Free Country of Exiles by William R. Leach

period 1967–70, “millions of Americans (mostly liberal) reindictedthemselves for the nation’s old imperialism, its often brutal conquest of the Indians. They read of the poetry and beauty of the old Indian ways, reproached themselves for what their ancestors had destroyed, and warmly embraced the new Indians, the Indian of Alcatraz, who defiantly promised a rebirth of native heritages that many whites had feared extinct” (p. 293). This romance lived in New Age cults, in white obsessions with sweat lodges and Indian spirituality, and in white acceptance of practices by Indians, from race-based citizenship to extreme forms of body-piercing, which most whites refused to tolerate in their own behavior (at least up until very recently).
    36. Nabokov,
Native American Testimony
, p. 383.
    37. This discussion draws on Bordewich’s excellent analysis
(Killing the White Man’s Indian
, pp. 170–71).
    38. “Collectively, these actions,” Bordewich has argued, “along with similar legislation in many states, some of them requiring reburial of any Indian remains in museum collections, represented the clearest extension yet of the principle of tribal sovereignty into the realm of American culture”
(Ibid.
, p. 171).
    39. Johansen,
Life and Death in Mohawk Country
, p. xxiii.
    40. On water and fishing rights, see Timothy Egan, “Indians of Puget Sound Get Rights to Shellfish,”
NYT
, January 1, 1995, A12.
    41. National Indian Policy, “Reservation-Based Gambling,” pp. 35–38; and Lynn Montante, “An Imposition on Tribal Sovereignty: The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act,”
Daybreak Magazine
(winter, 1994), 18–22.
    42. IGRA, however, may have been unnecessary as a spur to economic sovereignty, although many today argue that it was; as Charles Wilkinson has indicated, long before 1986 “the tribes” had “begun to take back their reservations.” See his essay “Paradise Revised,” in William E. Riebsame, general editor,
Atlas of the New West
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 33. Today a huge advocacy system exists to plead for all “the Indian nations” as one voice. This system has a national magazine called
Indian Gaming;
it boasts full-time Washington lawyers; and it has lobbyists and organizations such as the National Indian Gaming Organization.
    43. “A Battle Topped With Felt, Casino Mogul Helps MohegansRenew an Old Rivalry,”
NYT
, August 5, 1996, B1; “Not the Last of This Tribe,”
NYT
, March 24, 1994, B4; “Place Your Bets: A New Casino,”
NYT
, December 11, 1996, B1;
International Gaming and Wagering News
, December 5, 1994, 53. On Lyle Berman, see “You Gotta Know When to Hold ’Em,”
Business Week
, September 9, 1996, 69; “Roller-Coaster Ride of Stratosphere Corporation Is a Tale of Las Vegas,”
WSJ
, October 29, 1996, 1, A10.
    44. An essay could be written comparing the South African approach to tribal homelands with the American approach. Obviously the biggest difference was that Pretoria used tribalism to weaken the tribes and to strengthen the government, while in America, the government sought to revitalize tribalism as a way of strengthening the tribes. But there were obvious similarities. Both governments exploited or manipulated or bought into phony ideas about place—about culture, inheritance, the past—to achieve their ends, thus opening up opportunities, of course, for unscrupulous developers and other place-exploiters.
    45. On the South African government’s approach to the “tribal homelands,” see Brian Lapping,
Apartheid: A History
(London: Grafton, 1986), pp. 106–8, 128–47; and George Fredrickson,
White Supremacy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 240–46.
    46. For an account of this history, see “Report of the Division of Gaming Enforcement to Casino Control Commission in the Matter of the Application of Sun International Hotels Limited For Plenary Qualification as a Holding Company of Casino Licensee Resorts International Hotel, Inc.” (Trenton: