The New London Day, December 15, 1993, p. B4. 46Overton, 94 time, the tribal nation was interested in building a theme park on the former campsite.47 The North Stonington meeting was to voice opposition to further expansion of the reservation.48 The townspeople's anger was not against an asserted Mashantucket Pequot identity, per se, but at the concomitant shift in power and the ability to claim public attention. This opposition was voiced in a number of ways, including describing the conflict in racial terms. "[F]or all intents and purposes, the Mashantuckets are either white or black" (Overton 1993: B4), and thus not Indian, or in cultural terms: `There really is no culture. The Mashantucket culture was lost long ago. This cultural stuff, this struggle to retrace their roots, it's all a smokescreen. The tribe is no endangered species--they are already long dead.' [Hugh Crow, a Ledyard resident, quoted in Overton, 1993: B4] Trump and the townspeople are not alone in using static and generalized concepts of Indians as a yardstick for cultural authenticity. In The Invented Indian, James Clifton also cites cultural adaptation--and land and federal recognition suits--as indicators of "identity dissolutions" (Clifton 1990: 5), discounting the legal bases and battles over land and sovereignty. In Clifton's formulation, "invention" and "authenticity" represent poles in a dialectic of the acknowledgment of their relationship with Lim Goh Tong, the park was to have a Chinese theme, complete with a simulated section of the Great Wall of China. 48The concern proved not to be unfounded. On May 2, 1995, the Pequot were granted permission to annex 247 acres adjacent to the reservation, by the Federal Department of the Interior. See Johnson, Kirk, "Anger Measured by the Acre as Wealthy Pequots Win the Right to Annex More Land," The New York Times, May 3, 1995, p. B5. 47 In 95 factual--a move that brings one closer to "invention" moves one further from "authenticity." Robert Berkhofer makes a number of significant points about the identity "Indian." The first concerns the creation of the generalized category "Indian" within a popular American discourse. The conflation of individual tribes, peoples, and cultures into a larger abstract term served to de-particularize specificity among those peoples being conquered and displaced. "Indian" also created an open category of otherness, a space in which to shift concepts and images of individual cultures, assessed against an increasingly popular and vague notion of what an authentic Indian might be. "In short, character and culture were united in one summary judgment" (Berkhofer 1979: 25). Thus, "Indian" became a term of normalization (Foucault 1977) indicating marked and unmarked categories, categories of Indian and non-Indian behavior. These same identifying strategies were used on an inter-tribal level as well as on the level of Indian and colonist, with distinctions made between "savage" and "civilized" Indians. Categorization of the same people varied with time, location, and context, and was influenced by parallel designations of ally and enemy. Perhaps most significant in this analysis, "Indian" as a general term became fixed in time. It arranged a "true" Indian identity against a White background and positioned elements of cultural change as synonymous with a falling-away from this identity construct. Cultural identity became a generalizing concept locked in stasis, and change a marker of inauthenticity. 96 A second important observation is that the genesis of the identification "Indian" is as a conferred identification. It is defined from without, through legislation and popular imagination. As such, the idea of Indian as a cultural identifier was placed outside of the hands of those identified as such.49 Locked in time, "Indian" was also locked within a dominant power structure and the term operated as evaluation as well as identification. This equation is radically displaced at Mashantucket, through shifts in ways of being, in industry, and in a self-conscious use of the image of "Indian." But much of the discussion concerning cultural identity still centers on authenticity--in both a popular and a critical understanding. Academic debates over the invention of tradition or the deconstruction of authenticity can endanger practical, micro-struggles over sovereignty and self-determination. However effectively scholars deconstruct authenticity and reveal it to be an intellectual red herring, the concept remains nonetheless entrenched in popular thought and is an emotional, political issue for indigenous peoples, particularly for those who are engaged in a struggle for sovereignty. [Linnekin 1991: 446] distinction is also true for the naming of Indian tribes, both by whites and other Indians. Conventionally, the name that a people have for themselves translates, roughly, into "people" or "the people." In the Northeast, names were often based on places, and meant "the people of" a particular place. Names familiar in popular culture have, more often than not, been given from outside the tribe as imposed identifiers. In reading the entry for Pequot in the Grollier Academic American Encyclopedia, 1994, the origin of the Pequot name is given as "Pekawatawog, the destroyers." It serves to emphasize the encyclopedia entry, written by James Clifton, which outlines them as aggressive and "most feared." Introduced as an element of explanation, the name becomes important foreground to a depiction of the Pequot as "savage" loose cannons. In the Pequots' own promotional literature for the casino, they identify "Pequot" as meaning "The Fox People," a majority clan designation. 49This 97 Social theory is not protected from contrary utilizations. The construction of tradition, and its necessary fundamental ties to community and identity, is a useful theoretical tool. It has its own sense of danger, however, its own potential for misuse and misdirection. "What many anthropologists view as an advance in cultural theory can be read popularly as `destructive' of native claims to cultural distinctiveness" (Linnekin 1991: 447). But the "construction of tradition" is not solely useful as a means of cultural analysis or critique. Indigenous peoples also powerfully wield the practice of tradition construction. Cultural invention and borrowing are integral and traditional elements of cultural practice (Clifford 1987, 1988; Coe 1986; Campisi 1991; Strong 199250). Indeed, the practice of invention is one proof of continuity, a means of taking dynamic forces of change and uniting them with a particular type of unbroken cultural practice. The "construction of tradition" paradigm is also useful as an analytical tool to assess hegemonic constructions of Indianness, identity, tradition, and authenticity, to critique them to uncover their own roots of constructive practice. The point of constructivist theories of identity is not to strip away all constructed or active articulations of culture as inauthentic fabrications, but to understand the processes by which they gain or acquire authenticity. Understanding the "constructed-ness" of culture or cultural forms is only a beginning. The point of analysis is to push beyond this descriptive realization, to pursue how it is that also statements by Kevin McBride, Archaeologist (and current Director of Research for the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Library), in "Out from the Shadows," part of a special series run by The New London Day newspaper, 12/12/93. 50See 98 constructions are felt, naturalized, and used. This calls for a shift from seeking to establish survivals and tracing lineage in cultural groups, to examining the ongoing dynamics of culture, the forms in which these dynamics are represented and understood, and their processes of change. Paradoxically, essentialist arguments have real, pragmatic value. "`Indian blood'--and especially its more differentiated, tribe-specific varieties--is a hegemonic discourse within and against which indigenous identity is defined (Strong and Van Winkle 1991: 555). At Mashantucket, it is precisely this intersection of the "authentic" that is worth further exploration. One the one hand, authenticity is measured by Indian ability to live up to nostalgic or colonialist expectations. On the other, Indian participation in what might popularly be referred to as a modern project, guarantees a determination of inauthenticity by precisely that participation.51 This intersection involves two particular stances in regard to time, place, and the uses of the past. The first is reflective of an effort to firmly place Indians within an anthropological present that, as frozen or fixed, is constantly past.52 The second focuses on an ability to participate and sustain such a phenomenal level of success in contemporary American business landscape. Defining such participation as an inability or unwillingness to stay within the nostalgic parameters of popular conceptions of Indianness, it generates an accusation of "inauthenticity." Here point concerns time, the boundaries of time, and the breaches in ethnographic or frozen time caused by a participation in contemporary industries hitherto primarily controlled by dominant-culture whites. Such industries, like casinos, contradict popular expectations of Indian cultural values or abilities. Although, with the advent of "casino Indians," this too is changing, not necessarily for the better. 52 See Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 51 The 99 nostalgia is not a docile or benign practice. It is a means of producing desire and can be read as the white process of placement, framing, and delimiting Native people within a white imaginary. In an interesting reversal of historic colonial encounters between Native peoples and European settlers, discourses of development out of control and "without permission" have also been mobilized in critiquing the ongoing projects at Mashantucket. The following is another excerpt from the 1994 "60 Minutes" transcript cited above: (Footage of residents of communities surrounding the reservation) KROFT: The Pequots are trying to buy up huge tracts of land and annex them, and the local townspeople are feeling threatened. Unidentified Woman #1: They can increase the commercial development without any control--no environmental control, no land-use controls, no public-safety controls, none of that. No tax--no tax bite at all. Any businessman would like to develop under those circumstances. KROFT: Do they have a lot of political power? Unidentified Woman #2: Immense. Unidentified Woman #3: Money is power. Money is power. Woman #2: We've learned the golden rule. KROFT: Which is? Woman #2: Money talks. KROFT: We talked to the tribal chairman the other day, and he said, `Our people have gotten the short end of the stick for 300 years. This is justice.' 100 Woman #2: Well, they're taking in, like I said, last year, a half a billion dollars, and there's 300 members. Now is this justice? Woman #1: We have a big city that's been plopped down next to us. A city of 40,000 in the course of a year has been put right there at--at our boundary. KROFT: How big do you think it's going to get? Woman #1: I don't know. Ask--ask the tribal chairman. Woman #3: They won't tell us. Woman #2: And, you know... Woman #3: They say there is no plan. (Footage of the casino) [60 MINUTES, CBS News, September 18, 1994] Notable in the above interview is an imagined concept of injustice expressed in terms of the wealth that the tribal nation earns. If the Mashantucket Pequots were involved in an enterprise that earned them considerably less, say their earlier pizza restaurant or hydroponic lettuce concern, it is highly probable that such public expressions of outrage would not occur. It is difficult to talk about the practices of construction at Mashantucket, in all of its venues, without a discussion of what is at stake, and the terms in which the arguments are raised. What the Mashantucket Pequots utilize as a powerful locus of their ongoing "invention" is the concept of sovereignty: an autonomous self-determination and self-identification. Here a skillful use of elements of dominant discourse, of hegemonic concepts of nation or state, is practiced in the pursuit of specific and strategically Mashantucket Pequot ends. 101 Here identity is a process of self-definition, a recognition of the dynamics of change. In this view, change and tradition are in a constant process of formation.53 This practice is what Gerald Vizenor calls "survivance," the ability to survive by adapting and adopting ways and means of dealing with a powerful colonizing force by seeking out and inhabiting contradictions in the dominant system. These contradictions open spaces for an oppositional continuation and transformation of dynamic cultural presence (Vizenor 1994). Survivance works not only to retain cultural practices, but also to make the issue of resistance and adaptation an integral element of culture itself. At Mashantucket, the construction of community, identity, and traditions is successful precisely because it is mapped in the terms of the overarching structure, and because its construction takes advantage of contradictions in this structure. It is also true that such avenues of construction are the most powerful within which to arrange arguments of contingent independence.54 This point of analysis is not limited to a contemporary moment. The over 300 federally recognized American Indian tribes and tribal nations are, in large part, the invention of eighteenth and nineteenth century federal American Indian laws and treaties. (Prior to the eighteenth century, tribal designations were used in treaties and agreements between Native peoples and Colonial or European powers.) Examining specific tribal identities and continuities through the lens of Raymond. Marxism and Literature, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). use of this problematic term `contingent independence' echoes the legal concept of `domestic dependence' in describing Indian reservations and nations. Its contingency depends on a use of common structures of figuring power and politics, a defensive nationalism against a greater political force. 54My 53Williams, 102 the concept of construction, popular ideas of cultural continuity begin to break down. During the formation of reservations, the forced relocations and sometimes blending of different tribal groups, often clicked the "counter of continuity" to an arbitrary zero. This raised the potential for the cultural continuity of a particular tribal group to be measured from the formation of specific reservations. Rather than being a question of yes or no, construction then becomes a question of when, how, and to what extent. My interest is not in how constructed or renewed traditions reflect or transform authentic and unbroken historical continuities. It is in how construction fosters a contemporary sense of community and identity--how the construction of traditions can be an ongoing affirmation of community and identity, not a specific statement of continuity but a recognition of dynamic practice. Constructionist theories push process into the foreground and recognize it as an authentic and integral part of cultural practice. PHENOTYPE: THE MASHANTUCKET PEQUOTS AND "BLACK INDIANS" Many of the popular challenges to the cultural authenticity of the Mashantucket Pequots are framed in terms of race. `We've been called every name you can think of,' says Joey Carter, a Black Pequot tribal member and head of public relations for the group. But what I tell them is, `You can call us anything you want, but when you call us, call us at the bank.' [Chappell 1995: 50] Like many other Indian peoples, the Mashantucket Pequots intermarried with other marginalized peoples, including African Americans, over the course of 103 history. Over half the current tribal council can trace a combined African American and American Indian ancestry. Race in the United States is most often understood as a reading of signs, a decoding of physical characteristics and appearances to arrive at a particular category or designation. This phenotypical understanding is joined to an idea of "blood"--race is not only observable, it is inherited. The racial category most often invoked to counter a Mashantucket Pequot Indian identity is that of African American or Black. This categorization is used either as an affirmation of a mixed racial identity or as an attack on Indian identity at Mashantucket. In truth, racial and cultural categories at Mashantucket are two (at least) separate genres of identification. "Black Indians hit jackpot in casino bonanza" is the title of a 1995 article in Ebony magazine on the Mashantucket Pequots. The article refers to tribal members as the "Black Indians" of Connecticut, successfully confounding the parameters of an authenticity figured through racial difference by combining two divergent racial and ethnic markers, "Indian" and "Black," within one identity. The category "Black Indian" is, of course, not original to Mashantucket. Black Indians have long been a part of American Indian, African American, and United States history. Rather than representing a discontinuity between the categories of "Black" and "Indian" the Mashantucket Pequots, as Black Indians, display the characteristics of an "other" continuity. Jack Forbes (1990) explores the categories of Black and Indian identity as reckoned by blood quantum. Forbes problematizes the concept that one drop of 104 "Black blood" is enough to render a person "Black" (Black as a biological category), whereas "Indian" represents a cultural and historical category, one that must remain unchanged in order to be considered authentic.55 Recently, Trump has tried to use this potential conflict by referring to the Mashantucket Pequots as "Michael Jordan Indians," attempting to shift popular perception of the Pequots from the category Indian to the category Black, to de-legitimate their claims to cultural authenticity as Indian people. The logic used is that if the Mashantucket Pequots are cast as more Black than Indian, the category of Black will contaminate or consume that of Indian, or that nature will take precedence over culture. To prove them Black to the exclusion of their Indianness would disallow their Indian identity and call their federally recognized tribal status into question. Most of it is racial. There are people who believe that dark-skinned people shouldn't be making money, and they'll do anything they can to try to stop us. [Mashantucket Pequot tribal council member Gary Carter, in Chappell 1995: 46] Of course, Indian racial and ethnic identifications--both self-designated and assigned by others--are exceedingly complex, and the boundaries between such "popular" markers as "white," "black," and "Indian" have proved somewhat permeable over time. I am not able to give this discussion the room it deserves for a complete investigation (see Blu 1980 for an excellent analysis of how these categories historically signify and change among the Lumbee, for example) and Jack D. "The Manipulation of Race, Caste, and Identity: Classifying Afroamericans, Native Americans, and Red-Black People," The Journal of Ethnic Studies 17, 1990, 23. 55Forbes, 105 only introduce the subject as one indicator of the many facets of and challenges to a Mashantucket Pequot identification as "Indian." PASSING THE BLOOD TEST: BLOOD QUANTUM, INDIAN LAW, AND AUTHENTICITY Blood quantum reckoning--the legal fixing of identity by percentage of Indian blood--was introduced with the 1887 General Allotment Act. This form of reckoning continued with the Reorganization Act in 1934, and has been maintained to the present day. The federal minimum is set at one-sixteenth but individual tribes decide their own percentage for tribal membership, either at or above this level. The questions raised by this method of authenticating identity are multiple. Does the question of Indian identity pivot on biology or on the idea of authenticity and its configuration through different systems of articulation and verification? In short, is identity biological or cultural? In authenticating claims of identity, perhaps attention should be focused on the process of federal recognition (authentication) itself. How has it become a primary means of establishing cultural validity? Is it as tied to the colonial project as are the mechanics of blood reckoning? Should the treaties between the United States and separate nations of indigenous people be decided by heredity, a biological conception of nationality, or by cultural coherence and continuity, a sovereign nationality that depends on an ideological and cultural sense of belonging? 106 Annette Jaimes rejects blood quantum and identifies the process of federal authentication as a direct challenge to tribal sovereignty, a practice that transforms the sovereignty of Indian peoples into a formulation of bloodlines and biological heritage (Jaimes 1992). As such, it is the continuation of a positivist method of discerning cultural difference. This argument also suggests that the use of such authenticity-establishing structures in fact continues a colonized peoples' relationship with the dominant federal government, that American Indians thus perpetuate their object position within a colonial discourse, and that bloodreckoning is counter to the spirit of the treaties entered into by individual tribes and the United States. DOMESTIC (IN)DEPENDENTS Such arguments for sovereignty must be tempered with a realization of the unique position of Indian nations as "domestic dependent" entities, a conditional measure of independence that depends on being sanctioned by the overarching structure of the US federal government. The ability to counter-argue the hegemony of colonialism, however, may be most effectively sought within a reframing, re-presentation, and oppositional use of elements from dominant discourse. These discursive elements, including legal identity and popular culture, can be re-worked and re-articulated to take advantage of potentially weak links in a structure of control. In this sense, pursuing recognition through blood quantum is an example of strategic essentialism (Spivak 1990), the utilization of elements from multiple possible identifications to gain advantage within a dominant system 107 of figuring identity. The federal system of identification allows recognized Indian peoples specific access to industries, federal moneys, and federal programs. It is advantageous to use such a system of reckoning for the purpose of economic expansion and cultural continuation. CASINOS AS INDUSTRY: TRIBAL AND PAN-TRIBAL OPPORTUNITIES The phenomenal success of the Mashantucket Pequots is singular. By initiating Indian gaming in the northeast; enjoying a location close to the urban centers of New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts; and quickly and steadily expanding the casino complex, the Mashantucket Pequots have been able to establish a formidable industry. While the casino industry may be recognized as a boon for some tribes, location, intra-community dispute, belief systems, and competing casino operations (both tribal and other), effectively limit the industry's potential to pan-tribally solve endemically depressed reservation economies. One key to an ability to engage in Indian Gaming comes from establishing a relationship of recognition with the US government, a relationship codified in federal law. Success in this arena depends on a capacity to follow legal strictures for the possible benefits contained therein. Indian law both reflects and influences popular cultural conceptions of identity and "other"-ness. While choosing to struggle within the legal parameters of an occupying colonial force may seem a willing incorporation within a dominant discourse, options for struggle outside of these parameters are limited. 108 It is true that native peoples' appeals for rights on the basis of "ethnicity" are sited in European concepts and limited notions of property rights, and it is true that such claims are less expansive than those based on the premise that the claimant is the original and sole occupant of the land; it is also true that political mobilization based on African American (not African) or Indian (not Cherokee or Ojibwa/Annishnabe or Seminole) identity reflects the dominant discourse and realpolitik of race in America. Nevertheless, the reality is that the United States is the arena in which these debates and challenges occur and in which these battles must be won. [Nagel 1996: 70­71] While this statement calls for the recognition of Indians as a pan-tribal ethnic identity, the access to tribal sovereignty and the Indian gaming industry depends on an individual tribal reckoning. Thus, an ethnic and cultural identification at a pan-tribal level must also incorporate nationalisms imagined at a tribal level, no matter how proscribed or domestically dependent that nationality may be. How these processes of identification, between a specific tribal membership and identity, and a pan-tribal ethnic identity as an American Indian, can be reconciled is an interesting question. But, underlying this question is another concerning how these two spheres of identity are reckoned, and how they reflect a conflict between identity by choice and identity by ascription or assignment. Where these two strategies meet, one can find a fluid and dynamic assertion and use of identity, offering a continuum between two perspectives. The first emphasizes a concept of survival, of an unbroken continuance of traditional forms, unchanged and unaffected by contact with other cultural forces. The concept of "survivals" reflects an ideology that supports a legal configuration of 109 precedence and continuation. But the bounded notion of culture, of a discrete community unsullied by contact with others, able to be contained within the boundaries of geography and ethnography, has steadily lost ground and credibility in anthropology. The second perspective posits identity as a process of self-definition, recognizing process and dynamic change. In this view, change and tradition are in a constant process of formation (Williams 1977). Vizenor's concept of survivance is useful in its recognition that the ability to change under challenge is its own kind of continuity, its own cultural and traditional practice. This is not an argument for a naturalization of change through a historicizing of practice, but a recognition that the dynamic of change is an element that expressly defies such a fixing. Dynamic change resists occupying a space within a grand argument of continuity, raising the possibility that the concept of continuity itself deserves a more thorough analysis. What is it outside of a paradigm of authenticity establishing? The processes and concept of authenticity itself might benefit from further critical engagement--what does it depend on and what does it make possible? Survivance--a tactical, dynamic, and fluid understanding and use of identity politics--contrasts with classical anthropology's ideal type of survival: unchanged, continuous cultural forms that have survived intact by resisting all contact and exterior influence. If this classic view of continuity has lost currency in anthropology, it still retains a powerful presence in the popular imaginary. An entry into this type of record sets the parameters, not only for a concept of 110 survival as outlined here, but also in terms of federal Indian recognition. What is being measured and authenticated is cultural continuity from the time of contact. Pre- and post-contact figuring and conceptions of identity, ethnicity, belonging, community, nation, as located within tribal nations and traditions, are precisely not the issue. The question then becomes: what does the process of authenticating actually authenticate, and is it a tenable means of reckoning identity? Or is it a means of having to prove an identity within the terms of the dominant system itself, of authenticating oneself in the terms and conditions of a structure that seeks to delimit and contain one's own system of cultural reckoning. By attempting to universalize identity figuring within a formal system, does blood reckoning and its role in federal identity seek to make a cultural expression of belonging quantifiable in terms of positivistic biology? IDENTITY DIALECTICS The process of formulating Indian identity can be understood as a dialectic describing a field of tension or continuity between the ideal, imagined poles of self-assignment and ascription--the process of assigning identity through a formal structure of "Indian blood," law, and genetics. Figuring by ascription has its merits. A reckoning through existing forms of authenticating identity structures, for the American Indian, ensures a limited and protected ability for the affirmation of Indian identity as a specific category. In other words, it is useful in asserting demands for access to earmarked federal funds and resources, and 111 access to particular forms of industry. As Pauline Turner Strong and Barrik Van Winkle state, invoking Spivak: `Indian blood,' dangerous and essentialist as it may be, is at present a tragically necessary condition for the continued survival and vitality of many individuals and communities. [Strong and Van Winkle 1991: 565] But figuring by blood may also lessen the ability for an identification based solely on cultural affinity. Since it depends on a quantifiable degree of belonging, it excludes many who may also be "legitimately" Indian, including those with a complete cultural repertoire for a Weberian "sense of belonging." Current struggles over processes of identification offer a significant liminal moment in identity politics. The mechanics of assigned identity, through processes such as the Mashantucket Pequots', are open to reconfiguration and recontextualization. The Mashantucket Pequots have been able to take elements of a codified process of identity-definition and re-articulate them, to re-present them as acts of powerful self-definition. Such a strategic move can also be located as an ability to utilize, reinforce, and articulate themes of Indianness and Pequotness through the structures of the casino, the museum and research center, and the reservation itself. Self-definition does not only describe a creative process of identity construction, it also locates agency. It recognizes that the construction of traditions and the imagining of community can be powerful acts in a poetics of politics; an ability to reinvest marginal positions through an assertive reconfiguration of latent and actualized meaning. The categorization of identity becomes a reflection of a hegemonic notion of classification, and self-definition 112 can be regarded as part of a strategic use of elements from the dominant discourse. The possibilities of reconfiguration are limited, but the boundaries of these limits are the potential weak points in the membranes of the "structuring structure" that may yield further to consistent pressure. THE "INVENTED INDIAN": A RECONSIDERATION Native American reservation communities, whose boundaries describe their difference from surrounding states and from the federal government, dramatically foreground the concepts of imagined communities, constructed traditions, and created identities. That these boundaries also determine a community's ability to participate in the Indian gaming industry is a source of increasing tension among Native Americans and local, state, and federal authorities. Foxwoods and the MPMRC are integral parts of a nation-building effort, parts that provide legitimate symbolic capital for narratives of historical and essential continuity. The concept of nation is an important focus; an American Indian nation as the principal site of investigation draws many key tenets of an "imagined nation" paradigm into sharp relief. The historic translation of Indian land into a European identity of property56 is also implicated in the transmogrification of native peoples into "Indian nations," a constructed Cheyfitz, Eric, The Poetics of imperialism: translation and colonization from the tempest to Tarzan, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Jennings; and Todorov, Tzvetan, The Conquest of America, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1984). 56 See 113 identification and form of reckoning that continues to the present. It is critical to recognize that the Indian nations in question are currently within the unique category of "domestic dependent" nations57--unable to enter into treaties or alliances with other national powers, to sell lands to other nations, subject to certain jurisdictions of the federal and state authorities, and, in many situations, unable to decide national membership for themselves without a federal justification by computing blood quantum. What makes the Indian nations unique is their cross-identity, figured as ethnic minorities with access to particular federal funds, treatied nations with obligations and privileges described by such treaties, and a loosely imagined confederation of belonging that is not limited to membership in reservations or even specific tribes. It is through an active engagement with this reckoning, this past cultural and material construction, that the Mashantucket Pequot have been able to participate in the Indian gaming industry with such phenomenal success. The material success of such participation has afforded them the ability to not only construct tradition, community, and identity, but to do so on a remarkable scale. While the casino complex can be realized as an economic generator for the community's projects, the museum and research library is a powerful articulator this phrase was introduced in the Supreme Court decisions Cherokee Nation v. Georgia in 1831, and Worcester v. Georgia in 1832, it is indicative of the long-standing and unclear, yet proprietary relationship between the federal government and the distinct communities, nations, and peoples of Native America. Sovereignty is limited by historical practice as well as a legal decision and it is important as a site of contemporary struggle. While the concept has suffered different advances and restrictions over time, it is a crucial resource for Native resistance and self-determination. 57 Although 114 of particular Mashantucket Pequot and general Indian identity through the registers of history, material culture, and experiential displays. Theories of "constructed" and "invented" traditions extend in at least two directions. The first leads to an examination of practice. Communities, like nations, prefer to imagine themselves, as Benedict Anderson suggests, "loom[ing] out of an immemorial past, and...glid[ing] into a limitless future."58 The mechanics of this national imagination, or what can be understood as the "tangible practices" of identity59, recognize tradition as a deliberately selective and connecting process that offers historical and cultural ratification of a contemporary order (Williams 1977: 116). Tradition, a project of the present practiced by an active utilization of the past, in part legitimates contemporary practices by imagining them as unbroken continuities both distant and timehonored. On a micro and practical level, the Mashantucket Pequot's selfconstruction includes the incorporation and adaptation of different cultural performances, such as dance and song forms for powwows. But the community at Mashantucket also has an ongoing project of establishing traditions to carry forward, new practices such as Indian gaming; guaranteed housing, employment, and education; real estate development; and diversified investments and industries. Indeed, over the last 12 years Indian Gaming has shifted from anomaly to a powerful part of the accepted public imaginary concerning Native America. 58Anderson, 59Comaroff 12­13. and Comaroff, 44. 115 The construction of tradition paradigm enables a way of looking at contemporary practices--not only those that fit a popular conception of "tradition" as time-honored, but also those that are in the midst of establishing new traditional practices. The invention of culture--tradition, community, and identity--is a battlefield both for a critique of ongoing processes as well as of the defining process itself. Mashantucket Pequot identity must be realized in the same light. A large number of tribal members have moved to the reservation establishing a new community, a new sense of belonging that will, in turn, support a common and particular identity as Mashantucket Pequot. The identity and meta-identity practices carried on through the highly visible sectors of the casino complex present a number of different narratives used in the process of identity formulation and representation. In part, the Mashantucket Pequots draw from a generalized, pan-tribal Indian identification. Evidence of this can be seen in the design schemes of the casino complex that emphasize a "Native American" motif: "buckskin" mini-dresses and single-feather headdresses for the cocktail servers; the scattered display cases in the atriums and hallways of the casino filled with collections of traditional southwestern-style Indian pottery, and the large bronze statues of Indian figures placed throughout the building. The Rainmaker narrative reconfigures a natural or "neutral" history by presenting a pre-peopled state, then sketching in an implied continuity from post-Ice Age peoples to current Mashantucket Pequots, primordializing the affirmation of a present identity based on a connection to a limitless past. 116 Over time, the generalized Native American motif at Foxwoods has become less emphasized and the casino, like contemporary casinos in Las Vegas, includes itself and its immediate surroundings in its collection of referents. The exotic or exoticized narrative of "the Indian" has shifted as the genre of "Indian casinos" has changed from anomaly to an established and powerful industry. The Mashantucket Pequots are not closed-community survivals, but a group busy defining just what their cultural and reservation perimeters embrace. Culture and tradition construction, and the discursive processes used to discuss these projects, provide the reciprocal perspective necessary for a further analysis of the contingency of authenticating practices, both those within Mashantucket and those with Mashantucket as their critical focus. The American Indian subject--a formative representational project not limited to anthropology but extended through domains of state and federal government, photography, art, and literature--is integral in the imagination and construction of contemporary Mashantucket Pequot-ness. The concept of authenticity can be realized as an unfixed authenticating device, one in which the multiple users, pro and con, draw from similar wells of knowledge and knowledge resources. The point of a theory of cultural construction is not the revelation of the constructedness of different cultural practices, but how such practices come to seem natural and immutable (Taussig 1993). This naturalization can be understood as an active field, a contest over doxa (Bourdieu 1977), unspoken and consensual aspects of hegemony. Here the performance of "Indianness," as an ongoing, constructed practice, has an 117 important political edge: by re-working common-sensical performances of identity, community, and tradition--those that can be located in the white imaginary or the white man's Indian (Berkhofer 1979)--and reinvesting those practices with a particular, re-located power. Likewise, the ability to re-work and re-invest carries its own performative message: that such practice can move out of the margins and into a powerful center, a center connected with other significant forms of reckoning and placing. The economic and political power of the Mashantucket Pequot attests to such effective practice. 118 Chapter 3: Foxwoods Resort Casino--The Wonder of it AllTM Photograph 3.1: The Grand Pequot Tower. Photo from Foxwoods promotional materials. VIGNETTE 1: FOXWOODS, FIRST ENCOUNTER--THE RAINMAKER May 1995, Mashantucket Pequot Reservation: Having finished informal meetings with tribal members and assorted museum and library personnel, I decide to take a long walk through the casino complex to find the small museum there. I pass through the main entrance,60 at the top of a long, arching driveway. Once inside, I find myself in an enormous atrium, complete with a twenty-foot waterfall spilling over rocks into a large fountain. Directly ahead lies the cocktail original main glamour entrance is currently the least used. Lower-level bus drop-offs and outlying parking lots provide for the main bulk of the casino's clientele, and the completion of the Grand Pequot Tower in late 1997 provided a new opulent entrance for high rollers and other VIPs. 60 This 119 bar and lounge, to the left a mixed-gaming room. To the right is a room given over to slot machines and filled with the thick noise of jackpot bells and payoffs. In the center of this room, above the level of the machines, rests a new car--the grand prize for one of the cumulative slots. Foxwoods, like many contemporary casinos, offers a kind of debit and points-gathering card for its patrons. Called a "Wampum Card," many of the slots players keep them on brightly colored and tightly coiled "leashes," often attached to their clothing with alligator clips for safe keeping. Looking into this first slots room, one can see a number of people connected to the machines, their card tethers like tiny umbilical cords. Outside of this room is a small case filled with Southwestern Indian baskets and pottery, each with an identifying card and an estimated value. A nearby wall, between the case and the souvenir and information booth, holds a framed collection of portraits of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Council. I head for the bar, then cut through it to reach an atrium beyond. This second atrium is at the intersection of the passageway leading to the tour bus drop-offs downstairs, a concourse leading back to the hotel, a third gaming room, a collection of virtual reality rides and electronic arcades collectively called Cinetropolis, and the passageway from the main entrance. At the center of the intersection stands an enormous fountain. Made of simulated rock, it is surrounded by four large, false trees, complete with branches that hug the ceiling and extend over the fountain's main pool. A heavily planted platform built of stone rises from the center of the fountain. The top is flat. On it is the gigantic figure of "the Rainmaker," an Indian on one knee, holding a cocked bow fitted 120 with an arrow pointing heavenward, turning on its platform almost imperceptibly, to complete four revolutions per hour. Above the Rainmaker the roof comes to a four-sided, peaked glass skylight, the light from outside playing on this milky, urethane figure. Gaming chips, change, a few waterlogged bills--all tossed in "for luck"--fill the bottom of the fountain's pool. Five minutes before the hour, automated blackout curtains slide up to cover the skylight and the Rainmaker comes to a temporary halt. Fog billows out from beneath the central platform, and hidden lights play across the twelve-foot high figure. Against the skylight's blackout curtains are projected a small assortment of figures with a generic "Native" pictographic quality to them: a spiral, a crooked arrow, a buffalo, an eagle. With the sound of an eagle's screech, a recorded narrative begins to play through nearby speakers: Long ago before the Ancient Ones, the land still stood under a heavy blanket of snow several miles thick. As the climate gradually warmed, the giant freeze began to melt; for a thousand years great rivers flowed, eroding, forming and re-arranging the earth's landscape. Gradually, a summer began to take place. Trees from warmer climates began to edge northward. The first were spruce, fir, birch and the great oak. Game such as caribou, bison, mastodon, elk, giant beaver and the woolly mammoth were the first explorers of this land. They were soon followed by the giant game hunters. Later, nomads in search of food first came to this area as seasonal hunters, retreating southward as the harsh winters came. 121 The climate became warmer. This warming, along with the use of fire and animal skins for protection, encouraged these first people to stay and eventually settle this land. These people believed that the spirits controlled their destiny. A displeased spirit could cause drought, thunder, and even death. When pleased, these spirits could bring sun, rain, and bounties of food and game. Soon man came to believe he must honor, respect, and pay homage to the power of these spirit gods, for they, not man, controlled destiny. [Mashantucket Pequot tribal member John Holder, 1994] 122 Photograph 3.2: The Rainmaker. Photo courtesy New England Design. A red laser bolt shoots out of the end of the arrow and catches the swirling mist and fog playing against the ceiling. The show ends with a thunderclap, marking the beginning of a "thunderstorm." Water falls from the ceiling near the 123 figure, pours from the branches overhanging the fountain, reaching a crescendo of water and thunder. Then the lights come up, the blackout curtains slide back into their recesses, and the rain stops. The Rainmaker is based on the bronze statue, "The Sacred Rain Arrow" by sculptor Alan Houser (1914­1994), a member of the Fort Sill Chiricahua/ Warm Springs Apache Tribe. One of the original castings stands in the Russell Senate Building's Indian Affairs room, dedicated to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. Another stands in front of the entrance to Foxwoods.61 John Holder, tribal member and former draftsman with Electric Boat, designed The Rainmaker and researched and wrote its accompanying story (he also served as narrator for the recording). Holder moved to Mashantucket in 1978, when fewer than fifty people lived on the reservation, in trailers and tents. When the casino expanded, he was charged with the task of creating a spectacular sculpture that would parallel the fantastic thematic constructions of Las Vegas casinos. The crossroads where the Rainmaker is featured is designed as a town square, "a place that was separate from the gaming and where people could go in and experience a fun thing" (Holder 1996, taken from oral history texts). A number of different ideas were floated for filling this public space, including elves, a glass castle, and a Native American storyteller. Skip Hayward mentioned he had seen the statue by Houser and had been impressed by it. Holder and then-Foxwoods CEO Al Luciani decided to take "The Sacred Rain Arrow" a dedicated copy of the statue was also prominently featured at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah as part of the Olympics' representational theme of "American" history. 61 A 124 few steps further by making it 12 feet tall, translucent, and changing Houser's original Apache figure to one featuring Eastern Woodlands clothing and artifacts. It was Holder's idea to create an indoor thunderstorm. I know you go to Vegas and you got the Mirage and they got a big volcano that goes off, and you go to Circus Circus and they got circus acts, and a lot of them have their themes. You've got the Luxor. That's a pyramid and it's all theme done Egypt. Ours being a Native American casino, I wanted to have a Native American theme through, an awing experience. I said, `It would be nice to be known as a casino that had a thunderstorm going on inside it,' and it draws a crowd every time still. [ibid.] Holder worked painstakingly on the Rainmaker. He took bark molds from area trees, had the tribal archaeologist Kevin McBride verify designs for the breechcloth and moccasins, and kept refining the figure's muscular definition. Cast from polyurethane, the finished sculpture weighs 4,500 pounds. Holder spoke with tribal member Michael Thomas, part of the Mashantucket Pequots' drum Mystic River, and asked him to create four songs to accompany the different stages of the thunderstorm. Since its installation, the Rainmaker has proved a popular site for taking photographs. As it begins to cycle through its hourly display, the atrium fills with an ever-increasing flutter of camera flashes, growing in occurrence as the figure builds to its display climax. Photographs of the figure, of the fountain, of the atrium. Photographs of the family: mom, dad, enormous polyurethane Indian man with bow and arrow. The Rainmaker serves as unofficial logo, as an extensively trafficked symbol for the casino. It appears on postcards, menus, mouse pads, coffee mugs, 125 and jackets. In countless articles and stories, the Rainmaker serves as introductory icon--eerily lit, wet and dripping in its own private rainstorm. The statue thus occupies a unique position in Mashantucket; it is the reservation's best-known emblem, and its most popular piece of public culture in the larger public sphere Throughout the five-minute show casino visitors come and go, some stopping to watch or to toss coins or chips into the fountain. The nearby cart vendors carry on their business. One is selling t-shirts from last year's Schemitzun, or Green Corn Festival, and a small monitor plays a videotape from the event. The next vendor hawks sweatshirts and souvenirs for the upcoming Special Olympics in Hartford, which will be partially sponsored by the Mashantucket Pequots. Stretching past a section of Victorian facades and on toward the futuristic arcade "Cinetropolis," the concourse's enormous windows overlook the Connecticut hills and forests, with some of the landscape already being mapped out for future development by the reservation's architects. The surrounding trees and the supporting rocks of the fountain and statue share nothing with the gingerbread of the concourse storefronts, but the Rainmaker's narrative provides a pre-historic introduction for what is to come. Embedded within this foregrounded moment are many of the issues that arise at Mashantucket. One important element at Foxwoods is the blurring of spectacular, Las Vegas-style visual displays with the sober, didactic placards of the display-cased artifacts near the casino's main entrance. Another is the way in which popular discourses and stereotypes of Indians are incorporated within an 126 enormously successful economic enterprise fully owned and operated by Indian people. Obviously, my "instant recognition" of the figure in the fountain as "Indian" participates in the popular imagining of the American Indian male: highly stylized, bare-chested and well-muscled, dressed in breechcloth and moccasins, and brandishing a bow and arrow. But the figure's location at an intersection between gambling rooms, surrounded by a pool of money and a clockwork rainstorm, with the Connecticut landscape made clear through the glass walls of the building, is a central part of the vast endeavor of the Mashantucket Pequots. This endeavor reflects, in part, certain goals of the Indian gaming industry: how to utilize the popular representations of an essentialized or naturalized Indian, emphasized in dominant historical narratives, in conjunction with self representations and contemporary views of native peoples very much at home with modern projects like real estate development, donations to national charities, and the resort and gambling industry. The "Rainmaker" display is an epiphanal moment that problematizes a clear or untroubled understanding of the configuration of Indian identity at Mashantucket. It employs advanced, modern technologies to evoke the primordial: the "Indian," oozing fog and dripping moisture, kneels within a specially constructed fountain that emphasizes the natural. The spoken narrative introduces a cleared history in the highly public space of Foxwoods, a configured history beginning with the end of the Ice Age. From this initial configuration, the Rainmaker narrative suggests an unbroken continuum from post­Ice Age hunters to an emerging present and an undetermined future. The Ice Age narrative creates 127 a frozen tabula rasa where the foreground is redrawn and history in-filled. That unseen beings or forces, not "man," control destiny provides a perfect aside for casino patrons. THE CASINO AS CULTURAL ALLEGORY: SATURATION AND SEPARATION The performance of cultural representation--whether understood as an "on the ground" day-to-day event, a museum exhibition, or other activity played out in the public sphere--draws from contingent structures of history, ethnographic understanding, and narrative. At Foxwoods, these structures overlap and blur. The Rainmaker, for example, draws its narrative from ethnographic and historical research, folded together to make a presentation in keeping with the overriding thematics of the casino--the figure and its thunderstorm. Representations are by nature based in the past, in a sense or feeling, and in an appreciation and application of history (understood here as a discursive site without privilege). Ethnographic representations most often find their voices as ethnographies, as intensified textual depictions of cultural sites or practices created to evoke a compelling "other." As in any shift from lived experience to written text with a particular shape, an opening and a closing supported by boundaries both temporal and narrative, an ethnography is limited in its ability to create a persuasive (and contained) section of the world. Part of this loss, this transition to text from experience, is the loss of time as dynamic. The process of 128 representation is one that tears practice and discourse from the flow of time (Bourdieu 1984). As Clifford proposes, however, ethnographic texts are allegorical in form and content, texts that describe "the real" while simultaneously practicing valuesinfluenced interpretation. I suggest that casinos can also be understood as allegories, as sites of intensified representation attempting a compelling narrative of an exotic and bounded cultural space. In generating this significant space, casinos seek to evoke a significant "other." At Foxwoods, this environment and compelling narrative is also used to make moral and values-influenced interpretation as part of its political project, a project to re-locate the Mashantucket Pequots in the history and "place" of New England and the US. To situate the Foxwoods Resort Casino in the state and national landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is useful to first trace a short history of casinos, using Las Vegas as a focal point. THE EVOLUTION OF THE CASINO: LAS VEGAS AS ARCHETYPE The casino industry in Las Vegas began in the 1930s. At this time, the small casinos on downtown Freemont Street were almost indistinguishable from the other commercial façades along the sidewalk. In the 1940s the business began to boom, following the increased wartime demand for local defense industry products and the subsequent workers' population growth. El Rancho Vegas opened in 1941, a luxury dude ranch built on a western and "Spanish" theme. It offered a contained environment--gambling, shows and accommodation--within 129 the same structure. This trend continued through the decade with the creation of glorified full-service hotels (including gaming), building within the nation's already extant idea of a themed motel along the roadside, beckoning to the everincreasing automobile-powered tourist. In the late 1950s, a new era in Las Vegas casino design began--the Stardust opened on what would become the Strip. Its neon sign dominated the actual edifice, broadcasting both its location away from the center of town and a new realization of the casino. The building extended outward to embrace attention beyond its own physical space, its footprint. This sort of signaling hailed the quickly growing idea of participating in an auto-dominated touristic world, where distant beckoning needed to gesture more emphatically, to become a larger and more easily recognizable demand on the attention of the passerby. It is not so much that the building occupy a certain definable and distinct space, or even that this space is driven by a recognizable thematic. The "building as a sign" has been discussed extensively (see Venturi 1977). For the purposes of this dissertation, it is sufficient here to acknowledge that the casino shifted into featuring a more performative edifice evoking a sense of the exotic and wonderful, able to be viewed large from the distance of the road. Freemont Street and the Strip continued to develop, each using distinct design elements: the Strip sought to attract from afar, Freemont Street relied on its downtown concentration to share clientele. Throughout the 1960s strip signs grew steadily larger and more elaborate. The design of the buildings, to reflect and amplify the message of signage, also shifted. Although one can find the 130 foregrounding in such enterprises as El Rancho Vegas, the Sahara, the Thunderbird, the Dunes, and the Hacienda--all examples use a theme of the desert and/or the imagined "Spanish west"--casino constructions using and reflecting a deeper engagement with the marvelous went a step further. Caesars Palace opened in 1966 (the studied plural suggests that all its patrons are Caesars). The building was based on the now-established architectural conceit of using the building as sign, and responded as well to the growth of "theme experience" industry(ies): Disneyland, other amusement parks, "living history" sites, and super-saturated tourist destinations like Key West or New Orleans, for example. A long entrance set back from the road, accented by columns, fountains, and reproductions of Classical statues marked Caesars Palace. The inside held a Circus Maximus main show room, Noshorium Coffee Shop, and Cleopatra's Barge complete with a miniature Mediterranean. Its opening began "the era of the theme, where each Strip resort created its own mini-world based on history, fantasy, or exotic locales" (Hess 1993). Large hotel corporations and the creation of a dense urban corridor thick with high-rise buildings influenced the era that followed. This intensive development by large hotel and gaming corporations closely links structures of the fantastic and exotic, themed as high-rise and corporate-powerful, equally dependent on their own "mini-world" creation assembled from fragments of positioned history and narrative. Imagine this history of casinos against the landscape of Nevada. The first casinos, built out of an enlarged sense of the motor-court displaying the wares of short-term luxuries (swimming pools, air-conditioned buildings, food, and 131 gambling), played with a sense of connection to place, to location. As Las Vegas expanded, these small acknowledged connections to the landscape changed. Buildings moved past a recognition of their surroundings, marking instead their connection to a growing sense of Las Vegas itself. Casinos began to refer to themselves and, in so doing, to refer to their neighbors. The heyday of neon signs, three to four stories high on downtown Freemont Street, reflecting and indicating each other, turned the nighttime downtown street into a riot of color and mirroring glass--a roofless arcade. Windows and walls of glass doors looked out onto the sidewalk, across the street, into opposite windows. People moving along the sidewalk watched as others inside, gambling, served as animated advertisement for the pleasures within. Particularly in the 1960s, emphasis shifted away from downtown and to the Strip. The sign remained a dominant exterior feature. Clientele teethed on an ever-expanding sense of "amusement," however, began to respond to a more elaborate sense of deliberate theme, one that moved away from an obvious selfreferentiality and into an expanded notion of the exotic. As the center of gaming continued to move from downtown to the Strip, theme casinos also began to shift away from a sense of referentiality to the surround of Las Vegas itself, and toward an enclosure of space. Thematic, enclosed space emphasizes the severing of connection with the geographically sited and local environment. Enclosing space also effectively encloses time, not only in a sense of the fantastic, placing one in a sea of referents to an imagined Imperial Rome or Arthurian England for example, but also in the sense of removing referents to the 132 outside, erasing a recognition of "real" time. This control of time and space becomes critical in the representation of the casino as gambling hall and entertainment, and the casino as a creation of mythic history. In the casino, as Walter Benjamin asserted for the Paris arcades, a phantasmagoric shift is part of the experience, as practical value recedes while representational value advances. The understanding offered here is that "history" is crystallized as a commodity, a site where production and consumption relations meet. As James Duncan and David Ley assert: [A] commodity is the outcome of a set of economic relations between people, and between people and nature. But no less is it a site of meanings, of values and valuing, a magical realm where materiality is infused with symbolic meanings. [Duncan and Ley 1993: 12] For Foxwoods, history itself--what might be called an assemblage and sequencing of narrative elements with an eye on the present--is implicated as a similar phantasmagoric shift. Benjamin recognizes history not as a linear foundation for a voyage into the future, but as a jumbled pile of wreckage whose vanishing point is the present. For Benjamin, the past, rather than being a chain of events, is "one single catastrophe which relentlessly piles wreckage upon wreckage...[t]hat which we call progress is this storm" (Benjamin, "Theses on History, I" 697­98, as cited in Buck-Morss 1991: 95). The constructions or arrangements of the elements of this pile present a figuration of the present based on a utilization of the past--images, concepts, and objects. Creating a narrative from these elements creates [a] history, a presentation of the past for a particular purpose in the present. The pile of 133 wreckage created by the storm of progress indicates the materiality of destruction, which marks time in its creation as an array of fragments. If history, as a narrative, is an imagined progression toward the new, toward the modern, with a linear advance from the past, in this interpretation the casino and its discrete, contained constructions are this historical configuration writ small. In this instance, the casino's thematics represent a structured (if spectacular) history. Containing this spectacular history depends on three key things. First, a control of the interior, of the narrative's container. At Foxwoods this includes architecture, interior design, traffic patterns, and methods of egress and exit. The casino's thematic is reinforced at key interior sites like the Rainmaker. Second, maintaining a tension between the included and the excluded. This kind of tension is a critical element to all casino design and includes the distinctions between high rollers and smaller fish, players and spectators at the table games, and the demarcation between gaming space and "family" space (like the pedestrian concourse at Foxwoods). This kind of demarcation is further complicated in Las Vegas, where the casino interior plays to an included crowd, while the exterior sign plays at inducing a crowd from the passers by through invoking a seductive site. Finally, a realization of the limits of the experience. The casino thematic requests a certain suspension of disbelief, or at least a willingness to participate in the projected story. While virtually no one would mistake the waterfalls, fountains, raining trees, and plantings at Foxwoods for true "nature," their role at providing elements of the "natural" as elements of the thematic is part of the experience. 134 Casinos and casino design entered a new phase in Las Vegas at the close of the twentieth century. Beginning with the MGM Grand and The Mirage, the casino as family destination resort began to take center stage. The show of the casino's theme or particular brand of excess extended out to the sidewalk: the Mirage's hourly erupting volcano, the gaping maw of the MGM lion-as-entrance with amusement park style rides just inside, the hourly pirate battles in front of Treasure Island. The neon sign, a rushing, pulsing neon and incandescent construction, once sufficed as the key attractions for the buildings. In this most recent phase, casinos are approaching Disneylands, trying to keep a generation raised on amusement parks and special effects interested in their own created environments. In part, this is a recognition of demographics, opening the casino visitor experience to more of an immersion in a represented theme, a kind of interactive diorama.62 This shift also recognizes the growth in Las Vegas walking traffic, a transformation from beckoning the automobile tourist to arresting the attention of the pedestrian. But it is also a shift in the strategy of seduction. The spectacle on the sidewalk carries the show from the inside to the outside, it previews the pleasures within while realizing itself as another type of sign--experiential, tactile, and spectacular--referential to the interior dream landscape while indicating its own exterior separation. The show on the sidewalk ends on the sidewalk; it is the theme that carries you inside. also reflects a keen marketing assessment of the aging baby boomers, complete with significant disposable income and children with their own entertainment demands. 62 It 135 The 1990s were the first decade of the "super casino,"63 a term reflecting cost to build, visitor capacity, and the breadth of thematic embrace. The casinos became more and more monstrous in size, as if attempting to compress and synthesize the attractions and territory of an amusement park within a casino's more modest footprint. The Luxor, Mandalay Bay, Treasure Island, Excalibur--each of these super casinos represents a reach to or a grounding in a mythic past or present, a connection made fabulous by an intense overlay of mytho-historic themes. Here the connection to an imagined past is scripted,64 performed, and made obvious.65 Toward the middle of the 1990s, however, this mythic referent changes and casino foci shift to include New York New York, Bellagio, The Venetian, and Paris­Las Vegas. The mythic continues but the grounding of the narratives ties directly to other existing, and geographically located sites. The global landmark reference point is miniaturized--compressed and intensified through forced-perspective juxtapositioning--achieving a particular reduction that serves to super-saturate the remainder. costs have become part of the introduction for all super casinos--the $790 million Mandalay Bay, the $900 million dollar Luxor (including extensive remodeling costs), etc. 64 Andrés Martinez, 24/7: Living it Up and Doubling Down in the New Las Vegas, (New York: Villard, 1999), refers to the "Las Vegas ideal of scripted space, where buildings themselves perform," 86. For a less vernacular discussion, see Robert Venturi, Learning From Las Vegas, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977). 65 This phenomenon is not limited to Las Vegas by any means. The recently opened Atlantis Casino/Resort in the Bahamas not only refers to a thematic myth, but it reinforces this reference with underwater faux ruins presented as an "archeological tour"' attraction. The tour features such text as the following (from www.atlantis.com): "Also called The Rotunda, this beautifully preserved space is where the Altlanteans planned and mapped their elaborate voyages. The spectacular Navigation Guide in the center of the room depicts the city of Atlantis." 63 The 136 In many ways this miniaturization and accompanying increase in gravitational weight parallels the formation and evolution of the American Indian domestic dependent nation states realized as reservations. Such reservations serve as compression centers, as geographically located sites where Native populations were placed within new boundaries much less permeable and much more limited than their traditional areas of free travel. Over the history of federal­Native American relations, the majority of these original reservation sites have been significantly reduced, both drawing the interior remaining populations closer while continuing a government-to-government relationship from a diminishing geopolitical site. Mashantucket is but one example of this kind of reductive but intensifying evolution. At Foxwoods, this compression participates in the near-mythic qualities of celebrated and imagined geopolitical sites, extending them by drawing them through the lens of Las Vegas, which both anchors the authenticity of their specific origins while releasing their themes to active roles in the myth economy of fabulation. The casino's sense of the fantastic reflects a narrated and mediated space created from a positioning of textual and other representational elements--the contained, scripted, thematic experience that represents the modern casino. The modern theme casino provocatively blends the fantastic and the seductive, not only in the obvious narrative of an exoticized and imagined history, but also in the narrative of chance. The premise of gambling is the premise of risk, of the dare taken to defeat the odds and gain (fantastic) material wealth. This imagined wealth 137 provides another transition point from the text of the casino to that of the exterior, to "real" time and space. This relationship supports a notion that a non-mediated and transparent text of the everyday, of history and progress, exists beyond the casino doors. An immersion into the intensified presence of a constructed casino environment will be useful, not only to point out the constructed-ness of this interior fantastic narrative, but to either question or enforce that of the "nonmediated" and "transparent" text of the exterior everyday narrative as well. FOXWOODS RESORT CASINO: FROM "GAMING IN ITS NATURAL STATE"TM TO "THE WONDER OF IT ALL"TM The negotiation of a federally recognized tribal identity can be seen as a step toward a control and exercise of one's own performative identity politics. By tracing the history of the casino through its major cultural venue in the United States, it is clear that an integral part of a casino's presentation is the formation and extension of an elaborate mythic theme. Mythic in Benjaminian terms (Buck Morss 1991): a densely layered and textured interior and exterior that reflect a particular (mythic) narrative--Arthurian England (Excalibur), Imperial Rome (Caesar's Palace), Egyptian (and oriental) splendor (Luxor). Foxwoods, as well, displays some elements of thematic motifs. But where Foxwoods differs from the majority of its Las Vegas or Atlantic City counterparts is in its isolation from neighboring casinos or metropolis, and its incorporation of space, time, and history connected to the location of the reservation itself. 138 From the opening of the original bingo hall in 1986 to the opening of the first phase of the casino in 1992, Foxwoods participated in the changes and challenges of the shifts in casino design and strategies of the 1990s.66 In some ways, the casino follows the lead of Las Vegas and in some ways it does not. The Foxwoods casino complex emphasizes the "American Indian" in general and the Mashantucket Pequot in particular as thematic locations for extended narratives of the exotic; its placement at Mashantucket further emphasizes these themes. This original direction has itself shifted since the beginning of gaming at the reservation. The first casino, built as an expansion on the original bingo hall, emphasized a connection to the land at Mashantucket. The main gaming room incorporated floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the Great Cedar Swamp--a site important to a particular Mashantucket Pequot creation myth, the coming of the persecuted survivors from the Pequot War to Mashantucket. Here localized legend--or an exoticized specific historical rendition of Pequot origins at Mashantucket--became part of the casino's public space and the visitor's experience. Things "generally" or "popularly" Indian were worked through such other public registers as employee costumes and uniforms, interior design motifs, the purchase and placement of large-scale sculpture, and the small, cased collections of "Indian artifacts." Some of this reflects the Mashantucket Pequots' own processes for coming to grips with an extended separation from a tribal the time sequence here may seem foreshortened, the construction schedule for Foxwoods was intensely accelerated. Foxwoods reflected innovations in casinos being built with a more conventional construction schedule (and hence later opening dates). 66 Although 139 experience and the absence of a significant amount of material artifacts. In many ways, popular understandings of Indianness are used as resources for both tribal members and the visiting public. The location of a particular "Mashantucket Pequotness" is a site under active reconstruction and rediscovery. This process is perhaps better understood as part of the museum's project. Foxwoods, however, provided the Mashantucket Pequots with their first large-scale venue for public self-representation. As Foxwoods became the defining standard for Indian casinos in the US, the emphases of its constructions have changed. Like contemporary casinos in Las Vegas, Foxwoods includes itself and its immediate surroundings in its collection of referents. The exotic or exoticized narrative of "the Indian" has shifted as the genre of "Indian casinos" changed from anomaly to an established and powerful industry, an industry taking part in the phenomenal nationwide growth of the gaming industry in the 1990s. In many ways, Foxwoods presents a compression of the timeline and history for casino development in Las Vegas, from a concern in active play with its site and its sense of location, to one emphasizing a more dislocated or globalized sense of luxury. Each stage has reflected different agendas and influences, and the casino complex balances between its profit-making agenda and its political agenda--its use of the public space as an arena for selfrepresentation. Still, the Mashantucket Pequot casino occupies a unique position at the juncture between inside and outside, between a fantastic mythic narrative of a themed casino and the equally mythic narrative of history. In part, this stems 140 from its singular positioning within the landscape. In the middle of Connecticut forest, Foxwoods refers back not to surrounding casino neighbors, but to the reservation in which it is situated, to a complex blend of political, traditional, ethnic, and historical narratives. Additionally, as a geographically realized site, it evidences some of the twists and turns that can be read in the Mashantucket Pequots' project as a major and modern development. Representations at Mashantucket work in an active intersection of "Indianness." The invocation of general things "Indian"--in cocktail waitress costumes, design elements, and the Rainmaker, for example--work in a tenuous balance with things aimed in opposition to similar hegemonic notions, as seen in the scope of the enterprise, on a grand level, or the presented photographs of tribal council members that show a mix of phenotype and dress. This opposition works, in part, as a kind of destabilization process. The challenging and incorporating of refigured or reordered elements of cultural texts of "Indian," "Pequot," "modern," and "traditional," continues throughout the casino complex and related structures. The tension between the two, between stabilizing and destabilizing hegemonic notions and representations of Indianness and Mashantucket Pequotness, echoes the tactical moves within legal and ethnic discourses that brought the Mashantucket Pequots to their current status as a tribal entity and an economic force. The Mashantucket Pequots use legal definitions of tribal identity and inclusion to revitalize a once much-diminished community. A number of sources 141 challenge t his identity,67 and popular, monolithic notions of Indians have been used in discourse to counter Pequot identity claims as being discordant with a particular static view of Indianness.68 As Jane Sequoya notes, however: the problem indicated by questions of who and how is an Indian is that the material conditions of being Indian have changed over time, while the images of Indianness have not. [Sequoya 1993: 455] In fact, the current population of Pequots in Mashantucket represents a disparate and diasporic group. To re-establish, or newly establish traditional `ways of being,' the Pequot have carried on their own research into their traditional past--employing archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians. They have also incorporated different rituals, traditions, and representations of "Indianness," borrowed from other tribes. This sampling and retextualization of other representations finds itself played out in cultural performances69 and in the themes that run through the casino itself. Trump, William Safire, and Art Buchwald, as pundits of popular culture, have challenged the Mashantucket Pequots specifically. For a general and academic supporting perspective, see Clifton, James, Being and Becoming Indian: Biographical Studies of North American Frontiers, (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1989). 68 For an in-depth analysis of exchange in the popular media, see LaCroix, Celeste Claire, "Wealth, Power, and Identity: A Critical Reading of Competing Discourses about the Mashantucket Pequots and Foxwoods," Ph.D. dissertation, College of Communication, Ohio University, 1999. 69 For example, the blessing of the Foxwoods corner stone by Slow Turtle (a `medicine man' from the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe), or the hosting of (and participating in) Schemitzun, the largest prize-purse powwow in the Unites States. 67 Donald 142 NAVIGATING FOXWOODS It is hard to figure out the layout of Foxwoods in your first visit, or even the design of the approach and anticipated traffic flow. There is a fragmented cohesion to it--different areas were built in different phases, they are melded together through the use of common materials and colors, united by the low sounds of background noise everywhere. The sound of people walking, the hush of rubber soles on bright tiles and low pile carpet, the smell of food from the different restaurants, and the thick reek of years of cigarette smoke that no amount of air scrubbing will ever quite take away. The pedestrian avenues stretch out in a number of directions, meandering through retail areas and lounges, past frozen yogurt and t-shirt carts. The grand main entrance nearest the road is probably the least used. Most Foxwoods visitors come through three other entrances. One leads from the ground-level parking lot directly into one of the main gaming rooms, now called the Rainmaker Casino. The door is also used by shuttle buses and vans from the system of outlying satellite parking lots. At one time the original bingo hall for the Mashantucket Pequots, this room has been refurbished a number of times. It now houses table games and high-stake slot machines. A new section is devoted to betting on simulcast horse races. A second entrance leads from a downstairs parking area devoted to the big highway buses ferrying in players from all over New England and the northeast. Passengers entering the building through this entrance soon find themselves on an escalator that runs next to a two-story fountain featuring enormous sculptures of 143 salmon and trout. The escalator ends at Foxwoods' large food court: a variety of foods, a long counter with multiple registers, and a large open and tiled area with small tables. To the left are the main entrances to the high stakes bingo. In front of each door is a counter for information and bingo cards. To the right, windows look out onto an open square of asphalt, the parking lot below and the hotel directly across. From the older main entrance, the main concourse (Rainmaker Trail on the casino map, p.159) is one of the first pedestrian avenues encountered. As a prestigious space for limousine and taxi traffic, or valet parking, this entrance was supplanted by the newer Grand Pequot Tower entrance (see Photograph 3.1). 144 Photograph 3.3: View of the Concourse. The two-story Victorian façade is on the left. To the right, behind the retail displays, are windows looking onto Mashantucket. Photo by Thorney Leiberman. VIGNETTE 2: YANKEES IN THE CONCOURSE It is Friday, late afternoon. Too soon for a full on after-work crowd, but the complex still hosts thousands: early arrivals for the weekend, groups of retirees, tour groups, groups of seniors, people with more flexible schedules. The main concourse is well filled with pedestrians and the glass walls amplify the shuffle and slap of shoes on tile, the bubble of conversation, the sounds of retail, and the not-too-distant bells and cash spills of the slot machines. Here also are the 145 mixed sounds of children on family outings. The concourse is one of the few places where minors are allowed at Foxwoods. Some people sit and eat ice cream cones, watching the progression of others down the walkway. Hairstyles. Persian lamb coats. Faux sailor outfits. Older women with thin hair teased into dyed clouds with pale mottled domes showing through. Men with their hair plastered tight over bare scalps. Sensible shoes. Bright sweaters. Puffy nylon jackets with chevrons! Logos! Some with stripes and team affiliations, or designs with cards and dice. One person passes in a sweatshirt--on its front is the rendition of a hand-lettered cardboard sign: "Will Bingo for Food." A man sits on a bench, his belly on his lap like a gift. A number of employees make their way to the parking lots at the end of the day shift, or simply get away from the gaming rooms for a moment before heading home. Cocktail waitresses in small tight skirts, heavy makeup, too many bright teeth, and their single, dyed-feather headbands. Their jobs are considered the best in the casino--they are the only employees allowed to keep their own tips (the rest are pooled) and all drinks are free to patrons. Perhaps one of the more arresting examples of thematic construction in the casino can be found in the wide main pedestrian concourse. The concourse runs from the Rainmaker fountain and its ice-age narrative, past the escalators leading to the hotel's lower lobby area, a large mixed gaming room, the virtual reality attractions of the Cinetropolis, and on to one of Foxwoods' premiere restaurants before finally ending at the Grand Pequot Tower. The concourse is constructed on two levels--running down one side is a wall of glass, in some places over two 146 stories high, that frames the second-growth forests and rock formations of the reservation and the surrounding Connecticut landscape. The ceiling of the concourse features a subtle light show with projected clouds--the color of the projected light changes, looping from sunrise to sunset to evening darkness to sunrise again. Opposite the glass wall is a collection of two-story Victorian façades: gingerbread, widow's walks, bow windows, and verandas. The lower level allows access to one of the casino's mixed gaming rooms, a travel agency, visitor services, and Indian Nations (a store that sells art, jewelry, and other objects produced only by Native Americans). Above this level are second-story windows, finished with glass, glowing lamps behind draperies, small balconies, and three speaking animatronic figures. The composition of this "Yankee" trio is notable: a whaling captain, the proprietress of a tavern, and a clergyman who also seems to be a schoolteacher. There are a number of sound effects: a ship's bell, the sounds of an interior crowd, the ringing of a blacksmith's hammer mixing with the canned pop music and the distant sound of the machines. The figures reference each other, each playing a role that occasionally interacts with the others through an anecdote, a question, an admonition--a jumping off place for a quip or some sort of "informative" narrative. The figures and Victorian façades comprise a walk-through historical amusement/representation intended to evoke a placeless historicized village 147 combining some elements of nearby Norwich and Mystic.70 A nod is made to Yankee ingenuity, industry, and progress through a long spatial and temporal transition from whaling days through the advent of mills and the beginning of industrialism. These changes are further emphasized by changes in façades as the visitor navigates the concourse from the Rainmaker to Cinetropolis. Entering the concourse, one becomes immersed in a thick mixture of sounds, all bouncing back from glass and hard tile. Noticing the first figure, it takes a few moments of listening, of narrowing your field of aural recognition, filtering out the background noises of Foxwoods, fixing attention on the standing figure's speech. Listening carefully to their recorded voices, we learn that they are Captain John, Abby, and Father Tom: a triad of industry, entertainment, and church combined to offer a selective rendition of a New England community, an animatronic community in which there is no mention whatsoever of a Native American presence. Captain John The captain stands on a balcony over the Mashantucket Travel Agency, surrounded by heaped nets, incongruous fishing rods, a hanging yellow slicker, a lobster pot. Dressed in a peacoat, he moves through a series of slow and limited gestures, a stiff Tai Chi with the loosest of ties to his narrative, nodding his head every now and then, jerking his arm back and forth. The captain's voice mixes communication with New England Design, the design company responsible for the interior look and feel of Foxwoods. 70 Private 148 with the sound of the nearby Rainmaker's fountain, the burble of its crowds, and the shuffle of feet. Let me tell you about a Nantucket schooner. Look sharp. A whaler's no place for dreamers ...you'll find yourself in need of a wooden leg. ... I'm Captain John Barnes. I hope you've been looking out for whales. Every man must take his turn watching out . ...You haven't seen any yearling whale today, have you? We killed it this morning but it swam under . . . if you find it, we'll share it but the irons come back to me. Abby Wilson, Tavern Keeper The second figure acts as a kind of jack-in-the-box with a second-story window opening wide, left and right, allowing her to lean forward and address the crowd. She glides up to the window, stops, leans, speaks. She is Abby Wilson of Wilson's Tavern. We are told that she was once engaged and lost her fiancé to a "Rebel bullet." Hey, John. Will ye be coming by the tavern this evening? "You know I wouldn't come ashore without raising a glass with ye," responds Captain John. Father Tom He sits in a rocking chair on the largest balcony, overlooking the escalators from the lower hotel level, every now and then standing to make jerky gesticulations. He has gray hair and is wearing a black cassock. On his right is a table with a writing slate propped on its surface, next to a telescope on a tripod. A barometer, a chronometer, and a thermometer are mounted on a nearby wall. On 149 his left is a globe on a stand. The double doors behind him are open. Father Tom speaks about tending his flock or the wages of sin. His observations are often followed by a tart rejoinder from Abby. Last week, Father Tom gave a sermon on virtue. He asked all the virgins in the congregation to stand. Not a woman stood. The third time he asked, a woman with a babe in arms stood. `Young woman,' he said, `why are you standing? `Well, you can't expect a six-month old child to stand by herself!' Ahoy, I hear there are sperm whales out here. We've been deep for three weeks and haven't seen a single blow. ...Mate, you keep your eye sharp for sperm whales. Their oil makes the best candles and perfume. Why, one of them is worth three of your ordinary whales. A sperm whale is the best catch there is or my name isn't Captain John. ...So, you're looking to sign on a whaler? Captain John's narrative weaves together anecdotes about whaling, facts about spermaceti whales, whalers, and whale oil. Like the Captain, Abby addresses the passing throngs of tourists and gamblers, and most do not seem to notice her at all. Captain John can drink with the best of them, but no one can keep up with me. One evening, Captain John came out of my place, roaring drunk. Mrs. Ames says to him, `Captain John, you're the drinkingest man I know.' `Well, you're the ugliest woman I've seen,' he said, `and tomorrow I'll be sober.' I've been running this place for fifteen years. Been a working girl all my life. Hey John, why don't you come by tonight? I'll keep your stool warm for ya'. 150 I've been proprietor for over fifteen years. Well, it's long hours and low pay but what do you want, egg in your beer? ...we serve sailors drinks here. Once this city boy was in and he yelled out, `What does one have to do to get a glass of water in this hole? So I leans over, sweet as pie, and say, `Why don't you try setting yourself on fire?' Abby talks of the laborers at the local mill--hired one day, fired the next. Muggy heat and clanking machinery, mill workers "drenched in sweat and covered with dust." She states that the sea is a better place. There's a whistle in the background identified as the weekly boat train. Ah, but these people are good folk. Walking home from the mill, playing checkers with the family. Wake up Father Tom--looks like you've got some customers. Young woman, I am not engaged in commerce. I deal in men's souls. Father Tom talks of Judgment Day, "when the earth will tremble," against the background of recorded bells and the ambient noise of the casino's gaming rooms and shuffling foot traffic. So I ask you ladies and gentlemen: what could be more precious than virtue? Pride goeth before a fall. . . There's no such thing as a self-made man. . . . Forbear ardent spirits and tobacco. . . . Remember, cleanliness is next to Godliness. "Hey, Father Tom, half of your congregation's down at my place," says Abby. Were I younger, I would teach you proper reverence. 151 There are fat woman jokes, greenhorn jokes, preacher jokes. Father Tom speaks of the power of the good book, a strict moral code, and the importance of keeping clean. Abby extols the virtue of enjoying one's self while one can and backtalks Father Tom's homilies and mini-sermons; she asks Captain John to send his sailors by her place for some spirits before they head out to sea. Although there is not a representative character, each of the figures mentions the new industry of the mills and how difficult, dangerous, and dirty the work is there. The animatronic technology is based on that pioneered by Disney and evident at Epcot and parts of Disneyworld. The figures' faces are nearly blank, smooth, rendered in that Crayola color once labeled "flesh," with a slight indication of cheekbones, nose, and mouth. Father Tom's face is both more finished and more terrifying than either Abby's or Captain John's--shiny plastic with a distinct nose. Projected onto these masks, to animate them, are the images of moving faces. Perhaps it is more successful viewed head-on and at the same level; from the floor below they are deeply spooky and it takes a while to figure out that the faces have projected features at all. On first seeing them, I was confronted with a faceless trio, going through their respective jerky dances, opening windows, rising from chairs, gesturing toward an imagined sea, while the tape loops of their voices ran on and on. This collection of figures is the only place in the casino, except in the small under-waterfall museum, where "whiteness" is at all represented or thematized. In the museum, whites make their appearance in pictures with voiceovers, as English soldiers and colonial volunteers, or the disembodied voice of 152 "Connecticut" intoning, from the treaty of Hartford, the first tribal termination in Native American­European Colonial history. But in the concourse, these figures offer a sort of "living" historical representation and speak a set of interlocking narratives. The figures serve to intertwine three chosen perspectives from postcolonial, "white" history while also providing a kind of entertainment for the passing crowds. The figures, dressed in period clothing, are surrounded by facsimile artifacts and tools that further explain or extend the roles they have as representatives of people, professions, and, through their singularity, whiteness. This, in turn, is surrounded by a casino that uses generalized Indianness as a theme, and Mashantucket Pequotness as an anchor to the land, near a museum and research complex complete with artifacts from on-reservation digs, a virtual late seventeenth-century Pequot fort, and a recreated village with its own representative figures. The Yankees in the concourse mark some of the clear distinctions being made between the use of history as an element of a casino thematic, and the use of history as a vehicle for a revised understanding of the past, as in the museum and research center. In the concourse, Foxwoods also marks itself as part of the larger Ye Olde New England colonial history machine, referring to discourses of New England progress and industry that are the guiding narratives for places like the nearby Mystic Seaport, or even the Connecticut River Museum. In the concourse, the Yankees are mostly ignored and marginal figures, the voices of historicized experience replete with stale jokes and awkward 153 gestures. Their narrative processes are only a segment of the significance in this area of active multiple constructions. The entire Mashantucket industry, its development and surrounding projects, continually remind one that the location of power in this equation is radically different from many other constructions of Indians and Whites, including those in amusement parks and casinos, the oldtimey themes of living histories and colonial recreations, and the elaborate public spaces of malls and resorts. The overriding difference is that this is a Mashantucket Pequot casino, and a Mashantucket Pequot industry. The Mashantucket Pequots have followed the procedures of a federal legal system to establish a legitimated federal identity. This confirmation has allowed the advantage of exercising their own interpretations and articulations of different multiple identities--historic, ethnic, and cultural--through the structures and narratives of the casino. It has also gained them financial advantage, and enabled these constructions to be presented through the same elaborately high-tech representational methods as those offered within the dominant discourse. Foxwoods Resort Casino, however, is not a counter-hegemonic structure, nor is it one completely hegemonic. Foxwoods has been constructed in a series of building phases and necessarily reflects changes in architects, designers, and the Indian gaming industry. While many design elements mobilized throughout the casino work in opposition to a sense of "generalized Indianness," there are other that affirm this same sense. The Mashantucket Pequots, like many of the designers and architects they employ, work from some generalized concepts themselves. The rebuilding of a tribal and cultural presence is a difficult process, 154 especially in a community built from dispersed and disparate individuals and families. As in the past and throughout Native America, the Mashantucket Pequots practice a certain amount of cultural borrowing. Songs and dances for performance at powwows and other events have been learned from other tribes and tribal teachers, and regalia specific to the Mashantucket Pequots have also been developed. Importantly, Foxwoods is a business that is constructed to appeal to a large clientele of occasional and professional gamblers, mostly white (or at least mostly non-Native). The "Indian as Exotic" theme that runs through the casino delivers a certain, perhaps expected, theme to its countless visitors. 155 Illustration 3.1: Lower and Mezzanine Levels of the Foxwoods Resort Casino. Illustrations from Foxwoods promotional materials. 156 Illustration 3.2: Casino Level of the Foxwoods Resort Casino C1--Cinetropolis. C17--the Rainmaker. C25--central atrium. (The waterfall and staircase leading to the museum are between this and C26.) C26--the main entrance (pre-Grand Pequot Tower). "Rainmaker Trail"--pedestrian concourse with Victorian facades. "Pequot Trail"--walkway tying Cinetropolis to the Grand Pequot Tower. 157 FROM BELOW Up the escalator from the Great Cedar Hotel's lower level entrance. Dimly lit, spotlights pick up glints of brass, mauve, turquoise, and glass. Cars outside reflect the sun. The long escalator climbs past pools of water and money, cascades, the bronze Indian statue offering his pipe heavenward, the rocks and plants. Up, slowly rising into the sound of the casino concourse I come face to face with a huge bronze head with "classic" Native American features--hair, eyes, cheekbones--on a pedestal facing the escalator. Behind it a wall of glass. The vista includes Lantern Hill, rock outcroppings and woods. As I face this, behind me and across the escalator well, is the concourse. Father Tom's balcony matches the width of the well. I turn from the face and, walking toward Father Tom, enter the foot traffic of the concourse. Two bronze Indians, the last a massive head raised so its eyes are at your level, and a necessary turning away from this gaze toward the figure of the preacher, flanked by globe and telescope, complete with writing and measuring devices. The sound of a church bell mixes with his recollections of marriages performed and the virtues of the good book. He speaks of forbearing alcohol and tobacco as his spotlight catches the swirls and eddies of cigarette and cigar smoke from the passing crowd. His narrative mixes with the busy hum of the vending concourse, the sound of crowds and the distant machines. At the escalator's base, rising from a naturalizing sound of water, the bronze Indian figure offers a pipe--in blessing? hope? recognition?--to the quietly ascending metal staircase and the floor above. 158 If we accept as true that no casino is complete without a theme, a representation of a mythic past seated in imperial luxury or freebooting wealth, how does Foxwoods contradict or support this? At first gloss, the Mashantucket Pequot's casino, built on an exotic theme of the "Indian," seems little different than other casinos built on other exotic themes. Foxwoods has cocktail waitresses in buckskin mini-dresses and small feathered headbands. The cashless transaction "Wampum Card" works as a debit card and is your ticket to gambling. Like similar cards in most other large casinos, it also tracks your play, and your betting habits. Every daytime hour you are reminded of some sort of represented Indianness as the Rainmaker statue goes through its paces. And yet, there are significant differences. The theme of Foxwoods uses a tie with the land in two important ways, in generalized and specific American Indian representations. First, it participates in a popular imagination of a generalized "American Indian" ideology. During the final phases of the construction of Foxwoods, the trade magazine ConnStruction dedicated three issues to the Mashantucket Pequot Casino. Most of the articles in the magazines discussed the demands of accelerated construction, and the uniqueness of the casino's design. Many made statements about American Indian beliefs and practices as being exemplified by the casino's construction project. In one article for example, Stewart Sebastian, Mashantucket Pequot tribal member and the director of the Mashantucket Sand & Gravel Co., describes his decision to crush gravel from on-site rock as an actualization of the "American Indian practice of using all of the parts of an animal they have trapped so as not to 159 squander one of nature's gifts" (ConnStruction, (32)4, 1994: 41). The mobilization of such motifs over economy, ecology, or Yankee pragmatism, for example, typifies the use of such an imagined American Indian ideology as a positioned discourse. Second, "the land" is used as a material recognition of the Mashantucket Pequot reservation, with nature as part and parcel of a timeless continuity between the tribe and the environmental surround. Photograph 3.4: In the earlier phase of the casino the gaming rooms featured walls of glass that looked out onto the Great Cedar Swamp. Photo from Foxwoods promotional materials. 160 In the original main casino the Foxwoods slogan was "Gaming in its Natural State," and the casino incorporated the reservation's swamp and landscape into its gaming rooms through the use of picture windows. This actualized tie to the land is used in the construction of a mythic history that refers, not to ancient Rome or Egypt, but to the geographic surround. In later phases of construction and expansion, the windows were removed from the gaming rooms. The glass pedestrian arcade now offers the visitor a broad scenic vista that includes the Cedar Swamp and Lantern Hill, another marker for the reservation. The original windows can be read as a frame incorporating the swamp into the motif of the casino's design, creating both a picture and a reinforcement of the "natural"--a significant element of both Indian and Mashantucket Pequot discourse. To call the swamp simply framed and incorporated, is only part of the picture. What is not framed is equally important. In the Freemont Street casinos in Las Vegas, windows and glass doors are placed at the wall facing the street, itself a roofless arcade of casinos and businesses. Looking out, one sees other casinos, other players, other possibilities for movement and shifting that do not challenge the basic structure of interaction, gambler to gambling room. Time is obscured: the referents offered are more mirrors than reminders of other reckonings. Space doubles back on itself, self-referring. There are no sweeping vistas that break this short sight, no uncontrolled acknowledgments of space and time. At Foxwoods the inclusion of the natural, even as an element in an overall theme of both Mashantucket Pequot and generalized "Indian," serves to include time. 161 Set in the context of the reservation, the casino recontextualizes elements from the discourses of Indians, nature, and the Mashantucket Pequots . It works these through with representations of luxury and the exotic--both "Indian" and natural. The theme of the casino combines elements of these narratives in a number of ways. First is its relatively remote placement on the landscape. No dedicated exit on the Interstate leads one to Mashantucket. Visitors to the reservation and casino travel small two-lane highways through villages, farmlands, and second-growth forests. The road leading to the casino begins with a sign marking Foxwoods Resort Casino and the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. An entrance to both a destination resort and another nation (if not another nation state), the sign marks the distinct transition from the surrounding New England countryside through the reservation boundaries. There is a twenty-foot waterfall, accentuated by rock and local plants, is in the casino's main hall. The fallen-leaf motif of the carpets, the plant and flower designs of the stained glass windows, the repeated use of water and fountains, and the construction itself--abundant indoor plantings, windows, sky-lighted arcades and soaring atriums--draw on the natural as a repeated element in the material design. The Native American motifs came from a number of sources. The Pequots had compiled a great deal of information on their tribal history and a number of local historians, art historians, anthropologists and archeologists also provided research and information. In certain cases information was drawn from a more general idea of regional Native American cultures. Finally the use of natural materials, native wildlife and 162 natural light were very important to the tribe. [John Everett, New England Design, personal correspondence, 2002] Woven through these physical constructions are "Indian" and Pequot design motifs: repeated geometric patterns invoking basket and weaving designs, the "Pequot colors" of mauve and green, black and white, and the Mashantucket Pequot national symbol and corporate logo. Illustration 3.3: The Mashantucket Pequot logo. Illustration from Foxwoods promotional materials. Framed against a clear sky, the lone tree on a prominent knoll represents Mashantucket, the "much-wooded land" where the Pequots hunted and kept alive their identity as an independent people. Displayed on that knoll is the sign of Robin Cassasinnamon, the Mashantucket Pequot's first leader following the massacre at Mystic Fort in 1637. The fox stands as a reminder that the Pequots are known as "the fox people." [Text from the Foxwoods Resort Casino brochure, c.1998] Concerning one recent project, the 1996 re-design of the original bingo hall, Kevin Tubridy--president and owner of New England Design, the firm which oversaw the design and construction of the Foxwoods complex--stated that copper was incorporated into the hall's floor tile patterns to reflect a "Native American medicine wheel motif" (ConnStruction, (33)1, 1994: 44). The designers 163 used copper because "it is the only metal found among pre-Europeans ... [and it] has very strong medicinal value" (ibid.). Statements like these can be found throughout texts created around the construction project itself, as tribal members, designers, construction engineers, and architects attempt to mobilize imagined and popular notions of Indianness within the overall theme of Foxwoods. Countering these statements against historical discourse, (which would at least include a mention of other significant pre-European metals, or an explanation of the medicinal value of copper and how it might be useful as a floor tile element), only serves to underline a difference in the positioning of factual and cultural elements within these narratives. Tubridy said he and his colleagues were interested in obtaining a mix of both tribal designs and pure design. `You don't want to get so symbolic and so serious that you get a museum format,' he said. [ibid.] This highlighted tension between "tribal" designs and "pure" design is not to suggest that there is a transparent "real" representation that lurks beneath these constructed façades, waiting to be correctly described. Historical discourse is only one of many textual arrangements of the imagined past, of what Fredric Jameson refers to as the "absent cause." This generating engine for narrative construction allows particular depictions of the past, "the allegorical re-presentation of absent presence itself" (Stewart 1996: 58). Read ideologically, as a "narrativization in the political unconscious" (Jameson 1984: 35), the arrangement and deployment of these casino interpretive and representational texts implicate the parallel Mashantucket Pequot projects of rebuilding and extending their own cultural 164 narratives and tribal identity. Resources for these projects include popular and particular understandings of "Indianness." Foxwoods is a particular (multi) textual realization of (historical) narrative(s). The casino's representation of "theme" and the exotic, its position in the landscape of both the reservation and the "natural," and its material function as a capital-generating industry for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, reflect different positionings of its ideological intents and functions. Susan Stewart sets the power of narrative within an ability to seduce, a seduction based on a feeling of recognition (nostalgia). This recognition comes from a bridging of the gap between the signified and the signifier. Nostalgia as a sense of longing or an address of feeling, plays out in a narrative structure by creating a desire for completion, a desire to fill this gap. Nostalgia shifts in the space of tension created by this urge for a smoothed juncture where memory and recognition overlap in register. The efforts to achieve this smoothing reconfigure (by decontextualizing and then recontextualizing) different elements of narrative (different evocations, segments, images and feelings that invoke and imply other states of being through referencing an imagined real, historical or fantastic). This, in turn, creates a "desire for desire" (Stewart 1993). This tension, between a configured narrative and its indexical reference to a material real, drives the themed history that is the casino. It also indicates other forms of narrative including museums. Within Foxwoods, representations are placed specifically, with plot and purpose. The overall intent is an evocation of the exotic that weaves together the 165 more obvious elements of dream imagery with quotations from `traditional' histories and depictions. Working within the space of desire, the casino creates a seductive feeling of longing, a nostalgia seated in the gap between historical object(s)--actual objects, represented narratives, markers of the past--and the narratives built around them, encasing and extending them. This seduction plays with memory, with descriptions and representations of objects that spark the flash of recognition. Recognition itself is a narrative of the past that lights on that which seems to fit the space of memory, an imagined rendition of the past. Ethnographic text(s) are allegorical in form and content, "stories that simultaneously describe real cultural events and make additional, moral, ideological, and even cosmological statements" (Clifford 1986: 98) Ethnography, and ethnographic practice, is implicated in this understanding by its utilization of texts as vehicles for ideological expression.71 Thus, the casino and the museum and research center serve as allegories for the Mashantucket Pequot project of reestablishing the tribe and a tribal culture. The casino does so with a number of different allegorical overlays including 1) resurrection, the reestablishment of a tribal entity after near total political and historical erasure; 2) an Algeresque rags­to-riches narrative for the tribal nation and the individual tribal members; 3) the American Dream of capitalist opportunity and triumph; and 4) the risk taken that succeeds (who knew that a high stakes bingo hall in the middle of the Connecticut woods would eventually become the world's largest casino?). 71 Writing texts, ethnographic or otherwise, is ultimately an ideological practice. It depends on memory and recognition, of author and reader, whose genesis is in a system of value and belief. 166 Stewart observes that "[a]llegory draws special attention to the narrative character of cultural representations, to the stories built into the representational process itself" (1993: 100). The Oxford English Dictionary understands allegory as: 1. Description of a subject under the guise of some other subject of aptly suggestive resemblance. 2. An instance of such description; a figurative sentence, discourse, or narrative, in which properties and circumstances attributed to the apparent subject really refer to the subject they are meant to suggest; an extended or continued metaphor. [http://dictionary.oed.com/, accessed 18 July 2002] Keeping these understandings in mind, the casino can also be understood as an allegory for culture, as an extended metaphor of cultural practices and boundaries semi-contained in a porous shell. Foxwoods thematics present a saturated space of multiple meanings and fantastic narratives, while the practice of Foxwoods and what it is able to provide has far-reaching effect in the terrain of Native America. The creation, through narratives of the fantastic and of history, of a contained and intensified representation of a particular and discrete way of life--one with its own methods of seduction, its own plays within memory and desire--parallels the workings of culture. Culture describes a lived, shifting and contested ground, an active site where meaning is immanent and performed. Culture defies outline and encapsulation. Like the casino and its thematic, culture seeps and transgresses boundaries, influencing and giving body to its own narrative(s). The casino, by overlapping narratives from an exoticized and multiple past and the current project of re-establishing a history for the 167 reservation, offers a site where these concurrent and similar motives can be read in relation to one another. Foxwoods can be understood not only as a text of tradition and desire, a re-presented identity and an exotic "other," but also as an allegory for culture and, by indication, ethnography. Within the desire to create a discrete represented narrative of history and time is the intent to seduce one into a suspension of disbelief or, at least, a willingness to allow the narrative to play. This seduction hinges on the creation of an intensified exotic "other," a narrative strategy that compels the reader to extend credibility for the purposes of an imagined experience. The casino created mini-world shares characteristics of other miniatures-- the creation of an "other" time, separate and distinct from a "real" time, for example.72 This transposition of other and real has two edges. A depiction of "other" time indicates and supports "real" time. Such seductive strategies not only describe, but also serve to validate the comparison made between a sense of constructed time and "real" time. With its blurring of traditional casino tropes (time, space, the distinction between inside and outside, the realization of a completely created and separate mini-world) and its transgression into other indicated narratives--nature, Indianness, the surrounding landscape--the Mashantucket Pequot casino draws the "real" into question. The signified shifts 72 However, Stewart's discussion of an `other' time in the miniature indicates a time of arrest, of contemplation. Casino time is closer to Benjamin's concept of a distracted gaze, a perceiving marked by the possibility for a shock of recognition, of tactility, where an opening is created to disturb the waking dream of modern life. 168 from exotic theme to surrounding site and back again, and the suspension of disbelief given as one enters an intensified site of representation doubles back on itself. FOXWOODS AS AUTHENTICATING REGISTER The projects of building Mashantucket Pequot and Indian identity, and of extending and intensifying the exotic narrative of the casino, parallel and overlap one another. Issues of authenticity play out within an intoxicating evocative seduction of signs. Desire, realized as both an element of the gambling discourse of chance and wealth, and as an element of a nostalgic discourse (blending an image of the past with a representation of the present), motivates and perpetuates the circulation of intensified representation. But nostalgia is a cultural practice that "depends on where the speaker stands in the landscape" (Stewart 1988: 227). The nostalgia at work in the casino is multiply situated and reflects nostalgias of hegemony and resistance, middle- and working-class, mass culture, and "the local" (ibid.). It is a response both to the rich immersive and diffuse representations alive in the casino, and a strategy for navigating its many surfaces. The casino and the reservation are marked post-modern exemplars displaying the effects of cultural explosion. At this site in particular, commodity capitalism forcefully seeps and pervades all expressions of cultural identity. Industry, commodity, and capital intertwine with an ongoing project of identity articulation and assertion. "Indianness" and "Mashantucket Pequotness" cross over and blend the categories of asserted cultural presence and exoticized 169 commodification. Images and identities blur their discrete boundaries. As such, the reservation and casino form a simulacrum of cultural presence, a formal entity replacing a substantive entity. On this level, discussions on the "authenticity" of Mashantucket Pequot claims become assessments of the displacing strategies of signification and commodification. As simulacra, both the Mashantucket Pequots and the casino displace particular senses of the "real" through a rich surface interplay of signs. This analysis of Foxwoods locates the casino as a site of intensified representation and desire that creates a seduction rooted in the ideas of nostalgic longing. Asserting that such a displaced sense of the real negates the existence of the real (or authentic), however, would lose sight of a basic point: simulacra are not a refutation of the real, enclosed as a representation within a particular site. A simulacrum does not indicate the authenticity of its particular locus, and offers little use as a means for establishing or uncovering the real beneath the representation. As Baudrillard asserted for Disneyland, the park's thematic is part of "a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real" (Baudrillard 1994: 172). By establishing that the theme park itself is an imaginary, the corresponding assertion is: that which is not the theme park is "real." Foxwoods follows this strategy. Not only is the counter-indicated "real" (or authentic) but, as such, it is resistant to further investigation as a simulacrum in its own right.73 In this regard, the casino counter-indicates the realities of the investigated, it is to seek latencies and the exposable, different manifestations of discovery which do not question its underlying "reality." 73 If 170 community and the academic project at Mashantucket, and that of the process of identity-construction and affirmation (as both Mashantucket Pequot and Indian) within the over-arching federal structure of the United States. It reaffirms the reality of the federal Indian legal system, and the categories of identity conferred through blood, which conflate discourses of nature and culture. If we isolate "intensified representation" as belonging only to the seductive mythic thematic world of the casino, we are left discussing only a segment of the ongoing project at Mashantucket. For Baudrillard, seduction is an enchantment of the sign, the outward appearances of represented forms that evoke an "other," that create a space for desire. In this regard, desire manifests itself as the engine of production. Seduction creates this desire through a play and circulation of signs, negating the idea of deep or hidden meaning. Seduction moves away from an analysis of strategic instrumentalism and toward consideration as an instantaneous operation that is always its own end. There is no active or passive in seduction, no subject or object, or even interior or exterior: it plays on both sides of the border with no border separating the sides. [Baudrillard 1994: 160] Seduction and desire are realized as the extents of their own motivation and exchange. The overflowing boundaries of the Mashantucket Pequot constructions in and around Foxwoods also indicate this sense of borderlessness. The intensified representations challenge static images of Indianness, conceptions of ethnic and biological identity, and reintroduce time and history to the construction of themed 171 casino narratives. It also continues certain hegemonic discourses: Indians as exotic "others," ethnic identity as a legislatable entity, and a casino design that reflects current trends in mall and amusement park public structures as much as other possible discourses on time and space. By recognizing the multiple possibilities in "reading" Mashantucket, what becomes clear is that this academic narrative, like any form of narrative, is ideological. It seeks to establish and support a narrative with closure, through the creation and discovery of boundaries, and the evocation of concepts and people therein contained. What Foxwoods and the Mashantucket Pequots make clear is that any such attempt is but one of many. The explosive growth of the gaming industry, based in part on the strong US economy of the late 1990s, fuels the latest wave of casino design. Here all bets seem to be sure bets and stories of instant millionaires proliferate the media. These conditions indicate two possible directions for casino development at the beginning of the 21st century. One is to a completely exotic and self-contained world that extends its boundaries outside its own physical plant or the extended "large sign" effect of its building(s). This direction includes places like Atlantis (on Paradise Island in the Bahamas), or, even earlier, Excalibur in Las Vegas--places where the suspended disbelief also incorporates another world, with its own mythologies and history outside of the known, resplendent with its own artifacts and archaeologies. The second direction relies on the over-saturation of the known, made thick with glossy excess and compression--New York New York, Paris­Las 172 Vegas, or the earlier Luxor, for example. Places that make the known or the knowable exotic; places that reference an actual socio-political, historical, and geographically located place in the world and make it strange and thick through dramatic temporal and spatial transposition, performance, and translation. Foxwoods walks the line between these two different casino genres. It references both a knowable history and a commonly held imaginary of Native America. While its reason for being is necessarily caught up in its location and the knowable quantities of its history and its tribal members, the Mashantucket reservation that surrounds Foxwoods remains largely unknown, figured through the talk of the local townspeople's I-remember-when narratives, speculation on the expansion of the reservation and future possible losses of non Native-owned land, and presentations in the exhibitions of the MPMRC itself. VIGNETTE 3: FURTHER DOWN THE CONCOURSE TIMELINE The Victorian façades end and the concourse turns 90° toward the Cinetropolis area. Here one moves past a brick-fronted facsimile of an early twentieth-century "Mashantucket Town Hall." The town hall's doors are firmly shut. From inside comes the steady murmuring buzz of voices--a town hall meeting--cycling endlessly, on the edge of being understood but just below the aural threshold of actually making sense. The town hall looks across to a cramped collection of office and store façades appropriate to the time period: a printshop, a newspaper office, an exotic dance studio. The town hall has a brass plaque on a cornerstone: "Founded 1891." 173 Across the "street" a wall of monitors displays the multiple exotic images of music videos. The monitors are next to an old-timey theater entrance, complete with Deco style neon and chrome. Between facades, the backlit background of atemporal city high-rises--some turn-of-the-century brick mixed in with a beehive-like structure that recalls the San Francisco Federal Building. Cinetropolis is billed as "the city of specialty theatres,"74 and includes the Cinedrome 360° Theater (a large-format, large screen film theater), the Turbo Ride (3D motion-simulation rides using moving seats and a 40-foot projection screen), and Virtual Adventures (a virtual-reality "ride"). The current line-up for the Turbo Ride features the "Stan Lee 7th Portal 3D Simulation Experience," complete with costumed superheroes; "White Lightning," a car-chase experience with a 1930s Federal Agent theme; and "Mad Racers," a futuristic race complete with mutants and soul-theft. On the last leg of its journey from Cinetropolis to the Grand Pequot Tower, a singular shift in representative strategy marks the concourse. While the earlier stages of construction and design emphasize a connection to the natural (and, by extension, the reservation)--through plantings, fountains, and fallen-leaf carpet patterns, for example--the Cinetropolis area emphasizes an early 20th century experience of an idealized small-town urban setting. The passage to the Grand Pequot Tower emphasizes a dis-located referent: the sense of rich luxury. Or the recognition that luxury now presents its own sort of emphasized (and transnational) location. 74 From the 1998 Foxwoods Resort Casino brochure. 174 Following this segment, the visitor passes down a wide, carpeted hallway. On the left is the Golden Dragon, one of the higher-ticket restaurants at Foxwoods. Opposite this, a set of three large inset display cases contains six mannequins arranged in couples. The cases advertise clothing available for purchase in various Foxwoods shops. The first couple wears expensive golf togs, the last expensive and stylish "formal" wear. The middle couple models expensive buckskin regalia. In its way, the buckskin is just as inaccessible as the formal wear featured in the last case, through price, practicality, and the fine line between fashion and costume. The main pedestrian concourse cannot be realized as only a space of directed transit or window-shopping. The concourse leads from the food courts to the Grand Pequot Tower, a combination of highway and vestibule, a traveling space for the casino visitor gained only as part of the process of getting elsewhere. Once entered, it presents its own particular environment. The concourse provides an all-encompassing and porous space, a gap in the closed environments of gaming, entertainment, eating, and buying. As such, the concourse provides a moving point of entry as well as a space of its own. This may be the reason that the concourse is sometimes used as the primary destination for family outings. The concourse serves as the theatre for the presentation of Mashantucketas-background for the visitor experience, the reminder of the wooded roads traveled to get to the casino and the wooded surround of the reservation. This space allows the visitor the opportunity to move between venues devoted to different activities, and also to move between different spaces of located 175 perspective. Once in the lobby of the Grand Pequot Tower, however, the presentation of a non-located sense of luxury is completed by the use of rich wood paneling, thick carpet, and abstract glass sculptures wall-mounted behind the reception and concierge desks. The current Foxwoods slogan is: "The Wonder of it All." While luxury is the predominating theme of this area, representations of the globe are figured prominently as well. The lobby features a bar with a global theme, paralleling the bar in the Tower's twenty-fifth floor High Roller area. Part of the Paragon Restaurant, this bar curves around a huge globe made of blue glass and polished golden metal. The upper gaming level--accessed by a sweeping, curving staircase--offers a large circular area, contained by a handrail, which overlooks the bar. The sense of globalized luxury are made tangible as the bar, restaurant, and casino areas feature exotic wood veneers from South Africa, marble and granite floors with decorative rosettes, and ceiling coffers with hand painted murals, Turkish crystals and fiber optic lighting accents. [From the press release pages of www.foxwoods.com, accessed July 2002] 176 Photograph 3.5: The bar at the twenty-fourth floor Paragon Restaurant. Photo from Foxwoods promotional materials. ON LOCATION: THE EFFECTS OF EMPLACEMENT Since its inception, Foxwoods has served as an inspirational model and prominent example for all Indian casinos. The Mashantucket Pequots have welcomed other tribal leaders and business people interested in establishing their own gaming enterprises, and Foxwoods has served as a resource for information, training, and, in some cases, monetary assistance for establishing other Indian gaming concerns.75 correspondence with Katherine Spilde, former Director of Research for the National Indian Gaming Association and current Senior Research Associate for the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, July 2002. 75 Private 177 The financial success and accompanying high profile of the Mashantucket Pequots comes at a significant price. This emerging Indian nation has become a lightning rod for a number of volatile issues in the larger Indian community, the political economy of the region, and the United States. Anglo-Americans--and other Indian tribal peoples as well--challenge the legitimacy of the Mashantucket Pequot's self-identification as an American Indian tribal nation in arenas ranging from cultural practices to phenotypical appearance and blood-quantum reckoning. Paradoxically these often-pejorative constructions also provide the Mashantucket Pequot and other Native Americans with the means of asserting claims to sovereignty. These claims make accessible resources not available to other marginalized and subjugated groups in the US. In a larger context, therefore, Mashantucket Pequot attempts at self-definition and autonomy must be understood as often antagonistic--but always related--processes of contestation between local definitions and discourses of self and the dominant narratives of racial essences and cultural stereotypes that pervade the historical encounters between a majority "America" and this America's Indian "other." This must necessarily include the curious role of the Native American in United States history, both as tragically erased opponent and as integral figure in the imagination of an "American" history. Examining the politics and poetics of the casino complex and the MPMRC proves crucial to achieving an understanding of the dynamics of local community formation, as well as the entangled and continually transforming histories of the United States and Indian nations-in-themaking. 178 Photograph 3.6: The waterfall in the atrium by the main entrance. The casino's museum is down the stairs in the foreground. Photo courtesy New England Design. 179 THE MUSEUM IN FOXWOODS RESORT CASINO Photographs 3.7 and 3.8: Photomural showing an image from the wooded reservation, and including an inset photo of Elizabeth George Plouffe. Photos from Foxwoods promotional materials. 180 Photograph 3.9: From the casino's museum. The text panel to the right is against a background featuring Captain John Underhill's portrayal of the attack on the Pequot fortified village in 1637. Photo from Foxwoods promotional materials. To return to the narrative that opens this chapter, one of my initial experiences at Mashantucket began with looking for the small museum in the casino. A recent issue of Esquire magazine had done an extensive piece on Foxwoods, its opening featuring Frank Sinatra, and some of the history of the tribal nation and its enterprises. From the description in the article, I had expected to find a video or film, perhaps using static photos of archival documents, art, and artifacts with a voice-over presenting the history of the Pequots. I found both more and less than that. The small museum in the basement at Foxwoods--which does not appear marked on the large casino map reproduced here (see pages 162 and 163)--offers material support to the Rainmaker narrative upstairs. The basement museum is at the bottom of a flight of stairs that parallels the waterfall at the main entrance. Descending this staircase, one passes wet rocks and moist plantings, ending at a small pool with its own collection of tossed coins and gaming chips. To the left is a gift shop, straight ahead is a smoke-free slots room, to the right is a glass door leading into the glass-fronted museum room. It is off the beaten track. Access to the smoke-free slots room is more often gained from a double staircase leading down from the smoke-free table games area on the first floor. The small exhibition gallery offers a few objects of "traditional" Mashantucket Pequot material culture encased in glass-topped vitrines--primarily 181 contemporary baskets made following old styles, text-panel narratives, a sample section of a wooden palisade, a small bark-covered wigwam, and a rack full of the Pequot Times (the tribal nation's monthly newspaper). Visitors confront a large photograph of past tribal member Elizabeth George Plouffe. Plouffe was Skip Hayward's grandmother; he credits her with the initiation of the reservation repopulation effort in the 1970s. The picture is mounted against a large wall-size photomural of a section of the wooded reservation. A wooden plaque reads: "Hold on to Your Land." The closed room and the waterfall beyond effectively mute the insistent hum of talk and the far off sound of coins in slot jackpot trays. The room is relatively quiet. A pilot project for Design Division, Inc., the basement museum incorporates a number of the themes and ideas central to the later MPMRC (information and brochures now in the exhibition space also offer an introduction to the nearby museum and research center). Key to the casino museum display is an overview of Pequot history. The exhibition culminates with a multi-media display titled "The Massacre at Mystic Fort." To access this display, one steps behind a divider creating a semi-enclosed space in the back of the gallery. From the wall behind the divider comes the cry of "Owanux" and a narrator's voice translating "Englishmen." There is the sound of yelling, a fusillade of shots, the crackling sound of fire. Over it all a narrator's voice describes the massacre at Mystic Fort, the official termination of the Pequots in name and nation by leaders in Hartford, and the beginning of the long road to Mashantucket. The narration goes along with a mix of back lighted transparencies 182 and spotlighted photos and art arranged on a wall in the back of the museum. The sequence of their revelation--they are all dark in the beginning of the presentation, then back lighted or spotlighted in a specific order--is keyed to an audio loop. The entire display is behind a wall that creates an open-ended alcove and separates the viewing area from the rest of the gallery. A long black bench against this wall inside the exhibition offers room for about four people to sit comfortably. The narrative covers the 1637 massacre and its immediate aftermath, from April 1937 to the Treaty of Hartford signed September 21, 1638. The principal narrator remains anonymous. Other voices include those of Captain Underhill, unidentified Pequots shouting the warning of attack, and an unidentified male "authority" intoning text from the Treaty of Hartford. Maps, an engraving of Captain Underhill, a dog, a Pequot fort, the Underhill engraving of the War, and a portrait of John Winthrop (Deputy Governor for the Colony of Massachusetts and the colonial instigator of the War) accompany the segment. The display sequence ends with pictures of a map showing the post-war diaspora of the Pequots and an image of the Treaty of Hartford fading out while the narrator's voice states: "The English conclude their war of genocide and arrogantly declare the Pequots extinct. Nevertheless, the Pequot tribe continues to survive and endure." (See Appendix III for a complete transcript of The Massacre at Mystic Fort.) The total narration lasts no more than three minutes and the exhibition cycles endlessly, providing its own background rumble of noise in the small space. The direction, quality, and 183 subject of the lighting changed throughout the short presentation, the audio's straight narration shot through with small sound effects or shifts in voice. Benjamin suggested that the advent of motion pictures provided the first technology that exposed the subconscious, that the movie camera recorded all in its lens, even those elements that would go unnoticed within an everyday "distracted gaze" (Buck-Morss 1991). In many ways, however, the use of still images, changing lighting, and directed attention in the casino's museum serve to create not a theatre for the capture of the distracted gaze, but one for the manufacture of a distracted gaze blending viewer interaction with the exhibition, the exhibition's technology, setting, strategy, and fellow-viewer community. The small museum narrative continues where the Rainmaker narrative leaves off, moving from an unspecified period suggested in a near-timeless past and a mention of pre-"Ancient Ones" progenitors, to a selection of contemporary and recreated artifacts locating the Pequots in a recountable history. Not only a recountable history, but one framed in opposition to dominant historical narratives of colonial New England. The location of the small museum (inside the casino) includes the suggestion of the endurance of the "Pequot tribe." The "face-to-face" meeting with Elizabeth George Plouffe's portrait--over the legend "Hold on to your Land"--prepares the visitor for an introduction to the more contemporary history of the Mashantucket Pequots, including the return-to-the-reservation movement that ultimately led to the ability to establish a vibrant community and to construct Foxwoods. The narrative structure of the casino's museum also provides an entry point to the larger effort of the tribal nation's museum and 184 research center, while tangibly illustrating the mixing and contaminating experiences of casino and museum, of distraction and the possibility of contemplation. 185 Chapter 4: The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center Photograph 4.1: The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center observation tower. Photo by author. 186 10,000 years ago, a legacy was born. Now that legacy can be yours. [Text used on commuter train station posters and magazine advertisements for the opening of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center.] AT THE SITE As one approaches Foxwoods and the Mashantucket Reservation on Route 2, the slender spire of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center's observation tower reveals itself just over the shoulder of the casino's buildings and nearby woods. The tower marks the museum's site from a distance: the rest of the 308,000 square-foot structure is nestled low, blending into the surrounding forest and swampland. In the words of Polshek and Partners, the architects for the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, the building is "designed to interact with its surrounding environment and maintain the ecological integrity of the area . . . to emphasize and complement the permanent exhibits and their relationship to the landscape."76 Two of its five stories are underground, and the building's construction was carefully carried out to preserve as many of the surrounding trees as possible. The landscape, a post-glacial moraine filled with rocks and boulders, is harsh. Difficult for agriculture and distant from rivers and words of the museum's architectural firm from www.mashantucket.com, "Architectural Facts." Polshek and Partners have extensive experience in projects where interaction with the environment and the building-to-landscape relationship are paramount; their work includes the Santa Fe Opera House, for example. 76 The 187 coastline, Mashantucket is a typical reservation location. Although the reservation's history includes different periods of limited agriculture, the poor remote land is mostly not worth the effort to farm. MASHANTUCKET AS ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE One interesting outcome of the land's quality is that the reservation offers an intact and extensive archaeological record (McBride 1990). The Archaeological District of the reservation was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1992. The Mashantucket Pequots have been involved in the management, protection, and research of their history and culture through historical and archaeological investigation projects since 1985; professional archaeologists, historians, and college students have done the majority of this research. Recent exceptions to this pattern include the first phase of the Fort at Mashantucket Project (previously titled "Monhantic Fort Reconstruction Project"), focusing on producing an inventory from a seventeenth-century Pequot fortified site. Also included is a project on Indiantown, a late-eighteenth century agrarian reservation community influenced by the Brotherton Movement and the teachings of Mohegan minister Samson Occum. "The Fort at Mashantucket"--included as a virtual archaeological site tour in the museum's "Life on the Reservation" gallery--is important as an early example of Mashantucket Pequot appropriation of European technologies. The fort is built in a square European design, including bastions, and was constructed during Metacom's or King Phillip's War (1675­1677). This regional conflict 188 involved the colonies of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, and their Mohegan and Pequot allies, against the Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Nipmuck tribes of southern New England. It is likely that the fort was maintained during this War and several later Native-Colonial conflicts in the region. The Pequots were allied with the colonists in these conflicts, and it appears the fort was constructed to protect the Pequots from attack by hostile native groups. This period in the history of the Pequots at Mashantucket was of critical importance; the tribe was slowly recovering from the devastating losses of the Pequot War, their termination, and their removal and restriction to the reservation at Mashantucket. An important part of this effort was directed at community building and the forming of new alliances with Euro-American and other tribal military forces. The Fort project was designed to involve training tribal members in archaeological and ethnohistorical research methods and as docents for tours of the site. Plans at one time included incorporating a walk-through tour of the site within the overall MPMRC exhibition plan. The late eighteenth-century community Indiantown adapted EuroAmerican technologies--farmhouses and agricultural techniques--for use on the reservation as well. The Indiantown project was also designed to train interested tribal members in archaeological and ethnohistorical research methods, and final plans for the site included paths with signage for public docent-led tours. Other recent archaeological projects have included training tribal members. At the time of my research, two alumni of the projects had gone on to 189 use their acquired knowledge for the tribe. Tribal member Gail Graham77 was the Mashantucket Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, and tribal member Michael Goodwin worked in the tribe's Cultural Resources Office. THE MUSEUM: SITE OF NEGOTIATION, SPACE FOR CONTEMPLATION The constructed ethnicities, constructed identities, and constructed nationalisms that increasingly find themselves critical foci in anthropology and other disciplines depend on a common element--that of representation. Authenticating these multiple facets of identity-making often depends on the relating of a complex narrative augmented by images, objects, or locations that convey or in themselves represent resonant structures of meaning for consumption by an identified or hoped-for public audience. At Mashantucket photographs of neighbors and ancestors, the objects of ritual or heritage, and the land itself stand as evidence of a continued and continuous interaction with a located identity. But these registers do not work by only looking backward, by only positioning objects of the past within narratives of tradition located in the present (Williams 1977). Museums work at a complicated intersection of poetics and communication, meaning and message. The continuity that was suggested in the casino's "Rainmaker" narrative is traced large within the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, with one key difference. The Rainmaker does not include Beringea--the suggested Graham made her first appearance in this dissertation as one of the Indians in the attic of the Connecticut River Museum (see chapter 1). 77 Ms. 190 migratory land bridge from Asia to America--as part of its origin narrative. At the museum, the visitor starts with a brief introduction to the present-day reservation community and its enterprises, then travels back through time to begin again, with the Ice Age providing the thematic tabula rasa. The visitor then travels from the Ice Age to Pequots pre- and post-contact--including those involved in periods of trade, disease, and colonial massacre--and on to reservation life in its many historical stages. This latter part of the journey is made along floor-to-ceiling glass walls that overlook the woods of the reservation, with a re-created eighteenth-century farmstead in the near distance. The visitor finishes in a room with oversize black-and-white photo portraits of current tribal members, filled with a soundwash of overlapping oral histories. (See Appendix V for a complete narrative description of all Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center exhibitions.) The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center is an important site for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation and community. It provides a community source for tribal history and identity affirmation, and holds an extensive archive of historical documents, objects, and photographs. The MPMRC offers an opportunity for job-training and future career possibilities for Mashantucket Pequots. It also provides a fascinating example of museum administration, decision-making processes, and design strategy. The Mashantucket Pequots are wealthy enough to choose and enact any kind of exhibition strategy they wish. Mostly, the people in positions to make those sort of decisions at Mashantucket did not have the specialized experience to make 191 them. What they have is the power and the financial resources necessary to carry out whatever they choose to do. As in most museums, upper-level decisions were influenced by politics and power. Unlike most museums, funding was an influential--but not controlling--element. Finally, the MPMRC is an important resource for building an academic and scholarly profile for the research done and narratives created about the Mashantucket Pequots. For all of these reasons, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center is a key site for examining issues of articulated and displayed cultural identity. Museums are particularly significant as traditional spaces for the exhibition of narratives of the past, and the museum at Mashantucket is located at a dynamic intersection of identity and community building. Both ownership and placement of the museum reflect a connection to an essentialized and naturalized historical presence. Its companion structure--the casino complex--also incorporates historical and cultural displays within a spectacular entertainment space that serves as a powerful economic generator. The connection between the casino complex and the museum and research center is not only one of ownership and economy, but also one that articulates diverse elements from discourses of history, nature, tradition, and community. Using elements from these discourses, the two structures can be read as counter-indicative and counter-supporting industries that generate both material and symbolic capital. One crucial aspect is that the structures exist at all, especially as such state-of-the-art facilities. Both use displayed and intensified narratives of 192 Indianness, a specific Mashantucket Pequot attachment to and placement in the landscape, and configurations of history specific to the projects at the reservation. The financial success and growing development serve as powerful supporting narratives for the entire museum and casino experience. Further, the museum's location on the reservation, both as a point within an Indian nation and as a counter-point to the expanding casino and resort complex, also fits into the projected narrative of identity that must be realized as a part of the museum. Representation necessarily changes the dynamics of the past by re-locating them within a present and ongoing now and a present and ongoing community. 193 Illustration 4.1: Map of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center public spaces. Illustrations from Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center promotional materials. 194 MASHANTUCKET AS EXHIBITION SITE The undertaking of the museum--to tell the history of the Mashantucket Pequots--matches its impressive size. One begins in "The Gathering Space," an immense public space just past the admissions area. Photograph 4.2: Side view of the Gathering Space exterior; the observation tower is in the background. Photo from Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center promotional materials. 195 This massive glass atrium's double semi-circular form design was inspired by John Smith's seventeenth-century etching of the 1637 attack on the Pequot fortified village at Mystic. Illustration 4.2: Captain John Underhill's portrayal of the attack on the Pequot Fort at Mystic, 1637. Photo from Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center promotional materials. The floor of the Gathering Space--a deep blue terrazzo inlaid with bits of sea shell--is meant to recall the Pequots' habitation of Noank on the Long Island Sound, and the Pequots' traditional manufacture and use of wampum.78 Through from the website's document "Melding Landscape and Culture," March 2002. For a more detailed discussion of the importance of wampum to the history of the Pequots and the area fur trade, see "Native Wampum as a Peripheral Resource in the SeventeenthCentury World System," by Ceci, Lynn, in The Pequots in Southern New England: the fall and rise of an American Indian Nation, 48­64. 78 www.mashantucket.com. 196 the glass walls of this atrium, in the near distance, the casino's monumental Grand Pequot Tower can be seen just over the nearby treetops. From the Gathering Space, a long and curving ramp leads to the beginning of the galleries. The walls of the descending ramp are glass, covered with life-size and semi-opaque pictures of local trees. As one descends, the outside view of the reservation is slowly eclipsed as the visitor becomes immersed in the building. "Mashantucket Pequot Nation," the first exhibition, tells the story of the reservation community's rebirth over last 25 years. Photograph 4.3: Entrance to the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation gallery. Photo by author. 197 THE MASHANTUCKET PEQUOT TRIBAL NATION GALLERY The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation gallery displays life-size contemporary artifacts--including tribal nation EMT uniforms, a slot machine from Foxwoods, and a Pequot war club79 (on loan from the National Museum of the American Indian80). The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation gallery is an important interstitial space in the overall MPMRC. This introductory gallery initiates the transition from a contemporary to a historicized place. In part, this is accomplished through the "museumization" of particular artifacts, their inclusion in the representational displays, and their participation in a particular narrative of "museumness." VIGNETTE 1: SYMBOLIC CAPITAL, MUSEUMIZATION, WHITE GLOVES One of the first decisions to be made during preliminary exhibition design for Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation concerned which artifacts to include. Although the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center is not an object-centered museum, the choice of artifacts for exhibition determined the need for specific supplementary text and the design of cases and text panels, as well as the strategy for narrative and traffic flow in the galleries. Pequot artifacts have been preserved and the National Museum of the American Indian's collection does not hold many. Museums in Great Britain and Germany have more substantial collections of Pequot artifacts and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center has been researching the possibility of purchasing or exhibiting items from those institutions. 80 In 1994, the Mashantucket Pequots donated $10 million for the construction of the National Museum of the American Indian. (Their donation was matched by the Mohegan Tribal Nation in 2001, and by the Oneida Indian Nation in 2002.) 79 Few 198 At meetings convened to make these decisions, the museum project's collections manager would wheel in a cart filled with flat archival boxes. In one instance, the boxes were filled with EMT uniforms (emergency medical technicians, along with fire fighters, were one of the first community services created at Mashantucket). The collections manager donned clean white cotton gloves, opened the box in question, and carefully peeled back layers of acid-free archival tissue to expose the uniform beneath, it carefully tagged with an acid-free label filled out in pencil. That the cotton-polyester uniform had very likely been delivered to the museum trailers fresh from the dry cleaners even as recently as the week before made no difference in how it was handled. It had entered the gravitational field of the museum organizational system, making the transition from everyday object to exceptional artifact, and was thus entitled to a different level of care and deference. All of the artifacts from this gallery enjoyed the same handling--pizza boxes, t-shirts, restaurant menus, softball uniforms. This is standard museum practice, the creation of archival storage schemes and detailed record systems, culling objects from everyday (past or present) circulation to incorporate them into a museum project. Once entered into the system, the object in question becomes arrested and its life as a public object changes its emphasis as its use value goes through a radical transformation. It changes currency and, like a photograph or a quotation, is fixed as a representative icon. In part this is a phase in a contextualizing process. The object, in this instance the Mashantucket EMT uniform, is decontextualized or removed from its 199 original role and currency as a functioning uniform. The uniform already signified many things while it was being worn, including sovereignty, safety, and the necessary capital base to support a specialized emergency medical service for the reservation and reservation-based public spaces. The uniform changes its pool of signifiers to those appropriate for a museum setting, significantly a museum that serves as a "national" museum for the Mashantucket Pequots. Abandoning its use as a uniform, the object now gains symbolic capital as a measure of the aforementioned issues, but these measures gain gravitational weight in light of their new orbit. As a representative object presented under glass, the object shifts from the everyday to one saturated with significance. The uniform now stands (and performs) for a particular period of Mashantucket history and, in turn, indicates the existence of the museum itself as a further measure of that history. Here the museum serves not only as a chamber to authenticate the introduction of the EMT uniform as an artifact, but the uniform's presentation counter-authenticates the chamber that presents it. While one of the primary purposes of the museum is to perform and explicate its master narratives, one of the more powerful unspoken narratives is the existence of the theatre itself, the grand building and landscaping that is the MPMRC. Museums serve as time machines as well as performative spaces. As objects enter the museum's signifying field, they are frozen in time while, at the same moment, the museum's overall narrative confirms both the backward glance at history as well as the modernity of its own project, the distancing and 200 explication of history as a foundational narrative. The correspondence between the historicity of the objects and narratives, and the modernity and contemporary technological representative strategies being employed, is not accidental. One of the main roles of museums is to confirm the respective perspective of the visitor and the museum's subject, the viewer and the viewed. Part of the point of a museum involved with creating counter historical narratives, like the MPMRC, is to take advantage of the tension within this space of confirmation, while recognizing that such a window for changing existing "knowledge structures" is small. The museum and exhibitions at Mashantucket serve as counter example to current and ongoing discussions of traditional museums as colonial and colonizing forces. The museum at Mashantucket is one of a growing number of Native museums in the United States created and operated by Native peoples. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center straddles the roles of national, anthropological, and natural history museums as well as striving to be part of the regional community of historic sites organized and run for the lucrative New England tourist market.81 community includes the Mystic Seaport and nearby Mystic Aquarium, the Connecticut River Museum, and even the Plimouth Plantation living history museum in nearby Massachusetts. Connecticut has an active market in promoting itself as part of historic New England and its towns, villages, and cities all feature different historic sites, museums, attractions, and accommodations. 81 This 201 BIG AND SMALL As part of the visitor experience, different dialogues take place at Mashantucket, different inversions of subject position, of inside and outside, of interior and exterior. Transitions in scale, and the accompanying shifts in perspective and role, greatly influence the visitor experience of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. The largest object in Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation is a threedimensional topographic representation of the reservation, complete with significant buildings. The map is in a large case, surrounded by small photographs and panel texts presented as a waist-high border to the plexiglass cube covering the model. Each photo and text corresponds to a particular point on the map. By pressing a button near the text about the Public Safety building, for example, a small building on the map lights up. It is a fairly standard museum trope, the presentation of a miniaturized landscape with an interactive element built in for the visitor. Moving from text to text, the pushing finger navigates the different sites on the cased map, matching explanatory text or photograph to an imagined correspondence in a miniaturized landscape. 202 Photograph 4.4: The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation Gallery. Photo by author. The gallery juxtaposes miniaturized and life-sized artifacts, creating a sense of the grand from the mundane. Against the background of the miniaturized reservation, the uniforms and other artifacts take on a sense of the heroic, of the "larger than life." The scale model in this first gallery exhibition also reverses the relationship between the visitor and the reservation. The confirmation of "lifesize"--emphasized by the arrangement of the exhibitions and the positioning of their information, and the vista of the Great Cedar Swamp through the glass walls of the Gathering Space--return the visitor to a "normal" relationship with the presented world. As Susan Stewart notes: The transcendence presented by the miniature is a spatial transcendence, a transcendence which erases the productive possibilities of understanding 203 through time. Its locus is thereby the nostalgic. The miniature here erases not only labor but also causality and effect. Understanding is sacrificed to being in context. [Stewart, 1993: 60] There is a bridge between the miniature and the museum. Although one might suggest that the collection is a better metaphor or discussion focus for such a topic, the miniature and the collection have distinct ties. The miniature gains its power through its containment--through its twin role as describer and container of its subject. However, while the power relations of museum visitor to miniaturized reservation are metonymic to power or property relations outside of its case (Stewart 1993), these relations are further complicated at Mashantucket. The role of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center visitor--overwhelmingly non-Native or non­Mashantucket Pequot--includes acting as witness to a historical narrative substantially different from the standard New England colonial history trope. The Connecticut River Museum, for example, champions a mostly white, colonial experience in the "New World" as foundational fiction for a historical narrative of Yankee gumption and triumph. The perspective of the narrative "voice" of the MPMRC is telling a story often counter or even antagonistic to this trope. And scale--miniature, life-size, and larger-than-life--plays a critical role in this story telling effort. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center moves the visitor between these subject positions, at once supporting the visitor's distance and control of their museum experience and subtly subverting it. The miniature reservation functions as simulacrum, a construction gesturing toward a "reality" that does not exist and yet, through the gesture, 204 confirming a certain kind of supported existence. The micro example of the miniaturized reservation aside, the museum itself also functions in a reductive capacity, miniaturizing and rendering a complex cultural and historical narrative within the space of a building and its cases. Within a museum, a historical understanding is both privileged and denied through a use of miniatures--the real processes of museum labor are erased through the construction of its narrative, rather than the narrative of the museum's material construction. In other words, the museum emphasizes the (micro) story it wishes to tell, not the (macro) story of its construction. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center is rife with questions of scale and questions of interiority and anteriority. From the observation tower to the miniature Mashantucket under glass, from the life-scale village and farmstead to the life-size and larger-than-life-size photographs in the final gallery--even the visitor's approach to the museum through the Connecticut woodlands, with the Grand Pequot Tower of Foxwoods looming large in the landscape--a complex relationship of scale is established with the visitor as the central, effected point. The MPMRC main narrative also plays with the shape of time, of the miniature and the life size, the reservation exterior seen through the windows of the museum as backdrop or player in the exhibition galleries. The visitor occupies an uncertain place, between shifting time and place, between object and subject positions. This dislocation plays with the time of the museum and research center, between the time of the tribal nation's renaissance and the visitor's afternoon spent in the Connecticut woodlands. 205 Photograph 4.5: The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation Gallery. Photo by author. NAVIGATING THE MASHANTUCKET PEQUOT TRIBAL NATION: POETICS, POLITICS, TIME, AND SPACE The deployment of related objects either in cases or free-standing--tribal police and fire fighters' uniforms, mounted trout from the reservation's stocked lake (part of its water-reclamation efforts), artifacts from the Mashantucket Pequots' drum Mystic River, or a "Dream Catcher" slot machine--extends the tension of display and of the museum itself. Pequot (and Indian) ways of being are subtly recognized and re-presented within a place that not only acknowledges the contemporaneousness of the tribe itself but also draws subtle questions on the processes of display. Isolating an object within a case, and locating that display 206 object within a patterned structure of cases and displays invests that object with a resonance that exceeds its material presence. A museum poetics is located at this junction of meaning and excess. An intensified narrative of history and tradition is expected in a museum like the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. Museums--especially those devoted to history and anthropology--are designed to represent and draw from the past and, through the display of objects and the creation and extension of supporting narratives, to provide connections with the present. The Mashantucket Pequot museum is located at an intersection of nostalgia and poetics--these are both articulated within and exceed a number of formal discourses: space, narratives of history and identity, and material objects. Walter Benjamin identifies objects as meaning-laden materialized indices located at axes of history and myth, of reality (an imagined line drawn from petrified nature to transitory nature) and consciousness (one drawn from dream to waking) (Buck-Morss 1991). Within these objects lies a formula for understanding; the fetish quadrant of a field created by these axes refers to objects and to mythic history. The concept of material history stresses position and retelling as forming states of waking or dreaming. The difference between waking (awareness) and dreaming (subconscious) relies on a recognition of historical flows represented in objects and narratives. Objects can thus be reckoned as crystallizations of historical dynamics. History itself becomes a powerful subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now (Benjamin 1969). 207 Benjamin's analysis is useful in considering museum objects. Presented within cases, or within spaces that call particular attention to the activity of display, museum objects resonate with their own intensified sense of meaning. As these objects are projected further back in time (in what can be understood as a function of any museum that includes history and anthropology in its focus) this resonance increases, echoing larger as the chamber of meaning built around it grows, opening backward to embrace history and the past. This idea of resonance also works for objects more contemporary. The display artifact of a "Dream Catcher" slot machine that accompanies the panel text devoted to Foxwoods in the "Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation" gallery, for example, provides a deeply resonant object for exhibition. At its simplest gloss, the machine is metonymic, standing in place to indicate the Foxwoods Casino Resort. The machine also illustrates that the national industries producing gambling machines are embracing Indian gaming as a lucrative and expanding market in the overall US gambling business. The slot machine as object carries the potential for a number of different readings and realizations, not the least of which is a recognition of some sort of relationship between the casino and the museum. 208 Photograph 4.6: The "Dream Catcher." Photo by author. The museum administration was not always comfortable with this linkage. In museum press releases, interviews, brochures, and panel text the relationship between the two--one as a capital-generating business with a lot of public interest, one a project almost completely funded by that same business--has been either played down or not discussed. In the year before the opening, all efforts were made to either not acknowledge or to ignore the link.82 Since then, some efforts have been made to attract museum visitors from the casino, through the use of brochures made available in various areas inside the casino, or by directing information from the casino's own small exhibition space. But the audience bases desk in the museum project trailers was part of the public relations area. When calls came in from journalists looking to write about the connections between the museum and the casino, the reporters were either discouraged from pursuing the issue or redirected. 82 My 209 for the two enterprises may be too mutually distinct to provide much crossover population. The museum would benefit from increased visitation and membership--not only to increase its impact as a museum, but also to supply an independent base of funds for operation. The projected number of yearly visitors, prior to the 1998 opening, was 500,000. The yearly visitation number for the last two years museum and research center is approximately 275,000 per year.83 Compare this with the casino's daily average of over 40,000 visitors per day--the casino gets more visitors in a week than the museum does in a year.84 The inclusion of a Foxwoods panel and artifact opens the possibility for a connection to be made between the museum and the casino within the interior public viewing space inside the museum. The panel text that accompanies the slot machine reads as follows: Foxwoods: The Gaming Enterprise How does a community provide for itself and its members, and how does it create opportunity for growth? For the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, the advent of reservation-based gaming in the United States supplied a way to provide for the hopes and dreams of its people, and to build a dynamic community at Mashantucket. The Indian Gaming Rights Act (IGRA) was signed on October 17, 1988. It allows the operation of specific gaming enterprises on the reservations of federally recognized Indian tribes, and the Act's passage began a new era in tribal industries. For the Mashantucket Pequots, gaming granted a way to generate significant income, income to be used to build housing, a community center, a child development center, and facilities for police, 83 Private 84 Foxwoods communication with Kevin McBride, the MPMRC Director of Research. office of public relations. 210 fire, and rescue. Gaming proceeds are also used to provide health and education benefits, and for diversifying business. The first gaming structure built on the reservation was the high-stakes bingo hall, in 1986. Its success was nothing short of phenomenal, and the proceeds were used for community development as well as to improve and expand the facility. The casino complex--including gaming rooms, restaurants, and shops--has continued to grow over the years. Currently, Foxwoods is a world-famous destination resort and world-class facility that employs over 12,000 people. [Exhibition panel text] The placement of the "Dream Catcher" acknowledges the link--even if the panel text is devoted to discussing community development and jobs provided over dollars--even though no mention of the MPMRC is made. The slot machine and text also acknowledge the national (and now somewhat normalized) scope of Indian gaming. That the commercial slot machine features a popularized "Indian" motif--a dream catcher--indicates the financial power and large patron base of Indian gaming in the United States. The slot machine serves as a concretized intersection of axes materialized in the details of an object (Benjamin, in Buck-Morss 1991), and provides complicated nuance to the ideas of display and exhibition. The narratives that support the machine's viewing are open; the object enters into an intensified space and there it is, in effect, released. The meaning-making experience that such an object generates is not under the control of its exhibition, its supporting literature, or its environment of display. The object contains the potential for its own rereading, for the generation of its own shock of recognition which actualizes its display and may also carry the potential to shift it outside the confines of its 211 presented discourse. That this particular object, like the EMT uniform, could be found in day-to-day use at Mashantucket, outside of the museum, also contributes to an active intersection of meaning-making as the visitor brings yet another potential set of information for object recognition. Museums are spaces of tension that create narratives displayed through and alongside presented material artifacts. The building of an authoritative museum narrative (either oppositional or dominant), and the recognition of the inherent gaps in any representative project, highlights one possible area for dynamic slippage: an opening of interstitial interpretive spaces between the volume of galleries, the shape of objects, and the telling of stories. In this way, museums are potentially dangerous and open spaces. They are given over to exhibits and curation but, in so doing, they open a traffic in meaning-making that potentially exceeds the limits of constructed exhibition. Museums hold a significant parallel to a discussion of the poetic function of language and image, that function which exceeds the boundaries of form and carries effect and meaning beyond structure or technique. Discourses that the museum at Mashantucket participates in are many, and none of them exclusive: ethnic identity, natural belonging, nationality, cultural continuity, colonial and current histories of Indian and Euro-American relations name but a few. These narratives suggest others, blendings of elements dependent on the readings and actualizations of the museum's texts. A museum such as the Mashantucket Pequots' carries an additional weight due to the historicity of its underlying narratives. It is constructed, in part, to contextualize the Mashantucket Pequots 212 within the history of New England and Connecticut, to naturalize a connection to the land, and to firmly place the Pequots within a national discourse of Indians and Indianness. The historicity of these discourses necessarily draws on a feeling of nostalgia, generated through recreations of the past and presentations of artifacts from the past. Highlighting and displaying such potentially nostalgic objects marks a relationship with the past as both a site for longing and a site for the presentation or performance of such longing. Museums are both generators and theatres of nostalgic desire. Both the museum and the casino utilize a poetics of land: how "the land" is configured in the narratives of the museum--land use, land ownership, land access--is a material figuring of this poetics. This material tie to Mashantucket is both narrativized and supported through the texts of the museum as well as in the ownership and placement of the museum and casino. It is a performance of meaning carried out through formal relationships that find the issue of land as an orbiting center. This center unites both the stories of the museum and those carried on in the practice of everyday life. In one sense, land ownership enters as a particular defensive positioning, an expressive form where relationships and politics are negotiated, enacted, and contested. This parallels reservation land ownership, issues of extra-reservation annexation, and the formation of new corporations--the Mashantucket Pequots are currently extending their economic and land base through property purchases, and the creation of other industries. Within this overarching idea, different enactments are be located--sites for intensified representations and narratives, for 213 poetics speaking through form realized as space: as casino, as museum, as walkthough village and archaeological site. These different nodes are where certain imagined relationships or intersections are located--nodes emphasizing history, ownership (land, structure, artifact, business, identity), tradition, nature, and independence. There exists another parallel process--an imagining of the displays and exhibitions of the museum as actualized intersections where objects and sites can be read through different axes. The buildings become as much intensified sites for teasing out different potential readings, as do the objects within their cases and displays. Roman Jakobson describes poetics, in language, as a production of meaning differentiated from the referential through form and style (Jakobson 1960). It is what is at play in a representational system--performance, intonation, cadence--that creates the nuances of meaning while relying on its formal referential properties. In other words, poetics signals a shift that carries the communicative performance beyond referential signification. Gaston Bachelard takes the idea of poetics a step further, defining poetic language as an "emergence from language," as something that exceeds the language of signification (Bachelard 1969). Following Bachelard, poetics, or what can also be realized as the escape or formation of meaning, depends on exceeding or overspilling referential structure. Like all processes of meaning, the end result is unpredictable and uncontainable. The museum works through a continual offering of narrativized objects and passages through controlled space to present a series of impressions 214 with a focus on the continuity and ingenuity of the Mashantucket Pequots, as an identity and as a people. The Pequot identity is portrayed as powerful and adaptive, continuous in its ability to shift and overcome hardship and challenge. The identity explored through the museum displays is a relational one of process, necessarily located in the tension generated by the structure, not as a map of the structure itself. The poetics of the museum reach through the structure of the museum itself--its galleries, its exhibitions, and its photographs--to generate a different space of meaning, using the narratives and exhibitions to create an experiential force. This is partly structure-dependent and includes an idea of dialogic spheres of representation, where meaning is made in the spaces between speaking voices. Within the museum, one can understand such voices as different forms of representation. The structure of the museum's display strategy cannot be limited to either its collection of objects or the plots of its directed narratives. The museum itself enters into this exchange as an intensifying structure, a space that confers weight of a specific sort to the dialogues and representations that carry on under its roof. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center recognizes and activates some of this exchange and tension in the design of some of the panel text accompanying the different exhibitions. The overall exhibition scheme employs a "how-do-we-know-this" thread of inquiry made plain in a number of panels, allowing for a critical engagement with elements of the museum. This kind of panel text provides examples of archaeological and historical research, the use of Mashantucket Pequot and parallel ethnographic 215 data, and how some of the objects created for display were created from narrative descriptions found in primary texts. Through a juxtaposition of the design of the galleries and the design of the exhibits, the museum opens more relational perspectives than it closes. This disjuncture, this leaving open of connective narrative allows the museum to assemble a dynamic display, overlapping elements of voice and image and actively playing with ideas of historical significance. By picturing current tribal business and community enterprises, the opening gallery offers a glimpse into the workings of the Mashantucket Reservation. The glimpse expands the visitor's first notice of the Grand Pequot Tower or MPMRC observation tower from the road as monumental, the de-centering of a static or traditional image of an Indian tribal member, and transitions the depiction of such a member from an imagined past into a contemporary moment. 216 Photograph 4.7: Escalator into the glacial crevasse. Photo by author. ICE, ESCALATORS, AND TIME To return to the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation gallery, one of the more disjunctive uses of scale and visitor perspective can be found at its end. An escalator leads downward from the gallery to the beginning gallery of level 1, "A World of Ice," devoted to a historical overview of the Ice Age. The escalator descends through a simulated glacial crevasse, complete with dripping (melting) water, the sounds of ice creaking, and an accompanying drop in ambient temperature. 217 Photograph 4.8: The bottom of the glacial escalator. Photo by author. Turning from the end of the glacial escalator and into the gallery, one is confronted by a large globe, approximately 5 feet in diameter, enclosed by a circular railing. Mapped on this globe are the continents, overlain with masses of glacial ice. The globe is held inside a circular depression in the floor so that the visitor's eye level is equal to North America. Here the world is made small, offered for the visitor's grasp and comprehension. The miniaturization of the Earth grants a particular perspective to the visitor while, at the same time, it cements a particular narrative of the passage of time and history,85 while naturalizing a connection to the land through glacial histories and agrarian communities. 85 This use of the globe also provides a striking contrast to its use in Foxwoods's Paragon restaurant: see Photograph 3.4. 218 Photograph 4.9: Globe from "A World of Ice." Photo from Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center promotional materials. The gallery walls have large photographs of contemporary glaciers and different examples of post-glacial terrain, most of which are labeled as being taken at the reservation. Keeping the globe on one's left allows the visitor to find the doorway into the next gallery. Against the wall that has the passageway is a display showing the relative thickness of the glacial ice in Connecticut during the Ice Age. A large, thick slab of "ice," its rough edges to the gallery, offers an example; tucked into the base of the "glacier," to provide scale, is a miniature Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. The descent into the glacial crevasse marks a dramatic break from the referential qualities of the first room, a break from the contemporary into the past. Time is accentuated and removed, embraced and defied. The passage of time is 219 heightened by this shift backward into an active past. At the same moment, time is eliminated. What lies outside the museum is erased through a fantastic descent, ready to be re-presented and recontextualized within intersecting displays and models. Playing with effects of time and space, narratives of connectedness to the land and to the processes of history, both natural and social, the museum becomes a resonant and intensified space of experience. The glacier gallery's entrance breaks the imagined continuity of a present tense. This thread develops through the museum, as an overall plot placing the Pequots and their ancestors firmly "here," in the space (Mashantucket) that the museum self-consciously occupies. Once so placed, the successive displays and narratives center on the processes of contact, conflict, subjugation, and final occupation. The basis for the history has been subtly shifted through the World of Ice. By beginning history with the end of the Ice Age, European colonists and later Euro-Americans are firmly placed outside of the narrative of continuity, to be introduced further on. The glacier room also works by appropriating the dominant anthropological narrative of the Paleolithic Era and incorporating it into the foundational history of the Pequots. 220 Photograph 4.10: The Arrival of the People gallery. Photo by author. This gallery is followed, however, by "The Arrival of the People," a gallery filled with a selection of commissioned Native art illustrating different creation stories. The original exhibition plan called for the visitor traffic pattern to lead one from the escalator through the Ice Age, and then over a bridge to a glasswalled gallery devoted to creation stories. A bridge from this gallery would then connect to the rest of the museum. The bridges were to span the "run off" from the glacier and the traffic pattern would ensure that museum visitors experienced multiple interpretations of the beginnings of Native populations and culture. In the final rendition of the gallery, however, the walls of The Arrival of the People gallery are not transparent, and the bridges have been replaced by open metal grids mounted flush with the floor, under which the glacial run-off flows. The transition between creation interpretations is made much less dramatic, much less 221 dependent on a sense of equal or parallel traversing. The World of Ice interpretation is given a privileged position in the museum, with the escalator provided as a mimetic device for an immersion in a "scientific" past. The Arrival of the People, however, successfully appropriates the narrative forms of an art museum--by displaying commissioned art--and those of an ethnohistorical museum--by placing these objects and their alternative histories in a gallery following one devoted to the Ice Age. The narratives of the gallery offer different ways of reckoning the past, ways of knowing that are outside traditional western epistemologies, yet "more sophisticated than mere wishful thinking" (Nash 2001: 2). Arrival of the People closes with an option to enter a mini-theatre showing video recordings of Native storytellers relating some of the different creation stories represented in the exhibition, adding an element of located voice and speaker to these different reckonings. By shifting the referents of time--first establishing a picture of life on the reservation as a contemporary display of the here-and-now, then shifting reference through the entrance into the glacier's core--the museum design juxtaposes the fantastic with the documentary, the actual site of the museum with the historical site of colonial and native history, and different origin stories for the pre-contact population of North America. By maintaining a tension between these forms of narration, between the fantastic and the materially grounded, the displays and the narratives of the museum play with the existence of that dividing line. By opening the building outward, to include the reservation surround, the master narrative of the museum extends an inclusion to the exterior. The use of the 222 outside opens the question of inclusion itself, indicating the reservation with its casino complex and community services. This, in turn, is re-indicated by the opening and closing galleries of the museum, through their photographs of a contemporary community. Through such devices, the museum maintains a dynamic space between presented exhibitions and the surrounding reservation. Thus, a formal consideration of the museum and its projects cannot be limited to the objects and display within the building itself, nor to the surrounding landscape and nearby archaeological digs. The objects and display overlap, allowing for cracks and fissures in the experience of the museum, by referring back to both its production of meaning and to its location at Mashantucket. The museum itself must be considered as a formal device or construction, an asserting ground of history and identity that works its narratives through the form of a museum. The financial power and growing development at Mashantucket also serve as potent supporting narratives for the entire museum and casino experience. The museum's location on the reservation also fits into the projected narrative of identity that is a foundational element of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center.. Within a structure of meaning, the structure both holds the arranged objects and imparts the significance of their collected message. Such an arrangement depends on wells of intertextual understanding: experience, memories, and informed perspectives. The communicative act cannot be contained within the form of its communication, just as the museum's import cannot be contained within its structure. The museum figures into the landscape 223 of the reservation. It finds a place there, within a structure of industry and community, straddling a space between information presented as educational resource and information presented as spectacle. The museum and research center is but one permeable container of allegory for narratives of history, identity, and location that run through all the structures of the reservation. Each structural node can be realized as its own storytelling and meaning-conveying enterprise. The museum carries a different weight due to the traditionally perceived role of museums themselves: not only as containers for poetic and allegorical exhibition(s), but also as poetic generators. It is not just the collection of objects within the box, but the shape and the weight of the container itself. The museum is a space of performance, a theatre, a signifier that transforms what it presents. While one can imagine the poetics of a museum, how it presents and transforms the objects of its exhibition, one can also think of the museum itself as a poetics, as a narrative shift, as an intensifying tactical space, a structure of meaning with its own potential for excess and escape. The politics of such a structure are clear and are exercised not only through the shifts and decentering strategies of its display spaces and narratives, but also through the ownership of the means of display, of the intensified narrative production itself. The poetics of the museum can be imagined as the way "things" transform within the museum, with an emphasis on dialogic, open-ended displays. Poetics is an anticipated outcome of performative strategy, an exercise of technique and skill, self-consciously rendered, which leaves an open-ended structure for the 224 experience and meaning-making of the viewer. The dialogues of the museum--text, artifact, exhibition design, architecture, and location--can be imagined as a collection of monologues, directed outward, looking to engage a listener, a participant. But such participation takes place within a particular space. In imagining the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center as a form, the museum becomes a resonant space of allegorical meaning. In imagining the museum as a poetics, it becomes the intensifying chamber that necessarily transforms its subjects through the act of presentation itself, an echo-chamber of representations heightened by clear thematic distinctions between display and observance, between the subject of the visitor and the object of visitation. To imagine the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center as a politics includes both the ownership and the shape of its representative spaces, objects, and discourses within an overall appreciation of the structure and its import. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, as a touristic destination, plays an important role as part of an ongoing "production of heritage" project (Kirshenblatt-Gimblet 1998), with the reservation as its focal point. The production of heritage parallels the invention of tradition paradigm (Hobsbawm 1983), and earlier thinking on the role of tradition as a dynamic force configured in the present for use in the present (Williams 1977). Heritage is a located industry, not so much a conceptual shift as a commodity partaking in a particular sphere of touristical commerce, with the emphasis placed on location and experience. 225 The challenges facing the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center are multiple and intermingled. At once it is the national museum for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation and a destination node in the same network as Foxwoods and other destination sites in Connecticut. As the Mashantucket Pequots' museum, the MPMRC plays a critical role in actively imagining the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. As such, it "must define its location, a responsibility that has repercussions beyond the journey within its walls" (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 139). This is especially true as the museum becomes more and more an element of touristic destination, akin to Foxwoods as destination resort, where the visitor experience crosses over and back between the surround of the museum and the museum's displays themselves. Of course, this sort of building to building-to-surround relationship is not unique to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao shares these distinctions and crossovers, for example. The tourist experience of the museum begins as an aesthetic visiting of the building's outer titanium skin, its appearance in the city of Bilbao itself, and the subtext of it at once being a part of the international satellite gallery plan of the Guggenheim and as a national museum of the Basque people. Not of Basque nationality, but of the power of the Basque people to create an enduring site that resonates with the deeply Basque identity of the city and yet displays a situationality that is denied to the Basques themselves, a people without a discrete, geo-politically marked homeland. 226 THE MPMRC AND THE "DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR" Imagining the museum is not only a theoretical exercise. The pragmatics of display have their own influences on representational practice. Working in the trailer offices of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center project, I overheard a conversation between two staff members concerning the museum's future Pequot Village exhibition and issues of maintenance. One was describing a conversation he'd had that morning with a colleague at another museum that had used small-scale open dioramas as part of their exhibitions in the 1970s. That museum had finally gone to completely sealed dioramas because the maintenance made necessary by the open dioramas was impossible. They had had crews working in the evenings to try and keep up. Cleaning wasn't really an option; the horizontal surfaces were the only ones that could be vacuumed, and the crews used low-pressure air hoses to blow the dust around instead. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center staff members were discussing maintenance in terms of the approved budget for the upcoming fiscal year. Apparently, specialized exhibit maintenance costs had been written out of the most recent council-approved MPMRC operating budget.86 It had been suggested that the Foxwoods custodial services, whose cleaning carts are emblazoned "Department of the Interior," would be in charge of keeping the museum and the walk-through village clean. (Here the staff members exchanged MPMRC often had a difficult time getting its proposed budget approved in a timely manner at the tribal council level. This was due, in part, to the ever-expanding costs of the museum and research center. It was not unusual for the budget approval to be held up even three months after the end of the fiscal year. 86 The 227 horrified ideas concerning the use of spray bottles of cleaning fluids and buckets with mops, not to mention the "souvenirs" that might walk out of the building. The above conversation followed another discussing different methods for making the Village wigwams pest-free. At the time, the wigwams were sitting in a field next to the trailers' parking lot. They had been constructed over the course of the summer and were out to "weather" before the onset of winter. The staff members discussed the comparative merits of either fumigation and isolation, or disassembly, freezing, and re-assembly. Museums in general, and anthropology and natural history museums in particular, navigate a sometimes contradictory path concerning the inclusion of the "real" in exhibitions. Here, the Pequot Village will include real bark and cedar wigwams and real bits of material culture, either ancient or recently made. But control must be maintained to make the exhibition impervious to other "real" processes of contamination--infestation, the degradation of the exhibitions through foot traffic, and the imagined pilferings of a cleaning crew. The "contradictory path" moves between creating the suspension of disbelief necessary for the experience of "the visitor" (that blanket description of a future museum patron) and controlling the elements of the display for a variety of reasons (longevity of the materials and the experience that the materials support). Indicated within this brief description are the threats of nature (insects), culture (the practice of employee pilfering), and nature and culture combined (the wear and tear of the visitor's visits). 228 History museums traditionally raise many of the issues raised here, but they are especially intensified around the use of dioramas, a once time-honored strategy for representing the "other" and the strange. Historically, maintenance and security dictated that such museum dioramas be sealed--usually behind glass--and scaled small. Dioramas, sealed or not, have often proved rich fodder for anthropologists who recognize them as a highly problematic and objectifying representational strategy. Dioramas create mute and suspended tableaus within which the "other" stands (or sits, or skins an animal, or makes a fire) as emblematic for an entire people. Photograph 4.11: Scene from the Pequot Village. Photo by author. 229 THE ARRIVAL OF "THE PEOPLE" The Pequot Village is one of the exhibition highlights at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. It is located almost halfway in the overall narrative, after a set of four seasonal dioramas depicting different Pequot activities, and before a display concerning the wide-scale death of Natives by diseases introduced with the arrival of the Europeans. In truth, the approach to the Pequot Village begins at the end of the glacial crevasse escalator. It is a long journey, pulling the visitor along a chain of changing time and circumstances, from the "World of Ice," past the "Arrival of the People." The next gallery, "Life in a Cold Climate," features a circular caribou hunt diorama and first introduces the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center's full-scale human figures, here dressed in furs and depicted as busy in different tasks of the hunt. Photograph 4.12: From the caribou hunt diorama. Photo from Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center promotional materials. 230 Photograph 4.13: Caribou hunter. Photo by author. The life-size figures become more prominent in the galleries and soon become the focal points of almost every vitrine or open stand-alone display. Studio EIS, a New York-based company, is responsible for the highly detailed "lifecast" figures. One hundred eleven figures were created for the MPMRC by casting tribal members and "other Native Americans throughout the US" in a remarkably life-like material.87 The final results were often compound, mixing faces and body parts for a single figure. While the lifecast figures in the gallery depicting Pequot lifeways prior to 1637 were made from other Native Americans, and support a particular popular sense of "Indian" phenotype, those in the later period were made using tribal members (Nash 2001: 4). The lifecasting process also allowed different members of the museum staff to make sly appearances in the displays. The face of the museum's director of research is used for the figure from the document, "Details about the Permanent Exhibitions" can be found at www.mashantucket.com. 87 Information 231 of the European trader in the "Arrival of the Europeans" gallery at the end of the Pequot Village, for example. Photograph 4.14: A group of lifecast figures being finished for the MPMRC. Photo from Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center promotional materials. This slow unfolding of time in the galleries and the growing presence of the full-scale figures, settles them into the business of the museum's overall narrative. The figures from "Life in a Cold Climate" introduce the visitor to the magnitude of the exhibition's overall project. 232 Photograph 4.15: Lifecasts from the four seasons dioramas. Photo by author. The touch-screen interactive stations that circle the diorama introduce the depth of technological expertise and commitment. From the caribou hunt, the visitor walks past a long glass case broken into the four seasons and peopled with figures at work or play, and the solitary figure of a woman tending a patch of cornfield. 233 Photograph 4.16: Visitor at one of the computer interactive stations. Photo by author. VIGNETTE 2: LIFE IN THE PEQUOT VILLAGE Arrival at the entrance to the Pequot Village comes as a shift in tone and light. The entry vestibule is finished in dark wood, and a docent's counter sits in front of racks of "Acoustaguide" devices (an aural device that looks like a cross between a remote control and a portable telephone). If the visitor accepts the docent's offer of an electronic guide, he or she uses the instrument's neck strap, listens to instructions on its use, then turns and enters the village exhibition. The room is cavernous. Looking up, the high ceiling and supporting cross beams almost disappear under flat black paint. Light is cast in small pools on different areas of the village exhibition. A small ("real") river runs through it, finishing in an estuary, and the footpath bridges over the water a few times. A 234 broadly lit cornfield runs up one side of the gallery near the entrance, and a variety of domestic structures are presented along the multiple walkways. Many of the bark-covered houses and other structures have holes cut into their sides, revealing their interiors, crammed with material detail, made plain for viewing. Photograph 4.17: Figures harvesting in the cornfield. Photo by author. At different points, the meandering paths are marked with numbers. The numbers correspond to the keypad on the audio guide. The visitor, staking a place near or on a walkway number, keys that number into the device and a recorded voice unloops a story about what the visitor sees (for example, a family cooking and eating). Prompts imbedded in the narrative lead one into a deeper and deeper accretion of data. "Wish to learn more about the woman's necklace? The tool the man is using to make fire? The bow and arrows hanging from the wigwam 235 frame?" Following these prompts leads the visitor into deeper levels of subnarratives and contextualizations, assuring that each visitor's experience has the potential to be a completely unique navigation of what the gallery offers. Photograph 4.18: Scene from the Pequot Village. Photo by author. The village is peopled by lifecast Indians forever frozen in mid-gesture, and visitors wandering the pathways with handsets pressed to their ears in a posture that has grown far too familiar--the posture of the mobile telephone user. Here though it is almost silent, the shuffle of feet, perhaps some murmuring back and forth as people point out items of interest to their partners, their children, their fellow visitors. In part, the village offers an opportunity to "play Indian," to inhabit the village from the same perspective as a village "dweller." Also, the kind of looking that is called upon while in the village, a shifting attention that 236 depends upon changes in points of view, is "a key characteristic of display environments in general, namely, that they are simultaneously objects of looking and apparatuses of looking" (Dorst 1999:132). The village is open to being looked at in the same moment it shapes and directs your experience of looking. As a contained environment, the village is also host to a complex machine creating ambient sound. A number of motion sensors in the gallery monitor pedestrian progress and direction. Sounds generated for the visitor's journey depend on data collected from these sensors as well as other factors--the number of visitors in the gallery and the attendant background noise, proximity to other noise-producing mechanisms such as the waterfall, or the recorded sounds of different industries in the village. Photograph: 4.19: Cut-away wigwam with visitor. Photo by author. 237 Background recordings include birdsong and the occasional murmur of Native language (Passamaquoddy, since the Pequot language is no longer known) and help to establish the overall aural texture of the village. These noises, in part influenced by each visitor's navigation through the village, subtly individualize every visitor experience by producing an essentially unique set or progression of sounds for each walk-through event. As one of the sound designers for the Pequot Village puts it, the museum visitors were imagined as "musicians who played their own music as they moved through the exhibit" (Quin 1999:95). 238 Photograph 4.20: Figures working on the palisade. Photo by author. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett investigates the working intersection of tourism and museums in the construction of "heritage," and the idea of a destination as a site for experiential learning or exposure. Key to this learning is the idea of thematization, the "perfection of [a] restoration as a remedy for the 239 imperfections of history" (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 8). The Pequot Village thematizes a pre-contact living environment, presenting a walk-through experience of seamless history. The visitor's distance is maintained through the use of the audio-guides. The strange disjuncture of fellow visitors navigating through the frozen tableau is partially homogenized through the shared practice of using the guides. Each visitor becomes an assertive consumer of knowledge and the tableaus are ingested as gateways to understanding and knowledge collection rather than as solely transitional spaces. The walk-through dioramas also effectively (and self-consciously) authenticate the museum as a museum, by incorporating anticipated or traditional museum display technologies. "Exhibitions are fundamentally theatrical, for they are how museums perform the knowledge they create" (ibid: 138). For this performance, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett outlines, there are two fundamental museum display strategies: in-situ displays (re-creations of settings) and in-context displays (displays arranged to meet other conceptual frames of reference). In-situ displays are immersive and environmental, in context displays depend on the drama of the artifact. At the MPMRC, these two strategies combine throughout the building and its exhibitions, pulling the visitor through immersive sites like the village or indicating the reservation itself, through its windows, as a kind of ultimate dramatic artifact. In performing the knowledge that it creates, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center works at an intersection of popular conceptions of Indianness and museum practice. In part, the museum depends on existing 240 discourses of Indians and exhibitry to provide points of contact, recognition, and interaction for its visitors. These discourses parallel other experiences outside of the reservation, including exposure to films, television, popular fiction, theater, and other museums. The overall exhibit design works within an "interocular field" (Breckenridge and Appadurai 1992) that is both created within the space of the galleries--moving focus from images to figures, interior to exterior--and in the larger space that embraces visitors' references outside of the museum--by presenting modern correlatives to ancient tools, for example. The negotiated nature of viewers' experiences in the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center resonates profoundly with Bakhtinian notions of the dialogic nature of consciousness and the idea that "reading" museum displays and objects is a profoundly intertextual and dialogic enterprise (Bakhtin 1981, 1984; Briggs and Bauman 1992). The experience of audience members in a museum setting is contaminated by their immediate surroundings--the density of displays and information--as well as by their experiences in the world outside. Museums are social spaces for individuals with differing cultural and personal experiences, places where ideology mixes with matter and with sensory experience, not detached venues for quiet contemplation and cogitation. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center occupies such a space, not only in terms of its own density of displays, but also in terms of its location at Mashantucket. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center embodies an evocative nexus between social interaction and negotiation, and quiet 241 contemplation, between resonance and wonder (Greenblatt 1992). Resonance describes the ability of a museum object or narrative to extend beyond itself, into other displays in the museum and beyond, into the world outside. Wonder is akin to Benjamin's concept of contemplation (Benjamin 1969) coupled with an arrest, a shock of recognition or awe that stops one in one's tracks.88 In Greenblatt's formulation, "resonance" gains meaning as a function or definition of an object in context. In other words, resonance parallels contextualization, where the shape of the echo is contained within its building. Contextualization is also a form of interpretation or positioning, one able to provide answers to questions of provenance, positioned narratives and histories, and the re-appropriation of objects or cultural lifeways (performance). Contextualization, however, like provenance or descriptive panel text, can also be a practice without a clear finishing point. It is but one part of the process, one methodology among others, and it is precisely this being amongst others that gives it much of its force. Greenblatt's use of resonance speaks to the surrounding museum, while also indicating the need to place that structure itself within multiple and interrelated structures. This expansion is an integral part of a dialogic framework keeping these interrelating tensions open and productive. While Greenblatt's Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991); see also Appadurai, Arjun, ed., The Social Life of Things: commodities in cultural perspective, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: reflections on photography, (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981); and Kopytoff, Igor, "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process," in The Social Life of Things: commodities in cultural perspective, Arjun Appadurai, ed., (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 88 See 242 "resonance" may seem to advocate a kind of "thick," Geertzian contextualization, it carries the potential for a further or extended understanding, dislocating the endpoint to a series of extending, echoing shocks. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center strategically plays with the form of a museum as it signifies on other museums and on itself, as a means of enhancing or creating a message (Gates 1992). Understood thus, the museum is a signifying space whose project extends imagined, interconnected registers that play with the museum's formal constraints in a different kind of resonance. Elements of the displays, designs, and narratives continually fold back on themselves, creating multiple unfixed opportunities and gaps for engaging with the density of the exhibitions (Stewart 1996; Taussig 1993; Tsing 1993).89 A dialogic engagement with the museum avoids presenting a closed or seamless narrative. Much of the exhibition design at the MPMRC relies on nods of recognition shared with amusement parks, museums of art and natural history, dioramas, and mimetic architectural forms. Over the last decade the practice of museums--collection, interpretation, and exhibition--like that of anthropology, has increasingly been put under a critical lens and analyzed for its implications within a colonial project. Alternative museums, Native museums among them, have also been the subject of much attention (see Weschler 1995; Ames 1992; Clifford 1991; Houlihan 1991; and Stocking 1985, among others). 89 Also see the films of Jean Rouch. 243 Johannes Fabian poses the question: "What would happen to the West if its temporal fortress were suddenly invaded by the Time of its Other?" (Fabian 1983: 35). At the heart of this question lies a consideration of the museum as either a representative and formal space that owes its organization and conception to a Western sense of time and things made significant, or as a fluid and adaptive form able to reflect different configurations of time and narrative.90 James Clifford has considered this topic extensively, not only in "Four Northwest Coast Museums: Travel Reflection" (1990), but also in earlier work, including "Of Other Peoples: Beyond the `Salvage' Paradigm" (1987). In the latter article, Clifford draws from Ralph Coe (1986) to explore the differences and definitions between traditional and contemporary, Indian and non-Indian art. Clifford suggests that Native museums depend on a "concrete, nonlinear sense of history--forms of memory and invention, re-collection and emergence, that offer a different temporality for art- and culture-collecting" (Clifford 1987: 126). Here is a reassertion of the old within the new and its reversal, an upsetting of a linear time with a transposition of another reckoning, another way of authenticating, of figuring and calculating the way that time passes or is celebrated, used, and regarded. In this way, "[a]uthenticity is reconceived as hybrid, creative activity in a local present-becoming-future" (ibid.). This sense of authenticity ties intimately to control, ownership, and display of objects. Chaat Smith, Paul, "Every Picture Tells a Story," in Partial Recall: Photographs of Native North Americans, L. Lippard, ed., (New York: New Press, 1992). 90 See 244 Approaching any museum as a site for analysis requires a critical stance that takes into account the shape such reconfigurations take, and what they support or maintain, confound or unfix (Appadurai 1986). At the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, appropriated technologies and knowledges--including museum design and curatorship, anthropology and archaeology--are a critical part of this reconfiguring strategy. The reconfiguration of an imagined pre-contact Pequot village as a walk-through museum exhibition, complete with recorded birdsong and hand-held audio guides is a riveting example of how these technologies and knowledges are put to work in creating an immersive and engaging site for public consumption. This kind of reconfiguration depends on the strategic deployment of significant objects, a deployment that depends on nostalgia and desire (Stewart 1993) as powerful motivating factors for interacting with, and making sense of, such saturated representations. The exhibition design at the MPMRC provides a striking example of how nostalgia and desire are depended on in an imagined visitor's urge for participation or experience. "As experience is increasingly mediated and abstracted, the lived relation of the body to the phenomenological world is replaced by a nostalgic myth of contact and presence" (Stewart 1993: 132). Here the imagined "pre-contact" state of the Pequot village serves as a point of immersive contact for the visitor and, although it is mediated by audio guides and signposts, the village pathways map the liminal space between contact and imagination, between the ideological and the experiential. Nostalgia, as an active and seductive force or feeling, attempts to bridge that space. 245 There are places where such a bridge is frustrated, where no amount of nostalgic desire can link the ideological and the experiential, the hoped for and the possible. Adjacent to the Pequot Village is the "Pequot Society" gallery. The gallery's project is the exploration of (past) Pequot daily social and political life. In addition to exhibited ethnographic materials from the museum's collection, the gallery features a number of videos of "Native artisans creating many of the objects on view in the village, such as the dugout canoe, wigwams, clothing and food" ("Facts about the Permanent Exhibits," www.mashantucket.com, June 12, 2001). At one end of the gallery is computer station featuring an interactive program on Algonquian languages, including Micmac, Passamaquoddy, and Ojibwe. A video of a storyteller is combined with text from the story being told. Selecting words from the text printed on the screen will allow the visitor to hear pronunciation and see the word or word phrase defined in English. The original plan for the station included Pequot as one of the languages. On the museum's opening day, I visited the gallery as part of the overall tour. As I sat at the station, I read the screen menu on the languages available for an interactive story. The bottom button, in that partially ghosted on-screen representation that signifies either "closed" or "in progress," was a selection for Pequot with the notation "coming soon." Unfortunately, the Pequot language is no longer spoken and there is no written record. The current language menu offerings do not include Pequot as a future possibility. The original hopeful inclusion of Pequot as one of the languages for the gallery illustrates an uncomfortable moment where nostalgia, desire, and 246 exhibition practice collide, and contains the assertion that the language somehow exists but has not been found, rediscovered, or remembered yet. I recall reading conflicting reports about the Pequot language and how it might be used in the tribe's Child Development Center. At first, the center was going to use a Pequot speaker as part of its curriculum. This was later modified to state that a Pequot vocabulary was going to be used as a learning device. Finally, it was suggested that the center would teach a related Algonquian language, with the recognition that the Pequot language was irretrievably gone. The story about the center depended on who you spoke with and when. Nostalgia as a practice is also put to work in creating or bolstering narratives of tradition, authenticity, and cultural heritage, narratives that are also linked to significant objects (Battaglia 1995). The multiple projects at Mashantucket use and foster nostalgic practice through different exhibits and narratives. Nostalgia, however, is not a dis-located or sourceless force--the experience of nostalgia depends on where one stands (Stewart 1988). In other words, nostalgia is a positioned and positioning strategy, a way to consider the powerful feelings invoked by objects and narratives and their pasts, but not as an encapsulating answer for how they work--a way to understand process not closure. My understanding of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center draws on theories of poetics, dialogism, and literature on the potentiality of objects (Benjamin 1969; Buck-Morss 1989). It finds a critical anchor in close readings of exhibitions in the MPMRC and the overall strategy of the museum 247 and research center as a structure sited on and involved in the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation. Objects can be understood as crystallizations of history and historical processes, carrying their own potential to generate a feeling of wonder, an awe, or a "shock of recognition" that stops one in one's tracks. Here the contemplative is coupled with or interrupted by an arrest and connection. Or what Roland Barthes, in discussing the power of photographs, refers to as a wound or a puncture, the effect of a piercing and arresting image (Barthes 1981). The context of the interaction with the object--both its localized setting and the narratives of use, ownership, and placement that intersect through it--is also critically important. The location of the MPMRC and its active blending of indoors and outdoors reinforces a sense of the "local" through strategic design and placement. In "Four Northwest Coast Museums: Travel Reflections," Clifford's explores the role of the local in four museums in Canada displaying Indian art and artifact: the University of British Columbia Museum, the Royal British Columbia Museum, the Kwagiulth U'mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay, and the Kwagiulth Museum at Cape Mudge. (Clifford 1991). According to Clifford, the first two exhibit an "aspiration to majority status and aiming at a cosmopolitan audience." The last two are better understood as "tribal institutions, aiming at local audiences and enmeshed in local meanings, histories, and traditions." The MPMRC attempts to bridge these two positions--the local and the majority or cosmopolitan--in the scope of its displays, the size of its facility, and the abundance of its resources. As Clifford also notes, however, "the local" and "the majority" are terms that may give a false sense of cohesion or uniformity to a 248 deeply contested category. Any consideration of the local at Mashantucket must also include those neighbors who primarily see themselves as New Englanders and who see Mashantucket Pequot claims to a legitimate cultural identity as highly suspect. The "majority" in this case must also reflect a consideration of pan-Indian reckoning, and of the curious role of the Native American in United States history, both as a tragically-erased opponent and as an integral figure in the imagination of an "American" history (or an incorporation of the "other" as both mythic ancestor and sign of degradation; see Herzfeld 1987, and Strong and Van Winkle 1996). Not exactly a national museum in Clifford's terms, nor precisely a local one, the MPMRC attempts to straddle an imagined gap between the two. The enormity of its enterprise pushes it beyond the idea of a local museum, while its location away from metropolitan and government centers may limit its realization as a (US) national museum. LIFE ON THE RESERVATION The distance maintained between the visitor and the lifecast figures in the walk-through Pequot Village exhibition is beguiling. Brochures for the museum talk about "experiencing" a sixteenth-century Pequot village, but the visitor experiences this village much as he or she experiences the reservation that surrounds the museum, at one remove. While the reservation inhabitants are animate, they are invisible; while the village "dwellers" are visible, they are inanimate. There is a sense of disjunctive schism, of overlapping intersections of different contemporaneous time periods between the "now" of the village and the 249 other museum exhibitions, the population of museum-goers, and the surrounding reservation. Indeed, the surrounding reservation may be understood as an exclusive gated community, beautiful and wooded but supplied with security checkpoint kiosks and located conveniently near the community's main source of employment and income. Exiting the Pequot Village, the visitor walks past galleries devoted to the "Arrival of the Europeans" and "Death by Disease," and two 110-seat theaters offering a 30-minute film titled "The Witness." The film dramatizes the events surrounding the Pequot War and the near annihilation of the Pequot people. The journey continues down a curving hallway, up a flight of stairs, and into a long exhibition hall. Titled "Life on the Reservation," this exhibition gallery tells a history of the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation, and is peopled with more lifecast figures. 250 Photograph 4.21: Pequot Austin George--Union soldier in the Civil War. Photo by author. Photograph 4.22: Pequot Peter George--whaler rendering blubber. Photo by author. 251 This exhibit hall has one long and curving wall of glass that looks out onto the reservation's woodlands and Great Cedar Swamp. "Life on the Reservation" focuses on Pequot history from the beginning of the Mashantucket Reservation to the present day, and spans over 300 years. In front of the glass wall, the gallery is organized in a series of vignettes featuring one or more lifecast figures. The gallery's first figure is one of Robin Cassacinamon, the seventeenth-century Pequot sachem that first lead the Pequots at Mashantucket. Other figures include William Apes, a Pequot Christian minister; Hannah Ocuish, an indentured child; Austin George, a Union soldier from the Civil War; and Peter George, a whaler. There is a freestanding meetinghouse playing a recording of eighteenthcentury Mohegan preacher Samson Occum91 delivering a sermon, and an eighteenth-century farmstead. Unlike the Yankees in the Foxwoods concourse, these figures are used as a collection of biographical vignettes, telling a different and particularized Colonial and US history. In this history, the contributions of the Pequots and the different adaptations made to a changing world are emphasized. Unlike the village, the vignettes make particular and metonymic tableaus to represent different eras in Pequot history. Rather than an aggregate and immersive experience, this gallery reintroduces the contemplative distance between exhibition "object" and museum visitor. The traffic pattern, while still somewhat linear, is made more open and allows for eddies and the creation of varying points of perspective. minister Samson Occum (1723­1792) attended Eleazar Wheelock's private school for young men in 1743. He devoted his life to spreading the Christian gospel among Native Americans. 91 Mohegan 252 Photograph 4.23: The Mashpee Meetinghouse. Photomural and photo by author. The exhibition is arranged chronologically and each figure is part of a scene that tells a life story during these times. Cassacinamon is part of an exhibition discussing the beginning of reservation life, a farmstead is part of the story of adaptation and persistence in the eighteenth century, and Apes is part of a narrative of changing times and intolerance in the nineteenth century. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were marked by Pequots leaving the reservation in search of other opportunities for work, and to leave behind the difficulties of life at Mashantucket. Unemployment, the lack of resources, the absence of a strong infrastructure, and the hardships of poor housing made life on the reservation increasingly difficult to impossible. 253 Photograph 4.24: The farmstead in the gallery. Photo by author. VIGNETTE 3: THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS The farmstead vignette begins with a small wooden structure, which at first appears to be backed against the gallery's glass wall. A second look reveals that the farmhouse bisects the wall of the museum, with the majority of the structure on the "outside" of the main building. A simple wooden doorway, accessible from the gallery, provides a way in. 254 Photograph 4.25: Farmstead interior. Photo by author. Inside the one-room farmhouse, an older female figure is busy with a domestic task, and a young girl plays in a loft. (The model for this vignette is the Sunsimons, a family that lived at Mashantucket at the end of the eighteenth century.) The exterior is visible through the room's one small, framed window. In an adjoining wall is a wooden framed door. Opening it, the visitor can step out of the museum and onto a path that leads through cultivated fields contained by a low, dry stone wall. Beyond this, the reservation makes itself known with deep woods and the thick growth of the swamp. It is pristine: behind, the gleaming structure of the museum, ahead, and the tall pine trees that meet the sky. What is missing in this vista, perhaps, is the enormous Grand Pequot Tower. It hovers, an absent presence just beyond the tree line. 255 On the approach to the museum, the casino's Grand Pequot Tower is more than evident. Its presence is looming, insistent, supported by satellite parking lots and the ever-present fleet of brightly marked shuttle and tour buses on the highways. The tower is seen one last time from the "The Gathering Space," before descending into the Pequots' historical narrative. While the reservation presses up against the building's glass walls and windows in many areas of the exhibit halls, the Tower disappears. "[T]he major function of the enclosed space is always to create a tension or dialectic between inside and outside, between private and public property" (Stewart 1993: 68). The farmstead presents a wonderful moment of disjuncture, a culmination or seductive node of one the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center's major narrative projects. The windows, atriums, and transparent walls indicate the museum's present site while its interior explores a history of place, actively crossing between past and present. The farmhouse door opens onto an "actual" exterior, rendered historically complete with crop fields and dry stone walls. The door to the outside represents a strategic shift in framing the visitor's experience. One moves from the exhibition hall, where the farmlands are seen as part of the museum's supporting landscape, to finding access to these same fields. Entering the fields, one becomes part of an animate, life-size cast in a diorama turned inside out. The shift also contains a sideways glance, a simulacric moment when the inside opens to the outside and seems to close a circle of experience with the seal of the authentic. 256 In the museum's pre-contact village, the classic diorama form was played with to produce a diorama both full-size and walk-through, where the visitor experiences an eerie tour as one of a few animate figures maneuvering through a community frozen in mid-gesture. Navigating the fields of the farmstead, however, the visitor becomes the exterior vignette's animation. The arrested landscape combines with the voyeuristic gaze of the museum-goer onto the revealed landscape, both the seemingly controlled landscape of the farmstead's fields and the seemingly uncontrolled landscape of the reservation's swamp. The farmstead acts as a mediator between inside and outside, historic and contemporary--a disjunctive space between the confirming now of the exterior and an exterior historicized through an exhibition that leaks between the containment of the building and the containment of the reservation. This dynamic shift, from inside to outside and back again, affects the visitor's processes of contextualization at Mashantucket. As part of the museum and research center's function, elements of the displays and spaces within are decontextualized, through research and presentation, then recontextualized, both within a museum setting as well as within the embrace of the reservation. Through the walls of the Mashantucket Pequot and Museum Center, the reservation is a site for referential processes created or enacted by the visitors. The reservation itself--meaning tribal members' homes and the childcare center, and the majority of the land, for example--is not accessible to the general or museum- and casino-going public. This is not to argue that they should be, but to state that "the reservation" holds a particularly "removed" yet compromised 257 relationship to the industries that include it in their referents. These industries are on reservation land; the experience of the reservation and of the Mashantucket Pequots by "the outside" is necessarily filtered through the registers of Foxwoods and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. Both have a story or multiple stories to tell, and both do this from a particular and treasured space. Certainly, there is no way to appreciate the MPMRC and Foxwoods without thinking of them in terms of what they represent to the tribal nation. Nor could these industries exist without the physical presence and confines of the reservation, itself the focal point for the Mashantucket Pequots' land claim and federal recognition. Engines of enormous material and cultural capital, humming beneath the landscape, these two structures annually cycle through a huge visiting public. That museum visitors could remain completely unaffected by the relationship between the reservation and its industries seems impossible. Looking back, the vision of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center from the farmstead de-centers a truly seamless narrative, but the shift opens a complex and active disjuncture between the museum's historicity and the contemporary site that is Mashantucket. The farmstead also continues the overall narrative of "Life on the Reservation." By presenting figures from Mashantucket Pequot history engaged in activities and occupations not generally foregrounded in the public imaginary concerning things Pequot or things Indian, the exhibition serves as another site for subtle oppositional tactics aimed at unsettling hegemonic notions of Indianness. But "Life on the Reservation" also leaves at least one key issue untouched--that of race. Although racial essentialism 258 is one of the means by which Mashantucket Pequot "Indianness" is challenged in the public arena, the museum does not choose to overtly engage the issue of Mashantucket Pequot racial heritage, or to problematize discourses that link phenotype or race to cultural identity or authenticity. Some of this may be due to interfamily political battles at the administrative and council level. Much of the phenotypical variation can be mapped onto distinct family lineages, and political disagreements between family factions sometimes included race as a factor. At Mashantucket, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center was often seen as a Hayward family project, controlled by Richard and Theresa Hayward. (Phenotypically, the Hayward family appears mostly Euro-American.) Total projected costs for the construction of the museum increased while the deadline for completion experienced a number of delays. For both of these reasons, the museum project was a source for council-level disagreements and tensions. Early plans for the museum did include an exhibition area for such an engagement, but the section was removed from the overall museum narrative.92 Race, as an issue for museum exhibition, may have been written out due to a lack of consensus on how to frame the argument. Conflict between family factions, a tribal council power structure that shifted in frequent elections, and a tribal council chair whose power declined and eventually waned, had material effects at the level of the museum's different display environments as well. While council approval for the museum and communication with Lauri Halderman and Mike Hanke of Design Division, Inc. 1997. See also Nash, Alice, 2001 [2000], Still Pequot After All These Years, electronic document in Common­Place, 1(1), www.common-place.org/vol-01/no-01/lessons. 92 Private 259 research center's budget was often delayed, efforts taken to reduce the budget to meet council demands as a line item in the budget for the tribal nation often resulted in changes in the exhibition design. The farmstead is a case in point. All the vignettes in Life on the Reservation were based on carefully researched and documented figures from Pequot history. The farmstead is the only exception. The exhibition was designed to illustrate a dispersed farmstead--in contrast to the Indiantown era at Mashantucket (a community of small farmsteads)--and the Sunsimons became its inhabitants fairly late in the game. As they were not based on document research, the parameters of the vignette were somewhat malleable (and vulnerable to budget decisions). As a result of budget trimming, the originally intended extended family of Sunsimons now present an anomalous single-child family in the exhibition. As in any museum, funding and administration directly effect the ability to mount exhibitions. Because of this, it can be difficult to actually pin down cause and effect between original idea, following design, and final execution. For this reason as well, the exhibitions at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center can be understood as part of a larger oppositional narrative, one that shifts and adapts as the parameters of possibility and support change. WHERE TO GO AND HOW TO GET THERE The presence of the museum in the farmstead, and the absence of the nearby casino, presents a complicated moment in the visitor's experience. It offers 260 an intense and problematic juxtaposition of the modern with modern-rendered traditional narratives of the museum: history, cultural identity, and Indian nationalism, to name a few. The "invention of tradition" paradigm calls for an intensive exploration of the strategic representational deployment of traditional and/or revitalized practices. As Eric Hobsbawm observes, the invention of tradition is "highly relevant to that comparatively recent innovation, the `nation'" (Hobsbawm 1983: 13). (Even if the nation in question is an Indian one, problematically classified as "domestic and dependent.") The processes of adaptation and change in pursuit of survival can also be understood as cultural or traditional constants, where what is measured is not the continuity of a traditional presence as much as that of a traditional practice: i.e., ongoing adaptation to enormous and often life-threatening change. The "Catch 22" inherent in this understanding, however, is that the continuity of a traditional presence, over practice, is crucial to federal recognition (see Campisi 1991, or Harmon 1998 for different examples of how this has played out in suits brought for federal recognition). The passage out into the farmland also resonates with an appraisal of the constructed and revealed environments of the Mashantucket Pequots as simulacra, as a strategic feint that, by its own dissonance in discovery, supports the authenticity of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center narratives. This recognition acknowledges a deep strangeness, a vibrating tension made apparent and engaging in the overlay of the present (part of which is the museum's current narrative of the past) and the future (part of which is one 261 direction of Native industry and economic gain). But there is more at work here than a strange disjuncture or the absence of an incorporating text panel in the farmstead's field, gesturing back to the museum or the rest of the contemporary reservation. The unseen Grand Pequot Tower is a major reason that the $193million structure exists at all. Rather than marking a deeply strange moment in the present-day experience of Mashantucket, the unseen Tower may mark a deeply strange moment in the historically assessing industries of museums and anthropology. This recognition embraces not just the role of capital in Mashantucket's different arenas of self-representation and affirmation. It also pushes for recognition of the role capital plays in museums understood as elements or nodes of a global, representational practice. Anthropology is implicated because of its own attraction to the well-presented story, the engaging "text" in all of its multiple forms, and its own role as part of a global and globalizing representational practice. At Mashantucket, the role of both cultural and material capital in mounting self-defining representational machines is clearly discernable. What is strange in the museum moment is this kind of bald recognition of the link between capital and the ability to museumize particular subjects and narratives. Through the efforts of the tribe, the architects, and the exhibit designers, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center actively plays with its structural forms, confounding hard distinctions between interior and exterior. Part of what makes the museum captivating is the active play between contained representational space and its location within the reservation. The MPMRC is a 262 self-referential structure that locates the story of the Mashantucket Pequots as its master narrative, then relates that narrative within a state-of-the-art contemporary building located at Mashantucket--a place rarified by its separateness from the county and state surround. The known or imagined understanding of the casino complex viewed in the near distance93 further extends the visitor's experience beyond the museum's property and immediately surrounding landscape. In seeking an understanding of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, one needs to look beyond the recontextualizing efforts of the museum's exhibitions and spaces, or the poetics of the museum visit and experience, and raise one's eyes from the farmstead to just beyond the near horizon, to the looming sign of the major Mashantucket Pequot industry. A poetics of the museum only provides one method for entering the MPMRC's vast project. It is the poetics of the reservation--and the sensory experience of visiting the museum--that transform the fact of the site, pulling it through the intensified register of place and meaning. The invention or construction of tradition, like the re-telling of history, relies on an interior authentic core of the past, a historical force around which people interact and narratives cluster. History and traditions are stories told in the present, by the means of the present. At Mashantucket, these means include the museum and the casino as twin registers of historical force and contemporary narrative. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, for all of the modernity of its exhibition and the Mashantucket Pequots have been extensively featured in news stories and promotional literature since the first bingo hall opened in 1986. 93 Foxwoods 263 technologies and the post-modernity of its self-referential construction and narratives, is a deeply traditional space and form for story telling. It embodies a means of explaining the present through a series of connected and mutually indicating historical narratives and naturalizing histories. The heart of any museum is its exhibitions, its considered and careful representational (and visible) interaction with its perceived public. Exhibitions, and the halls that house them, are the museum's interstitial spaces, rife with narrative gaps and incomplete closures. Through navigating and cross-reading the museum's narratives--understood as a truly multi-media experience--the visitor makes his or her understanding. And through such uncontainable and inter-textual experiences museums exercise their own poetics; disjunctive spaces that speak through their forms, leaving the visitors to make their own sense in the gaps and fissures of environments, displays, and narratives. At Mashantucket, it is not so much the shape of the museum that is different, but an understanding of its surround: a complex intersection of popular imaginary, local history, and current practices of tribal industry. At what point these practices, building on but radically transforming and extending those of the past, enter the canon of tradition, remains to be seen. "Life on the Reservation" closes with "Bringing the People Home," an exhibition devoted to the first wave of Mashantucket Pequots returning to the reservation in the mid-1970s. That initial return, at first to simple trailers in the woods, was the beginning of a great renaissance for the tribal nation. The 264 comparatively recent arrival of the great bulk of the tribe's recognized members,94 coupled with the construction and phenomenal success of the tribe's high stakes bingo and casino concerns, created a tension-filled cultural arena. Critics and competitors lined up to dispute Mashantucket Pequot claims to tribal and cultural authenticity, regardless of the federal government's official 1983 recognition. And Foxwoods, since it opened in 1992, has been a lightning rod for national debates on Indian Gaming. These debates often locate Indian gaming as an unfair competitor for mainstream industries, an industry that preys on the consumer or encourages crime, or an "inauthentic" Native American practice. Here the maintenance of traditions, and the potential for their loss, is framed as a paramount concern. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center is a charged and deeply subtexted site. A cultural industry in the shadow of an enormous and controversial capital-generating industry, the museum presents narratives of the past--of traditions and history--within a gleaming and modern structure, complete with the latest in interactive and museum technologies. Most of this is not that unusual. Museums are complex places, where stories of nationalism, history, cultural persistence, and appropriation are made interesting or accessible through a variety of different strategies, including electronic media and spatial design. Computer-based interactives provide a hightech way to move through exhibits, providing links to short films or other reservation population went from two to over 300 in twenty-five years. In 1997 the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Council dropped the blood quantum requirement for tribal enrollment; there are currently over 600 tribal members. 94 The 265 explanatory data. In an age when museum interactivity is most often defined as intercourse with software and hardware, the MPMRC systems are vast and compelling, fabulous with resolution and the promise of information. Different levels of interaction are woven through the entire Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center experience. Visible through the glass from nearly every gallery, the recurring presence of the reservation takes an active part in the museum's intricate dance of representation and incorporation. On one hand, Mashantucket Pequot history is presented as a discrete, well-researched, and supported narrative. On the other, the museum experience is presented as dynamic and inclusive, calling for individual visitor navigation and input, so that each visit is self-directed, customized, and unique. Some of this reflects the pattern in modern museums, from the virtual visit that allows you to arrange your own exhibit and tour, to disorienting, Internetdriven bubble-view experiences that offer you 360° roller-coaster ride through a bricks-and-mortar site. The modern museum is under siege and reacting in many different ways to the perceived changes in audience demographics and expectations. This most recent decade witnessed an unparalleled construction in museums, reflecting both extensive refurbishing and the building of new facilities. At the same time, the museum has never been more unclear as to what its next step should be in terms of representation, interaction with the Internet, the seduction of students, or the promise of becoming a popular destination for school and college educational programs. Much of the promise for the future, and the attractive hook for funding and support, still lies in the conception of the museum 266 as an educational resource. While this seems to make a certain amount of sense, is that what a museum is? By nature? By conviction? By desire or inclination? What is educational? Like nostalgia, whose educational resource is it and from what vantage point? Photograph 4.26: The trailer home in the gallery. Photo by author. 267 That was the only way we knew we could do it, was to be able to get a trailer, something that was portable, that you could buy, that you didn't have to build, to get a loan for. Something you could pay cash for, an old used trailer to make do. ... It was the only way we could survive here was in a trailer, because you couldn't build a home. Where was you going to get the money? Where was you going to get a loan? It was three bedrooms, very, very small. It was hell. [Voices from the Mashantucket Pequot oral history project.95] AURALITY: DISTRACTED GAZING MEETS DISTRACTED LISTENING The last object in "Bringing the People Home" is an old trailer home. It is one of the homes used in the beginning of the reservation renaissance in the 1970s. Placed against the gallery's ending wall, the trailer is open for inspection through its doors and windows. Furnished as it was when occupied by tribal members, the trailer rests on a large, white plinth. Like most of the exhibits in this long gallery, the trailer has a certain minimalist force. The glass wall to its right floods the area with natural light. A text panel in front discusses how tribal members moved, took up residence in Mashantucket, and began to work toward self-sufficiency and self-determination. oral history project was suggested by Design Division, Inc. and started on the reservation near the beginning of the museum project. Great effort was made to get as wide a sample of the reservation population as possible, with an eye on eventually using selections from the collected narratives as either bits of aural representation, or as text worked into the exhibition panels. The project's archives were large and were extensively edited for presentation in the museum's texts and recordings. 95 The 268 We were all working to get whatever it was that we could get to move back up to the reservation, even if it meant camping, which some of us did do. Some did come back and live in pop-up tents and campers. I remember boiling the snow on the stove to make water to pour through the hose to unclog the ice from the hose to take a shower. There wasn't any funding sources for houses. You couldn't get a bank loan because it's on tribal lands. [Voices from the Mashantucket Pequot oral history project.] The exhibit is complemented by the sound of voices. Different pieces of recorded oral histories are played together, and are heard most clearly as one focuses on the trailer and its interior. Pig farming was started, hydroponic gardening, maple sugaring, that sort of thing. Cutting the dead tree falls and selling firewood, those were all things that were done just in order to keep the heat in the houses, just for survival. It wasn't any moneymaking enterprise; it was a survival tactic. [Voice from the Mashantucket Pequot oral history project.] This is the second time that recorded oral histories have been spliced together and played to complete an exhibition design. At the trailer, the voices are those of tribal members recounting life on the reservation during the 1970s, including efforts at tribal businesses and the challenges of living in a rustic and underfunded community. As an aural artifact, however, the recordings of the tribal members work at a particular level of distraction. Although multiply voiced, the narrative spins out in a single, unraveling sound collage or recounting: a single voice speaks at a time, even though the voices change over the course of the narrative. 269 One of the first things that we started to do on the reservation was to build a community garden. You know, we weren't thinking about bingo halls, casinos...it was blood, sweat, and tears...grassroots effort to work with the land and create community, a sense of community on the reservation. Membership meetings began to grow and--and we began to meet some relatives we hadn't seen for a long time and other relatives we never saw before. [Voices from the Mashantucket Pequot oral history project.] This design is also true at the visitor's first encounter with recorded voices of tribal members. At the four seasonal dioramas that precede the Pequot Village, a bench has been set into a small alcove across the hall from the cases. Ceiling speakers above this bench play the voices of tribal members recounting their feelings about seasonal change and nature. The use of recorded voice in this gallery is fairly subtle and, like the animatronic Yankee monologues in the Foxwoods concourse, the majority of visitors go by this element of the exhibition without noticing it or stopping to listen. Of course, the aural at the museum is not limited to recordings of tribal members. From the initial recordings of creaking ice and howling wind in the glacial escalator to the birdsong and animal calls in the village, background noise is offered in a number of places to verify the visitor experience, to more firmly place an exhibition within a projected time or place. There are also a number of sound leaks--the murmur of films in the theatres, the sound of displays on the interactive screens, and the ambient noises of museum goers and docents negotiating the galleries. 270 The journey through the long gallery that houses Life on the Reservation provides a gradual and subtle unsettling of existing stereotypes about Indians in history and in the present. Here Indians are whalers, preachers, farmers, soldiers, and laborers. They change and adapt as their circumstances necessitate. They are the inhabitants of marginal and recognizable dwellings like house trailers. The master narrative of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center is a historicizing narrative, and the Mashantucket Pequot history places them as agents in, rather than subjects of, this story. Facing the trailer, with the rest of the gallery behind the visitor, there is a door to another gallery on its left. Further to the left is an exit leading out to a light-filled atrium, and a stairway leading back down to a scenic overlook for the Pequot Village, and another entrance to Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. This area of the museum is given over to meeting rooms and auditorium, classrooms, and a lower-level temporary exhibitions gallery.96 There is a walkway leading away from the top of the stairs, back to the Gathering Space, Trading Post (the museum's gift shop), and restaurant. exhibitions include "Rain: Native Peoples of the Desert Southwest." Organized by the Heard Museum in Phoenix, "Rain" opened at the Museum of Mankind in London in 1997; the exhibition was sponsored by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. 96 Recent 271 Chapter 5: A Tribal Portrait OVERVIEW Tribal-controlled museums are extremely significant venues where the poetics of self-representation and renewed Indian sovereignty are enacted and performed. Photographs of American Indians are a historically embedded, highly contested genre of identity representation. This chapter focuses on the final gallery of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center to do a close reading of its exhibition--a collection of portraits of tribal members. Part of this chapter's focus is on the problematics of photographs of American Indians, and how these issues are addressed at the MPMRC. The photo portraits at Mashantucket serve as a museum visitor's "personal" introduction to many contemporary members of the tribal nation. At once evocative and evidential, these large-format images embody a singular moment in the photographic representation and exhibition of "Indianness"--if only as a significant component for the largest Indian-owned and Indian-operated museum and research center in the world--and offer a key site for exploring the use of photography in the museum. The photographs also offer a powerful rebuttal to challenges to Mashantucket Pequot Indian authenticity made in the public sphere and organized in terms of racial and ethnic identity. The final gallery presents the clearest example of race being mobilized by the Mashantucket Pequots as a field of assertion. The exhibition is the result of a series of choices made about self-representation; there is no particular reason that 272 the Mashantucket Pequots needed to design and include "A Tribal Portrait" in terms of the museum's overall narrative. The structure of this dissertation is mimetic of the act of increasing focus, a spiraling closeness, a radial image (Berger 1980) that works inward from an imagined edge, or one that acts as one constellation of different offered points of contextualizing information and evocation. This narrative began with a siteestablishing overview that worried the containment capabilities of the location that is Mashantucket. From that initial point, the history and the renaissance of the Mashantucket Pequots were considered against the backdrops of both localized and US­national history and politics, and a critical gaze was fixed on the boundaries and entity of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. The next tightening turn in this spiral introduced and explored Foxwoods as both the largest source of funding for the tribal nation, and its primary and most popular public arena. The casino provided the Mashantucket Pequots' first experience with intensified and immersive representational sites. From the casino, attention was brought to the architecture and exhibition design strategy for the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, exploring the galleries and exhibition objects as part of the tribal nation's engagement with a space devoted to a saturated and immersive self-representational effort. The final chapter will focus one step closer to examine the final exhibition gallery's photographs and their placement. It will then go on to contextualize the portrait project within the history of the American Indian subject in photography, and how this subject intersects histories of photography and anthropology. The 273 work of Edward S. Curtis (1868­1952) will be used as emblematic for the formation of the American Indian subject in the history of the United States, the politics and poetics of photo making and photo viewing, and the strategies and tactics of using photographic imagery as representational documents in a museum setting. While there were clearly many other photographers producing images of American Indians during Curtis's time, his work exemplifies this pervasive industry. The choice of Curtis as emblematic of "Indian photographers" is fourfold. First, Curtis is the photographer best recognized in the popular imaginary for this kind of work, and the scope, effort, and reach represented by his final product is enormous, not to mention that his work is enjoying a current renaissance as aesthetic archive and focus for critique. Second, the recognition of Curtis's images as iconic in the display of American Indianness, and as foundational for popular understandings of Indian identity, is one shared by the population at Mashantucket--the images belong to that same general pool of "things Indian" that find themselves worked through other public venues at Mashantucket. Third, although Curtis may not have coined the use of the term "vanishing" in connection with Native Americans, one of his more enduring images--"A Vanishing Race"--has participated in and effectively extended the influence of the "vanishing Indian" trope. Finally, David Neel--the Kwagiutl photographer and artist whose work occupies the final museum gallery--cites Curtis's work as an example of the kind of popular and pervasive imagery against which his own photography stakes a position (Neel 1992). In his exhibition, Neel 274 recognizes that a photograph is a transitory and sliding image, open to multiple engagements and recontextualizations, and celebrates that fluidity in his work. One effect of this strategy is that the gallery offers a powerfully nuanced, covert rebuttal to existing public challenges concerning Mashantucket Pequot racial and cultural identity. Photograph 5.1: The end of Bringing the People Home. Photo by author. A TRIBAL PORTRAIT I The trailer marks the end of the Life on the Reservation Gallery as a unified exhibition design. Up to this point, the light from the curving glass wall of the outer gallery dominates the exhibition hall. The individual exhibitions are 275 somewhat minimalist: figures standing alone for periods on the reservation, many without a crowd of objects or furnishings. Light is a predominant feature of the hall's design. The flood of directional, natural light emphasizes the clean lines of the gallery and the exhibitions, the absence of encasement for most of the exhibitions, and the volume of the hall itself. Placed against the gallery's far wall, the trailer rests on wheels and blocks. To its immediate left there is a door to another gallery. Further to the left is an exhibition-hall exit. The door immediately to the left of the trailer is glass. In sharp contrast to the preceding gallery space, the room beyond feels dimly lit--here the ceiling is dark and the light from the windows does not carry as far. Ceiling-mounted spotlights are trained on a series of large black and white photo portraits. Shot with a large format camera, the detail in the photographs is sharp. The subjects are generally alone, occasionally in pairs. Many are larger than life size. They all address the camera, eyes meeting the visitors' through the mediation of the lens, the viewfinder, and the final print. A large number of portraits hang on the walls of the gallery, but many others are suspended from the ceiling in the middle of the room and anchored to the floor in pairs, back to back. The frames of these portraits are guyed top and bottom with slender steel cables, and the overall first impression is of entering a different kind of gallery space, a space more influenced by the conceits of a contemporary art or photo gallery. The suspended portraits break up the floor space of the gallery, providing a variety of possible paths for the visitor to take, winding through a maze of oversized faces and dramatic light. 276 Photograph 5.2: The final gallery: "A Tribal Portrait. Photo by author. A lot of people that come back to the reservation come back sometimes finding out...they just found out they was Mashantucket Indian. Sometimes they come back knowing it all along but never practiced it at all. They don't practice their native culture right away. They may not even say that they're Indian at all within the community. But the growth of the community depends on their acceptance of who they are and what the community stands for. ... So, it's getting the new members that aren't aware of the identity to be aware of the identity so they respect their identity. [Voice from the Mashantucket Pequot oral history project.] Entering the gallery, one enters a space of voices. Overall, the polyvocalic sound hovers at the level of cocktail party back noise, like overlapping voices at the beginning of the evening before everything starts to get louder. At first one cannot tell if the voices are carrying on a conversation or speaking in parallel. The 277 sounds grow and fade as the visitor approaches and walks away from different portraits. The recorded voices are tribal members and the recordings make up a significant part of the Mashantucket Pequot oral history project. The tribal members speak of what they remember about life at Mashantucket and elsewhere before the boom in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. The reason that I came here ... is because I believed in what was going on here, and at the time it wasn't we're going to have a billion-dollar casino. That wasn't it. But I believed in what was taking place here, that it would be something unique, because you would have a community made up of a body of people who are also blood relatives.... We're just a normal community fighting for the rights of our people. We work. We pay taxes. ... We're just like anybody else. [Voices from the Mashantucket Pequot oral history project.] The voices recall stories of origin, family, tribal identification, and strategies for cultural and pragmatic survival. Particular ceiling-mounted speakers are dedicated to individual recordings of voices, and the visitor moves in, out, and between spheres of audibility. The voices embody that space between patterned noise and speech recognition and call on the same sort of meaning-making process that is invoked by the first viewing of a photograph. One begins with initial concentration and a gradual settling into the image, and then extends to a recognition based on expectations, memory, and experience. The voices are not explicitly or individually tied to the portraits in the gallery--the two projects, 278 voice and image, were carried out separately and assembled as an exhibition for the museum.97 It sounds stupid and it sounds corny, but it is like a dream come true. I am back home. I am on tribal land. My children are here and my grandchildren are here. There's a special feeling that you get from this land, and no matter if you have to put some tar on it or put a building on it, that it's not going to change the vibes that you get from this land and the spirit that's in this land. [Voices from the Mashantucket Pequot oral history project.] The placement of the gallery raises questions about how it relates to the rest of the museum: the shift from the airy wash of daylight in the previous gallery, the photo gallery's satellite position to the established visitor traffic flow, and the clear changes in design mark it as a distinctly "other" exhibition space. The gallery makes a shift from the historic to the contemporary at the same moment that the exhibition moves from a grand hall to a smaller, segmented space. The portrait gallery serves as counterpoint to the opening gallery and the visitor's introduction to the museum. Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation opens with a large group photo of Mashantucket Pequot tribal members--the museum closes with a group of individual renderings of some of those same tribal members. From the initial group image--a color photograph enlarged to the point Neel was not familiar with any of the oral history texts while shooting his project, and the oral histories were collected before the photo project had been finalized. 97 David 279 of pronounced graininess--the representation of tribal members moves to the sharp detail of large format, mostly studio-lit portraits rendered in black and white. This gallery ends the exhibition-gallery experience in the museum. Exiting this room, the visitor is confronted by a light-filled atrium, with a stairway leading back down to the Pequot Village level, and a walkway leading away from the top of the stairs, back to the Gathering Space, gift shop, and restaurant. Multiple levels, meeting rooms and an auditorium, classrooms, the entrance to the research center, a set of glass doors exiting to the front drive, and a lower-level temporary exhibitions gallery all extend from this area of the museum. The lack of clear signage makes the visitor's transition from gallery to atrium confusing. Photograph 5.3: The exit at the end of Bringing the People Home. Photo by author. Until this final gallery, photographs in the MPMRC provide supplementary, visual documentary images for other representational strategies; 280 they illustrate other museum narratives. Text panel photographs in the first gallery match images of buildings to small narratives about business and life at Mashantucket; interactive computer screens around the caribou hunt supply still and moving images augmenting and explaining hunting technologies and histories. Photographs show the features of glacial and post-glacial landscapes. Other photomurals document the Mashpee Meeting House or a symbolic interpretation of large-scale death by disease in a portrayal of empty wigwam frames against a low, gray sky. Historic photographs are used in some of the smaller exhibitions in the Life on the Reservation gallery but photographs, as sole visual element for an entire exhibition, appear only in the museum's closing gallery. Photograph 5.4: A Tribal Portrait. Photo by author. 281 DAVID NEEL: BACKGROUND AND FOREGROUND We live in a time of the created image--if you do not create your own, someone will create it for you. The image created for us is one of a people stuck in time, as though we are not part of the twentieth century. As early as the mid-1800s, Native people were viewed as part of the past and were imagined to be a `vanishing race.' [Neel 1992: 14] Between 1988 and 1991, David Neel worked on a project photographing the chiefs and elders of different First Nation peoples of the Northwest Coast. As part of this project, Neel collected interviews from each of his subjects and included them with the photographs. Our Chiefs and Elders, the publication of this project in book form in 1992, served as his defining project and provides critical background to his selection as the photographer for the MPMRC photo portrait exhibition. Neel's work draws from a number of traditions and influences and contains many of the standard tropes in photo-portraiture of the American Indian. In this collection of photographs from the Pacific Northwest, two things stand out. I will use the portrait(s) of Nathan Young to illustrate some of the more pertinent features. 282 Photograph 5.6: Chief Nathan Young--from Our Chiefs and Elders. Photo by David Neel. First, the chiefs' and elders' portraits are primarily presented in pairs. In one photograph, the subject appears in ceremonial regalia or the formal dress of an official role or office. In the other photograph, the subject is shown in everyday working or casual clothes. The photographs are captioned, and the captions provide names, family affiliations, and geographic locations. The book includes excerpts from interviews and conversations between Neel and the various subjects. The placement of the subject in Photograph 5.6 also points clearly to the portrait as a constructed and constraining frame. In the photograph, Chief Nathan Young powerfully fills the foreground of the frame with his cloak, creating a 283 feeling of forced perspective that is further emphasized by the low angle of the camera. Young not only fills the foreground, but his headdress almost exceeds the limits of the image, pushing against the near center of the frame. In photograph 5.7, Young again exceeds the frame in the foreground, part of him (his feet) having escaped the photograph's containment completely or partially. His suspenders, tinted glasses, and "gimmee cap" unsettle the iconics of Photograph 5.6--the traditional "nobility" trope of traditional portraits of American Indians. Photograph 5.7: Chief Nathan Young--from Our Chiefs and Elders. Photo by David Neel. The easy posture of Young, the style of his wooden chair, and the clear meeting of lawn and painted canvas backdrop serve to connect this photograph's 284 "moment" with its picture-making event. There is a complicity between the photographer and subject--their relationship is made obvious at the same moment that the photograph is "speaking back" to an established genre of American Indian portraiture. The Neel photographs participate in a number of strategies reflecting the existing genre of photography of Native Americans. But the work supports an idea of identifying through a self-designated system of naming that does not reflect standard anthropological categorizations. Instead, it recognizes other identifying schema, including family and what Keith Basso (and others) call "the place where one is from."98 The inclusion of transcribed interviews narrativizes and further extends the "pictures" one gains from the book and the juxtaposition "ceremonial" with "casual" dress serves to confound attempts to detemporalize the various subjects. As Neel states: "I have tried to show people as they are, with their lives in two worlds, two cultures" (Neel 1992: 13). Second, there are some critically important formal distinctions to Our Chiefs. In classic studio portraiture, the background is moved beyond the plane of the camera's focus, and the background's boundaries exceed the edges of the photographic frame. What is presented in the final photograph is a seamless backdrop of pure, mottled, or gradual tone. In contrast, Neel uses a fairly narrow painted canvas background. He shoots in small spaces, where the background also Clifford, James, "Four Northwest Coast Museums, in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Feld, Steven and Keith H. Basso, eds., Senses of Place, (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996); and Blu, Karen, The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian People, (New York: Cambridge University Press 1980). 98 See 285 cannot drop out of focus, or he ensures that the background is close to his photographic subject. The width of the background, used in combination with the medium-distance portraits he prefers, means that the background, its edges, and often the walls behind, are all included within the photograph's frame, in clear focus. In this way, the final portrait clearly implicates and indicates the processes and boundaries of photo making. These same boundaries have provided fodder for deconstructions of Edward S. Curtis's images by addressing the erasure of "contemporary" elements in his photographs. While Neel discusses this erasure in Our Chiefs and Elders, it is photographer Christopher Lyman's book, The Vanishing Race, which is perhaps best known for this critical perspective. (Lyman is not alone in his critique--anthropologist James Faris for example, in his book Navajo and Photography: A Critical History of the Representation of an American People, similarly accuses Curtis of "shameless fakery.") Lyman worked with a selection of Curtis prints and glass plates to uncover different methods of image alteration that took place before the print was made public. Some of the methods included retouching the plate or print to excise elements like clocks or parasols, objects that would prove potentially "anachronistic" in the presentation of "timeless" or "time past" photographs. Other methods included the use of long-hair wigs or "traditional" clothing for subjects with short hair or Western dress, and the use of clothing or material objects not consistent with the subject's tribal affiliation. 286 Other critics take issue with the depiction of Curtis as an unprecedented wholesale image re-toucher or subject costumer. Smithsonian anthropologist Joanna Scherer establishes that the supplying of "traditional" garb for Indian photographic subjects was common before and during Curtis's time (Scherer 1978), and critic A.D. Coleman points to the relatively small sample of images Lyman uses, and questions the application of his conclusions of fabrication to all of Curtis's photographs. Coleman points to a number of Curtis photographs in which the markers of contemporaneity are left obvious, even when their excision could be accomplished fairly easily (through cropping, for example) (Coleman 1998: 132­158). There are still other critics that laud Curtis for his creation of record and ignore accusations of fakery. George P. Horse Capture, in the forward to Native Nations, states: One of Curtis's major goals was to record the Indian people's images and to make a picture of the culture of their time. ... Reenactments of battles, moving camp, and other past activities were preserved. ... I am sure this effort provided extended pleasure to these elders. And it continues today to bring us closer to our traditional people and history. [Horse Capture 1993: 17] Neel's technique of making the photo-making event an obvious and direct part of the finished photograph participates in similar styles by commercial portrait photographers such as Annie Liebowitz and Irving Penn.99 But it is also a comment on the erasure-of-"anachronism" debates raised by Lyman, extending 99 See Penn, Irving, Worlds in a Small Room, (New York: Grossman, 1974). Neel cites this project as influential to his work. 287 these strategies by a different connection to the subject matter. The artifacts of the photo-making process made visible further illustrate the contingent mechanics of the photo-making event. They also illustrate the photograph's fusion of technology, subject, and practitioner, to produce a truly "collaborative artifact"100 while foregrounding elements that confirm the time and place of its making. In the Neel diptychs, the background and the subject's distance from the background stay the same in both photographs. This strategic move presents an interesting, almost stereoscopic picture of "authentic" Indians. For an outsider the photographs portray both a "traditional," or perhaps expected view, and a day-today view. But the photos also illustrate specific individual tribal roles as marked by special clothing or artifact. At a number of levels, the portraits show the different roles that each of the individuals inhabit. This strategy shifts the subject from a place of static-tradition depiction--or an incorporation into what Gerald Vizenor terms "manifest manners" (Vizenor 1994) and the reflection of white dominance--into a space of contemporary belonging. By extension, the juxtaposition destabilizes and temporalizes the genre of stoic American Indian portraits, creating the potential for a more critical engagement with this genre. The exhibition "A Tribal Portrait" was designed by Design Division, Inc. The firm requested proposals for the photo project in the summer of 1995. David 100 In a large sense, all photographs are the products of collaboration between photographer and subject. There are, of course, different levels of collaboration. See A.D. Coleman, "The Image in Question," in Depth of Field. 288 Neel was chosen as the project photographer in 1996,101 and shooting began in 1997. Neel has just completed the third phase of the project (May 2002). Photograph 5.8: Alice R. Kirchner. Photo by David Neel. As in the Young diptych, the subject of photograph 5.8 (Alice R. Kirchner) is at medium distance from the lens--the image records the entirety of 101 I was one of three finalists for the photo project. 289 the sitter. Kirchner is shown in fairly elaborate buckskin, including boots and a bag. She is also wearing necklaces, a bracelet, and a two-feather headband. Her hair is carefully coifed, her eyeglasses somewhat matronly. She sits on a chair in what may be her kitchen--the linoleum floor and the cabinets in the background support this hypothesis. Her shoulders are at an angle to the camera but she faces the camera dead-on, her chin raised a little. Kirchner is lit with one broad source and the background behind her catches some of the spill light. Her shadows are soft but dark. The elements of Young's diptych are compressed here, the contemporaneity of the setting mixing with the style of Kirchner's dress. The unsettling that Neel achieves by pairing the photographs of Young is now made clear in one photograph and, as if to emphasize the unsettled quality of the image, the horizon line is skewed. The use of a subverted horizontal is evident in many of the photographs in this gallery. This compositional device quite literally unsettles the subject position and, by so doing, the viewer's position by almost subconsciously calling for a neck craning as the viewer attempts to "right" the photo subject's footing. It is a subtle way to elicit a reaction of unfamiliarity, and a signal that the photograph and its subject share a sense of place distinctly different from that of the museum visitor. It is an interesting moment in the museum's narrative, this meeting between museum visitor and pictured tribal member. The mix of the contemporary and what might be understood as the traditional participate in the ongoing dialogue at Mashantucket concerning self-representation, authenticity, 290 and temporality. The tension between the "placelessness" of the painted canvas backdrop, and the obvious markers of place are also key in the community's ongoing discourse of representation. And the fact that it is not only photographs, but large-format black and white portraits that comprise the last exhibition is particularly telling. Photographs are artifacts that, more than any other, mix a sense of the evidential--the photograph as mechanical record--with the evocative--the photograph as location for imagination, connection, or unfinished and uncontainable narrative. A SHORT HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY Photography's invention is often marked by Daguerre's patent in 1839. But photography, as a technology capable of creating infinitely reproducible images, was not perfected until the 1850s. The glass-plate wet collodion process enabled both shorter exposures and the creation of a photographic `negative'--a stable reverse image. The existence of such a negative-to-positive process also meant that an infinite number of identical images could be produced from a single negative. Photography shared much of the mid-nineteenth century's optimism and perspective on the process of mechanical representation. The "pencil of nature" (Talbot 1969102) described an intersection of technology and the natural world, a 102The title of William Henry Fox Talbot's first collection of photographs. Talbot is credited with discovering the negative photographic process in 1835, a process that changed photography from a series of un-reproducible Daguerreotypes to the infinitely reproducible photographic process that we use today. 291 transparent, denotative transference from the visible world to the photographic record, from nature to culture, without connotative, interpretive influence. Indeed, one of the first schools of photography, pictorialism, was created within this environment. Pictorialism sought to establish that photography was a legitimate artistic, interpretive medium and not simply a mechanical record. Pictorialists used a painterly approach, often manipulating their images by hand.103 The legacy of this beginning, and of the popular use of photographs as advertisements, mementos, court records, and identification documents, continues to blur the line between photographs as created, representational, interpretive objects, and photographs as direct transfers, as "something stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask" (Sontag 1973: 154). Photographs have a problematic relationship with the visible world. At once record and object, photographs are created by the registration of reflected light from a subject.104 In this way, photographs carry a sense of arrested emanation, an expression of the reflection of a subject. Photographs do not capture subjects; they capture the light that subjects emanate. As instruments recording and representing such indexical reflection, photographs have been popularly misunderstood as indexically representing reality; the photographic document has become an evidential measure of authenticity. 103 Pictorialism was also a reaction to the growing ranks of amateur shutterbugs or "Kodakers." In 1888 Kodak introduced a popular $25 amateur camera, pre-loaded with film enough for 100 photographs, creating a new and rapidly spreading population of photo-makers. 104Actually, this simply describes how photographs are begun as objects, as latent image on a film plane. There is a tendency to write of the photograph as synonymous with the act of exposing film, without considering either the processes of bringing the latent image to print, or the motivations of the photographer in exposing the film. 292 As visual documents that record the appearance of the individual body, photographs have become enormously useful in registering that body. Indeed, this is some of the uncomfortable legacy that anthropology and ethnographic photography share with the colonial project--the registration and incorporation of the colonial subject. The photograph is a representation with the power of evidence. Thus, the photograph not only pays homage to a subject, but it is also "an extension of that subject; and a potent means of acquiring it, of gaining control over it" (Sontag 1973: 155).105 What makes an ethnographic photograph is its inclusion within an ethnographic project. As such, it shares the perspectives and many of the problematics of anthropology itself. PHOTOGRAPHS--WHAT AND HOW THEY MEAN Photographs as latent image are the product of light "captured" on a light sensitive emulsion. "How that [subject] is controlled for the capture, and for what purpose, and how that image is received by a viewer, are, however, profoundly cultural matters" (Marjorie Halpin 1992: 185106). As both Neel and Halpin note in Our Chiefs and Elders, the control and use of the captured subject as a viable point for critical analysis does not end in some past historical moment.107 As Neel states: "Photography has been used since the last century to support . . . ideas of cultural superiority, to the loss of the First Nations of the world" (Neel 1992: 15). 105 See also Taussig, Michael, Mimesis and Alterity, (New York: Routledge, 1993). Halpin is the Curator of Ethnology at the University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology. 107 See Berkhofer, Durham, Lippard, and Lyman. 106 Marjorie 293 Representations of American Indians in historical photographs have contributed to current (mis)understanding. As David Penney, Curator of Native American Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, asserts: "[p]hotographs of American Indians illustrate scientific, ethnographic, and historical texts. They form a large part of what is thought of as knowledge and truth about American Indian people" (Penney 1994: 6).108 Vine Deloria relates a story of meeting with a congressperson to talk about Indian policy and hardships of life on the reservations. The policy-maker said "Don't tell me about Indians. I know about Indians," and tossed a book of Curtis's photographs onto the desk between them. The impact of images such as Curtis's cannot be underestimated, and his photographs continue to appear behind current conflicts over the authenticity of contemporary images and peoples. Appearance has long been critical to cultural perception, both in the popular imaginary as well as in the more rarified circles of such methodologies as anthropology and photography. This is also true when considering the extensive archive of photographs of American Indians. Images made for the "preservation of the vanishing Indian" commit a problematic sleightof-hand when they do not admit their own complicity in creating both that perceptual genre as well as a yardstick of authentication for current and future Native peoples. This measure is bound to frustrate and confound by binding the photographic subjects to particular presentations (appearance, activity, 108Penney, David W., "Images of Identity: American Indians in Photographs," included in a catalogue for a show of the same name at the Detroit Institute of Arts, published by the Detroit Institute of Arts Founders Society, 1994, 6. 294 environment, or dress, for example) and temporal placement (either vanishing or locked forever in a primordial and timeless past). The Neel photographs in the final gallery, continuing in the tradition established by his earlier work, speak directly against this binding. Combining contemporary elements or settings with traditional dress or objects, the photographs disturb the possibilities of a timeless and placeless read. Further, the presentation of the portraits in a gallery reflecting the aesthetics of contemporary photo or art galleries, firmly seats the photographs as part of a current and dynamic project--the photographs depict living tribal members. Finally, the use of voices complicates and "thickens" the self-representational project of the tribal nation. EDWARD S. CURTIS AND THE AMERICAN INDIAN "The Pool--Apache" is the first photograph featured in Volume I of Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian and it sets the stage for the enormous work that follows. A man is in the center of the photograph, wearing a breechcloth. His long hair is held by a headband, some of it rests on his shoulders, some comes forward onto his chest. A pool that exceeds the image's borders commands the foreground. In the middle of this pool is a reflection of the man, who we understand at first to be the photograph's subject. Behind him is the pool's bank and, directly rising from that, a lush, dense tangle of woods and vines. This wooded background gradually falls out of focus toward the photo's edges. 295 The photograph appears timeless and placeless--a sense of primeval unspoiled wilderness or the tangled beauty of Eden saturates the location of the photograph. The picture contains many of the elements that make Curtis's photographs so compelling. A balanced composition, a romantic, placeless place as the represented world of the photograph's environment and its sole denizen, a foreground containing a reflecting pool, and a photographic subject that both commands recognition for a particular individuality or agency and, at the same time, gestures toward a much larger population pressing in, unseen, at the edges of the photo, just out of frame. It is difficult to approach a Curtis photograph without some of the romantic rubbing off on you, without some sense of "object wonder." It is part of what has given his images such a long-standing and often contentious currency. And Curtis was, undeniably, a talented and exhaustive photographer. But there is a strange sense of disjuncture, a sense of both overlap and gap that rises from looking at the prints in The North American Indian. 296 Photograph 5.9: "The Pool ­ Apache." Northwestern University Library, Edward S. Curtis's `The North American Indian': the Photographic Images, 2001. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iencurt.ct01002 297 Curtis is most often identified as a romantic, as a photographer given to certain poetic excess in rendering the subjects of his photographs. In part, this disjuncture is most obvious when The North American Indian oscillates between two cataloguing spaces--one that includes photographs of harvesting, ceremonial dances or masks, house types and elements of domestic culture, and one of images larger than themselves, images of heroic individuals and "typical" specimens. This disjuncture, of course, is not new and this issue is a fundamental problem in anthropology--the representation of the few as an index or encyclopedia for the many. And Curtis is certainly not alone in imagining the ability of photography to capture a complete register of a people or a society.109 Part of what makes the Curtis work so compelling is the point that it occupies in history. His lifework occupies a major crossroads in photographic imaging, and partakes in an ongoing and heated discussion attempting to place photography as art or science, as interpretive method or factual record.110 During Curtis's photographic career, the battleground of aesthetics in photography as art was complicated and multi-faceted. The pictorialists were first to attempt to bring photography into the realm of fine art. This movement was further refined by the 109 Curtis's contemporary, German photographer August Sander's work, the "Faces of Man" paralleled and followed Curtis's effort. Sander created a portraiture project of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s that sought to create a complete catalogue of humanity. Later projects, including the "Family of Man" exhibition organized by Edward Steichen for New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1955, Irving Penn's "Worlds in a Small Room" from the early 1970s, or Richard Avedon's "In the American West" from the early 1980s, also participate in this effort of creating expansive, representative catalogues. 110 See Newhall, Beaumont, The History of Photography: from 1839 to the present, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, Little, Brown, 1982. 298 photo-secessionists, under Alfred Stieglitz. Within this movement, however, some practitioners used photography as a method for achieving existing classical tenets of art, primarily exemplified by paintings, and others sought to create a new aesthetic for photography as its own distinct artistic medium, stressing "purity" over interpretive manipulations. But Curtis's effort must be distinguished from other photographic (and ethnological and anthropological) documenting efforts of his day. Curtis was born in 1868 and began taking photographs as a boy. In the early 1890s, Curtis opened a photographic studio in what is now Port Orchard, Washington. Here he worked as a portrait photographer for Seattle society. In 1898 Curtis photographed "Princess Angeline," the daughter of Chief Sealth (from whom the city of Seattle took its name). One photo is a formal portrait. Another, titled "The Mussel Gatherer," shows Princess Angeline collecting shellfish on the shore of the Puget Sound. From that beginning image to the publication of the final volume of The North American Indian in 1930, Curtis built an unprecedented catalog of images of Indians. Curtis's work is nothing short of stunning--the 20 illustrated volumes of The North American Indian, and the 20 portfolios of large photogravures, represent an exhaustive effort to create a complete catalog of the Native peoples of North America; in all, Curtis shot more than 40,000 photographs of Native North Americans. His work paralleled an enormous change in anthropology, a shift from the universal cultural evolutionary stages established by Lewis Henry Morgan and based, in part, on a strict understanding of Darwinian theories of evolution applied 299 to a model of culture, to the cultural relativism taught by Franz Boas, which held that the differences in peoples were the results of historical, social, and geographic conditions and that all populations had equally developed cultures with unique histories. Boas also emphasized the practice of studying a culture in all its aspects--including religion, art, history, and language--as well as the physical characteristics of the people, and urged the collection of this data as a method for constructing a people's complete cultural profile. Like Boas, Curtis endeavored to record not only the "vanishing" but also the "vanished." His end goal: to create a comprehensive work documenting the North American Indian recording language, history, stories, lifeways, and images. Through careful framing, cropping, costuming, and captioning Curtis set out to photograph the American imaginary of what the Native North American peoples were. At once a gesture inclusive of the past and an active interpretation and infilling of that past. This is not to say, as Lyman might suggest, that the Curtis photographs are boundless (or groundless) acts of fancy that might have been achieved in a studio as easily as in the field. But the photographs were documents engaging with an active and ongoing sense of nostalgia, an interpretive "looking backward" firmly rooted in an active and dynamic present. The North American Indian also represents an enormous textual achievement. The collected stories, chronicles, songs, languages, and descriptions of Native lifeways offer evidence collected during a period of rapid change in the United States and in the opportunities and hardships of its Native peoples. 300 Curtis's photography, however, offers his most enduring and best-known legacy. His photographs of Native peoples have enjoyed different periods of popular circulation as posters, book-covers, prints, and the subject of new anthologies.111 Curtis's images also continue to be the subject for new investigations, exhibitions, research, and scholarly conferences. The Curtis photographs can be seen as occupying three distinct areas: first the categorical, but non-typological for human subjects, including activities, and objects of material culture. While these photographs deserve an in-depth discussion of their own, for the purposes of this dissertation I will be focusing on Curtis's images of people. Second, the people, including two distinct sub genres--those photographs of named individuals that assume an iconic and almost heroic quality (including such subjects as "Chief Joseph­Nez Perce" and "Bear's Belly­Arikara"), and those that give only a tribal name and a designation by age (old woman, matron, maiden, and young girl, for example). Included in this second subset are typological photographs of people. Such photographs of "type" are emblematic and categorical, more templates than possible agents. And third the romantic, images that have been the focus of much of the conflict over the "straight" documentary value of Curtis's work and the significance of his contributions. In this last area we find such photographs as 111 See Curtis, Edward Sheriff, Visions of a Vanishing Race, (Boston: Houghton Miflin Company, 1968); Portraits from North American Indian Life, (Outerbridge & Lazard, Inc., 1972); The Portable Curtis, (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Co., 1976); Selected Writings of Edward S. Curtis, edited by Barry Gifford, (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1976); The Vanishing Race, (New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1977); Native Nations: first Americans as seen by Edward S. Curtis, edited by Christopher Cardozo, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), for example. 301 "The Vanishing Race," "Invocation­Sioux," and "Prayer to the Mystery," but we also find such images as "A Son of the Desert." Here the "emblematic" quality of one image standing for an entire people is taken even further. Instead of the sleight of hand that "reveals" one set of representations as standing for an entire group, such photos as "The Vanishing Race" gesture not only toward an entire people or group of nations, but also indicate something that exceeds category. (All photographs on the following pages are from Northwestern University Library, Edward S. Curtis's `The North American Indian': the Photographic Images, 2001.) 302 Photograph 5.10, "http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iencurt.cp08001; "Invocation­Sioux,' and Photograph 5.11, "Prayer to the Mystery" http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iencurt.cp03016. 303 ;Photograph 5.12, "The Vanishing Race," http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iencurt.cp01001. 304 Photograph 5.13, "Bear's Belly­Arikara" http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iencurt.cp05003, and Photograph 5.14, "Chief Joseph­Nez Perce" http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iencurt.cp03034. 305 Photograph 5.15, "A Son of the Desert­Navaho" http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iencurt.cp01032, and Photograph 5.16, Kalispel Type" http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iencurt.cp07018; CURTIS AND THE FORMATION OF RECORD Curtis's most substantial contribution to history is the creation of a particular popular archive. By use, an archive makes itself available for readings that support either the original intent(s) of the compiler, or an oppositional reading. Curtis's historical impact is powerful. But the existing body of work also creates a space for critical engagement, a demand for seeking beyond the imagined parameters of the representational images and engaging in critical questions of representation, category, and the ethnographic imagination. Through 306 the categorizing aspects of the overarching oeuvre one finds a peculiar relationship between the romanticism of Curtis's iconic images and the negative romanticism of his categorizing attempts. This can be understood, in part, as a difference between ethnology (the scientific study of variation between cultures) and ethnography (ethnology's companion that stresses observation over interpretation). The issues are also familiar to photography's ongoing and unresolved position, straddling the distinctions of art and document, or questions of the camera as interpretive tool or objective recording technology. It is a problematic written into the fabric of the technology itself, and that technology's intersection with a system of beliefs and perceptions. If Curtis holds a powerful place in the histories of photography and ethnology, he also holds a tenuous place. It is a place subject to pressures and limits, to the changing sensibilities not only of photography and anthropology but also to ideas of documentary evidence and the popular imaginary. One of the things that makes photography such a powerful and slippery medium is its ability to be moved through different contexts, to appear not only in such disparate venues as The North American Indian, dorm rooms, and galleries, but also that the accompanying text or placement, its surround, has enormous influence over its "read." As Clifford suggests (1997), the setting and interpretive orbit for an object profoundly determine or influence its possible meaning. The 307 museum, for example, becomes a powerful theater of possible counter-readings for a photo portrait, providing a number of possible public subject identities.112 The North American Indian contains an exhaustive encyclopedia of images, but this enormous work is not the body upon which Curtis has made his deepest impression in the popular imaginary. That impression and sense of both the known and the nostalgic is based on a much smaller sample. Curtis leaves a curious and contended legacy. In considering Curtis as the creator of romantic and monolithic monographs or Curtis as a cataloguer of types over individuals, we must look at the images that made the larger impression. One of the dominant impressions of Curtis's work is the romantic one--the vanishing Indian, taking leave from this mortal coil through the warm sepia tones and partially soft focus backgrounds of the photograph, dressed in traditional native garb, looking at once resolute and timeless, epic and damned. Cataloguing creates a map of the "known" world, a record that becomes the narrative itself, displacing what it sets out to record and, through this act of displacement, rendering its origins invisible. One of the things that has been most striking about Curtis and the photographers of his era, is that the record created to describe the vanishing Indian does not acknowledge its own complicity in that process. Photographers such as Curtis are often presented as marginal, along the periphery of white dominance or conquest, cataloging and collecting images in the face (or just ahead) of a voracious white expansion. But such photographic 112 See Clifford, "Four Northwest Coast Museums." Clifford draws from Tradition and Change on the Northwest Coast: the Makah, Nuu-chah-nulth, southern Kwakiutl, and Nuxalk by Ruth Kirk. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986. 308 projects played an important role in this expansion. The control of the West depended on a control of its history-making processes, including those of image making. The very creation of a narrative record of disappearance enforces and supports the processes of disappearance. Colonial expansion depended on control of representational technologies as much as on the maintenance of boundaries, armed forces, and development. This is part of the problematics of such a body of work as Curtis provides, a unique genre of photography that shared a number of elements with other schools of thought and image-making, but that also used this combination to bring forth a singular practice and melding of documentary, ethnographic, and romantic photography in the making of the colonial Other. The presentation of the Other as strange solidifies their difference while the same stroke cements our similarities (our being the great unseen community that occupies the looking end of this particular looking glass). Or, as Robert Berkhofer more succinctly states, "The Indian is what the white is not."113 This is what makes Curtis such a devil to get at, and what makes his contributions so rich--the unusual tension of this body of work, the clear and present hand of the photographer and the desire to make the documents transparent, somehow, as a version of "pure recording." 113 Berkhofer. 309 PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE FORMATION OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN SUBJECT It is not surprising that the camera, as a product of nineteenth century science (along with the evolutionary theory that spawned Social Darwinism and its incumbent acts of organized brutality), became an accessory to the process of domination. ... Here was a machine that could make of this landscape a surface; of this territory a map; of this man, this woman, this living child, a framed, hand-held, negotiable object to be looked at, traded, possessed: the perfect tool for the work of the `wasi'chu,' the greedy one who takes the fat. [Grady 1989: 5]114 Photographs of American Indians, particularly those taken in the last half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, comprise a rich archive of historic and iconic images. This time period is important for two reasons: it marks the beginnings of anthropology and photography and, it marks the entry of the American Indian (as object and subject) into both systems of knowledge. During this period, the photographic project reflected and paralleled a concurrent ethnographic (and colonial) project, the scientific cataloguing of the Other--"[f]or an anthropology deeply rooted in positivism, photography offered a tempting proposition: an objective vision and collection of `facts,' facilitating systemic organization and analysis, in the service of scientific enquiry"(Wright 1992: 20). 114 From Dennis Grady's article, this passage carries the following footnote: "`Wasi'chu' is a Lakota term describing the first Europeans to come into contact with them on the northern plains. Johansen and Maestas explain the term's modern usage: `Wasi'chu has come to mean those corporations and individuals, with their governmental accomplices, which continue to covet Indian lives, land, and resources for private profit. Wasi'chu does not describe a race; it describes a state of mind." (p.5) 310 Curtis's work represents this period. While his romantic images may be faulted for their lack of veracity as "authentic" ethnographic documents,115 they cannot be faulted for providing distinct and important documentary and ethnographic evidence.116 His photographs, and the genre of photography of American Indians,117 provide popular representations that resonate with popular anthropological discourses of the time. These included the idea of cultural survivals, of others rendered as exemplary icons to explain or illustrate whole peoples, and a belief in the making of an unproblematic record through technologies of representation. Curtis's photographs, then, may be read as authentic constructions representing the Indian in the white imagination (Berkhofer 1979) and the position of the Other in discourses of science, history, and anthropology. The realization that a number of Curtis's photographs were deliberately staged or retouched118 is not a new insight, but it does underscore the arbitrary nature of image making and image-reception; it is "a reminder of the contractual element of the visual contract with reality" (Taussig 1993: 24). This element can also be realized as a contextual element, seating the photograph within the 115See Lyman; Scherer, "You Can't Believe Your Eyes: Inaccuracies in Photographs of North American Indians"; Bush & Mitchell; Chaat-Smith, "Every Picture Tells a Story"; Dippie, "Representing the Other: The North American Indian"; Durham; Grady; Lippard; Tremblay; and Vizenor, "Ishi Bares his Chest." 116Indeed, the American Indian, like many marginalized peoples, continues to serve as fodder for projects both photographic and anthropological. 117I use this cumbersome term to distinguish such images from American Indian photographs--photographs taken by American Indians. 118 Lyman. 311 contexts of its own production. For, "[w]hat a photograph shows us is how a particular thing could be seen, or could be made to look--at a specific moment, in a specific context, by a specific photographer employing specific tools" (Coleman 1998: 57). The arbitrariness of photographs provokes a critical assessment of the practice of photography and of the reliance on photographic records as "windows on the real" (Burgin 1982). It forces the realization, or at least the suspicion, that all photographs are more or less simulations.119 In the gap between more and less lies the utility of photographs as documents and the implication of photographs as varying measures and illustrations of truth, reality, or authenticity. While understanding that a photograph as a transcriptive artifact (Grady 1989), the remaining question concerns the context of the photograph's use, its participation in a particular economy of meaning through articulation with and against other symbols, signs, settings, and text. What makes a photograph such an intriguing object is its ability to shrug off its leash, to be recontextualized in other settings, uses, or narratives. In this light, the MPMRC is a powerful contextualizing register. The scale of the museum and research center, the richness of its exhibitions, and the advanced state of its technology all serve as constant reminders of the ability of 119I use Baudrillard's term here cautiously. The theory of simulacra adds a certain perspective to the discussion of photographic images. However, I hesitate to designate photographs as simulacric constructions. By nature, photographs are representative constructions. To put too much emphasis on their identity as simulations would be to diffuse an ability to talk about them as they are, as highly charged and resonant images that affect the viewer through a panoply of registers and associations. 312 the Mashantucket Pequots to not only control but to create their own self representation. Their ability to operate on such a level also underlines their financial power. No one who travels to the MPMRC can be unaware of the nearby casino, itself a tangible measure of this tribal nation's ability to successfully navigate the complex issues of identity politics, and federal and state legislation. The "contract with reality" presented by the portraits is reaffirmed through the registers of place and tribal nationhood. A BENJAMINIAN CONSIDERATION Walter Benjamin describes the tensions between film's ability to both mimic and illustrate the subconscious, and the active project of film-making that seeks to smooth over the gaps, allowing unconscious slippage between the two. As he notes of the camera's point-of-view and its presentation of a filmed scene as a deceit-free scene: "the equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology"(Benjamin 1969: 233). The final cut, in which the viewer steps into the point of view of the cameraperson and shares the perspective of the viewfinder, buries the spectacle of film production. Here, filmmaking and photography clearly parallel; the point-of-view of the lens of a still camera is an intersection easily as tension filled. Photography, with its silent and frozen moment, its particular ability as a commodity to be easily cast loose from its original contextualizing technological or narrative moorings, may be the more problematic medium. Not only are there tensions between the subconscious 313 revelatory aspects of such photographs as "Prayer to the Great Mystery" or "Invocation--Sioux," and the technology and process of shooting, editing, and presenting the finished photographs, but the placement of these photographs within the entirety of The North American Indian underlines ideological and historical tensions as well. Access to such narrative-making processes of The North American Indian reflects a positional strategy--a sometimes subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle appropriation of history itself--and the formation of identity by active repositioning within a dominant historical narrative. Debunking certain Curtis images to expose hidden contradictions is not the only point in critiquing the work. In the case of "Before the White Man Came--Palm Canyon" for example, carrying the date 1924, it does little to either the narrative of the image or its imagined impact to point out that Palm Springs (the photograph's nearby site) was founded in 1876 and incorporated in 1938. The adult woman in the photograph--bare to the waist and offered in a visually seductive three-quarter profile--has almost certainly come into contact with "white men." The text following the image's caption, locating it in the Agua Caliente Reservation, indicates that the photograph was taken well after the establishment of the reservation system by the Federal government. And Curtis himself, on the other side of the tripod and camera, must be recognized as yet another influential "white man" evident in the photograph's "moment." But this kind of factual debunking misses a few key points. While the image can be deconstructed for its shortcomings as a strictly documentary image, if we restrict its definition as a documentary image (a highly problematic designation that will 314 be glossed here in its idealized sense as an "objectively factual recording") to the framing and accompanying text selected by its author, we must embrace it as a powerfully documentary image of its time. The key realization, as in any discussion of documentary photography, is precisely what the photograph documents. 315 Photograph 5.17: "Before the White Man Came--Palm Cañon." Northwestern University Library, Edward S. Curtis's `The North American Indian': the Photographic Images, 2001. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.award/iencurt.cp15001 316 While Curtis might argue that one major motivation for the creation of The North American Indian was the rendering of a valuable service to "the world of art and literature," he also suggested that it represented "a substantial and comprehensive addition to the documentary knowledge possessed by the human race."120 It is precisely this tension, between the interpretive and the documentary that has dogged photography since its inception. In the forward to Native Nations, editor Christopher Cardozo describes Curtis's effort thus: "to catalog how Indians lived prior to their contact with the white man." Curtis himself could not have improved on this thumbnail description. Within that one contradictory phrase we may see all of the conflicts and triumphs of his life's work. The idea of a pre-contact recording, that depends on the very real contact of photographer and subject, may seem ludicrous in its built-in contradiction. While Curtis imagined his work at the edge of art and science, he also imagined that the setting for the images, and their accompanying fieldwork, lent them a supreme veracity: "being directly from Nature, the accompanying pictures show what actually existed, not what the artist in his studio may presume the Indian and his surroundings to be" (Cardozo 1993: 19). Or, as Teddy Roosevelt summed it up in the preface to The North American Indian: In Mr. Curtis we have both an artist and a trained observer, whose pictures are pictures, not merely photographs; whose work has far more than mere 120 From the forward to volume 9 of The North American Indian, written on the death of his patron J. Pierpont Morgan in 1913. 317 accuracy, because it is truthful. [Roosevelt 1906, as cited in B. Gifford, The Portable Curtis, 1976: i] But the battle lines between record and interpretation are often drawn in terms of degree rather than kind--much of the ability to make such distinctions rests upon the strange artifact that the photograph itself presents. Photographs enjoy a particular kind of circulation, and a particular ability to transgress boundaries (of genre, discipline, language, or culture, for example). For a photograph is a curious and potentially dangerous thing. It represents a moment stripped from time, invested with two-dimensional and forced perspective, subject to aestheticized decisions involving point-of-view, processing, enlarging, cropping, re-presentation as a print, or as a print within other changing contexts. A decontextualized moment fixed by representational technology, a photograph offers the opportunity for almost limitless shifting and altering recontextualizations. Curtis's work, for example, has gone through a number of different uses and appreciations since the publication of The North American Indian, and the symbolic value and cultural capital of the images have experienced a series of dramatic changes. From a fairly small and specialized circulation, the images entered a decades-long period of obscurity. It has since gone through different renaissances, or different stages of one long rebirth, including counter-cultural icons of resistance and struggle in the 1960s, and use as a source of cultural 318 critique and image deconstruction in the 1980s.121 They now occupy a space of mixed appreciation and double-edged apprehension. This is not solely a series of observations about the power of contextualization and the nuances of recontextualizing efforts and strategies. The shifting venues for and value of the Curtis images are not necessarily part of a grand progression toward accuracy or authentic representation. "Greater," "better," or "more complete" contextualizations will not solve the images' inherent problems of accuracy, authenticity, and representation. Representations are always "incomplete" or "inaccurate"--they can be nothing else. Images are, by nature, the product of positioned perspective. Shifting the point of their positioning or layering the image(s) with more and more complex contextualizations does little to uncover the "truth" of individual Curtis images or of the images as an entire body of work. The nature of image making is contradictory and transitory. A photograph confirms a moment of exposure at the same time that it fixes it, removing the moment and, indeed, the concept of dynamic time itself. The photograph both inhabits and is inhabited by this moment, transforming that contact point into an iconic image that begins a life of circulation as an object (Appadurai 1986). Within this extended moment (from initial exposure to finished print) is sketched the transition from subject to object, a transition that parallels anthropology's own 121 Over the last 30 years as well, Curtis's images have slowly raised in value on the art photo market while increasingly carrying the burden for colonial imaging and the imposition of a traditional representation through theatrical means--costumes, settings, and period accuracy, for example. 319 problematic process from theory and fieldwork to text. As Elizabeth Edwards states: "In anthropology [as] in photography, the specific moment becomes representative of the whole and the general" (Edwards 1992). Deciding which moment is deeply, ideologically embedded. One of the realizations that must be made when viewing photographs, particularly the Curtis portraits and their appeal to an advanced iconics, is the extent to which the photographic document is the product of intense mediation. This mediating process includes the reciprocity and mutual understandings involved between the photographer and the photographic subject--no matter what informs these understandings or how out of balance they may be--and between the photographic technology and the photographed site. What is remarkable in many of the Curtis photographs is not only their timeless quality and the pictured pristine isolation or wilderness of their backgrounds, but the realization that Curtis worked with glass plates and a large view camera. It is partly this Benjaminian orchid-like location of the mechanics of Curtis's work that provides a possible blossoming of awareness for approaching a Curtis portrait critically. It is also this location, this seamed gap between the mediated and the immediacy of the photo portrait that is problematized in Neel's portraiture. WHAT PHOTOGRAPHS ARE AND HOW THEY ARE MEDIATED Photographs, as a form of optical recording, inherently contain certain weaknesses, unique distinctions that separate their ability to record as distinctly different from the eyes' ability. The lens optics render the world with linear 320 perspective, foreshortened. With different lenses, this sense of perspective changes--long lenses "compress" space, juxtaposing objects near and far in a "flattened" rendition that blurs distinctions of distance. Shorter lenses emphasize the distance between objects and, at the same time, begin to affect the perspective of the vertical. Vertical lines begin to converge, buildings "keystone," accentuating the weight of their bases, their nearness to the lens. Although each camera format has a designated "normal" focal length lens (indicating a distortion-free focal-length approximating the human eye for that particular format) this designation is problematic. There is no lens with an indexical relationship to the eye's perspective. The photograph is mediated from its inception, a result of a mechanical interaction and intersection with the seen. As a monocular device, the camera creates a flat, two-dimensional field of vision. In its very act of "seeing," of transmitting light to the film plane, lens optics are distinctly different from the depth of binocular vision. As the optics transform depth or space, the event of the photograph transforms time. The event itself is implied in the rendering of a photograph, but an indexical relationship to such event's time as dynamic is removed, creating an inherent loss in photographic imagery. Reading or viewing a photograph might then be realized as an exercise in nostalgia, in the desire for filling the gap between flat and frozen image and actual event. "As experience is increasingly mediated and abstracted, the lived relation of the body to the phenomenological world is replaced by a nostalgic myth of contact and presence" (Stewart 1993: 137). To consider the viewing of a 321 photograph only as a mediated and nostalgic exercise, however, would be overly limiting. As a trope of loss, such a reading connects the full realization of the image in its connection with the past, and its possible indications for the future. It approaches the image as a gateway for "making sense," but pursues this sense along the avenues of the creation of a past-centric narrative. The experience of viewing is primitive, however, potentially explosive, and outside of language. Nostalgia, as a theory linking loss and the present, falls short in describing the sensual impact of vision itself. Although the mediations inherent in "making sense" of an image are clearer--in body, memory, and theory--it is this primitive state of raw apprehension or sensual experience that remains outside of a generalizing theoretical approach. Here the photograph occupies the territory between the expressive and the critical, between the sensual experience of sight and the abstract experience of theory; these categories are not discrete. KNOWLEDGE, NORMALIZATION, AND THE THEFT OF SOULS The collection of photographs of American Indians that continued through the end of the nineteenth century, enacted as parts of cataloging campaigns, photographs of delegates to Washington,122 or Ishi photo opportunities behind his home in the university museum in Berkeley, California, are parts of a positioned knowledge (Vizenor 1992). Some American Indians, such as Oglala Sioux leader Crazy Horse, refused to have their picture taken, thereby rejecting incorporation 122 Images like this are extensive. See Scherer, "You Can't Believe Your Eyes: Inaccuracies in Photographs of North American Indians"; Lippard; or Bush and Mitchell, for example. 322 into a collection of images in the hands of the whites (Grady 1989). To lose control over one's representation, to lose control over the context of one's own imaged "presence" is the loss of control over an integral aspect of self, akin to the loss of one's soul. A self that loses the context of its appearance and the photographic event becomes a flat visage, an object in the stream of commodities participating in the conquest of the West and the domination of its Native peoples. Inclusion within the expanding corpus of Indian photographs also continued the confusion and collapse carried out within the generalizing category "Indian." Before Wounded Knee, the ultimate massacre of the "Indian Wars," tribes retained a certain particularity. Even if "Indian" was a category in use from first contact, its overarching powers of inclusion and conclusion were checked by the identities of tribes and tribal nations. While the tribes and their leaders were identified as singular bands in armed opposition to the United States--over violations of treaties, the encroachment of settlers, speculators, prospectors, and removal from their lands--they maintained a group of singular identities: as nations entering into compacts with the government, as peoples coming in delegations to Washington, and even as Indians traveling in Wild West shows. The creation of catalogs, like the end of the Indian Wars, supported the final dominance of the all-inclusive category of Indian, a category that served to normalize an understanding of what it was to be an Indian and what such a designation demanded in terms of appearance. The catalogs of photographs and the trade in images supported this normalizing category, as did the placement of the photographic subjects within a 323 place of static time, removed from localized space. In the Curtis photographs, for example, the landscape becomes secondary, often chosen for the composition of the photograph rather than for conveying a sense of place. Mountains were popular, as were endless horizons with a reflecting body of water in the foreground. Dark and ominous skies, dramatic clouds, endless prairies. Within the white imagination, these sort of settings contributed to the normalizing perspective and perception of the American Indian: a "blanket people," removed from the distinction of category and national belonging, represented as vanishing "chiefs" and "warriors," romantic and doomed. This portrayal was integral to incorporate them within such a narrative. Like other forms of representation, the photograph served to fill a need that was prescribed by its own existence. The use of props and wigs was not so much an affront to ideals of "objective" reporting--some sort of clear picture onto the real--but it extended the category and depiction of the Indian as belonging to the past. It extended a narrative that located the authentic Indian in the past, discounting or dismissing contemporary Indians without regalia or noble poses. Similarly, the photo typologies did nothing to change this perception as they de-individualized their subjects as a measure of type, firmly rooting them as examples rather than agents. The growing popularity of photography and the increased portability of photographic equipment in the first half of the nineteenth century, contributed to the rapid expansion of the genre of Indian photography. Refinement in film and paper emulsions and lens optics over the years, have made the camera a portable and easy-to-use recording instrument. But what precisely is it the camera records? 324 PHOTOGRAPHS--WHAT AND HOW THEY DOCUMENT Photographs remove the subject from the flow of time and space. While this can be argued as a problematic element of photographic practice--paralleling the concept of an atemporal ethnographic present (Fabian 1983)--it is also the source of photography's most powerful attribute. A removal from time allows the space of contemplation, a meditative space that also allows for dialogue, recognition, or potential recontextualization on the part of the viewer (Benjamin 1969; Greenblatt 1991). The process of recontextualization is not always a source for affirmation. Rendering the photographic subject as photographic object, much like the creation of an ethnographic Other, removes the subject self from the ongoing process of his or her own representation. But it is this dual aspect of time in the photograph that is important to keep in mind. While a photograph can be read as a static representation of the subject at the instant of the film's exposure, the photograph is also an ongoing and active object within the process of ``making-meaning" that lies at the heart of the photo-viewing or photo-receiving. Indeed, that lies at the heart of any participation with an act of representation. In the same measure, photographs hold the potential for powerful recontextualizations and re-readings, as documents of particular historical discourse.123 123See Clifford, "Four Northwest Coast Museums." See also Lippard, for an extended multiple exercise of this photo-reading strategy, and Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981), for a discussion of the phenomenological and semiotic extensions of such a viewing practice. 325 The photographic subject becomes photographed object, an object that enters particular fields of constructed meanings, of multiple potential contextualizations. The photograph "forces a concentration on the picture edge--the line that separates in from out" (Szarkowski 1966: 9). It thus enters the discursive fields of anthropology and photographic practice as a singular and intensified cultural object. Photographs, appreciated as objects, as icons or indexes, become visual quotations; signs mixing a double-meaning of apprehension as both a way of knowing and a way of critically assessing the appearance of a re-contextualized referent (Stewart 1993). Photography as visual quotation indicates the image as a point of departure, as a point of contemplation, and as a point of entry within the texts of ethnographic and photographic structures of knowledge. Photographs invoke an image that holds itself frozen and fleeting, momentarily caught in the motion of looking backward while indicating the present and the future--a point of departure and of ethnographic and historical attention. And the photograph is a perfect document for representing stasis--not only a static image but also an enforcement of static time. Here the methodologies and theoretical bases of both a young anthropology and an equally young photography are very much co-indicative and co-dependent. Photographs occupy an important gap between signifier and signified, a resonant space that is filled with meaning in an effort to bridge this breech, to smooth the gap between a "real" time and referential time. It is this gap that is often bridged by an anticipation of the real, an expectation or longing for the photograph to be a direct transfer of the real, visible world. 326 Current ethnographic practice stresses an engagement with the subjects of study that often translates to political or social activism. The belief in any sort of representational technology as a transparent recording medium has been brought under close, even cynical, scrutiny. And the ability to imagine an ethnographic subject at the distance of a "survival," closer to nature than to culture, has been the locus of extended theoretical critique. Anthropological and photographic practice are concerned with the creation of a record, the (re)presentation of actual events, or of someone crossing the field of the camera. With the creation of such a record, the specific moment becomes general, a representative of the whole. Both disciplines rely on a shared concept of the "real," as technologies that capture and deliver "reality." But this delivery does not solely depend on their respective technologies. It also depends on expectation; "in other words the photograph is perceived as `real' or `true' because that is what the viewer expects to see: `this is how it should be' becomes `this is how it is/was'" (Edwards 1992: 32). The same holds true for ethnographic texts. But this realization can also be inverted and, in so doing, enters a highly charged zone of identity politics where "this is how it was" becomes "this is how it should be." This is a powerful legacy of photographs of American Indians, for example. Romantic, nostalgic images have set powerful conceptual precedence supporting a "vanished" Indian as an "authentic" Indian. Roland Barthes examined this problematic relationship, between what a photograph shows and what it represents, between a denotative aspect of the image, that which it is, and a connotative aspect, that which it illustrates or the 327 meaning it conveys (Barthes 1977). Through these two aspects, he hoped to develop a way to explore, and decode, photographs. But the opposition of denotative and connotative aspects calls for an initial figuring of the photograph as a pure object, a literal text, a purely visual image. John Tagg suggests this effort to strip bare a "purely visual image" is "nothing but an Edenic fiction" (Tagg 1988: 188). Allan Sekula also rejects the denotative function of photographs, suggesting that the idea of a primitive core of meaning in a photograph, devoid of all cultural determination, is illusory at best. The concept of denotation is useful, however, as illustrative of what might be called the "folklore of pure denotation," the "ideal type" of photograph as neutral evidence that elevates the photograph to the legal status of a document and testimonial. It generates a mythic aura of neutrality around the image. I deliberately refuse to separate the photograph from the notion of task. A photographic discourse is a system within which [a] culture harnesses photographs to various representational tasks. [Sekula 1975: 37] Sekula's observations parallel contemporary movements in poststructuralism that problematize a separation between metaphoric and literal meaning, and seek to analyze all language or representative systems as inherently metaphorical or tropological. As a representational task, a photograph becomes an icon that is invested with meaning. It becomes a vehicle for transmitting a message, a message that exceeds its own containment. This understanding significantly de-centers the photograph as neutral document, while it opens the photograph to consideration as 328 an object that reflects shifts in structures of knowledge. In other words, "the photograph, as it stands, presents merely the possibility of meaning" (Sekula 1975: 37). What is critical to understand is what is mobilized to fill this possibility, how photographs are placed within representational contexts of anthropology and photographic practice, for example. How the contextualization of an image within a discipline can effect its viewing, or the task it performs within a given perspective or direction; and how the investment of meaning can change direction--how a photograph, as document, can be re-read against the grain of its original message or context. The generic sources of the photograph place the photographic object into important initial fields of orbit. The possibility of a discrete boundary between discursive fields matters less than the meaning made from such an object, however, how the photograph is placed and how it is used. Photographs from the formative period of "Indian photography" are documents of cross-cultural encounter and cultural relations (between EuroAmerican photographers and Native peoples) rather than solely documents of their subject:.124 Photographs of American Indians continue to form a large part of what is thought of as knowledge and truth about American Indian people. If one understands the photograph to be a document of cultural relations, however, one must also understand it as a document of power. A photograph appropriates its subject and, in so doing, allows the viewer to enter into a certain power relation 124 See Penney, David W., Images of Identity: American Indians in photographs, (Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1994); Edwards; and Lippard. 329 with the visible that feels like knowledge. To challenge this relationship, photographs of American Indians must re-enter the power dynamics of a current now, to be seen not as the images of archaic survivals but as part of "an ongoing process, politically contested and historically unfinished" (Clifford 1988: 9). The Neel photographs emphasize the unfinished and ongoing process at Mashantucket. They offer powerful documentary evidence of the tribal nation at a particular point in its history, displayed through the faces and circumstances of its people. The activity of the portraits is, in part, achieved by their ability to straddle a number of photographic genres. For it is difficult to pin down exactly what the Neel photographs are. Documentary? Straight Portraiture? Ethnographic? The photographs participate in all of these categories and serve as catalogue, record, and art. But their placement is key to their multiple project--context, to an extent, decides use value and the portraits perform a number of interconnected tasks at the same time. The power dynamics of a current now are expressed, in large part, by the placement of the images in the final MPMRC exhibition gallery. The contemporaneity of the museum, and the present issues of Native identity and history which are the backbone of its entire exhibition plan, locate the tribal nation and tribal members in a present moment. As photographs, the Neel portraits offer particular kinds of historical and documentary information about their subjects. Photographs, however, are more than a medium of information. What they show, how, and where are all parts of a complex interpretive--and often invisible--process. 330 Photograph 5.18: From A Tribal Portrait. Photo by David Neel. 331 In photograph 5.18, the distinctive elements of the paired portraits from Our Chiefs and Elders are again compressed, and signs of recognizable Indianness--buckskin dress and footwear, jewelry--are blended with other, contemporary signs that do not reflect popular notions of Indianness--the highbacked chair and white crew socks, for example. There are elements that clearly foreground the photo-making activity from which this image is drawn: the edge of the backdrop is visible, a stand holding the canvas catches light in the otherwise dark right edge of the picture, another canvas backdrop has been placed on the floor to almost effectively remove the "place" of the image. The horizon line is skewed, the shadows rich and soft. The main light is broad and directional. Unlike images from his earlier project, however, a family group is this photograph's focus. Rather than a discussion of family origins and place, the group here is shown in the moment, present, as if family and connection are reckoned in a space similar to that of the image--framed together and mixing signs. In contrast to iconic (and overwhelmingly solo) portraits done in the style of Curtis, this photograph blends a family group as a composite image of a tribal family. Compare this image to photographs 5.21 and 5.23. Both images of tribal member families, they actively play with signs of popularly (and not-sopopularly) recognizable Indianness, shifting from regalia and headdresses to a single Mashantucket Pequot logo on a polo shirt. What is critical in understanding this collection of photographs is their ability to transgress a variety of expected or anticipated signs and genres to unsettle popular understandings of Indianness, formal photo portraiture, and the 332 identifications of race and ethnicity. While a micro analysis of individual images can further problematize the formal disjunctures of the photographs, reading the group of images as a whole provides some of the exhibitions more powerful, and subtle, statements. What is made clear by the collection of photographs is the representation of Mashantucket Pequot identity as profoundly mixed, as drawing from a variety of phenotypical features, Indian dress and objects, different recognitions of nature or the close security of a separate and photographed "place," a place that exists only for the taking of the picture and that will disappear once the photograph is done. While the arrangement of the photographs, as individual or small family group confronting or meeting the gaze of the camera's lens (and, by extension, the imagined gaze of the museum visitor) offers singular points of possible connection or identification, the overall impression of the exhibition is one of a diverse but familiar community. 333 Photograph 5.19: From A Tribal Portrait. Photo by David Neel. 334 EVOCATION AND EVIDENCE: THE PHOTOGRAPH AS DOCUMENT OF MEMORY, SENSUAL EXPERIENCE, AND POWER It has been argued that the photograph is an analogue of physical reality and that the assigning of meaning, interpretation, is a secondary activity. However, it may be more useful to consider the photograph as an analogue of visual experience, and as such, a culturally based ordering of the world in which the signifier and the signified are read at one and the same time. [Edwards 1992: 8] The dual role of the photograph, as both contributor to, and product of the US popular imaginary concerning Native Americans, focuses attention on the image's reception. Also key is the subject's journey from photographic event to photographic document. What are the tools for a photograph's ingestion as a representative object, and how can photo viewing be understood as an experience within a structure of feeling (Williams 1977)? There are different ways of assessing the problematic relationship between image and ideology, the experience of expression and the experience of criticism, and what can be understood as evocation and evidence. In photographs, these forces--the theoretical and the sensually experiential--contaminate one another. Memory serves as a bridge connecting the theoretical and the sensually experiential. The following investigation focuses on the experience of photo reception and is mimetic of the experience of a photograph that gains attention--through association, consideration, and experience--to rapidly overspill its own attempted boundaries. Photographs experience their widest use as documents, as iconic representations of particular narratives alone, or as objects in adjunct to other 335 narratives. One overwhelming use of the photograph is as a "realistic" illustration, as an integral element in an argument for attention. This emphasis depends on thinking of the photograph as an evidential representation. As a representation claiming evidential authority, photographs are often deployed in discourses of power. Photographs have become part of a system of information, a vast "shadow archive" (Sekula 1989) of all things photographed, waiting for categorization and utilization. Here, photographs straddle an uneasy fence-line between a magic of subject acquisition and such acquisition's potential use within a system of identification, normalization, and evidence. As in the case of Curtis's photographs, these potential uses change as the systems that put them to use change. As evidential power, or elements of different discursive regimes, photographs have come to be examined for what they mean, how they fit into and are used by different narrative and power structures. Photography as such has no identity. Its status as a technology varies with the power relations which invest it. Its nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work. Its function as a mode of cultural production is tied to definite conditions of existence and its products are meaningful and legible only within the particular currencies they have. Its history has no unity. It is a flickering across a field of institutional spaces. And it is this field we must study, not photography as such. [Tagg 1993: 11­12, emphasis added] Photographs occupy a field of meaning decided by use and use value. The effort is one of examining the motivations, framings, and implications of their appearance within an ideological and textual framework. Susan Sontag's On 336 Photography concentrates on understanding the code of the visual document in relation to that which surrounds or supports it, either in text or in site.125 Understanding the generic distinctions between different uses of the photograph maps different exercises in evocation and evidence. An insistence on discerning and understanding the code, however, relies on the imposition of a code-based system of meaning onto representations, which are further nuanced by their inescapable relation to sensual experience. A search for the code creates a viewing system that is dominated by semiotic perception, truncated from the sensual and essential. These exercises in discerning generic difference and in mapping intent and use move further away from the photograph as a site of sensual experience, and closer to understanding it as a site for ideological analysis. Photographs are judged for their appearance, their surfacing within particular contexts, in light of "what dependencies they create, what antagonisms they pacify--that is, what institutions they buttress, whose needs they really serve" (Sontag 1973: 178). As such, the photographs are fit into a narrative of power, and are read for what they indicate about a particular structure of power. Photographs are a particular kind of narrative device, and the representations themselves must be investigated for positionality. Here the motives of the image-maker and the image-receiver are brought under closer inspection. Ideas of truthful representation, mediation, and the processing of image reception into information beyond the visual become the focus. In this 125In museums, galleries, courtrooms, universities, or police stations, for example. 337 approach, however, the image is in danger of becoming complete metaphor, a visual stimulus that leads to the formation of ideological sense. While such analysis is useful in understanding processes of representation, the image as visual experience is elided. One possible problematic here is a seduction of seeing the representation as secondary to the original, as replacing the original. Rather, instead of supplementing or supplanting the original, it serves to create the original. . . . each fiction contaminates the imaginary purity of everyday life by denying the privileged authority of immediate, lived context and that context's subsequent `authenticity' of experience. [Stewart 1993: 21] Mediation, understood as an interpretive distancing from an imagined "real," is a function, not an effect, of representation. Equally problematic is the idea of a non-mediated experiential site conceived as buttress for a use-value critique, which shifts the plane of significant experience from the event to the experience of the record of the event. In photography, the preliminary means for egress to the event and to the record of the event are so closely parallel as to almost be the same: the sense of sight. Such experience, however, is neither limited to nor contained by this discrete sense. How then to view a photograph, and what does the act of viewing entail? Viewing necessarily includes larger processes and extensions of memory, and the utilization of different systems of knowledge and recognition. In About Seeing, John Berger introduces the idea of radial memory and image--that the photograph doesn't so much represent a segment of time, captured and fixed, as an image that leads or points away from itself into an infinite variety of 338 connections and stimulations. He suggests that the presentation of a photograph should necessarily reflect this: Words, comparisons, signs need to create a context for a printed photograph . . . they must mark and leave open diverse approaches. A radial system has to be constructed around the photograph so that it may be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday, and historic. [Berger 1980: 62­63] In many ways the concern for creating structures allowing the exercise of radial memory closely resembles current trends in museum and exhibition design including supplementary text and objects, image grouping or juxtaposition, the use of open-ended information sources (like multi-directed touch-screen computer displays or audio texts), and architectural strategies. Roland Barthes' ideas on writing and intertextuality, on the unboundedness of the reading experience (as well as the idea of the animating or affecting image) provide another kind of support for the concept of radial memory and presentation. Intertextual reading is an associative practice whose beginning in memory and imagination starts as a shift from text to experience. Viewing a photograph involves an initial sensual experience, what was before referred to as an overlapping parallel with the sensual experience of viewing the photographed event itself. Berger suggests, as part of an effort to further contextualize photographic images, constructing a presentation that would allow for other possible ways of making connections with the act of viewing the photograph--other texts, narratives, photographs. In this way, the act of viewing would expand from a 339 linear or constricted act into a larger, multiply connected, multiply contextualized experience. As such, viewing the photograph would be connected with other forms of memory provocation. If we want to put a photograph back into the context of experience, social experience, social memory, we have to respect the laws of memory. We have to situate the printed photograph so that it acquires something of the surprising conclusiveness of that which was and is. ... Such a context replaces the photograph in time--not its own original time for that is impossible--but in narrated time. Narrated time becomes historic time when it is assumed by social memory and social action. [Berger 1980: 60­61] Here Berger emphasizes the difference between the instantaneousness of photographs, how they freeze a moment, and the connectedness of meaning and memory. They serve to connect the moment to a narrative of history and this connection, in turn, reintroduces time and continuity. The concept of narrated time is key to approaching the final gallery of the MPMRC. An overlapping aural experience provides a particular performance of contextualization through the use of voices and spoken, personal history. 340 Photograph 5.20: Sisters Arline Phelmetta and Eunice Mitchell. Photo by David Neel. A TRIBAL PORTRAIT II The exercise of the portrait gallery extends beyond an idea of an extensive contextualizing effort. The shape of the gallery--its design as an art or photo gallery--presented as the final exhibition of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, calls for a shift in meditative space. The photographs as 341 commodity objects enjoy a different currency than the preceding objects of the museum, from life-cast figures to full-size village to examples of material culture. In the portrait gallery, the presented photographs carry the majority of the exhibition's weight. The meaning-making process in this gallery parallels the meaning-making involved in "reading" a photograph, in taking in an image and processing by the powers of memory, of imagined history, of sensual experience and visual evidence. Making sense of the images both depends on a general public knowledge of "Indianness," and receptivity to that hegemonic image being turned on its head. To use Berger's terms, a radial system been constructed in this gallery, surrounding and extending the photographs, opening the images to be seen "in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday, and historic" (Berger 1980: 63). The soundwash of recorded tribal members relating personal histories is key to this opening. The histories ground the images in a particular way without providing a one-to-one relationship between the voices and the images. More so than the group picture in the opening gallery, this group of portraits provides an extensive and multiply nuanced group photograph of the tribal nation. Here the visitor is invited to navigate between images, creating pathways and links while traversing the room, moving from voice to whisper and back again. In Our Chiefs and Elders, Neel takes great care to create an interview situation that respects the individuality of his sitters while the final collection simultaneously makes the point that the individuals involved have multiple 342 cultural roles. Each sitter is identified by family, by place, and by tribal governmental or ceremonial position and responsibility. The photographs in the book are presented together, after Neel's introduction, and the texts of the collected interviews are presented in last half of the book, in the same sequence as the images. The reader can move back and forth between image and text, from portrait to story. The narratives in the gallery, however, are individually disconnected. The stories told provide a more general voice to the collective experience of tribal members returning to the reservation or setting foot on it for the first time. The voices serve to present a more generalized personal experience of Mashantucket, opening the gallery experience to the simultaneous registers and experiences of a radial presentation. The Neel photographs occupy a territory between the evidential and the evocative, all in a more conceptual archive that creates a composite picture of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation at a particular point in time. While the gallery offers a temporally located rendering of the tribal nation, it also provides a forward-looking archive, a resource for future generations of Mashantucket Pequots. It's kind of difficult to describe, but just imagine finding out tomorrow that you are the cousin of an entire family of people that are total strangers to you, and then attempting to rejoin that family, if you will. So it definitely wasn't a socially comfortable thing, but still that sense of belonging that said the moment I was there that I would not leave. [Voice from the Mashantucket Pequot oral history project.] 343 Photograph 5.21: From A Tribal Portrait. Photo by David Neel. 344 Photograph 5.22: From A Tribal Portrait. Photo by David Neel. 345 Photograph 5.23: From A Tribal Portrait. Photo by David Neel. 346 Photograph 5.24: From A Tribal Portrait. Photo by David Neel. 347 Photograph 5.25: From A Tribal Portrait. Photo by David Neel. 348 As a portrait of the tribal nation, the collection also makes some interesting and subtle statements. First and foremost is the absence of any foregrounding or discussion of race. The tribal nation has been attacked by politicians, powerful developers, and local neighbors on grounds of race since the beginning of the Mashantucket Pequots' rise to financial power. The gallery, however, shows a wide variety of tribal members, young and old, representing a range of phenotypical features and characteristics. Race, a massive force in any discussion of Mashantucket Pequot representations of cultural identity or authenticity, is not made an explicit exhibition element. The variety of racial characteristics is paralleled by the variety of subjects and settings. Here in regalia, there at the kitchen table, here as a corporate portrait, there incorporating other historical portraits within the frame. The photographs are captioned with names only, with no further contextualization of origin, family, or occupation. The group of photographs resonates with a powerful and underlying statement: "We are all Mashantucket Pequots, each and every one. Although we may seem disparate, we present a group identity to the viewing world. And we don't have to explain ourselves to you." Race shifts from a field of contestation or challenge to a field of assertion and affirmation. The dislocated oral histories further support this sense of group identity. Without a specific identification for the speakers, or a didactic linking of voice to image, the soundwash of the intermixing voices creates an aural environment 349 where every story describes a shared history, where related experiences are made common through an anonymity of speaking. The formal conceit of the portraits, the direct gaze of the subjects, adds another unifying element to the group of photographs. Although indicative of a sitter making eye contact with the lens of the camera, and with the photographer through the camera's viewfinder, the direct portrait gaze engages with the viewer, the museum visitor, the public which, by this collective gaze, is rendered Other, the object of the photographed subjects' sight. This is the first space in the museum's exhibitions where the gaze of the visitor is met and returned. It is the last gallery of the museum, the final impression that is made before the visitors are turned loose to make their way to the museum shop or the parking lot. The overlay of multiple oral histories, the mixed sensation of visual and aural stimuli, plus the gallery as possible final node of experience in a multi-texted, multi-media museum exhibition tease at radial experience and multiple contextualization. Berger also argues for the extension and use of a social memory, however, a sense of connectedness that unites the private and the public. At this point, the MPMRC effort may be more methodological than united by a sense of close or extended community or shared sense of social memory. And here the strategies of the MPMRC may be more problematic due to the Mashantucket Pequots comparatively recent reconstitution of its reservation community, and its oftenantagonistic relationships with the towns and villages that surround it (see chapters 1 and 2). 350 The danger of photography is its ability to transform everything into public spectacle, which creates an internal present of immediate expectation: memory ceases to be necessary or desirable. With the loss of memory the continuities of meaning and judgment are also lost to us. The camera relieves us the burden of memory. [Berger 1980: 54­55] Here memory defines a sense of justice, a sense of knowing that is a part of a continuum of morality and identification. It is memory a step removed from the body and located nearer to the moral self. The act of viewing is not discretely visual. For Berger, the photograph displaces memory. Memory is invoked by looking at a photograph, but such a memory more resembles a narrative exercise. Photographs are linked to texts, possibilities of texts, ideas of radial presentations that incorporate and reflect different textual interactive levels. As such they offer the idea, most notably expounded by Bakhtin (1981), that text does not exist as a discrete object, understandable as the meaning of an author's words being linearly ingested by the reader. In the space between author and reader, between the text and the act of reading the text, exists an unbounded space of possible multiple meanings, with no authoritative closure. The act of reading is an open act, an ongoing processing and creation of meaning, which takes the text as a jumping-off place but is neither limited by nor contained within it. Seen this way not only is there no closure, but also the text's or image's reading resists fixing. As the viewer/reader changes, so does the potential understanding/sense of the object viewed or read. 351 Viewing a photograph resembles this process of reading, but with a distinct difference--that of visual sense and recognition. It is this sense that can be read as the expansive ability of an image to exceed its obvious subject. Just as the eye begins to make sense of the scene depicted, to recognize objects and their relationships within the frame, it also begins to translate the image from a twodimensional artifact to the three-dimensional event it conveys. Were the photograph to remain at the level of representation, it would be indistinguishable from other forms of pictorial rendering. Because of its connection with an event, its realization as a "trace" of a "real" that has passed in front of the lens, the photograph achieves a distinctly different form of representation. As Edwards states above, the photograph can be appreciated as an analogue of visual experience, key to creating and supporting a culturally based ordering of the world. The photograph as analogue becomes a vehicle of evidential history as well as a stimulus of memory. Berger points to the social use of a narrated time as an indicator of historic time. Social acceptance of a particular narrative moves that narrative from the private to the public. This move parallels a photograph's journey from photographic moment to incorporation in a public (narrative) discourse. It is this incorporation into public narrative that needs to be further problematized. Key here is the realization that history is not a narrative, it is narrativized (Berger 1980, Chambers1991). The public narratives that the photograph takes a place in are influenced by, and reflective of, historical force. 352 As in Benjamin's observation of history as an ever-increasing pile of wreckage with the present as the vanishing point, the underlying recognition is one of history as a force, a force that narratives or representations cluster around, describing and influenced by its power without fixing, containing, or mapping it. As such, photographs, like writing, ignite "the capacity of the imagination to be lifted through representational media, such as marks on a page, into other worlds" (Taussig 1993). Or, as Tagg reminds us: Histories are not backdrops to set off the performance of images. They are scored into the paltry paper signs, in what they do and do not do, in what they encompass and exclude, in the ways they open onto or resist a repertoire of uses in which they can be meaningful and productive. Photographs are never `evidence' of history: they are themselves historical. [Tagg 1993] If images can be read as trace, as "historical" documents, they can also be read as documents of memory. And these two strategies for reading or understanding unite under a concept of the public imaginary. The final gallery of the exhibitions both culminates and indicates the entire MPMRC design strategy. Not only has the master narrative been one of temporal erasure through a descent into the Ice Age, but it has also been the gradual infilling of time and place at Mashantucket. Tracking from prehistory to history, from contact to post-contact periods, and tying the personalized history of tribal members to particular points and eras in the larger backdrop of US history, the MPMRC recreates a localized and Mashantucket Pequot­intensified narrative of the past becoming present. The portrait gallery not only provides a contemporary moment to the end of this master narrative, it does so by 353 reintroducing the idea of dynamic time through the medium of photography. It accomplishes this by its participation in the trope of "the Indian" as photographic subject, creating a site for multiple engagement on the part of the visitor, a place for expectations and public imaginations to connect or be deflected through a personal, intensified body of images (self re)presenting a group identity. The photographs offer a shifting and uncertain ground, a latent engagement with imagined audiences; it is this point of engagement that is the most powerful and potential. The photo gallery also closes a circular exhibition narrative for the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center--from the initial introduction to the contemporary community in "Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation," through extensive and contextualizing historical exhibition galleries, to a final reckoning with/of the Mashantucket community. The information and new set of knowledges gained through this immersive journey navigating through the galleries is called upon as one "meets" the tribal members, "face to face." A Tribal Portrait also represents a process--the growing role of the museum as part of the Mashantucket community. Neel initially found it difficult to get members to sit for the portraits.126 The gallery had originally been planned based on an initial installment of photographs, and had not been intended to continue in project installments. Although the exhibition design company established no maximum number for the gallery portraits, a minimum was suggested to have on display by opening day. The popularity of participating in the project has grown since its inception, reflecting a shift in the perception of 126 Neel, private communication 1997. 354 both the gallery and the museum as a community resource. The project has gained momentum and a place has been made for ongoing participation. Neel has recently finished shooting his third installment on the project, and the entire collection of finished images now numbers over 75. The photograph exhibition parallels much of the overall impact of both the museum and the casino: that context and ownership, while not necessarily bringing a change in performance or poetics, dramatically affect the politics of representational genres. Here the actual boundaries of the image are called in to question, and interpretive frames radiate from its center. Is the edge of the representational image defined by the material photograph? The group of photographs? The gallery setting? The ongoing battle over representational power and authorship? The Neel photos are documentary, ethnographic, and straight portraiture--they participate in all these categories, and serve as catalogue, record, and art. But their placement is key to their multiple project and the portraits perform a number of interconnected tasks at the same time. As counter to the vast shadow archive of photographs of unnamed Native Americans, the Neel portraits and their context re-inscribe this image making with a connection to the present. And, by drawing a critical comparison to the existing bodies of work like Curtis's, contribute to the recontextualization and repatriation of a genre. 127 127 I use the term "repatriation" cautiously. The distinction I am trying to make is that the Neel photographs--as photographs of Native Americans taken by a Native American for use in a Native American museum--are participating in a project larger than the repatriation of a single image (see Clifford, "Four Northwest Coast Museums." and Horse Capture, George P., "Foreword," in Native Nations: first Americans as seen by Edward S. Curtis, edited by Christopher Cardozo, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), for example). Here an image is repatriated by re-immersion or reconfiguration within forms of reckoning very different from those of their 355 But the Neel portraits, like much of the rest of the museum, walk a fine line between reaffirming and subverting the canon (in this instance, that of photography of American Indians.) In many ways, the portraits participate in and depend on the same iconics as those in Curtis's photographs, and betray some of the same distanced and objectified positioning. The Neel's tribal portraits provide an excellent example of strategic challenge to popular hegemonic notions of Indianness and race. This is accomplished through their incorporation and subversion of traditional canons in Native American portraiture. The entire design strategy of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center is indicated in the comparative and recontextualizing practice exemplified by the final gallery. As part of an overall project of Mashantucket Pequot self-representation and self-identification, the photographs stake a certain claim on attention and make a collective statement about group and individual identity. Part of this statement is seen in the variety of people that the tribal nation embraces as its citizenry. The mutability of the identifications "Pequot" and "Mashantucket Pequot" has been a constant factor throughout the museum--from the initial introduction to Paleo-Indian ancestors, through periods of Native settlement to contact, from the decimations of disease and war, to a long period of Euro-colonial and post-colonial challenges--and the exhibitions feature the accommodating and resistant abilities of the Mashantucket Pequots as central themes of the overall narrative. While the majority of the exhibition galleries map inception. The repatriation of a genre speaks to the reconfiguration of the role of photography within a distinctly Native mode of production. 356 the social and cultural changes, the final gallery presents a collection of the results and survivors of those same changes, in a contemporary moment. In the portrait gallery, what goes without saying because it comes without saying is the wide range of racial, ethnic, and professional markers made visible in the photographs. As a group, the portraits make a contemporary statement affirming tribal membership and community belonging. As photographs, the Neel portraits offer particular kinds of historical and documentary information about their subjects. Photographs, however, are more than a medium of information. What they show, how, and where, are all parts of a complex interpretive--and often invisible--process. Throughout the exhibition galleries, the MPMRC has attempted to create an inhabited rendition of tribal history through the use of lifecast figures and lifescale exhibitions. The mixing of interior and exterior, the use of the reservation as omnipotent presence and exhibition "partner" seen through the windows of the galleries, and the shifting location of the visitor--between spectator and exhibition animator--all play at unsettling the idea of a "fixed" representation by keeping a connection to the dynamic "now" alive. The portrait gallery works in this space of dynamic time by presenting images of living tribal members. The portraits re-invigorate the historic progression of "Life on the Reservation" by introducing the contemporary to the visitor experience. As the oral histories provide a shared remembered history, the portraits give that history an individual face. While they indicate each other as a group, and destabilize essential notions of "Indianness," the portraits provide a 357 progression of possible singular connections for the visitor, mixing elements of personal, historic, and cultural markers, offering multiple routes for recognition. In this consideration the photographs, like the museum, become charged contact zones and the arrested points of view become points of negotiation (Rugoff 1995). 358 Chapter 6: Conclusions--On Evidence and Evocation [A photograph's] function as a mode of cultural production is tied to definite conditions of existence and its products are meaningful and legible only within the particular currencies they have. Its history has no unity. It is a flickering across a field of institutional spaces. And it is this field we must study. [Tagg 1993: 12] The overall project of this dissertation has been to investigate the productive space--or field--between reference and performance, and the articulation and strategic use of this space at the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. The play between the referential "fact" of the Mashantucket Pequots as a federally recognized and identified tribal nation, and the publicly performed "experience" of that identity as represented in displays and historical narratives constructed on the reservation, anchors this investigation. The representational project at Mashantucket is created in a number of different levels, some best understood as differences in levels of sharpness or closeness, some as levels of kind. The Mashantucket Pequots frame and use their self-representational strategies in several key arenas and these, in turn, hold almost infinite points for focus and understanding. I have tried to move between these different levels of representation--from the casino to the museum, for example, to the details of animatronics and lifecast villagers--as a fruitful method for understanding the nuances of poetic expression as a means of selfidentification and self-representation. Mashantucket offers a number of immersive environments, and each environment uses a variety of representational methods and technologies. 359 The dissertation navigates and inhabits that tense landscape between the evidential and the experiential, backtracking across spaces of fact and legislation, accelerating to describe a rich and lived space, caught in the blue shimmering light of newscasts, the sound of the spill in the casino, the birdsong and murmuring voices of the museum. Occupation of this landscape is tangential for all involved--for the Mashantucket Pequots who are mapping their history and, through historical reckoning, their origins and identity; for the variety of visitors to the museum, brushing the overlays of their own historical and contemporary understanding of Indianness and Mashantucket Pequotness against the density of exhibitions and architecture; and for the casino patrons, moving between spaces of distraction, entertainment, and gaming, experiencing Foxwoods as an Indian thematic space (or not). As a parallel exercise, the dissertation has been structured as its own kind of experiential immersion, ratcheting to an ever-tightening focus, a process of getting to the "observable grain" of the "institutional spaces" of representation at Mashantucket, finally centering on the images in the closing gallery. The final chapter introduced the idea of a radial system of presentation for the unique visual artifacts that are photographs, a presentation that would allow for the photograph to be seen "in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday, and historic" (Berger 1980: 62­63). This understanding of a radial system for presentation, however, also works as a useful means for approaching the practice of representation at Mashantucket as a whole--each artifact, building, representation, and industry 360 offer a complex set of interconnected influences and understandings. Radial describes both an expansion of context and contextualization, and a saturation and overlap of space, time, and represented identities (or the industries of identity representation). It is at this point that the casino and the museum meet most fully, creating a porous boundary of cross-contamination. The dissertation traverses three different junctures or fields of experience. First, it explores the relationship between the poetic and the referential. Key to this exploration is the referential meaning of "Indian" as it relates to the performative meaning of "Indian." The first distinction refers to the legal and practical struggle for recognition, experienced as a navigation of formal category and legal establishment. The second refers to the representational conceit(s) for the casino and the museum, and how Indianness is performed for public consumption in the representational spaces of the reservation. This relationship has been discussed in terms of a dialectic between evidence and evocation, between meaning as an assembly of evidential data--visual, aural, spatial, and textual--and meaning as felt or evoked through using this assembled data as the foundation for a sensual immersion through visual, aural, spatial, and textual performances. The casino is a particularly rich site for this kind of interplay, but the relationship made obvious there is no less foundational than that in use at the museum. With that in mind, however, it is important to remember that the bingo hall and the eventual casino were the primary public representational spaces for the Mashantucket Pequots for over 10 years before the museum and research center opened. 361 While the casino uses the relationship between the inside and the outside as part of its overall thematic, the museum emphasizes this interplay as critical for its entire narrative, experienced as both the relationship between the architectural shell and the reservation surround, and this same surround as an active element in a number of exhibitions and galleries. The exhibitions are also an arena of active play between poetic performance and referential significance. The final exhibition in the museum crystallizes the majority of these strategies and relationships within the genre of photography--both the genre of American Indian photography and the Neel portrait project create documents that are evidential and evocative, referential and poetic. Second, the dissertation recognizes that the Mashantucket Pequots' skillful use of appropriation is crucial to the dialectic between the evidential and the evocative on the reservation. In many ways, the entire Mashantucket Pequot project--of representation and public-dependent industry--finds appropriation as fulcrum and focal point. Both the casino and the museum appropriate industries, technologies, knowledges, and existing archives and genres for re-reading and incorporation. If we understand appropriation as a kind of poetics, a way of generating new meaning in existing referential relationships through shifts in positionality, emphasis, and performance, then Mashantucket is rife with examples of such poetic shift(s). Here, as an engine to the representational and moneymaking projects of the reservation, appropriation can be understood as a powerful means of production. 362 Cultural production and reproduction are necessarily linked to the practices of "cultural industries," industries both marked as culturally specific (like Indian gaming) and those whose industry is the production or explication of cultural difference. This latter category is exemplified by a museum that speaks to and represents the practice of national, ethnic, and cultural identity (with the subtext of authentication). The practice of appropriation speaks to the relationship between the hegemonic and the counter hegemonic, between a stabilization of tradition and strategies designed to destabilize traditional practices or discourses. One example of this would be the use of photography to destabilize or counter existing discourses concerning Indians as photographic subjects, and the use of photography at the reservation as a factual or explanatory medium, extant in such different venues as museum exhibitions or public relations materials. This tension between the hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic plays through the entire project of identity at the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. While it is perhaps most acutely sensed in the tribal nation's spaces of representation, particularly in the relationships between a hegemonic notion of Indianness and a particular understanding of Mashantucket Pequotness, it is also an integral aspect in understanding the politics of Mashantucket. For example, while some Native activists would maintain that taking part in the system of federal recognition or state compacts for gaming compromises a true sovereignty for Native America, others recognize that one path to political power follows the structure of existing law and legislation. And that such power can be realized by 363 reading this structure oppositionally, looking for the cracks and fissures that can be exploited for tactical advantage. One eerie embodiment of this tension, as a particular element of the museum and research center's main narrative, can be found in the commissioning and use of lifecasts in the exhibitions. The composite figures stand as imagined actors in an "accurate" portrayal of Pequot history. At the same moment that the museum is particularizing the story of the Mashantucket Pequots, its technologies are drawing from a generalized Indian--in thematic and physical type--through the use of these figures. Here the use of a generalized Indianness is indicative of an active play with a hegemonic referential system. The figures in Life on the Reservation are based on lifecasts of Mashantucket Pequot tribal members, those before are not. Poetics and hegemonics, or stabilization and destabilization, are linked at the reservation through a productive against-the-grain reading of historical and contemporary Indianness. The creation of counter histories, like those in the museum, depends on the existence of a structure from which to depart or reconfigure. The Mashantucket Pequots work within existing structures to both uphold them (as in the case of federal recognition or the legally mandated issues concerning gaming) and to subvert them. They work within existing performative structures and genres as well, to re-cast them or to create new performances with new emphases (in photography, museums, and casinos, for example). Finally, Mashantucket offers a space to investigate the concept of "imagining the nation." In Anderson's original formulation on the birth of the 364 modern nation state, the advent of print capitalism (the convergence of capitalism and print technology, particularly newspapers), is stressed as a key moment in the formation or confirmation of a national collective imagination or consciousness (Anderson 1983). Newspapers provided a national, referential forum for burgeoning ideas of nationhood and nationality. This was supported by both the content of the news (and the representation of the nation within the news, as an element of one among a league of the similar) and the language of the news (the use of a common and national tongue). If newspapers, along with the pragmatics of nation--borders, government, citizenship, language, identification, and policing--provided the referential framework for nationality, then the lived experience of being a national citizen was an act of imagination, an in-filling of this framework with a performance of belonging, of nationality. This sense of belonging was both inclusive and exclusive, both figured within the national boundary and figured against the boundaries of other nations. Representational and informational media both enforce and enact this sense of a national imaginary. The museum and the casino offer a prime site for understanding the revitalized formation of a national community, and how public spaces of representation--both in a formal space of representation and in one more vernacular--are mobilized to support the parameters of community as an inclusive and exclusive construct. The flickering light for this dissertation embraces the difference between pragmatics--the tangible as law or legislation--and the representational/ 365 poetic--the fabulous story told by the museum and the casino. While the Mashantucket Pequots have a secured legal identity as a tribal nation, they still spend a great deal of time and money creating a projected representation(s) of themselves as Native Americans and Mashantucket Pequots. The Mashantucket Pequots recognize that this public terrain is a key battlefield for articulating a tribal identity. The struggle over public terrain is emblematic of contests across Native America--reacting to centuries of images and understandings forged in the public sphere. The advent of Indian gaming has brought a new source of capital for engaging in this struggle and has effectively accelerated and energized this contest. Since gaming depends on a large patron base, Indian gaming has also provided new public forums for self-representation. Museums, as both a latetwentieth century growth industry and a traditionally recognized theater for "authentic" historical narratives, have become a parallel enterprise for many tribal nations. But comprehending the complex institutional spaces at Mashantucket provides understandings and raises questions not limited to Native America. The relationships at Mashantucket indicate the ongoing interplay between the politics and poetics of self-representation. 366 Appendices APPENDIX I: MASHANTUCKET PEQUOT PHOTO PROJECT PROPOSAL Both anthropology and photography are disciplines with mixed histories. At their best, they are ways of representing and discussing other people, exploring views and perspectives not immediately familiar. Both disciplines can offer a different way of viewing, from the imagined level of the photographic or ethnographic subjects, to the story built by the photographer or ethnographer. Unfortunately, throughout their mutual histories, both ethnography and photography have often been used to objectify and de-personalize their subjects by keeping them at a place of one-way observation. The voice of the photographer or the ethnographer is often the strongest, or even the only one, allowed to speak. This proposal attempts to recognize these conflicts and work within them to create a body of documentary photographs that have their own active "voice." The core of this project is a series of black and white photographic images. Over the course of a year, I plan to make photographic portraits of as many members of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation as I am permitted. One possible way to accomplish this would be to initiate a community-level photographic project (perhaps through a youth center or the museum) by offering a course in black and white photography, with a class project designed to explore issues of identity through portraiture. If offering a course is not an option, I would 367 like to present this project to the Tribal Council as a community-driven enterprise. Volunteer subjects from the community will be photographed as they wish to present themselves (through setting, dress, and objects). The photographs will emphasize personal identification combining, but not limited to, Native American and Mashantucket Pequot identity. Once the portraits have been printed, they will be returned and each subject will be asked for their reactions to the portrait, and to write their responses onto the paper itself. These inscribed images will then be shown to the Mashantucket Pequot community in a group exhibit, where further responses from the community will be collected. The potential for creating a significant historical archive for future Mashantucket Pequot tribal members is enormous. This form of photography can best be described as dialogic, a form that seeks to expand traditional boundaries of portrait, documentary, and ethnographic photography, and that incorporates response or dialogue within the photograph itself. I completed a pilot project using volunteer graduate students of diverse ethnicities and backgrounds as participants in 1997. This project, called "About Face," was part of Display/Displacement, a group exhibit for the anthropology department at the University of Texas at Austin. The Mashantucket Pequot photographs would contribute an important facet to existing tribal representational practices. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center and the Foxwoods Resort Casino can be recognized as the public faces of the reservation community, as official image generators and articulators. It is important to consider what might be gained by another 368 perspective on the issues of representation, a perspective located at the community level. By creating a photo project with the community, issues of representation and identity can be given an expanded venue. The collaborative photographs' focus on the articulation and display of identities can be carried into an active and ongoing project, exploring a sense of community and individual identity. The use of photography in this project can be realized as both metaphor and methodology for ethnographic representation. The representative act of photography is traditionally one-way: as illustration or as icon. This project attempts to break this traditional structure to incorporate a use of photographic images that allows a variety of responsive voices in an actual and real sense. 369 APPENDIX II: 60 MINUTES--"WAMPUM WONDERLAND," 1994 Copyright 1994 Burrelle's Information Services CBS News Transcripts SHOW: 60 MINUTES (7:00 PM ET) September 18, 1994, Sunday TYPE: Profile LENGTH: 2453 words HEADLINE: WAMPUM WONDERLAND; NATIVE AMERICAN TRIBE, THE PEQUOTS, THOUGHT TO BE EXTINCT SINCE 1630, OPEN CONNECTICUT GAMBLING CASINO BODY: WAMPUM WONDERLAND STEVE KROFT: It's a story rich in irony: rich because it involves lots of money, irony because it's about Native Americans finally turning the tables on the white man--the craps tables, the blackjack tables and the roulette tables, to be precise. Seven years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Indian tribes can run their own gambling businesses on tribal land. Today, 90 tribes run 94 casinos. And as sovereign Indian nations, the tribes are free of state regulators, free of taxes and free of the rules that rein in the big-time casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. And the biggest jackpot winner of all is the Mashantucket Pequots. History books say the tribe's been extinct since a British massacre 360 years ago, but you can't believe everything you read in the history books. If you have any 370 doubt, just head for Ledyard, Connecticut, and look for the biggest building you can find. (Footage of an Indian casino) KROFT: (Voiceover) It rises out of the backwoods of Connecticut like some kind of wampum wonderland, Las Vegas with an Indian motif. In fact, if Bugsy Siegel had gone into business with Sitting Bull, their casino might have looked a lot like Foxwoods. Every hour on the hour, the rainmaker statue shoots his laser arrow into the heavens. And every hour on the hour, an indoor storm follows just as certainly as three-of-a-kind beats two pair. Welcome to the land of the notexactly-extinct Pequots and to the largest, most successful casino in the Western Hemisphere, conveniently located on sovereign tribal territory in the heart of the Northeast corridor, within a three-hour drive for 22 million Americans. This is a Monday night... Mr. MICKEY BROWN (Runs Casino): Yes, sir. KROFT: ...in the middle of the... Mr. BROWN: It'll pick up later on. KROFT: ...wilds of Connecticut. How many people do you think you've got in here right now? Mr. BROWN: Oh, we probably have about 6,000 people in the room right now. KROFT: Are there any Pequots in here? Mr. BROWN: I'm sure there's somebody working some shift that's a tribal member. (Footage of Brown giving Kroft a tour) 371 KROFT: (Voiceover) This is Mickey Brown. He runs the place. He's not a Pequot Indian, he just works for them as chief executive officer. Like most people, he'd never heard of the Pequots until three years ago, when he got a call from a friend. Mr. BROWN: He said, `I have an Indian tribe in Connecticut, and they may want to open a casino, and they're looking for someone with expertise in casino development and regulation. And they want to hire you.' KROFT: What was your reaction? Mr. BROWN: I thought he was drinking his lunch. (Footage of Brown and Kroft) KROFT: But that was before Brown, a lawyer and a former head of the New Jersey Gaming Commission, had read the Supreme Court decision or the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which allowed tribes to run high-stakes casinos. You must have realized that it was a potential gold mine. Mr. BROWN: We knew it was a gold mine. We didn't realize it was a platinum mine. I mean, being the only legal casino in New England has enormous benefits. So simple common sense would tell you how good this place was going to do. Unidentified Man #1: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe Reservation in... KROFT: Good enough to host championship fights, good enough to hire Frank Sinatra to open the showroom and good enough for a lot of people to begin wondering exactly who the Pequots are and where they came from. (Paintings of Pequots; footage of the Western Pequot Indian Reservation) 372 KROFT: (Voiceover) Twenty years ago, they didn't exist, at least as far as the federal government was concerned. The history books said they'd been wiped out back in the 1630s. There was just a small reservation given to the remnants of the tribe by the state of Connecticut. And for a time in the 1970s only one person lived on it, a 78-year-old woman named Elizabeth George, who was blessed with a very ambitious grandson. Who did this? (Footage of Kroft with Skip Hayward) KROFT: (Voiceover) His name is Skip Hayward, and he used to be a nuclear pipefitter with the Electric Boat Company. But he decided to quit his job and move back to the reservation. Mr. SKIP HAYWARD (Lives on Indian Reservation): A lot of... KROFT: ...the only thing here? Mr. HAYWARD: Well, there was a lot of woods. A lot of woods, and a lot of animals. (Footage of the Casino) KROFT: (Voiceover) The first thing he did was to recruit his brothers, and sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins to join him on the reservation. Next, he hired a lawyer to sue the state of Connecticut over land claims. He settled for an act of Congress, officially recognizing the Pequots as a tribe. They tried various business ventures of pizza parlor, hydroponic vegetables, pig farming, but nothing worked. Then all of a sudden, BINGO! Unidentified Man #2: G-47. 373 KROFT: (Voiceover) With a loan from the Arab-American Bank, guaranteed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the tribe opened a high-stakes bingo parlor. How successful was it? Mr. HAYWARD: I think we ne--we netted around $12 million a year. KROFT: Pretty successful? Mr. HAYWARD: It's not too shabby. Man #2: Your next number: N... KROFT: (Voiceover) Not too shabby, but chump change compared to what the tribe might make now over several long holiday weekends at Foxwoods. Most of the money from the casino resort came from a Malaysian gambling family after the Pequots had signed a treaty with the state of Connecticut. The tribe pays the state a minimum of $100 million a year in exchange for a monopoly on slot machines. Today, the Pequots are one of the biggest employers in Connecticut, but their clout reaches all the way to Washington, where they're the fifth largest contributor to the Democratic National Committee. How profitable is this casino? How much money will you make this year? Do you know? Can you tell me? Mr. BROWN: In--in the hundreds of millions of dollars. KROFT: One hundred? Two hundred? Three hundred? Mr. BROWN: Mm-hmm. KROFT: Four hundred? Mr. BROWN: Well... 374 KROFT: Maybe not? Mr. BROWN: Maybe not. KROFT: Three hundred to 400 million dollars a year? Mr. BROWN: In the neighborhood. (Footage of casino; of Pequots; of a clerk) KROFT: (Voiceover) The casino has brought a lot more than prosperity to the Pequot reservation; it's brought Pequots to the Pequot reservation. There were barely 30 voting members of the tribe when Skip Hayward became chairman. Today, there are more than 300 members. And according to the tribal clerk, who was processing 87 new applications when we met her, there's no shortage of aspiring Indians from London to Louisiana, eager to sign up and share the wealth. How much Indian blood do they have to have? Mr. BROWN: Our current quantum is 1/16th. KROFT: So you could be 15/16ths something else and you could still be a Pequot? Mr. BROWN: Well, you know... KROFT: I mean, this definition... Mr. HAYWARD: Yeah. Sure. (Footage of a reservation) 375 KROFT: Which means if you can prove that one of your great-great-grandparents was listed in the tribal census of 1910, you're entitled to membership in what has become Connecticut's royal family--entitled to comfortable housing, free college tuition, a tribal job that starts at $ 60,000, plus bonuses. Clifford Sebastian was working as a transit cop in New York City until he came to the reservation as an assistant chief of the tribal police. Mr. CLIFFORD SEBASTIAN (Assistant Chief of the Tribal Police): My father just told me, `You're Pequot Indian.' I heard of Pequot, I just didn't know--I knew it was somewhere up in Connecticut. I just didn't know where at. KROFT: Did you practice the culture? Mr. SEBASTIAN: To tell you the truth, I knew I was Pequot Indian. But I grew up on the Lower East Side. It was a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood-Puerto Ricans. (Footage of a Native American display; of archeologists) KROFT: (Voiceover) For the culturally deprived, the Pequots offer classes in Native American history. They've hired archeologists to begin digging up their past and anthropologists to reconstruct their lost language. Despite all this wealth and power, the tribe is not without some powerful enemies who consider them not only nouveau riche, but nouveau Indian. Mr. DONALD TRUMP (Atlantic City Casino Owner): Now maybe we say politically correct, or not politically correct--they don't look like Indians to me. And they don't look like Indians to Indians. (Footage of Trump at a congressional hearing) 376 KROFT: (Voiceover) There's Donald Trump, the Atlantic City casino owner and Pequot competitor who pulled no punches when he complained about Indian gaming at a congressional hearing. Mr. TRUMP: When you go up to Connecticut, and you look--now, they don't look like Indians to me, sir. (Footage of Robert Torricelli) KROFT: (Voiceover) And there's Trump's political pointman, New Jersey Congressman Robert Torricelli, who says the Indians have all sorts of unfair competitive advantages. And he, too, questions the Pequot's bona fides. Representative ROBERT TORRICELLI (New Jersey): Under the federal criteria to establish an Indian tribe, the tribe could never be recognized. KROFT: Are you suggesting they're not really a legitimate Indian tribe? Rep. TORRICELLI: Clearly, in the Pequots' case, they meet none of those criteria. KROFT: So you're saying this is really a tribe of convenience? Rep. TORRICELLI: This was an enormously clever scheme. KROFT: Scheme? Did you call it a scheme? Rep. TORRICELLI: It was a clever scheme that has more than aptly paid dividends for those who conceived of it. Mr. HAYWARD: Maybe that's the only way Mr. Torricelli can weigh things, is in schemes. This is not a scheme. This is real. There's no scheming in it. 377 KROFT: I think this is what Torricelli is--and some other people are getting at: Here you have a very small tribe that was virtually extinct 20 years ago; just your grandmother living on the reservation. And here, by... Mr. HAYWARD: It wasn't extinct; it was dormant. KROFT: `Dormant,' as you put it--and by quirk of a law, now find themselves in control of a multibillion-dollar business entity. Mr. HAYWARD: Wha--is it a quirk in the law? Or--or was--was somebody really trying to help? I mean, this is no accident. This is taking a lot of things into consideration. KROFT: Justice? Mr. HAYWARD: It's--I believe it's got a lot to do with justice. (Footage of residents of communities surrounding the reservation) KROFT: But don't tell that to the residents of three small towns that surround the reservation. The Pequots are trying to buy up huge tracts of land and annex them, and the local townspeople are feeling threatened. Unidentified Woman #1: They can increase the commercial development without any control--no environmental control, no land-use controls, no public-safety controls, none of that. No tax--no tax bite at all. Any businessman would like to develop under those circumstances. KROFT: Do they have a lot of political power? Unidentified Woman #2: Immense. Unidentified Woman #3: Money is power. Money is power. 378 Woman #2: We've learned the golden rule. KROFT: Which is? Woman #2: Money talks. KROFT: We talked to the tribal chairman the other day, and he said, `Our people have gotten the short end of the stick for 300 years. This is justice.' Woman #2: Well, they're taking in, like I said, last year, a half a billion dollars, and there's 300 members. Now is this justice? Woman #1: We have a big city that's been plopped down next to us. A city of 40,000 in the course of a year has been put right there at--at our boundary. KROFT: How big do you think it's going to get? Woman #1: I don't know. Ask--ask the tribal chairman. Woman #3: They won't tell us. Woman #2: And, you know... Woman #3: They say there is no plan. Woman #2: You--you got to keep... (Footage of the casino) KROFT: (Voiceover) There's a lot of things the Pequots don't have to tell or do. They don't have to pay federal income tax, or file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And they don't have to reveal the financial relationship with their Malaysian investors. 379 Rep. TORRICELLI: They have $ 200 million of financing from a Malaysian company. We don't know anything about them. We don't know who they are, where the money came from, what their contract is. Mr. BROWN: The terms are not public, and I won't discuss them. KROFT: Why not? Mr. BROWN: Because it's a private agreement between a company and a--and a-a tribe. KROFT: This agreement, if it existed in New Jersey, would be a matter of public record. Mr. BROWN: Yes, it would be. KROFT: Why isn't it public record here? Mr. BROWN: Because it's an agreement between a federally recognized Native American tribe. And we don't have to file certain documents with the state of Connecticut. KROFT: You have a very small number of Native Americans with maybe 1/16th Indian blood... Mr. BROWN: Mm-hmm. KROFT: ...who, through good fortune and good legal advice and good business sense... Mr. BROWN: Mm-hmm. KROFT: ...and the hiring of the right people, have lucked into a multibilliondollar business. 380 Mr. BROWN: God bless America. That's the American way. (Footage of Hayward showing future projects) KROFT: (Voiceover) And there's no more American way than having big dreams. There is new construction for as far as the eye can see--plans for a monorail, a theme park, and a couple of championship golf courses and Skip Hayward's pride and joy: a $130-million Native American culture center. Mr. HAYWARD: And it will take you right through time, right up until the time when the Pequots were here and lived in wigwams. (Footage of construction) KROFT: (Voiceover) As fast as the millions come in, the tribe finds ways to spend it. Mr. HAYWARD: It's long overdue. And if it didn't happen now--if it didn't happen now, right now, it would never, ever happen. Let that ancient voice speak out. Let that ancient voice have a say. Man #2: B-5, B-5. ...(unintelligible). Please hold your cards. (Footage of a slot machine) KROFT: (Voiceover) The Pequots' money has been speaking so loudly, they may soon have some competition from neighboring tribes. Both the Mohegans and the Narragansetts are betting that there's room for more than one Indian casino in the Northeast, and now they're warming up the dice. Copyright © 2001, LEXIS-NEXIS®, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. 381 APPENDIX III: 60 MINUTES--"WAMPUM WONDERLAND," 2000 Copyright 2000 Burrelle's Information Services CBS News Transcripts SHOW: 60 MINUTES II (9:00 PM ET) May 23, 2000, Tuesday TYPE: Profile LENGTH: 2587 words HEADLINE: WAMPUM WONDERLAND; LEGITAMACY OF CASINOS RUN BY INDIANS ANCHORS: STEVE KROFT BODY: WAMPUM WONDERLAND STEVE KROFT, co-host: Tonight's 60 MINUTES Classic is rich in irony--rich, because it involves lots of money; irony, because it's about Native Americans turning the tables on the white man--the blackjack and roulette tables to be exact. Thirteen years ago, the US Supreme Court ruled that Indian tribes can run their own gambling operations on tribal land free of taxes and free of outside regulation. The ruling not only created a $ 10 billion industry, some would argue it created some Indian tribes, or at the very least, resurrected them. 382 New questions are being raised about the legitimacy of the biggest and most prosperous of these tribes, the Mashantucket Pequots. According to most history books, the original tribe has been extinct for more than 300 years, but as we discovered six years ago in our original story, you can't believe everything you read, even in the history books. (Footage of aerial view of Foxwood's; waitress; rainmaker statue; gambling within Foxwood's) KROFT: (Voiceover) It rises out of the back woods of Connecticut like some kind of Wampum Wonderland, Las Vegas with an Indian motif. In fact, if Bugsy Siegal had gone into business with Sitting Bull, their casino might have looked a lot like Foxwood's. Every hour on the hour, the rainmaker statue shoots his laser arrow into the heavens. And every hour on the hour, an indoor storm follows just as certainly as three of a kind beats two pair. Welcome to the land of the not exactly extinct Pequots, and to the largest, most successful casino in the Western Hemisphere, conveniently located on sovereign tribal territory in the heart of the Northeast corridor within a three-hour drive for 22 million Americans. Announcer: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Mashantucket... (Footage of boxing ring; Frank Sinatra singing; Foxwood's High Stakes Bingo & Casino entrance; drawings of Indians; sign reading: Western Pequot Indian Reservation Established 1667; reservation; photo of Elizabeth George) KROFT: (Voiceover) This is big business, big enough to host championship fights, big enough to hire Frank Sinatra to open the showroom, big enough for a lot of people to begin wondering who the Pequots are and where they came from. Twenty years ago, they didn't exist, at least as far as the federal government was concerned. There was just a small reservation given to the remnants of the tribe by the state of Connecticut. And for a time in the 1970s, only one person lived on it, a 78-year-old woman named Elizabeth George, who was blessed with a very ambitious grandson. (To Skip Hayward) Who did this? 383 (Footage of Kroft and Hayward within Foxwood's; Kroft and Hayward on reservation) KROFT: (Voiceover) His name is Skip Hayward, and he used to be a pipe fitter with the Electric Boat Company. But after his grandmother died, Hayward decided to quit his job and move back to the reservation. Mr. SKIP HAYWARD: A lot of... KROFT: And this is the only thing here? Mr. HAYWARD: Well, there was a lot of woods--a lot of woods and a lot of animals. (Footage of Kroft and Hayward within Foxwood's; Kroft and Hayward walking on pier) KROFT: (Voiceover) The first thing he did was to recruit his brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins to join him on the reservation. Next, he hired a lawyer, sued the state of Connecticut over land claims. He settled for an act of Congress, officially recognizing the Pequots as a tribe. They tried various business ventures-a pizza parlor, hydroponic vegetables, pig farming--but nothing worked. Then all of a sudden, bingo. Casino Dealer: G-47. (Footage of bingo game) KROFT: (Voiceover) With a loan from the Arab-American bank, guaranteed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the tribe opened a high-stakes bingo parlor. How successful was it? 384 Mr. HAYWARD: I think we n--we--we netted around $ 12 million a year. KROFT: Pretty successful? Mr. HAYWARD: It's not too shabby. Casino dealer: Your next number... (Footage of bingo game; gambling within Foxwood's) KROFT: (Voiceover) Not too shabby but chump change compared to what the tribe might make now over several long holiday weekends at Foxwood's. How profitable is this casino? How much money will you make this year? Do you know? Can you tell me? Mr. HAYWARD: In--in the hundreds of millions of dollars. KROFT: One hundred million, $ 200 million, $ 300 million... Mr. HAYWARD: Mm-hmm. KROFT: ...$ 400 million? Mr. HAYWARD: Well... KROFT: Maybe not? Mr. HAYWARD: ...maybe not. KROFT: Three hundred million dollars to $ 400 million a year. Mr. HAYWARD: In the neighborhood. 385 (Footage of gambling within Foxwood's; children playing; woman shaking hands with Kroft) KROFT: (Voiceover) The casino has brought a lot more than prosperity to the Pequot Reservation; it's brought Pequots to the Pequot Reservation. There's no shortage of aspiring Indians from London to Louisiana eager to sign up and share the wealth. How much Indian blood do they have to have? Mr. HAYWARD: Our current quantum is 1/16th. KROFT: So you could be 15/16th something else and you could still be a Pequot under this definition? Mr. HAYWARD: Well, yeah. Yeah, sure. (Footage of woman looking over some documents; Foxwood suburb; Clifford Sebastian at work; police cruiser) KROFT: (Voiceover) Which means if you can prove that one of your great-greatgrandparents was listed in the Tribal Census of 1910, you're entitled to membership in what has become Connecticut's royal family--entitled to comfortable housing, free college tuition, a tribal job that starts at $ 60,000 plus bonuses. Clifford Sebastian was working as a transit cop in New York City until he came to the reservation as assistant chief of the tribal police. Did you practice the culture? Mr. CLIFFORD SEBASTIAN: To tell you the truth, I knew I was Pequot Indian, but I grew up on the lower East Side. It was a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, Puerto Ricans. (Footage of aerial view of Foxwood's) 386 KROFT: (Voiceover) Despite all this wealth and power, the tribe is not without some powerful enemies who consider them not only nouveau riche but nouveau Indian. Mr. DONALD TRUMP: Now maybe we say politically correct or not politically correct, they don't look like Indians to me and they don't look like Indians to Indians... (Footage of congressional hearing) KROFT: (Voiceover) There's Donald Trump, the Atlantic City Casino owner and Pequot competitor who pulled no punches when he complained about Indian gaming at a congressional hearing. Mr. TRUMP: When you go up to Connecticut and you look--now they don't look like Indians to me, sir. (Footage of congressional hearing; Kroft with Hayward) KROFT: (Voiceover) And there's Trump's political point man, New Jersey Congressman Robert Torricelli, who says the Indians have all sorts of unfair competitive advantages, and he, too, questions the Pequot's bona fides. Senator ROBERT TORRICELLI (New Jersey): This was an enormously clever scheme. KROFT: Scheme? Did you call it a scheme? Sen. TORRICELLI: It was a clever scheme that has more than aptly paid dividends for those who conceived of it. 387 Mr. HAYWARD: Maybe that's the only way Mr. Torricelli can weigh things, is in schemes. This is not a scheme; this is real. I mean, this is no accident. This is taking a lot of things into consideration. KROFT: Justice. Mr. HAYWARD: It--I believe it's got a lot to do with justice. KROFT: That was six years ago, and justice for the Pequots now translates into an annual take of more than a billion dollars. Their Foxwood's resort has tripled in size, but questions about the tribe's legitimacy haven't gone away. And the white settlers of Connecticut, or at least their descendants, are demanding that Congress investigate. (Footage of skyline of Foxwood's; inns and restaurants; high-speed boat; school bus; Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center; Hayward) KROFT: (Voiceover) The skyline is more impressive now with the new hotel tower, and now the roads leading to Wampum Wonderland are dotted with inns and restaurants all owned by the Pequots. The tribe even manufactured high-speed boats to ferry in the high rollers from New York. And every morning, hundreds of schoolkids from all over the Northeast come to visit the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, a $195 million state-of-the-art monument to all things Pequot. Skip Hayward, a bit grayer since we last met him, gave us a tour. Mr. HAYWARD: Well, as you can see, the--the corn hanging and the--the bow and arrow, the quill. (Footage of exhibits within museum; Kroft with Jeff Benedict; Ledyard Fire Co.) KROFT: (Voiceover) There are dioramas with plastic Pequots, even an entire Pequot village. You can learn just about everything you would want to know about the Pequots, except, according to author Jeff Benedict, the real story of how Skip Hayward got the US government to recognize them as a tribe. 388 Mr. JEFF BENEDICT: The Pequots aren't the Pequots. This group of people that has been what I would say undercover as an Indian tribe for the past few years while this casino's been open isn't the same Pequots that inhabited Connecticut a couple hundred years ago. They're not even close. North Stonington is not where the Pequot reservation is. KROFT: Mm-hmm. (Footage of Kroft and Benedict looking over some documents; photo of Hayward with others) KROFT: (Voiceover) In his new book, "Without Reservation," Benedict says the tribe and its lawyers pulled a fast one on the federal government, and that if Congress had been paying any attention at all back in 1983, when it gave the Pequots tribal status, it would have discovered that the tribe didn't meet the minimum requirements. Mr. BENEDICT: They promised the federal government, the Congress, that, `We are this tribe. We have the genealogy to back it up, and we've been here forever. We, us--we've always been here.' Congress took their word for it. They never checked. They didn't ask for a single birth certificate, nor did they see one. KROFT: 1896... Mr. BENEDICT: Right. (Footage of Kroft and Benedict looking over documents; photos of Hayward with others; photo of Elizabeth George) KROFT: (Voiceover) Benedict says he spent two years pouring over court records and census tracts and claims that these Pequots not only can't trace their bloodlines back to the original tribe as Congress required; he says they hadn't 389 functioned as a tribe for decades until Skip moved his friends and family back to the reservation in the early 1970s, when he was still identifying himself on most public documents as white or Caucasian. As for Skip's grandmother, Elizabeth George, Benedict says she was probably descended from Narragansetts. Mr. HAYWARD: That is the--that's the biggest crock of crap I've ever heard in my life. He's nothing but a damn lunatic. I mean, either someone has paid him to do this, or--or h--or he's an I--or he's a Indian hater who can't stand what we've been able to accomplish here. (Footage of Hayward; tombstones) KROFT: (Voiceover) Hayward, who is no longer chairman of the tribe, but vice chairman, says the state of Connecticut has recognized the Pequots for 300 years, and he took us to visit the graves of his ancestors buried on the reservation. Federal overseer reports from the 19th century confirm that his relatives, listed as being at least part Pequot Indian, had been living on and off the reservation in Ledyard, Connecticut, since the 1870s. And no matter what his marriage license said back in the 1970s, he's always considered himself a Native American. Mr. HAYWARD: Well, I remember going to Ledyard Center when I was five years old. They knew exactly who we were, `The--the injuns from the hill.' The injuns--I-N-J-U-N-S. (Footage of Hayward with Pequot Tribal Council; photos of Pequot tribal members) KROFT: (Voiceover) Since we did our original story, the Pequot Tribal Council, which now includes two convicted felons, has dropped the requirement that trial members have any Pequot blood at all, and the membership has doubled since 1995 to more than 600 people. Mr. KENNY REELS: We cover all tribes. We have newspapers of--of every tribe. 390 (Footage of Reels talking with Kroft; Reels, Hayward and Kroft walking within museum) KROFT: (Voiceover) Kenny Reels, the new Pequot chairman and a former gravel pit operator, says it was government neglect and no jobs that forced their ancestors off the reservation in the first place and left them with no choice but to try and assimilate into the rest of society. Mr. REELS: We are tired of people trying to label us or paint what they want an Indian to look like. Since we've removed the blood quota, we've had a lot more unity in our tribe, and it's the best thing we ever did. Mr. BENEDICT: It's fraudulent. I mean, frankly, to go to the Congress of the United States and to portray yourself as something that you're not and to get benefits, dollars, as a result of it--status--is fraudulent. KROFT: I think you would have to admit also that if Skip Hayward were up there growing vegetables, nobody would care. Mr. BENEDICT: Right now? KROFT: Yeah. Mr. BENEDICT: I would agree with that. I think what makes this an issue, though, is that he's not up there growing vegetables. He's up there bringing in a billion dollars a year, changing the face of three communities in southeastern Connecticut forever. (Footage of tractor-trailer rig passing Parke's Place; within Parke's Place; Foxwood's; traffic surrounding Foxwood's; aerial view of Foxwood's) KROFT: (Voiceover) And no one has embraced Jeff Benedict's book and research more warmly than the people of Ledyard, North Stonington, and Preston, Connecticut, which surround the Foxwood's casino. They're fed up with the 391 congestion and the traffic and the tribe's plans to annex even more real estate. They circled the wagons, so to speak, and are demanding a congressional investigation to reevaluate the Pequots' credentials. Mr. BOB CONGDON: What ever happened to one nation under God, indivisible? (Footage of Congdon with Kroft and others within Parke's Place) KROFT: Bob Congdon is a selectman from Preston, Connecticut. Mr. CONGDON: I have a real problem with--with this country being set up where there are different rights for different groups--different privileges, different immunities. This is one nation under God, indivisible. (Footage of Congdon with Kroft and others within Parke's Place; gambling casinos) KROFT: (Voiceover) If it were just the Pequots, maybe the people here could learn to live with them in peace. The Mohegans opened a casino just down the road, and seven other tribes in Connecticut are stepping up to the tables. The Southern Pequots, the Eastern Pequots, the Paucatuck Eastern Pequots, the Golden Hill Paugussetts, the Schaghticaokes, the Brotherton and the Niantic are all seeking federal recognition and hoping the federal government will call their number. If you're wondering where Donald Trump, one of the original Pequot opponents, stands on all of this, well, The Donald, who doesn't look much like an Indian either, has given up the fight and is trying to get in on the action. He signed a treaty with the Eastern Paucatucks to build them a casino. Copyright © 2001, LEXIS-NEXIS®, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. 392 APPENDIX IV: THE MASSACRE AT MYSTIC FORT--FINAL AUDIO SCRIPT (Supplied by Mike Hanke, Design Division, Inc.) ENGRAVING: COLONIST FIRING A MUSKET (F1) Button is pressed to start show. Overhead lights slow dim to off as music plays before narration. (F1 ON) [NARRATOR]: "It is the month of April, 1637. The conflict between the Pequot tribe and the English colonists in Massachusetts and Connecticut has grown more intense, setting off a chain reaction of killings. Each has suffered bitter losses and seeks revenge. But one side is bent on annihilation." (F1 OFF) PROTRAIT OF JOHN WINTHROP (F3) [VOICE OF JOHN WINTHROP] (F3) ON "The Court being assembled for the special occasion of prosecuting the war against the Pequots, it was agreed upon and ordered . . ." [FADE OUT] [NARRATOR]: "The Colony of Massachusetts, under the leadership of Deputy Governor John Winthrop, Senior, announces that war will be waged on the Pequot tribe. Connecticut is quick to join the cause." [VOICE OF "CONNECTICUT"]: "There shall be ninety men levied out of the three plantations, Hartford, Weathersfield, and Windsor . . . under the command of Captain John Mason . . .. It is ordered that every soldier shall carry with him one pound powder, four pounds of shot, twenty bullets, one barrel of powder form the river's (F3 OFF, F4 ON) mouth, and a light gun if they can." [CROSSFADE] ENGRAVING OF BOATS (F4) [MUSIC & EFX: WATER, HOISTING SAILS, MEN'S VOICES] 393 PORTRAIT OF JOHN MASON (F2) (F2 ON) [NARRATOR]: "The following month, Captain John Mason and his ninety men journey down the Connecticut River. They are accompanied by a group of Mohegan and Connecticut River Indians--enemies of the Pequots--under the leadership of the Mohegan sachem, Uncas. Meeting up with a contingent of Massachusetts Bay forces led by Captain John Underhill, Mason outlines a strategy: rather than sailing up the Mystic River and meeting the Pequots head on, they will sail further east and double back, attacking by land. [VOICE OF MASON]: "By Narragansett we should come upon their backs, and possibly might surprise them unawares; at worst we should be on firm land, as well as they." (F4 & F2 OFF) MAP SHOWING ROUTE OF ATTACK, LOCATION OF TROOP ENCAMPMENT, AND LOCATION OF PEQUOT FORT (F5) (F5 ON) [NARRATOR]: "The combined forces sail to Narragansett Bay and disembark. They are joined by still more enemies of the Pequots--Narragansetts and Eastern Niantics. [ENGLISH-TYPE DRUMS] [NARRATOR]: "The colonists and their Indian allies, now over several hundred strong, set out, marching twelve miles west. As they come to the boundary of Pequot territory, many of the Narragansetts and Eastern Niantics turn back--in fear of the Pequots. The rest continue to Porter's Rocks, set up camp for the night, and post their guards." (F5 OFF) LIGHT UP SLOWLY ON DRAWING OF PEQUOT FORT (F6) [SFX: INDIANS DRUMMING, SINGING--F6 ON AT START OF SINGING, DIM UP SLOWLY FROM BLACK] 394 [NARRATOR]: "The singing of the Pequots in the nearby fort penetrates the still night air. The Pequots are celebrating: they have seen the English ships pass the mouth of the river and believe that they have driven the invaders away. Before dawn the English arise, and the force begins a silent two-mile march. At the top of a hill stands a circular Pequot fort, with its 70 wigwams on two acres of land." ENGRAVING OF A DOG (F7) (F7 ON) [DOG BARKS] "A dog warns the Pequots of the enemy's approach." (F7 OFF) [INDIANS]: "Owanux! Owanux!" [NARRATOR]: "Englishmen! (F6 OFF, F8 ON) Englishmen!" the Pequots shout. PORTION OF UNDERHILL ENGRAVING: ENGLISHMEN FIRING MUSKETS (F8) [A BLAST OF MUSKET FIRE] [NARRATOR]: "Immediately, the English fire a volley through the palisade. [SHOUTING] Mason and sixteen men burst in through one entrance; Underhill and his men struggle through another. They surprise some Pequots in their wigwams, killing them with swords. Others are slain as they flee the village. [ONE OF TWO LIGHTS FLASHES ON AND OFF AT SOUND OF GUNFIRE IN SOUNDTRACK] PORTION OF UNDERHILL ENGRAVING: INDIANS FIRING ARROWS (F9) (F9 ON) [NARRATOR]: "But the Pequots are quick to return the fight, and Captain Mason sees that his small army will soon be overpowered. He seizes a torch." (F8, F9 OFF) 395 [VOICE OF MASON]: "We must burn them!" (F10 ON) ENGRAVING OF PEQUOT WAR (F10) [NARRATOR]: "Mason ignites the woven mats that cover the wigwam. They burst into flame, and the fire races through the village." ENGRAVING: UNDERHILL DEPICTION (F11) (F11 ON) [NARRATOR]: "At Mason's command, the English now retreat, encircling the burning fort. The Mohegan and Narragansett allies form a second ring behind them." ENGRAVING OF FORT IN FLAMES (F12) (F10, F11 OFF--F12 ON) [NARRATOR]: "The massacre is merciless, and the Narragansetts and Mohegans protest: `It is too furious,' they say. `It slays too many men.'" ENGRAVING OF UNDERHILL (F13) MASON'S SWORD (F14) (F13 ON) [NARRATOR]: "Captain John Underhill: [VOICE OF UNDERHILL]: Many were burnt in the fort . . . others forced out, . . . twenty and thirty at a time, which our soldiers received and entertained with the point of the sword. (F14 ON) Down fell men, women, and children; those that `scaped us fell into the hands of the Indians that were in the rear of us . . .. Great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of young soldiers that never had been in war, to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground, so thick, in some places, that you could hardly pass along." [NARRATOR]: "Estimates vary as to the number of Pequots killed: three hundred, five hundred, perhaps as many as seven hundred men, women, and children. The entire process takes no more than an hour." (F12, F13, F14 OFF) 396 [MOMENT OF SILENCE] MAP OF DIASPORA (F15) [NARRATOR]: "Still the war continues. Many Pequots in other villages survive, and the Pequot sachem, Sassacus, argues that they should continue to fight. But the Pequots are no longer united. Some flee. (F15 ON) Others are captured by the English forces and divided between the Narragansetts and the Mohegans, or sold into slavery. In August 1637, word reaches the English that Sassacus has been killed by the Mohawks; his head is sent to Hartford as proof of Mohawk support. It is the end of the war." TREATY OF HARTFORD (F16) [NARRATOR]: "On September 21, 1638, the Treaty of Hartford (F16 ON) is signed by the English of Connecticut, the Mohegans, and the Narragansetts. The Pequots are forbidden to live on their land, which now "belongs" to the English. The captive Pequot men and their families are to be dispersed between the other two tribes, and the Pequots-- [VOICE OF "TREATY"]: "shall no more be called Pequots, but Narragansetts and Mohegans." (F15, F16 OFF) The English conclude their war of genocide and arrogantly declare the Pequots extinct. Nevertheless, the Pequot tribe continues to survive and endure." 397 APPENDIX V: NARRATIVE OF THE PERMANENT EXHIBIT AT THE MASHANTUCKET PEQUOT MUSEUM AND RESEARCH CENTER, FEBRUARY 1998 (Supplied by Lauri Halderman, Design Division, Inc.) Gathering Space Your exploration of the Pequot past begins here. As you gaze up at the glass dome of the Gathering Space, you see two large canoes suspended overhead. Figures of men, women, and children are inside, and the faces of some are dramatically painted. What is the meaning of this scene? The year is 1637, a time of conflict among the Pequots, their Native neighbors, and the colonists. With a series of events-disagreements, misunderstandings, and isolated murders-violence escalated, and Pequot leaders realized that their people were in danger. Families gathered up some essential possessions, and warriors escorted women and children to a nearby island where they could remain with friends for protection. They made the trip in ocean-going dugout canoes, vessels that were large and rugged enough to travel the waters of Long Island Sound. The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation An array of dynamic exhibits introduces you to the land, the people, and the community at Mashantucket today. As you descend the ramp and enter the exhibit lobby, your attention is drawn first to a photomural of the Pequot cedar swamp rhododendrons in bloom. The occasional sounds you hear are the birds and insects of the swamp, and the intent of this area is to call attention to both the beauty and the importance of the Pequot land. You pass through a massive entryway framed by panels of bark, the true entrance to the permanent exhibit. Your entry to The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation 398 exhibit begins with a large-scale photograph of the assembled Mashantucket Pequots today. An introductory text panel welcomes you on behalf of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. Artifacts and color photographs fill the room, and together they create a portrait of the Mashantucket community: children swimming in the pool at the community center . . . the Sassacus, the first superfast passenger ferry launched by Pequot River Shipworks . . . the Mashantucket Pequot Men's Softball League playing a game . . . artwork created by children at the Child Development Center . . . tribal members and employees at work at the Post Office, the Fire Department, and the Tribal Police Department . . . a young tribal member wearing traditional dance regalia . . . and more. Your first impression is that this is a contemporary tribe, one whose diverse members are engaged in a variety of activities, both traditional and modern. Step up to the topographic model of the reservation and take a look at the land and the life of the community-its child development center, health service, housing, police, emergency medical service, recreational facilities, economic ventures including Foxwoods Resort Casino. Text-and-photo panels mounted on the rail identify Mashantucket's buildings and natural features depicted in model form; use the push buttons to illuminate each one. As you move through the exhibit area, you become aware of voices. You can listen to tribal members talk about Mashantucket today-their thoughts about family, the community, traditions and the land. The voices are welcoming, and you are intrigued. Continue on to learn more about the Pequot story. The Glacier While an escalator carries you to the exhibits in the lower level of the museum, experience the icy chill of a glacier at close range. As you leave the first exhibit, you begin your journey back in time. You see a photomural of an otherworldly landscape: a blue sky above a white expanse of ice 399 that extends as far as the eye can see. You step through the doorway and onto an escalator and, surrounded by walls of glowing blue ice stretching in layers above and below, you descend through a crevasse in a re-created glacier. See the water trickling down the sheets of ice and splashing into a pool below . . . hear the wind howling around you, and the ice creaking and groaning . . . feel the cold radiating from the glacier's surface. Contemplate for a moment a world so foreign that it bears no resemblance to the landscape you left behind just moments ago. This was New England 20,000 years ago. A World of Ice Explore this land as it existed some 18,000 years ago, when ice nearly a mile thick towered over where you now stand, and learn how the retreating ice shaped the land in ways that still are visible today. Follow the glacier and step into the distant past, into an awe-inspiring world of ice. A cool blue light suffuses the room, as though the sun were filtered through the glacial ice that surrounds the entrance and wraps around the wall. The centerpiece of this exhibit area is a large globe providing a look at the last advance and retreat of the Wisconsin glacier on a global level. Use the interactive systems surrounding the globe and, by manipulating bird's-eye views on-screen, see the ice advance and retreat over thousands of years. You can also examine how the contours of New England and the reservation took shape, and learn more about how the glacier has affected the land and people's lives on a national and local scale. As you continue through the exhibit area you see a scale model of the museum site dwarfed by a column of ice directly above it. Look up-it's a graphic demonstration of the relationship between the world as we know it and the height of the ice sheet. 400 A sweeping photomural depicts a contemporary glacier, reminding you that glaciers still exist today and could cover New England once again. Other photographs superimposed on this mural provide views of glacial features at Mashantucket, including the moraine and kettlehole that lie just outside the walls of the museum. The Arrival of the People Native oral tradition and archeological evidence provide different beliefs about how people came to inhabit this continent. How did people come to this part of the world? The stunning works of art in this gallery provide some interpretations by Native artists. Here you can explore different beliefs about the origins of the cosmos and the people. In one exhibit, archeologists suggest that people came from northern Asia, arriving by crossing a land bridge that linked Siberia and Alaska during the Wisconsin glacier. Other beliefs are revealed by Native stories from across the continent. The arrival or creation stories of nine tribes are told briefly in text form and are also represented visually by Native artists-painters, sculptors, weavers and others. Together, these remarkable works of art create a provocative and fascinating gallery. At the far end of the exhibit area, enter the Arrival of the People Minitheater and hear some of these stories as told by tribal storytellers, both in English and in their native languages. Stories from the Kwakiutl, Kiowa, Cayuga, and Mohave tribes are featured. These elders are among the few remaining speakers of their languages, and they consider these creation stories to be sacred. Come in, and hear the stories as they have been handed down from generation to generation. Life in a Cold Climate A dramatic environment re-creates how early people made use of the caribou, while adjacent areas present a look at the diverse flora and fauna of more than 10,000 years ago. 401 As you emerge from "The Arrival of the People," you first come upon life-size replicas of some of the large animals that inhabited this part of the continent 10,000 - 15,000 years ago. The mastodon and giant beaver are but two of the species that may surprise you. To your left, in a circular environment fifty feet in diameter, you see a vivid scene from daily life some 11,000 years ago. Hunters have cleverly driven a small group of caribou into a stream bed, cornering the animals and making them more vulnerable. You witness a moment in time: the massive size of the animals . . . the strategy and tools of the hunters, poised for the kill . . . and the chilly landscape inhabited by people and animals alike. Surrounding the perimeter of the diorama are text-and-graphic panels, many with artifacts that you can touch, as well as interactive stations that interpret the scene. Use the touchscreen systems to learn more about caribou, for example, and see a segment with contemporary footage of these animals in their native habitat. Onscreen animation provides additional interpretation for young and old alike. You can get a close look at authentic stone tools and other artifacts in a nearby case, where an actual 9,000-year-old site from Mashantucket is interpreted. Who left these tools and fragments? Was this a small group of men on a hunting expedition, or a family that paused in its travels? These two intriguing interpretations are explored. A Changing Environment Follow the development of the land and the people by exploring southern New England approximately 8,000 to 3,000 years ago. The sequence of exhibits that stretches before you reveals that the climate of southern New England continued to warm for several thousand years after the passing of the Ice Age. The vegetation changed, as spruce trees and conifers were joined by oak and other hardwoods; some animals became scarce or extinct, while others became more plentiful; and the four seasons as we know them today developed more fully. Native people took advantage of these changes by 402 developing new tools and by moving seasonally to take advantage of plentiful seasonal resources. Step up to a wooded terrestrial environment with a stream at the downslope end, a typical locale rich in plant and animal resources. Here, a woman and her young daughter gather hickory nuts on a warm autumn day. Surrounding the diorama are stations with an interactive program challenges you to identify each resource and its use by Native people, whether for food, medicine, tools, or other purposes. The nature and uses of these resources would have been common knowledge to the ancestors of the Pequots-but they may be unfamiliar to you today. How do we know what we know? Two exhibits in this area help you understand some of the research and processes that went into the making of this museum. In the first of these exhibits, entitled "The Cedar Swamp Core," look out the windows toward Cedar Swamp and see the area from which a core of sediment was taken. Examine a thin section of the core itself, and see enlarged photographs of plant fragments found within it that provide clues to past environments. You will learn how geologists, paleobotanists, archaeologists and others work together to re-create the past. Not far from this exhibit is the second exhibit, a case entitled "Understanding the Past." Here you can see how experts use artifacts, ecofacts, sites, oral tradition, oral history, and other evidence to piece together a picture of the past. Beyond this exhibit is a series of dioramas depicting three environments, each at a different season of the year. A family group tends to some winter tasks and listens as an elder tells a story. A large group of people takes advantage of plentiful fish and shellfish resources in the spring, while in the summer two nearby groups rendezvous for an exchange of news and gifts. Opposite these dioramas is an oral history program; take a seat, and hear about life in the four seasons as told to you by tribal members. The Tool Theater, located at the end of this area, enables you to take a seat for a moment and see how stone, bone and even copper tools were made. At the 403 entrance of this theater, tools from thousands of years ago are compared with those of the 20th century-revealing some surprising similarities. The Introduction of Horticulture Learn how corn, beans and squash became a new part of the Pequots' diet . . . and how the introduction of horticulture affected ways of life. By approximately 1000 AD the first domesticated plants appeared in southern New England and gradually, over the course of many centuries, the Pequots began to practice farming. Here you can see the tools the people developed . . . the techniques used for growing "the three sisters" together, using the corn stalks to support the beans, and planting squash in the remaining spaces . . . and take a look at a diorama of a Native woman weeding her garden. Find out how horticulture affected social life, as the Pequots gathered together each year for schemitzun, a ceremony to give thanks for the harvest of the first ears of corn-and see how the Pequots today keep this tradition alive. Learn about the origins of domesticated corn, and how this important crop came to the Northeast. See, too, the great variety of other plants-sunflower, Jerusalem artichoke, gourds, and tobacco-that were domesticated in the Northeast by 1000 years ago. The Pequot Village Take a walk through a 16th-century Pequot village . . . explore every aspect of Pequot life and culture . . . and look "behind the scenes" to see how traditional skills have been revived to create this experience. The living world of the Pequots unfolds before you as you step into a re-created 16th-century village. Pick up a digital audio system that will provide you with as little or as much information as you want about this 20,000-square-foot scene. 404 Listen to the sounds of people at work and play: the chipping of flint . . . the crackling of a hearth fire . . . the grinding of corn . . . the laughing of children. Look closely as figures re-enact scenes from daily life: cooking . . . building a wigwam . . . weaving rush mats . . . making arrows. . . telling stories. . . and more. Walk inside a typically-furnished wigwam and see what life was like. Take a breath and smell the pines in the perimeter forest . . . the salt air at the edge of the inlet . . . the meal cooking over the hearth. And in the adjacent Daily Life gallery, learn more about the Pequots' activities of daily life-food, clothing, transportation, shelter, ceramics, and more. Here you see not only exhibits but also short films that reveal the expertise involved in making a dugout canoe, wigwam, clothing, and a meal. For special presentations, experts and artists will demonstrate various activities on stage. In the Pequot Society gallery, learn more about social and political organization; the roles of men, women, children, and elders; the positions of sachem and powwow; the siting of a village; and language. Explore an interactive program on language to hear some Pequot words and learn more about them. A third gallery, "The Arrival of the Europeans," introduces the early explorers and colonists. Here you find out why Europeans came to this continent, gain a sense of how each culture was perceived-and misperceived-by the other, and see how early trade was, in some ways, beneficial to both. You can also learn about some early European settlements, whose success or failure was often a result of the interactions between colonists and Native people. Continue your trip through the Pequot village and enter a palisaded village-one of the changes in Native ways of life brought about by the European presence. Inside the village are some subtle differences. You will notice some new materials and household items that have appeared as the result of trade-iron kettles, pewter or copper spoons, and wool blankets. You will also see how new diseases brought by Europeans had devastating results. 405 Before you leave the village, step inside the longhouse and spend a moment . . . perhaps even hear a Native storyteller . . . and feel what it might have been like to have lived among the Pequots more than three-and-a-half centuries ago. A Great Mortality The first Europeans who settled in New England brought with them more than just strange customs and novel goods-they also carried European diseases that spread rapidly through Native communities. In this gallery, you will learn how smallpox and other epidemic diseases decimated Native populations in New England . . . how some groups lost up to 95% of their members . . . how the loss of community leaders disrupted social patterns . . . and how Europeans took advantage of these losses and seized possession of Native land. A large photomural of an abandoned wigwams starkly illustrates the Native practice of abandoning a place of residence after family members died. Quotations from 17th century observers, both European and Native, describe the terrible effects of the epidemics in the words of those who witnessed them. A Clash of Cultures Discover why the Pequots became embroiled in conflicts with the Dutch, the English, and neighboring tribes... and discover the horrifying outcome of the Pequot War. As you walk first through a series of thematic exhibits, learn about the problems developing between the Europeans and the Natives of southern New England during the 1620s and 1630s. First, "The Trade Triangle" is the story of the exchange of European goods for Native wampum and furs. At first trade was beneficial to both Natives and colonists, but the Europeans' enormous demand for furs soon depleted the resources of southern New England and created rivalries among competing tribes. 406 In the nearby minitheater, see a short video program on the history of wampum, revealing how Europeans in the 17th century transformed the traditional meaning of wampum by using it as currency. Another video program in this same minitheater shows the precise, time-consuming work involved in making a single wampum bead. Now continue on through the gallery into the Prelude to War exhibits, which focus on events leading the Pequots into war with the English and their Native allies. First, a series of three exhibits-each with a large-scale map, video monitor, and synchronized LED-light program-detail the events that led to the brink of war. The first exhibit concerns the Pequots and the Dutch, and the series of incidents that put an end to trading between these two groups. The next recounts the problems that ensued when the Pequots next turned to the English as trading partners. Finally, in the third exhibit you learn about the relationship between the Pequots and their neighboring tribes. Why did the Narragansetts and other tribes side with the English rather than the Pequots? The short video program in each of these three exhibit niches provides some personal perspectives, as 17th-century people from each of these communities give "man-on-the-street" statements expressing their understanding of events. On the opposite curvilinear wall, a timeline provides further details. At the end of this exhibit area, "The Pequot War" exhibit chronicles the events that culminated in the 1637 massacre of the Pequots at their village in Mystic. A map reveals the step-by-step route of attack used by the English and their Native allies. Cases flanking the map hold colonial and Native weapons similar to those used in the war. In the center of the floor is a model of the Mystic Fort and the surrounding terrain. See the hilltop village that was the site of the most brutal massacre of the Pequot War, and examine artifacts that were found at the actual site. "The Witness" Take a seat and, as a powerful film unfolds, witness the tragedy of the Pequot War. 407 Enter one of the twin circular theaters and, as the lights dim, you have entered the 1630s in southern New England. You see the places where events really happened, and you see the participants. The story that follows is true, and sobering. The 30-minute film opens with a brief review of the Pequots' interactions with the Dutch. You then meet Wampishe, a Pequot elder, who tells you that he was the witness, and that he will tell you the story of the Pequot War. As the flashback begins, you see Wampishe as a boy. With him, you witness the vengeful attack on the Pequots by John Endicott and his men. It is clear from the unfolding story that the colonists of Massachusetts Bay and the Connecticut plantations believe they have all the justification they require to take action against the Pequots, who they have come to regard as their enemy. The Pequot sachem Sassacus attempts to enlist the aid of the Narragansetts-but the Narragansetts are not interested in joining forces. Instead, they side with the English, as do the Mohegans, under the leadership of Uncas. After the Pequots attack the English settlement at Wethersfield, in retaliation for Endicott's raid, the Connecticut plantations declare war against the Pequots. Captain John Mason is the leader of the colonial forces. Follow the men's journey down the Connecticut River . . . witness as they formulate a plan of attack . . . and see the incredible Pequot territory through their eyes as the colonists and their Native allies sail along the coast, march thirty-odd miles back, and camp for the night. You hear the voices and drumming of the Pequots, unaware that enemy forces hovers outside the walls of their village. And as the army rises at daybreak and silently marches to the top of Mystic Hill, you feel the tension that three-and-ahalf centuries of time has not diminished. While the Pequots are sleeping, the colonists burst in to the village. As the slaughter begins, it is as if you are in the fort yourself, and you hear the chilling 408 sounds of death all around you. You see flames, small at first and then larger and larger. This is warfare on a scale the natives have never imagined . . . this is genocide. Wampishe escapes, one of only six survivors. At last the flames die down, the crying of voices fades away. And yet the war continues as the colonists pursue Sassacus from one location to another until finally he, too, is dead, murdered by the Mohawks. As the Treaty of Hartford is read by a treaty officer, you realize that this is the start of a new chapter in nativecolonial relations-one in which the Pequots are driven from their homeland, and colonists claim the land by right of conquest. Yet as you learn from the epilogue, the Pequots survived. 409 Life on the Reservation Learn how the Pequots obtained a reservation-and then fought to maintain this land and their existence for more than three centuries. During the latter half of the 17th century, the Pequots divided into two tribes with separate leadership. The Western Pequots fought to stay at Noank but were formally granted land at Mashantucket, thus beginning a new chapter in their story: life on the reservation. As you enter this exhibit area, you first encounter a life-size figure of the 17thcentury Pequot leader, Robin Cassacinamon. As you look down the length of this exhibit area, you see that the room is filled with other individuals. Spanning three hundred years are political leaders such as Robin Cassacinamon . . . Peter George, a whaler . . . the Christian minister William Apes . . . Hannah Ocuish, an indentured child. . . the Sunsimon family living on a farmstead . . . and more. Each of these is surrounded by an exhibit that tells a story of life during these times. Arranged chronologically, the exhibits provide a look at both the personal and collective experience of the Pequots. One highlight is a late-17th century Pequot fort, probably built in response to King Philip's War. See a model of this square fort and many of the artifacts found there, and use an interactive video system to explore the site and hear an archeologist talk about his findings. See what 18th-century life was like by stepping inside a 1780 farmstead typical of those on the reservation. Learn how frame houses and wigwams existed side by side as Pequots maintained their traditions and yet also adopted some European ways of life. During warm weather, continue your experience outside-follow the interpretive trail that leads you to the animal pens and gardens, to the black ash trees used for making woodsplint baskets and the apple trees valued for their harvest. Nineteenth-century life is conveyed vividly by a short film on the Christian minister William Apes. An outspoken social critic, Apes left behind a collection 410 of writings that provide a clear record of his beliefs about the equality of all races and the true teachings of Christianity. This filmed re-enactment will give visitors a sense of how Apes' beliefs are still relevant today. Additionally, a short film on making woodsplint baskets is part of an exhibit on two 19th-century Pequot basketmakers; this traditional Native craft was one way that both men and women earned an income. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the lack of employment reduced the quality of Pequot housing and the standard of living-but not the people's determination to survive. By the mid-20th century, the Pequots' land had been greatly reduced and many people had been forced to leave. Explore an interactive program entitled, "The Changing Reservation," and see how the shape and nature of Pequot territory changed-and is still changing. By the middle of this century there were only two women left on the reservation, Elizabeth George Plouffe and Martha Langevin Ellal. Tenacious and determined, these half-sisters held on to the small amount of remaining Pequot land and lobbied for improvements in housing, medical care, and treatment of the tribe. Bringing the People Home Hear the story of how the Mashantucket Pequot tribe became revitalized and gained federal recognition-from those who made it happen. In the early 1970s, the tribe took action to address the future by reorganizing the tribal government, establishing a written constitution, and finding ways to create jobs. See an exhibit on some of their early economic endeavors, ranging from maple sugaring to hydroponic gardening, and learn how the tribe-under the leadership of Elizabeth George's grandson, Richard "Skip" Hayward-petitioned the federal government to recover the stolen tribal lands. See, too, a typical Pequot residence from this time, a trailer, that includes an oral history program with the Pequots telling you in their own words about life in the 1970s. In 1983, the US Congress enacted the Mashantucket Pequots Indian Land Claims Settlement Act, which settled the tribe's land claim, provided federal recognition 411 and paved the way for the tribe's economic revival. What is federal recognition? Why are some tribes recognized and others not? What are the benefits that are available to federally recognized tribes? Take a seat in a minitheater and see a short film that features the Pequots as well as their legal counselors and advocates who provide a firsthand accounting of this complex process. A Tribal Portrait As you spend a few moments in this final exhibit, consider the Pequots today in light of your new knowledge of the past. Bold black-and-white photographs of tribal members, both individuals and families, are the visual component of this gallery. These formal, larger-than-lifesize photos create a striking portrait of individual tribal members today-a complement to the portrait of the Pequot community presented in the Museum's first exhibit. The voices of tribal members filter throughout the room. Listen to their thoughts on what life was like for previous generations . . . what it means to be a Pequot and Native American today . . . and why the preservation of the history and culture in this museum is so important for the future. 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During the following years he was employed as a short-order cook, telephone answering service operator, customer service representative, retail foods manager, fine black and white printer, photographic production assistant, studio manager, and photographer. He worked in commercial photography, specializing in advertising and editorial work in San Francisco, for over ten years. In August 1993, he entered the Graduate School at The University of Texas. He received the degree Master of Arts in Anthropology from The University of Texas at Austin in December 1995, and completed coursework and exams for the Ph.D. in May 1997. From July 1997 to May 1998, he worked in contract consulting positions for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation and Design Division, Inc., the exhibition design firm responsible for the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. He researched and wrote panel text and took photographs for wall murals and exhibitions. He served as curator for the 437 Connecticut River Museum in Essex, Connecticut from July 1998 to October 1999 when he accepted a position as grants writer and special projects officer for The Wolfsonian in Miami Beach. In August 2001, he returned to the University of Texas at Austin to complete his dissertation in anthropology. Permanent address: 2501 Lake Austin Blvd. #F201, Austin, TX 78703 This dissertation was typed by John Joseph Bodinger de Uriarte. 438