Country of Exiles (14 page)

The spot Costner chose to build on was a beautiful bluff just outside of Deadwood, South Dakota, from which one could see the Black Hills, with their green ponderosa pine, aspen, cottonwood, white birch, and willow. These were among the hills the Sioux viewed as sacred, the hills that were taken from them by the federal government in the 1877 treaties. No one better than Costner knew this history; his film had honored it and even inspired the local Lakota to make him and his brother, Dan, honorary members of the tribe.
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But little did the Indians know that the movie star planned
to convert their spiritual domain into what he called “the Switzerland of America.” Costner got the property in a land swap with the U.S. Forest Service in 1995. A few years earlier he had purchased 585 acres in Spearfish Canyon, a slice of private property belonging to the Homestake Gold Mine Company (the biggest gold mining concern in North America) that happened to be nestled within the federally owned Black Hills. Costner bought the land, which Homestake no longer needed, only to encourage the Forest Service to take it in exchange for the land Costner
did
want—the 640 acres near Deadwood. In the tradition of “wise use,” the Forest Service was eager to make the swap. The Service viewed the Spearfish Canyon site as having the same value as the Black Hills property (basing their determination on real estate standards, ironically enough). They wanted to incorporate it into the park system to save Spearfish from residential development, maintain its biodiversity in perpetuity, and preserve its natural beauty so that more and more people might be drawn into the region. After all, nearly 2.6 miles of U.S. Highway 14A, designated a National Scenic Byway under the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, was located within Spearfish Canyon.
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In the spring of 1996, Costner began in earnest to reshape his land into what his publicity literature called the “
largest
resort complex [to be] developed in North America in many decades.”
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The estate occupied nearly 840 acres and, when finished, would contain a 320-room hotel and conference center, four tennis courts, two pools, skiing and ice-skating facilities, health spa and sauna, an eighteen-hole golf course, nine retail outlets, a 3,000-seat outdoor amphitheater, a movie theater, an equestrian center, and a twenty-four-hour casino. By August 1997 his developers had completed a massive transplanting of trees to the site (since the previous leaseholder had stripped it of trees), the “largest [transplanting] effort
ever attempted,” according to Dunbar’s brochure.
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The golf course, too, had been seeded, and a rail bed for a train linking the resort to the airport in Rapid City was graded. But there were snags as well, unforeseen delays, fears that unless the betting limit imposed by South Dakota law (five dollars) was raised, the high rollers would not stream in. By winter 1999, the project had slowed to a crawl. A local news editor complained that “Costner has achieved nothing” but “to hold the town hostage.” Still, many locals refused to lose faith. They had come to see Costner’s kingdom as the linchpin in the future “growth” of this part of South Dakota.
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What lay behind Costner’s fantasy of a new Switzerland in the Dakotas? Why, indeed, had so many people in just fifteen years turned to tourism and gambling as good ways of making a living? And why, for heaven’s sake, were there casinos on Indian reservations? For some analysts, such as Paul Biederman, professor of tourism at New York University’s Center for Hospitality, Tourism, and Travel Administration, answers to these questions could be found in one cause—the ever-expanding number of people, especially middle-class people in foreign countries with more money than ever in their pockets, and just as eager to unload it on vacations and cruises as Europeans and Americans had been over the past hundred or so years. These individuals, who lived in such places as Malaysia, India, and China, not only could afford cars, TVs, and computers but, as Biederman argued, they “longed to be tourists and visit the United States.” Before 1998—after which the Asian economic meltdown threw a dismal pall over such longings—these people
formed a kind of “built-in growth component,” guaranteed to swell “for the next fifty to one hundred years.”
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But hordes of tourists waiting to spill into America by sea and air were the least significant cause for the appearance of places like Costner’s Dunbar. The tremendous growth of the airline industry with the number of commercial airplanes nearly tripling from 2,100 in the 1960s to nearly 6,000 in the late 1990s certainly played its part, permitting anyone with money to go almost anywhere and to see anything.
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More important, however, were the internal economic causes, above all, the fundamental shift in the character of the American economy. As manufacturing, mining, ranching, logging, military spending, and family farming fell away as sources of work and income for Americans, governmental bodies around the country turned to tourism and gambling to make up the difference.
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It was the logic of this reality that lay behind Bill Clinton’s ardent defense of tourism at the 1995 Travel and Tourism Conference. It was this logic that made Rudolph Giuliani, mayor of New York City, a staunch supporter of tourism in New York and a serious advocate of bringing gambling to that city; and it was this logic that converted Christine Todd Whitman, blue-blooded governor of New Jersey, into an apostle for Atlantic City casino interests.

These economic conditions explained why Costner was bulldozing in the Black Hills: many local whites had welcomed the actor to the region because they had lost their jobs when the federal government closed Ellsworth Air Force Base in Rapid City. South Dakotan politicians, too, at all levels of government, saw in Costner’s new Field of Dreams a boon for employment.
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And how was it that Americans could play roulette at such unlikely places as Indian reservations? The answer to this question boils down to one thing: the rehabilitation of Indian sovereignty
that has taken place step by step over the past thirty years. During that time, Indian sovereignty has been rebuilt, first politically and culturally, and then, for some tribes, economically.

Before the 1960s the United States—except for a brief time between the world wars—had worked to destroy Indian sovereignty and to compel Indian assimilation into the American mainstream. After the late 1960s, however, the United States worked to promote Indian sovereignty and tribalism and
rejected
assimilation.
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The government granted the Indian tribes new claims to sovereign status, indeed to such an extent that, as Richard White, an historian of the West, has written, it “ironically made tribes more important than they have ever been in Indian history.”
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In 1968 Congress passed the Indian Civil Rights Act, which forbade the states from exercising civil or criminal jurisdiction on Indian reservations. Two years later, Richard Nixon, in an executive order, announced that “Indian acts and Indian decisions” would, from that time forward, determine all federal policy regarding the Indians.
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This order was followed by a remarkable body of legislation and Supreme Court decisions that, altogether, “served as the vehicle for preserving tribalism in numerous Indian groups.”
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From the seventies to the present, moreover, both federal and state governments recognized the sovereignty of Indian groups. Indeed, it was ironic that at a time when many Americans were beginning to question (and even attack) the very idea of American sovereignty, they seemed sure that Indian nationhood should be reawakened and strengthened.
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This shift in government policy was in part animated by the collapse of Western imperialism and the rise of independent Third World countries; by the American civil rights movement; and by the spiritual needs of many middle-class white
Americans who were estranged from established religion and looked to some outside source for spiritual renewal and insight. Indian cultures, after years of being ignored or ridiculed by many people, were now elevated, even idolized by mainstream Americans as the source of cultural vitality (as they still are today).
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In the early 1970s, as part of this rehabilitation of cultural sovereignty, Richard Nixon also signed a law that restored to the Taos Pueblos in New Mexico 50,000 acres in the Carson National Forest, which contained the tribe’s sacred Blue Lake, the “heart of their culture and site of their secret August pilgrimage.”
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Twenty years later, Congress was still midwifing the cultural rebirth of the tribes. In 1989 Congress passed a law to establish an Indian museum in the Washington Mall, a fitting symbol of the Indian renaissance on the national scene. The act also mandated that the Smithsonian Institution survey all its Indian artifacts, with the aim of returning them—“repatriating” them as Native American leaders called it—to those tribes that owned them originally.
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A year later, Congress extended this law to nearly all other museums, stipulating that upon request they must return all “sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony” to the relevant Indian descendants.
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It was in the context of this cultural-political rearmament of the Indian tribes that the federal and state governments also attempted to foster Indian
economic
sovereignty, so that the Indians—as presidents from Nixon to Clinton hoped—would get off the welfare rolls and “privatize” themselves.
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Since the 1960s, the federal government provided the reservations with financial assistance, including the granting of water and fishing rights, designed to stimulate their economies along traditional lines.
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But the biggest boon by far to many reservations turned out to be gambling, which Washington facilitated through the passage of the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), a
radical act ushered through Congress by Representative Stewart Udall and acclaimed by Ronald Reagan, who, perhaps more than any other president, wanted to terminate Indian programs (but not the tribes) and launch privatization.
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The IGRA allowed any Indian tribe that could prove itself to be a tribe the right to operate tax-free on their own any form of gambling going on in its state. It also stated that any tribe that wished to conduct casino-type gambling had first to request negotiations for compacts with their respective states and, second, they had the right to sue those states in federal district court, if the states refused to negotiate (this right, however, the Supreme Court withdrew in 1996).

Given the current of revitalization set loose to promote Indian sovereignty, coupled with the existence of chronic Indian poverty and the experience many tribes already had in conducting low-stakes gambling since the 1970s (mainly bingo), the law seemed almost inevitable. But it had results that no one could have foreseen. Without consenting referenda or input of any kind from those
local
non-Indians who would have been affected the most by it, this federal law brought casino gambling to states that had never before had such activity. It unified American tribes (or at least their enriched elites) into one cohesive unit in a way that no other event or law had ever done, complete with Washington lobbyists, organizations, and magazines. It transformed some tiny tribes into little Kuwaits, governed by their own rules but able to shape the world around them.
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To put it another way, this law—along with the whole effort to reempower Indian sovereignty—helped remake the American political landscape by adding yet another semisovereign entity to a growing community of such entities. Like the country’s giant semi-sovereign port authorities (the ports of Long Beach, Los Angeles, Elizabeth, and so forth), and like its equally giant semi-sovereign research universities (discussed in the
next chapter
),
these Indian casino empires belonged to a nearly autonomous and unaccountable institutional world, unique to this fluid, global age.

Perhaps equally as striking, the quest for Indian sovereignty brought to life a breed of non-Indian developers who cared nothing about Indians but saw in their supposedly nowhere homelands the perfect sites to house slot machines and crap tables. They included Lyle Berman of Minnesota whose Grand Casinos Corporation built, opened, and managed the profitable Mille Lacs and Hinckley casinos for the Chippewa Indians of Minnesota; also Solomon Kerzner, CEO of Sun International Hotels and a resourceful developer who, in 1998, owned more than thirty casinos in Europe, Africa, America, and the Bahamas.
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A native South African, Kerzner started his gambling empire in his own country during the heyday of apartheid, taking full advantage of the government’s system of homelands. Kerzner focused on the homelands because their laws allowed gambling, while the rest of South Africa banned it. Moreover, the homelands were ideal places for casinos because they were not the products of actual black African history but the inventions of the white-controlled government bent on finding a way to segregate blacks from white society (except as reserves of cheap labor). In a way that eerily mirrored the resurgence of tribal sovereignty in America, the South African government urged the blacks to “return” to these “homelands” where they might reclaim their “tribal” pasts and cultures. It set up eight homelands (formed from hundreds of native reserves), each with its own constitution, its own legislature and cabinet, and its own system of education to transmit tribal culture. The desire, of course, was not to restore sovereignty (as in the American case) but to destroy it, and to ensure that the strategy worked, the government (especially
during the 1980s) herded millions of blacks into the homelands, many of whom had long forgotten their tribal histories.
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The outcome was not only worse poverty for blacks but the formation of corrupt tribal elites answerable to Pretoria and willing to enter into lucrative compacts with such gambling entrepreneurs as Solomon Kerzner.
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