Free Country of Exiles by William R. Leach Page B

from it, see “Sprawling Toward the Millennium,” a six-part series published by
The New Day
(a newspaper serving the southeastern Connecticut towns of North Stonington, New London, and Norwich), May 18–23, 1997.
    69. Phone interview with Charles Elias, selectman from North Stonington, August 18, 1997.
    70. “Trains Proposed to Link to Foxwoods,”
The New Day
, June 12, 1997, A1, A7.
    71. Phone interview with Charles Elias.
    72. See Wilkinson
(American Indians
, pp. 186–87), on the role anthropology has played in arming these kinds of “Indians” with philosophical material to justify these positions. “We shouldn’t reject everything,” said William Belvado, a Sioux leader who urged his tribe to embrace tourism as well new technologies, scientificadvances, and new business methods (Bordewich),
Killing the White Man’s Indian
, pp. 237–38. Men like Belvado might have agreed with Terry L. Anderson, free-market thinker and journalist, who insisted in an influential essay in
Reason Magazine
that Indians, far from being communalists and nature “mystics,” have historically been more capitalist than most Americans. Indians, Anderson said, have always defended “private property rights” against government intervention; and they have “encouraged investment and production in personal property as well.” In the context of these arguments, then, gambling and tourism did not stand against but emerged out of Indian life, just as they did in the case of non-Indians (Anderson, “Dances with Myths,”
Reason Magazine
, February 1997, 48–50).
    73. Mark Marvel, “Gambling on the Reservations: What’s Really at Stake,”
Interview
, May 1994, 114;
Minnesota Gaming Directory
, 1994 edition; and David Segal, “Dances with Sharks,”
Daybreak
(winter 1993), 21.
    74. Julie Nicklin, “Casinos Bring Riches to Some Tribal Colleges, but Windfalls Are Rare,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, September 8, 1995, A54; and Angie Debo,
A History of the Indians of the United States
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), p. 373.
    Jo Ann Jones, president of the Ho-Chunk Indians in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, echoed these themes in her testimony in defense of Indian gambling before the U.S. Senate. Thanks to gambling, she argued, we “have increased employment by 2,000 people in three years, and it is able to pay a good living wage” (see Segal, “Dances with Sharks,” 21).
    Such leaders, in fact, were confident that they could separate the cultural life of the tribes from economic life; in the classic American manner, they believed that the private spiritual world could flourish in a public setting that threatened to destroy it. Their aim, as Christopher Jocks, professor of Native American culture at Dartmouth, argues, has been to “put tourist and gambling operations somewhere on the margins and not at the heart of things” (phone interview, April 2, 1996). “We have made an attempt not to mix tribal culture with the business,” insisted Keller George, spokesman for the Oneidas in upstate New York. (KellerGeorge quoted in Melissa Gedachian, “Oneida Nation: Keeping an Eye on the Sparrow,”
Indian Gaming
, February 1996, 28.)
    75. Quoted in Tim Johnson, “The Dealer’s Edge,”
Akwe-kon’s Journal of Indigenous Issues
(summer 1995), 20.
    76. Kathryn Harrison, chairperson of the Grand Ronde Indian tribe near Portland, Oregon, on the tribe’s Spiritual Mountain casino, which has the distinction of having introduced high-stakes gambling to Oregon (quoted in
Indian Country Today
, Jan. 27–Feb. 3, 1997, B2).
    77. Doug George-Kanetiio, columns for the
Syracuse Herald American
, February 19, 1995, and May 14, 1995.
    78. On the Seneca referendum, see
Putnam Reporter Dispatch
, May 3, 1998, B1.
    79. Interview with Elaine Quiver (Grey Eagle), Pine Ridge Reservation, May 21, 1997. This testimony can be found on pre-printed postcards mailed in May 1995 and used by many tribes to get their members to communicate their