122 Wag(er)ing Histories, Staking Territories: Exhibiting Sovereignty in Native America *John Bodinger de Uriarte, **Melissa Biggs Abstract Based on research carried out in 2009–2010, this article suggests that gaming revenues created new possibilities for Native peoples to take control of their own public histories as expressions of cultural and political sovereignty. It recognizes museums and cultural centers as parallel spaces for cultural self-representation. Casino-generated funds allow many tribal nations to create or expand existing exhibitionary spaces for repatriated objects—including museums, casinos, resorts, and public attractions—that publicly articulate stories about history, identity, and the practice(s) of sovereignty. Seemingly disparate spaces— casinos thematic and generic, museums old and new, garden and memorial sites, village greens and hotel lobbies—can best be understood as an array of responses to the challenges of articulating Native identities to mostly non-Native publics. Such sites exemplify particular strategies of Native curation in a variety of spaces actively shaped for public attention. Key words: Native America, exhibitionary practices, representation, curation, casinos Have profits from Indian gaming helped to establish or expand Native museums and cultural centers as venues for cultural self-representation and the waging of history? This article approaches this question through research carried out in 2009–2010 through multiple sites to Connecticut, Minnesota, and Southern California and a national survey administered to a list of 241 ‘gaming tribes’ (compiled in the 2010 National Indian Gaming Commission’s Gaming Tribe Report - see Bodinger de Uriarte and Biggs 2011).1 We hypothesized that gaming revenues created new possibilities for Native peoples to take control of their own public histories as expressions of cultural and political sovereignty, and we understood museums and cultural centers as a growth industry in Native America following the passage of the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) and the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). We speculated that, in many cases, such growth responded to challenges against Indian gaming as the effect of some sort of ‘loophole’ in formal federal relationships with Native peoples, or the claim that many Indians and Indian identities had been created to take advantage of the possibilities created by IGRA. We recognize cultural self-representation as a critical exercise of political sovereignty, and museums and cultural centers as parallel industries created with, and in part validating the use of, Indian gaming profits. Some of the current challenges to Indian gaming raise the specters of wasteful spending, the irresponsible use of funds, and the creation of ‘Rich Indians’ (Harmon 2010; Spilde 2004). Spaces for cultural self-representation offer significant venues to respond to such accusations and racism. Casino-generated funds allow many tribal nations to create spaces for repatriated objects that publicly articulate stories about history, identity, and the practice(s) of sovereignty. This article explores several Native public spaces for selfrepresentational exhibitions; many are best understood as hybrid, or blended and porous sites, combining elements of museums, casinos, resorts, and public attractions. We introduce the concept of hybridity with some caution here, in part because of its complex and often contradictory use in contemporary anthropology. Theories of hybridity have been critiqued as positing or reifying discrete, bounded spheres of cultural practice that become museum and society, July 2013. 11(2) 122-157 © 2013, John Bodinger de Uriarte, Melissa Biggs. ISSN 1479-8360 Museum & Society, 11(2) 123 blended through ongoing tension and eventual rupture. Our use of hybridity does not presuppose discrete boundaries for places like museums or casinos. We understand these domains as fully dynamic sites for ongoing blending and negotiation of self-representations made public. Rather than evidence of a rupture of boundaries, our use of hybridity questions understanding museums as contained exhibitionary spaces. What do the designations ‘museum’, or ‘museum practices’, contain? If we extend far enough in this direction, for example, what is not the museum? We argue that one of the key components of museums is the tension between directed attention and immersive environments. Other practices that actively engage and form publics, like retail merchandising and display, and national(ist) imaginings, clearly reflect this. Our research recognizes that seemingly disparate spaces - casinos thematic and generic, museums old and new, garden and memorial sites, village greens and hotel lobbies - can best be understood as an array of responses to the challenges of articulating Native identities to mostly non-Native publics. Such sites exemplify particular strategies of Native curation in a variety of spaces actively shaped for public attention. Focusing on this array raises questions of category or type for locating and understanding different Native engagements with public exhibitionary practices. Our research began in Uncasville, Connecticut, home to the Mohegan Tribe, the Mohegan Sun Casino, and the Tantaquidgeon Museum. The Mohegan Tribe uses both its museum and its casino as densely realized spaces for self-representation; they also participate in a larger web of articulated relationships with the place and space of specific locations in and around Uncasville, and as an element of Colonial New England. Set back from the road, the Tantaquidgeon Museum looks like a small outbuilding for the larger house facing the turnpike. The Museum opened in 1931, the personal project of three members of the Tantaquidgeon family, John and two of his children, Harold and Gladys.2 Gladys, born in 1899, trained in tribal history and healing practices by elder women, went on to study anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania under Frank Speck. Focusing primarily on the healing practices of the Mohegan and related East Coast tribes she traveled extensively, collecting information and publishing numerous articles. Her family home became a repository for Mohegan artifacts and documents, as well as objects collected during her research. In 1930, her father and brother began building a small structure to house the objects. At first, the museum featured these family artifacts. Gradually, other tribal members began contributing items. During the 1930s and ’40s, Gladys worked for first the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and later the Federal Indian Arts and Crafts Board. Objects she gathered and was given during her tenure with both agencies also made their way into the Museum. The formation of this collection illustrates an intersection of specific Mohegan artifacts, artifacts collected from a number of other tribes and Native American peoples, and an ongoing participation in creating and supporting a generalized (and generalizeable) represented Indian identity. The Museum maintains a long-standing relationship with the local Boy Scouts. Museum personnel make presentations on both ‘Indian lore’ and Mohegan stories and histories. Such presentations work to connect local understandings of ‘Indian’ to specific renderings of Mohegan and other tribal peoples. Many Native public representational spaces - including museums and casinos - seek to put into place a dialogue of representations between general and specific Native identities, in part depending on popular notions of Indians as an assumed ‘common ground’ for other, more specific representational narratives. Inside the Tantaquidgeon A small placard on the door welcomes visitors and presents the museum’s restricted operating hours, Wednesday through Saturday, April to October. Entering the building, we see a guest book to the left of the entrance, old-fashioned flat industrial carpet on the floor, and objects dolls, arrows, photos, coffee mugs, portrait busts, signs, weavings - everywhere. The initial impression is of the crowded home of a well-traveled elderly relative, souvenir items next to finely carved crafts, newspaper clippings, snapshots, and formal portraits competing for wall space. Baskets, paddles, fishing spears, and a canoe balance across the open rafters. 124 John Bodinger de Uriarte, Melissa Biggs: Wag(er)ing Histories, Staking Territories: Exhibiting Sovereignty in Native America Figure 1 Figure 2 Museum & Society, 11(2) 125 Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, tribal historian, medicine woman, and grand-niece of Gladys Tantaquidgeon greets us. She presents a brief history of the museum, and offers a quick overview of its organization. The front rooms, holding Mohegan and other East Coast artifacts, are ‘home’; the back room contains objects from the western tribes with whom Gladys worked, as well as donated objects representing a variety of peoples. Renovations completed in 2008 provided for climate control, fire protection, a new roof, and other structural improvements, but kept the exhibits mostly unchanged. She points out a few pieces: an eighteenth century wampum belt, the case holding Gladys Tantaquidgeon’s regalia, and the life-sized carved wooden statue of Gladys herself, moved from its first home at the casino. The house and its contents remain closely tied to a Mohegan presence that pre-dates federal recognition (1994) and the casino’s construction and opening (1996). It serves as a site for Mohegans to apprehend connections to place and family—realized in statements like ‘my great-grandfather carved this spoon’ - and to make those connections visible to interested outsiders. Unlike the casino, the museum maintains a low exterior profile. With no external signage marking its presence, simply locating the museum, at least for someone coming from outside the area, requires a certain intention. Figure 3 The museum’s interiors contrast with its subdued exterior. The intimate space and the approachable scale of the exhibits invite an attuned attention. Labels provide the names of artifacts in both English and Mohegan, and provenance; some identify materials or processes used to produce the item. A few placards balanced against the cases offer more detailed information. Most of the exhibits feature quotidian items, like tools, baskets, and bowls, appealing not only to the gaze, but to touch as well. Some surface at the level of the expected Indian artifact, like framed geometric displays of collected stone points. A comment about a finely carved club prompts Zobel to tell us that visiting school children so frequently moved the 126 John Bodinger de Uriarte, Melissa Biggs: Wag(er)ing Histories, Staking Territories: Exhibiting Sovereignty in Native America Figure 4 club around that the staff decided to put it in a case, to save the trouble of having to find it. A question about the casino interior designs leads Zobel into a discussion of what she calls ‘ambient learning’. Casino patrons absorb the atmosphere of the Mohegan Sun imbued with Mohegan sensibility. She likens it to walking down a street in Paris, breathing in the ambience. For a certain number of visitors, this absorption activates a desire to learn more: to ask why there are turtle shell motifs on the carpeting, for example. But even for those who are not so motivated, the exposure itself can result in small shifts in awareness, as patrons walk past representations for each of the Mohegan seasonal moons, for example, or features made to resemble buckskin, birch bark, or local rock formations and plants. The Mohegan Sun - A World at Play One of our primary questions in Uncasville focused on the interior design decisions made for the Mohegan Sun, and what such decision-making processes might reveal about the relationship between the museum and the casino as exhibition spaces. We knew that the thematic elements of the interior closely linked to specific Mohegan narratives of place, and to a careful inscription of the public spaces of the casino as opportunities for presenting significant elements ‘Moheganness’. We also recognized the interior as both immersive and non-didactic: there were far more opportunities for visitor engagement with the interior’s details than directed narratives about what it all ‘meant’. Audio tours and a free pamphlet titled The Secret Guide, available at the hotel’s concierge desk for the asking, are not obviously advertised. Indeed, while the Mohegan Sun’s brochure states that ‘every inch’ of the casino is ‘infused with the spirit of the Mohegan Tribe’, it makes no mention of the Guide or the tour, establishing an interesting relationship between ‘the secret’ and the seen. This relationship is also maintained in and around Uncasville, where markers of Mohegan historical significance and presence can be found, embedded throughout the landscapes of public and private spaces (see below). Museum & Society, 11(2) Figure 5 Figure 6 127 128 John Bodinger de Uriarte, Melissa Biggs: Wag(er)ing Histories, Staking Territories: Exhibiting Sovereignty in Native America The Mohegan Sun includes many elements familiar from the museum. But the casino offers more than a series of possible attention-focusing details. Like the museum, the casino provides a space saturated with opportunities for engagement and a sense of accretion, of details layered over other details, of spaces and objects that surface and recede against a larger background of traffic and activity. As exhibitionary space, the casino oscillates in a combined space of ‘distraction and intoxication’, what Walter Benjamin identifies as a richly dense place that offers different opportunities for engagement without enforcing or foregrounding any of them. It, again, brings to mind Benjamin’s discussion of the differences between concentration Figure 7 and distraction in an engagement with a work of art: the former allows an individual to be absorbed by the work, the latter an opportunity for ‘mass absorption’ of art. Architecture, in Benjamin’s thought, functioned as ‘the prototype of a work of art, the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction’ (1968: 239). The Paris Arcades served as both ‘laboratory and atmosphere’ for him (Eiland 2003). A mix of architecturally enclosed space and public promenades, they provided rich spaces imagining and realizing the relationships of capitalism and history through the practices of display and commodity. At the Mohegan Sun, the density of place displays different experiments and realizations in perception. Like the museum, the casino presents a thickly mixed set of signs that present a vocabulary, if not a grammar, of Mohegan self-representation. Experiences in Uncasville lead us to identify exhibition space as permeable space, as a set of interior and exterior possibilities for making sense, or different kinds of sense, in the gaps and fissures that exceed formal museum spaces. In Uncasville, Mohegan articulations of selfrepresentation carefully work through ‘the surround’ as parts of identity-making and identityconfirming practices. These practices reside in history - in the relationships between Mohegans and Europeans and Euro-Americans after contact - and in shared senses and uses of space. Museum & Society, 11(2) 129 While the densely crammed interiors of the museum and the casino offer the possibilities of object and narrative engagement, the landscape/terrain affirms Moheganness in other kinds of public spaces. These affirmations include inscribing and re-inscribing places with new meanings, allowing older meanings to resurface, and putting potentially contentious figurings of time and space into active dialogue. If, as Keith Basso suggests, ‘places consist in what gets made of them’ (Basso 1996: 56) landscapes and significant landmarks hold, reflect, and are reflected in, self-representational narratives. Places in space become rich repositories of potential and actualized knowledge. In Uncasville, two public spaces invite special focus: Shantok, on Mohegan land, and the Royal Mohegan Burial Grounds in nearby Norwich. Shantok, recognized by the Mohegans as their first settlement, continued to be used as a gathering place and traditional burial ground until 1926, when the state claimed the land through eminent domain and converted it into Fort Shantok State Park. Efforts to reclaim the land began in the 1970s. Shortly after the Mohegans received federal recognition, the state transferred the property back to the tribe. The tribe renamed the site Shantok, Village of Uncas; a sign outside the park welcomes visitors to the Mohegan Reservation. Park regulations are posted in English and Mohegan. Signs also identify the Sacred Fire site and the burial ground. Inside the burial ground, a cairn stands among the old and new graves. Erected in 1923 by the Society of Colonial Dames, it commemorates the friendship between seventeenth century Mohegan sachem Uncas and the English lieutenant Thomas Leffingwell.3 The burial ground is still in use: on one of our visits, we encountered the tribal burial committee, conferring about an upcoming interment. The Royal Mohegan Burial Ground is in downtown Norwich, about a block from the town green. Mid-nineteenth century development desecrated the grounds, leaving just 1/16 acre of the original approximately 26 acres intact. This compact parcel holds the graves of Uncas and members of his family. A small obelisk, dedicated by President Andrew Jackson in 1833, memorializes Uncas and the Mohegans–colonial alliance. In the 1920s, the remaining land Figure 8 130 John Bodinger de Uriarte, Melissa Biggs: Wag(er)ing Histories, Staking Territories: Exhibiting Sovereignty in Native America Figure 9 became the site of a Masonic temple. As Masonic membership declined, the temple fell into disrepair. Casino profits enabled the tribe to purchase the temple, demolish it, and restore the burial site. The landscape in and around Uncasville reflects violent political changes carved out in, and indicated by, territory. These, in turn, animate Mohegan histories marked by alliances with English colonial forces against neighboring Native forces. Throughout his leadership, Uncas entered into alliances and military actions that confirmed Mohegan presence and viability in the face of colonial aggression and expansion, even as indicators for the eventual loss of Native landholdings became increasingly clear. The collapse of Pequot hegemony after the Pequot War, the Treaty of Hartford, and King Philip (Metacomet)’s War, mark historic turning points in Native resistance to colonial invasion and control. These points inform some of the nature of Mohegan relationships to local and national histories, and their attention to narratives that frame and potentially control such histories. The Mohegans navigated a changing political landscape, jockeying for powerful allies to either settle existing political grievances or to solidify relationships with what was a growing political and military presence in the Northeast. At the end of the twentieth century Mohegans again took measures to claim control of particular historical markers and narratives that would confirm their place in history and in the surrounding political and natural landscape of Uncasville. The completed public monument, dedicated in September 2008, recognizes the impossibility of completely reinstating the burial grounds; the official Mohegan press release describes the site as having been ‘left to nature’. An open green surrounds a circular arrangement of short columns, each engraved with one of the 13 moons that make up the Mohegan year. At the center, a flat red stone memorializes the site and lays the desecrated to rest. While plainly visible from the street, the markers cannot be read unless one actually enters the site. In Uncasville, different sets of reckoning incorporate the local and the known, actively Museum & Society, 11(2) 131 pushing at the boundaries of how space is made significant. Multiple meanings saturate the landscape, those built up and invested in the terrain over time, and alternate or additional ones poured into reclaimed and reconfigured places. Casino profits enable the Mohegans to reposition dominant narratives about land and presence. Fort Shantok moves from a space where Mohegans are objects of its history - even as victors in battle - to a space in which they articulate history. The razing of the Masonic Temple allows the Royal Mohegan Burial Ground to resurface and reclaim its space in a network of memorials and historical configurations. Different histories inform different ways of seeing ‘the surround’. The Mohegan Burial Ground gestures toward an absent presence, and supports a connection to a different kind of history, a history that includes burial, displacement, Masons, and return through purchase. As Karen Blu (1980: 199) asserts, ‘community places and their significance are socially and culturally constructed, contested, and reconstructed over time. They appear and disappear from human consciousness and alter in meaning for those who mark them’. Ongoing Mohegan representational strategies rely on the relationships between interior and exterior, between the spare aesthetic of the Royal Mohegan Burial Ground or Shantok and the dense environments of the museum and casino. Public Mohegan spaces move between articulations of spaces for quiet contemplation, like museums and public markers, and places for distraction and disquiet, like the overlapping and competing demands for attention in the casino. This is not to suggest distraction and contemplation as fully discrete practices, or to fail to recognize that public use of such spaces may defy design intentions. But contemporary relationships between different venues for Native self representation to different imagined publics provide some key opportunities for recognizing - and even contemplating - how such representation serves as both a reminder and a function of Native sovereignty. Figure 10 In Mohegan, the Tantaquidgeon museum works as a historic site, a space for the collection and display of historic objects, an element in the tribe’s history, and its own historic object cast against the background of Uncasville and other public representations of what it means to be Mohegan. The casino works across this register, in part by not foregrounding its relationship to 132 John Bodinger de Uriarte, Melissa Biggs: Wag(er)ing Histories, Staking Territories: Exhibiting Sovereignty in Native America this museum, in part by making plain its representational function as a kind of immersive theater for things Mohegan. Here ‘the surround’ is the densely thematic spaces of the casino, the overlays of environment and design that support a space of ‘distraction and intoxication’, a thickly mixed set of Mohegan self-representational signs. This relationship—between constructed spaces as containers for specific narratives, and ‘the surround’ as places shot through with meaning and worked through narratives both local and larger or, as sites that are made meaningful—runs through our field site experiences. Places in space become rich repositories of potential and actualized knowledge. Minnesota: Mall, Museum, and Casino4 We began our second set of site visits just outside the Twin Cities at the Mystic Lake Casino Store, operated by the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community (SMSC) at the Mall of America, the second largest mall in North America. The centerpiece of the four-story mall is a seven-acre, fully enclosed amusement park, licensed since 2007 by Nickelodeon. The Mystic Lake store occupies a second-floor corner space on an interior corridor. The mall website describes the store as ‘a marketing tool for both Mystic Lake and SMSC enterprises’, and as the only space in the mall ‘that represents Minnesota Indian Gaming’.5 The SMSC website foregrounds the store’s retail services, including a free shuttle to the Casino, and its status as a Ticketmaster vendor for events and concerts at Mystic Lake and elsewhere. It also identifies the site as a locus for information about the SMSC and its enterprises, other federally recognized Minnesota tribes, and the Minnesota Indian Gaming Association. Figure 11 The interior of the store divides into two spaces: one side clearly devoted to ‘business’, with promotions for the casino and upcoming Ticketmaster events, and the other the ‘cultural side’, with interactive kiosks, video screen, encased displays, and an array of informational pamphlets. Museum & Society, 11(2) Figure 12 Figure 13 133 134 John Bodinger de Uriarte, Melissa Biggs: Wag(er)ing Histories, Staking Territories: Exhibiting Sovereignty in Native America Figure 14 A prominent wall plaque lists public donations made by the SMSC in 2009, focusing on a $14.5 million donation to the University of Minnesota. Two million of this funded the Minnesota Tribal Nations Plaza, erected at the main west entrance of the football stadium. The Plaza, with its 11 ‘sky markers’ - one for each federally recognized tribe in Minnesota - dominates the representational space in the mall site. A standing rack holds cards that depict each of the sky markers, complete with the marker’s text on the reverse; one pamphlet addresses the SMSC donation to the University; another shows various images of the stadium, with text highlighting the financial contribution of the SMSC. Other publications present SMSC financial information, describe powwows and powwow etiquette; and respond to imagined questions about Indian gaming in Minnesota, such as ‘Are Indians exempt from taxes?’ The mall site incorporates familiar conventions of retail display - which, of course, developed parallel to museum display practices (Giebelhausen 2003) - while it indicates larger spheres and relationships. Unlike other spaces considered in this analysis, the Mystic Lake store is not on Native-owned property; its presence in leased mall space asserts economic prowess and investment in arenas beyond the reservation, investments made possible by Native gaming profits. Crammed into the hyper–retail space of the Mall of America, the SMSC storefront exercises an unquestioned access to sovereignty - self-representation - at an intersection of commodity consumption and essential difference (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2009). In addition to putting forth an image of Minnesota Native nations as active participants in non-Native economies, the exhibits at the store work to advance the preservation of Native gaming in Minnesota generally, as well as promote the Mystic Lake/SMSC ‘brand’ in particular.6 Mystic lake branding seeks to create and serve a consumer base for the casino and other profitgenerating enterprises operated by the community. It also serves to render Native sovereignty, and its benefits to both Native and non-Native communities, visible. The displays place the SMSC and other federally recognized Minnesota Natives in the present, as cooperative, financially supportive, and significant players in state concerns. Museum & Society, 11(2) 135 Figure 15 Mille Lacs We next visited the Mille Lacs Ojibwe Reservation in central Minnesota. In the summer, Lake Mille Lacs draws tourists eager for a respite from the heat; deep in winter, ice fisherman flock to the area. A generic sign featuring an overflowing pot of gold marks the Treasure Island Resort and Casino. The casino and its adjoining hotel and entertainment complex give little indication of their location or relationship to the Mille Lacs Ojibwe, or Minnesota at all. The hotel lobby resembles the lobby of any mid-priced business hotel in the United States. Even at midday, the casino space is dim and smoky, filled with rows of slot machines and the occasional promotion for an upcoming concert. It is perhaps the most stripped down gaming space either of us have ever been in. The pragmatics - maximizing the number of machines possible per square foot - overwhelms any other possible use of the space, and thematics are limited to the names of some of the restaurants and hotel rooms: The Woodlands Steakhouse, the Arrowhead Suite. Less than half a mile from the Grand Casino, the Mille Lacs Indian Museum and Trading Post presents a completely different profile. Constructed of cedar, and embellished with a decorative band modeled on beadwork made by tribal elder Batiste Sam, the current museum opened in 1996. Harry and Jeanette Ayers, who operated a trading post and fishing resort on the site, displayed a personal collection of Indian-made objects from across the United States in a back room; by the late 1950s, this expanded into an adjoining cinderblock building (Libertus 1996). The Ayers donated it to the Minnesota State Historical Society in 1959, and the Historical Society inaugurated a ‘State Indian Museum’ on the site in 1960. In the late 1980s, the collections were moved to climate-controlled facilities in the Twin Cities and planning began for a new museum.7 The former trading post now serves primarily as the museum store. While we waited for the site manager, Travis Zimmerman, we explored the museum grounds: some tourist cabins, 136 John Bodinger de Uriarte, Melissa Biggs: Wag(er)ing Histories, Staking Territories: Exhibiting Sovereignty in Native America the remains of a modest boatyard, and the Ayers home. Freestanding plaques provide reproductions of archival photos, and explanations of the sites address the viewer directly: ‘If you were vacationing at Mille Lacs in the 1930s, you might have stayed in a cabin like this one’. Peering through the windows, we saw neatly made up camp beds, and tables set for a simple meal. Inside the museum, floor-to-ceiling windows frame the tourist cabins, Ayers home, and the trading post, with the lake as backdrop. A spacious activity area, including a kitchen, extends behind the reception desk. We view the museum while Zimmerman attends to administrative business. The only area we cannot access on our own is the central Four Seasons exhibit, which requires a Native guide. Zimmerman later shows us the room, which imagines Ojibwe life at the time of first contact, portraying activities associated with each of the four seasons. Originally installed in 1964, and enhanced by mannequins lifecast from band members in 1972, the exhibit was carefully preserved during the transition to the current space. The lifecasts - made using tribal members as the casting models - work as both generic figures and as specific tribal individuals located in personal and general recognitions of Mille Lacs time and history, not only is that ‘how we used to harvest wild rice’ but also ‘that’s my cousin as he looked 20 years ago’. The newer exhibits circle around this enclosed gallery (see Stampe 2006). Figure 16 In some ways this is familiar vernacular museum space. Much of the design feels contemporary with that of the more famous Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, which opened in 1998. Panel text and exhibition objects make clear connections to the processes and history of Mille Lacs tribal sovereignty. Exhibits mix traditional and contemporary objects: a small aluminum trailer used for selling frybread at powwows is one of the larger gallery objects, for example, and the exhibition includes a door from a tribal police car and a video slot machine re-purposed as a video monitor showing different examples of community projects funded by Museum & Society, 11(2) 137 casino profits. Like the Tantaquidgeon, the Mille Lacs Museum can also be read as its own ‘museum piece’, an illustration or exhibition of a particular moment of museum design and execution. Figure 17 Mystic Lake Our trip to Minnesota ended at the Mystic Lake casino. The casino space billed as the largest in the Midwest, recently received a multimillion dollar interior redesign, which claims to reflect SMSC ‘history, culture and relationship with the land within the Minnesota River Valley’. In the sky over the casino and adjoining luxury hotel, a number of klieg lights create a kind of tipi frame, hundreds of feet high, from intersecting beams. Unlike the Mohegan Sun, where casino design directly reproduces particular objects and references Mohegan narratives, at Mystic Lake the references rely on natural materials and abstract pattern to convey a sense of place. The centerpiece of the renovation, a flowing red ceiling fixture called ‘The River’, curves around the mostly circular gaming space. We follow it, searching for the ‘cultural gallery’ promised by the SMSC website. We find it in a pedestrian throughway, across from the Minnehaha Café and close to the hotel’s registration desk. It is essentially a large walk-in vitrine, with two entrances and all but one wall made primarily of glass. The Lakota word Tatanka (buffalo), is written in gold above the glass doors. A stuffed bull buffalo, positioned to face out through longest wall, draws passers-by. The room contains few elements: vertical vitrines display various buffalo-related artifacts; one horizontal display case holds two decorated buffalo skulls presented to the SMSC by other tribes; and an interactive flat-screen kiosk leads the visitor to a wealth of information about all things buffalo. Visitors enter and move through the space, animating the exhibition. The space works both as a self-contained gallery and as a thematic element and interactive 138 John Bodinger de Uriarte, Melissa Biggs: Wag(er)ing Histories, Staking Territories: Exhibiting Sovereignty in Native America vitrine within the casino complex. The glass walls partly overlook the main gaming floor, and the raised platform exhibiting a car, the jackpot prize for one of the progressive slots. Despite its location, the walls preserve the hush characteristic of museum spaces. Like the interiors of the Mohegan Sun, however, or the mixed spaces of the Mall of America, the vitrine can also be imagined as a space that actively creates ‘a destabilized circulation of looking … characterized by constant displacements of one viewing position by another’ (Dorst 1999: 135) Figure 18 ‘Tatanka’ provides another opportunity to think about the relationships between the casino as a thematic space and as a space that provides for the exercise of a more museum-influenced curatorial design. The active play between representing Indianness in general - the buffalo is a powerful popular icon of this - and in specific (the buffalo figures as a central part of Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux history and culture) are melded and made plain. Both spectacle and space for contemplation, this public exhibitionary space prompts us to further refine one of our main questions. If curation implies the design of exhibitions for public display that tell specific kinds of stories with particular sets of intentions, how do we understand curatorial practices in nonmuseal representational spaces? More specifically, what are the points of focus in such spaces? This approach actively challenges thinking about Native museums and casinos as some sort of ongoing dyad of containing and immersive thematic representational space: both are mutually supportive and somewhat porous—counter-indicating and counter-supporting exhibition designs and narratives flow back and forth between these ‘structuring structures’ (Bourdieu 1990: 56). But the project started with the recognition that the relationship between these ‘sites’ was somewhat bounded by discrete poles: you slide too far in one direction, you are definitely in a museum, in another and you are most certainly in a casino. Public Native exhibitionary spaces present a wealth of possible engagement sites for analyzing the formation and presentation of self and nation as the exercise of sovereignties and self-representation. Importantly, such sites also depend on a skillful negotiation of a dominant public imaginary - how does ‘the Indian’ figure as a popular representation of a domesticated ‘Other?’ Museum & Society, 11(2) Figure 19 Figure 20 139 140 John Bodinger de Uriarte, Melissa Biggs: Wag(er)ing Histories, Staking Territories: Exhibiting Sovereignty in Native America Figure 21 Golden State South: Desert Resorts8 Native interests and enterprises in Southern California are instructive for a number of reasons. Genocide reduced the indigenous population from 300,00 in the mid-1840s to less than 20,000 at the close of the century (Scheper-Hughes 2004: 62). California v Cabazon (1987) was one of the two key decisions that led to IGRA, establishing Indian gaming as an important economic development possibility for many Native peoples in the US. An extensive site for development, Southern California has long figured as a space of expansion, economic growth, and ongoing community imagination. As the destination for multitudes of national and international immigrants, Southern California has historically been a place where neighborhood, community, and identity have been sites for active - and often conflicting - definition and re-definition. As a site for the motion picture and television industries, Southern California figured large in imagining and representing popular images of Indian people. The Hollywood film industry spent much of its substantive youth churning out Western films and television series that presented violent engagements with ‘the frontier’ as conflicts between the civilized and the savage, using Southern California as its backdrop and location. This industry powerfully contributed to what Richard Slotkin termed a ‘dilemma of authenticity’, a collision of ‘the West’ as ‘both an actual place with a real history and as a mythic space populated by projective fantasies’ (Slotkin 1993: 234). Finally, as a destination for state, national, and international tourism, the area actively shapes its image - for Southern Californian selves and others - in response to varying expectations and demands, projections and desires. A vacation ideal mixed with the industries of imagining elsewhere, it offers an ideal place to investigate public representations of authentic Indianness and tribal identities. Resorting to Nature Nestled in the rocky hills east of San Diego, the Barona Valley Ranch Resort and Casino invites visitors to ‘enjoy a rendezvous with nature’ while taking advantage of ‘the loosest slots in San Diego’. Operated by the Barona Band of Mission Indians, the Resort and Casino makes much of its scenic location, promoting the nature paths and various gardens on the grounds and its commitment to environmental sustainability. Here we examine the connections, both overt and Museum & Society, 11(2) 141 indirect, that public spaces at the Resort and Casino make between place as natural - native - and place as cultivated. By presenting evidence of themselves as both the inheritors of the valley and its resources, and as its careful curators, the Barona establish a dual claim to legitimacy as nation, one that draws on claims linked to the past through heritage and to the present and future through managerial acumen and appropriate use. Figure 22 The guest information packets available in the hotel rooms illustrate these dual claims. A brochure describing the Barona Valley Environmental Sustainability Program - printed on recycled paper - calls attention to the importance of the relationship between the Barona and the land, noting that this relationship changes across time. It opens with this statement: Living in harmony with nature is an essential part of our heritage. The Barona Band of Mission Indians works diligently to protect and conserve all natural resources on our reservation. In this ever-changing world, we have embraced technology and woven it into our inherent respect for the earth. In the same packet, a booklet detailing the band’s history carries the subtitle ‘The essence of an essential people’. The repeated use of ‘essential’, to describe both a way of being in the world and to assert a place in that world, encapsulates Barona self-presentation. When Father Junipero Serra first saw the terrain around what is now San Diego County, he declared ‘land is plentiful and good…there are so many vines grown by nature and without help, that all it would require is little work to cultivate’. He further commented on the ‘roses of Castile’ and ‘trees in abundance’, describing a veritable paradise inhabited by gentiles - s the priests termed unbaptized Indians - who welcomed the Franciscans with offerings of food (González 1997: 156). Neither Father Serra nor any of those who accompanied him recognized 142 John Bodinger de Uriarte, Melissa Biggs: Wag(er)ing Histories, Staking Territories: Exhibiting Sovereignty in Native America in the landscape around them the shaping hands of the native peoples who inhabited the area. What appeared to be bountiful wilderness was actually what Shipek (1982: 296) terms an ‘intensive resource management system’ that included controlled burning, knowledge of microclimates that permitted survival of staple crops during the hot, dry summer, and broadcasting of native grass seed, among other techniques. William Preston claims that ‘the union of the human and non-human worlds in California was consciously recognized by all Indian peoples’; this recognition included an expectation that maintaining stability and order in the world required ‘perpetual involvement’ on the part of humans (Preston 1997: 266). In effect, native peoples served as curators of their environments, selecting and carefully tending to their material surroundings. Native curators often modeled their practices after the changes caused by wind, lightning, floods, or animals such as gophers (Anderson et al 1997), custodial practices invisible to the non-Native eye. Oblivious to this, Serra and the other religious and military personnel sent by the Spanish Crown imposed their own regimes of order: disciplines of prayer and work for the indigenous peoples they saw as their wards, now forced to tend carefully demarcated plantings of the preferred Spanish grains and fruits, and herd the cattle, sheep, and goats that accompanied them. The history booklet provided by the hotel states: ‘For more than ten thousand years, our ancestors lived in harmony with nature on lands that included all of San Diego County and stretched deep into Baja California’. According to Florence Shipek (1982: 296), Spanish mission and military accounts indicate that these ancestors called themselves Kumeyaay, though the Barona booklet calls them ‘Iipay ancestors’. At the time of the Spanish incursion, approximately ten thousand Kumeyaay lived in the area (Shipek 1982: 296). The Spaniards renamed the Kumeyaay Diegueños, as they resided in the area allotted to Mission San Diego, established in 1769 by Serra. When the missions were secularized in the 1830s, after Mexico won independence from Spain, mission lands were granted to mexicano families. Under Spanish, and later Mexican law, ‘land areas belonging to and occupied by indigenous peoples were recognized as having a particular, protected status’ (Wood 2008-2009: 331). After the 1848 cession of California from Mexico to the United States, the United States government made several attempts to organize Native Californian peoples and territories. The complex history of these attempts is beyond the scope of this article; for our purposes, it suffices to say that an executive order issued in 1876 established the Capitan Grande reservation for the Kumeyaay people (Wood 2008-2009: 348), now known to the federal government as the Capitan Grande Indians. Capitan Grande took its name from a canyon through which the San Diego River ran; Kumeyaay had established homes, fields, and grazing lands along its banks. As the city of San Diego expanded, its need for water resources increased. City interests determined that the solution to their water problem lay in damming the river. The federal government held the reservation in trust. After initial resistance from the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA, later the Bureau of Indian Affairs), the city succeeded in its efforts and, in 1919, water rights and land in the Capitan Grande transferred to San Diego. Construction of the dam would flood the homes of the majority of Capitan Grande residents. As part of its agreement with the OIA, San Diego agreed to pay the full cost of relocation and reconstitution of the community (Thorne 2010: 44). The city would also have to gain the consent of the people living in the area. Gaining consent proved more difficult than anticipated; in addition to resistance from some of the Capitan Grande communities, non-Native business pressures also prevented the city from acting. In 1932, thirty-two families from the Capitan Grande communities accepted the government offer. With $75,000 from the city of San Diego, they purchased a portion of the Rancho Cañada San Vicente y Mesa del Padre Barona. The Rancho, named after one of the Franciscan priors at Mission San Diego, included territories recognized as originally Kumeyaay. Issued one wagon, two horses, and five cows for each family, the Barona band, as they were now known, attempted to maintain themselves by ranching and farming. Neither ranching nor farming proved lucrative; over the years, the band’s ability to maintain itself decreased. Searching for new income streams, the band followed the lead of the Seminole in Florida, becoming in 1984 the first Native group in California to offer high-stakes bingo. Although bingo proved profitable for the band, rapidly becoming a multi-million dollar industry (Look 1985), conflicts with the original management company and other problems with bingo led to the Museum & Society, 11(2) 143 decision to close the bingo operations and replace them with a card hall. The success of the card hall and subsequent gaming enabled the construction of the first casino on Barona property, the circus-themed Big Top Casino, which opened in 1994. Promotional material claims that the Big Top was the first themed casino to open on Native land. Other nearby Native gaming operations, such as Viejas and Pechanga, are positioned much closer to the highways, easily visible to passing drivers. Casino developers considered the relatively remote site of the Barona reservation to be ‘one of the worst handicaps a casino can have’. The themed casino was seen as one way to draw customers to the site. When the band decided to diversify casino operations in the late 1990s, they also decided to capitalize on the ‘backcountry’ location. Closing the Big Top casino, the band and its development team generated plans for an ambitious resort. The first phase, a golf course and club, opened in 2001. The new Barona Valley Ranch Resort and Casino followed in 2003. Figure 23 Barona promotional material states that the ranch theme selected for the hotel and casino intends to honor the band’s ranching past, and the families who struggled through the relocation. The resort sits off of the main road; visitors arrive via a winding driveway, first passing a sculpture group titled ‘The Greeters’, by Potawatomi artist Denny Haskew, then a pond with a small water wheel before arriving at the hotel entrance. The hotel, casino, and other buildings resemble the idealized ranches of TV’s ‘Bonanza’ and ‘Big Valley’ more than anything that might have been typical on Barona in the 1930s. Rustic exterior details - cupolas, weathervanes, siding that emulates barn doors - combine with decorative elements such as the water wheel, a windmill, and vintage farm machinery to create a comfortably bucolic atmosphere. Throughout the hotel, enlarged reproductions of photographs depicting Barona families rounding up cattle, or of the ranching landscape, hang on the walls. Aside from the photos, the most specific reference to the band’s own ranching heritage is the incorporation of the cattle brands belonging 144 John Bodinger de Uriarte, Melissa Biggs: Wag(er)ing Histories, Staking Territories: Exhibiting Sovereignty in Native America Figure 24 Figure 25 Museum & Society, 11(2) 145 Figure 26 to the 32 original Barona families as a recurrent motif. The brands are impressed into the walkway surrounding the pond, and also appear on small markers at each of the golf course’s 18 holes. By design, the hotel and the casino are separate structures. Complementing the ‘big house’ façade of the hotel, the casino exterior replicates a barn, complete with silo and hayloft. Inside, the rough stonewalls, blankets hanging from the ceiling rafters, and the brightly colored carpet patterned to resemble fallen leaves add rural touches to an otherwise sleek gaming space. From the initial construction of the golf course, the band and resort planners developed strategies that combined careful manipulation of the existing environmental features of the surrounding terrain with the introduction of elements intended to enhance those features. For example, streams that cross the grounds feed ponds and lakes incorporated into the golf course. The course designer incorporated boulders already on the grounds into the course plan. Designers also moved nearly 200 full-grown native oaks from another part of the reservation onto the course. Native grasses and plants edge the greens, sodded with drought-tolerant Bermuda grass. Viewed through the picture windows in the hotel lobby, the course appears to be a sweep of open grassland. The golf course and all of the resort grounds are watered using captured rainwater and wastewater processed through the resort’s own water reclamation plant. The retention ponds and some of the filtration processes form part of the ‘stunning visual landscape’ promised in promotional materials. The instillation of the main buildings included extensive landscaping, an effort to create ‘destination gardens’, as the pamphlets promoting the resort’s walking trails proclaim. The site plan includes four gardens: the water garden; the rose garden; the chef’s garden; and the Chekwaa Gardens, the resort’s native and ethnobotanical garden. The gardens illustrate the complex blend of ‘natural’ and ‘cultivated’ at the heart of the Barona Resort representational strategy. Of particular interest is the rose garden, which contains over 200 varieties of roses. 146 John Bodinger de Uriarte, Melissa Biggs: Wag(er)ing Histories, Staking Territories: Exhibiting Sovereignty in Native America Figure 27 Few flowers are more representative of European gardening traditions; recall Serra’s delight at discovering what he recognized as ‘roses of Castilla’ growing abundantly on New World soil. One section of the garden serves as a test site for English roses created by David Austin, a renowned British rosarian. The Barona test site is one of only ten operated by Austin in the United States. Staff horticulturalists monitor the success of the rose varieties in Southern California growing conditions and report back to Austin’s company (James 2008). Figure 28 Museum & Society, 11(2) 147 The golf course and the rose garden provide two illustrations of Barona ability to transform and manage the environment. While the golf course design highlights native plant and climate knowledge and implies a certain intimate connection to the land, the rose garden indicates mastery of the care of introduced species, and the skills necessary to adapt the environment to best maintain them. Technical acumen and wise management of resources permits both the ‘natural’ and the cultivated landscapes to flourish. Figure 29 Beyond the Salton Sea The Agua Caliente Cultural Museum is located in the downtown Village Green Heritage Center of Palm Springs, near the Agua Caliente Spa Resort, which is partly marked by a traffic island statue depicting two Cahuilla women gathering acorns. Like many desert resorts, public sites in Palm Springs are often a combination of fountains and statues of historical or mythical figures, sometimes connected to Hollywood glamour. Not far from the Heritage Center, for example, a life-sized statue of former Palm Springs mayor Sonny Bono rests at the edge of a fountain, by a ‘walk of stars’ that recognizes both the well-known and lesser-known, like Harpo Marx and Iron Eyes Cody.9 Along the shop fronts of Palm Canyon Drive, enlarged black and white photographs and reproductions of newspaper articles and other documents tell the history of the Palm Springs resort boom, a history that intersects profoundly with the tribe’s struggles for sovereignty and economic independence. The Agua Caliente Museum is a modest, modern structure. Visitors enter a reception area that includes the museum store, then goes down a couple of stairs to the exhibition space. A vitrine in the entryway displays plans, including for a future freestanding museum. A door at the rear of the reception area leads to a small outdoor patio. A kish (a traditional stick-frame dwelling covered by palm fronds) sits in one corner; native plants grow in the perimeters, and 148 John Bodinger de Uriarte, Melissa Biggs: Wag(er)ing Histories, Staking Territories: Exhibiting Sovereignty in Native America Figure 30 Museum & Society, 11(2) 149 Figure 31 the walls are decorated with murals illustrating traditional Cahuilla desert life. The museum was founded in 1991, and permanent installations use photographs, text, and touchable objects to present Cahuilla history. Surrounding wall texts provide information about the Cahuilla environment, and their utilization of natural resources. The main gallery holds temporary displays; the exhibit at the time of writing, Song of the Basket, features a selection of Cahuilla baskets from the permanent collection. In addition to the galleries in the museum proper, objects from the museum’s collections are also displayed at the Salton Sea History Museum; California State University–San Bernardino; Palm Springs City Hall; and the nearby Spa Resort Casino Hotel—its lobby and grounds serve as extended exhibit space. A statue exterior to the building, ‘The Cahuilla Maiden’, is accompanied by an engraved retelling of the legend that the statue illustrates. A walkway lined with native plants guides visitors through glass doors etched with desert scenes and, as in the museum, murals depict scenes from traditional Cahuilla life. In the hotel lobby, display cases and photographs present tribal history. Photo exhibits titled Tribal Lands and Women Who Led the Way describe the Agua Caliente relationship with the area hot springs, and the history of their struggle to retain control over this resource. A temporary art exhibit, The Dream of the Blue Frog, based on Cahuilla legends about the springs, hangs in one of the smaller hallways. Glass cases hold grinding stones and pottery. In many ways, the hotel lobby provides a museum-style display in a non-museum space. The sitting area contains a replica of a door from the hot springs bathhouse hanging on one wall, and a single stand-alone case holds an old-style slot machine. Both artifacts speak to a history of Cahuilla economic enterprise and its interface with a Southern California tourist trade, but the 1936 slot machine concretizes a few different ways to think about recognizing and renegotiating a nostalgic past. The Chief both offers a generalized and stereotypical working of ‘the Indian’ as a site for projected history, and as a confirmation of a working present. As an affirmation of 150 John Bodinger de Uriarte, Melissa Biggs: Wag(er)ing Histories, Staking Territories: Exhibiting Sovereignty in Native America a claim to inherited sovereignty, The Chief references the Agua Caliente Tribe of Cahuilla Indians as able to both own and display this object in the lobby of their own spa and resort, an institution connected to (and partly made possible by) a sovereign nation status claimed and verified through political and cultural continuity. Here the Spa and its extended casino interests operate within a space of recognition and authenticated identity - The Chief illustrates these ongoing relationships figured through registers of land and language, politics and self-representation. It would be easy to read this object as an ironic juxtaposition: Indians, once the romanticized subject of popular representations, now able to not only speak back to those representations through the operation of successful businesses, like casinos, but also able to own and decenter that nostalgic projection. Not only can Indians, as agents, traffic in these nostalgic objects that render them as subjects, but they can also do Figure 32 so within the lobbies of their own successful hotels. But this isn’t so much a story of resistance (or even irony), as it is a story of a specific kind of re-articulation. As an old object, The Chief illustrates the past of gaming. It connects the history of gambling with a nostalgic history of a Western past, narrativized and made popular in large part through Hollywood movies. Also, it connects to a projection of nature - the two panels depict a successful hunt, crossing the line between the Indian as master of nature and the Indian as one of many gambling themes (reflecting also the history of Las Vegas and its earliest incarnations as a Western-themed space for adult play). The Chief thus moves effectively between at least two invoked pasts—that of the American West (as much as there were indigenous peoples across the continent, it is primarily those of the West that are immortalized in the films of Hollywood’s foundational industries), and that of gambling in the American West; The Chief inherits both nostalgias. But the location of The Chief also speaks to the history of the Tribe, both as major players in the development of Palm Springs as a resort, and as Native people with very specific claims to the land, verified through an identity grounded in blood reckoning and federal law. Contemporary Indian gaming spaces are sites for making claims to gaming and non-gaming past selves—re-articulated and re-animated through contemporary gaming practices. The Chief, displayed within its plexiglass cube, invokes heritage and the past through an articulation of the untouchable (the museum object) as a site for attention and contemplation. As an object in a lobby, however, it oscillates in the spaces between what sorts of attention it can command. Perhaps most easily read as old-timey and vernacular, The Chief makes active a space that both recognizes Agua Caliente gaming and calls to it as a spot for attention or even scrutiny. Here the practices of public exhibition are able to articulate and rearticulate objects and Museum & Society, 11(2) Figure 33 Figure 34 151 152 John Bodinger de Uriarte, Melissa Biggs: Wag(er)ing Histories, Staking Territories: Exhibiting Sovereignty in Native America Figure 35 evidence of representation. While we can think of the slot machine as a certain kind of inheritance - the legacy of popular images of Indians and how they surface in and shape the American imaginary - it also indicates a contested terrain: who gets to control the representation of Native peoples, how, and where? In Native America, claim rights to the past, as both narrative and property, are paramount. Contemporary battles over authentic identities are located in authenticated pasts and these, in turn, are often grounded in relationships to property. Material objects, especially in museums, serve as evidence of identity relations shot through with power. Much of the critical literature on museums produced in the last thirty years focuses on how their ownership of objects is used to wage histories that affirm and support the relationships and identities of the nation state. Much also focuses on museums as sites for the re-imagination of the nation: places for the waging of alternate histories. Native museums have long been recognized as sites for this kind of history telling, and the curation of objects significant to these histories has been an active site for struggle; institutions like the National Museum of the American Indian are prominent examples of histories and object relationships retold. But museums are not the only public sites significant to such reconfigurations. Native casinos and Figure 36 hotels also provide spaces for the retelling of Museum & Society, 11(2) 153 histories - stories and relationships inherited from the past - to newly configured, and increasingly significant, publics. As vernacular spaces, such sites are able to draw from different fields of objects and styles of storytelling. And, as Indian gaming moves from innovation to a new tradition, the objects used to tell this story shift as well. The Chief - manufactured well before IGRA, but fully informed by an imagined Indian other - serves as both nostalgic object for the history of gambling in the American West, and as an assertion of contemporary Native economic power. It sits in the lobby of a highly successful Indian resort hotel and casino owned and operated by Native people. The Agua Caliente Cultural Museum participates in this kind of story telling, but it is also part of continuing tribal efforts to embed and reflect the history of the Agua Caliente Tribe of Cahuilla Indians in the municipal and public terrains and perspectives of Palm Springs, not the least of which is the large undeveloped lot on the edge of the downtown, marked as the site for the future tribal museum. Here public spaces participate as sites for an extended (re)surfacing, much like that performed in the public spaces of Uncasville: a re-configuration of knowledge dependent on a re-cognition of place. While hotels and casinos are display environments where latencies can be made obvious, and the boundaries and expectations of visitor experience can be stretched and re-imagined, the public landscape also resonates as a site for telling stories of place and space. Many Native American communities, governments, and organizations have consistently recognized the need to publicly tell their own histories, sometimes to counter other, dominant histories, and sometimes in concert with them. Visitors to Native casinos and resorts represent a growing potential audience for Native self-representation, one typically more focused on gaming and entertainment than historical and cultural narratives. As Native communities look to build museum and cultural audiences, hybrid exhibitionary spaces - like those at the Mohegan Sun, Mystic Lake, and the Agua Caliente Spa Resort Casino Hotel, for example - may continue to develop, with self-representational narratives and experiences specifically designed to reach this visitor base. It is in these spaces where some of the more complicated and intriguing public expressions of Native sovereignty are enacted and presented, specifically aimed at engaging larger audiences to either introduce or reinforce particular understandings of tribal and Native identities. Working through the survey data and field visit materials, we developed a preliminary typology of exhibit spaces maintained by gaming tribes, or in which gaming tribes participate: • Tribally owned and operated, within the casino complex. • Tribally owned and operated, on tribal land. • Owned independently of the tribe, private, used to display tribal artifacts/tell tribal histories on tribal land. • State-owned and operated, used to display tribal artifacts/tell tribal stories on tribal land. • Lobby or other public space in a tribally owned facility, such as an administrative building, hotel, or other business (excluding casinos) • Lobby or other space in a casino. • Casino theme used as part of a strategy to tell tribal stories in a public space. • Federally operated, on federal land, used to display tribal artifacts and histories in cooperation with tribal entities • Tribally operated, leased space on non-tribal land • International museums • University museums or collections This typology represents a work in progress. The categories, fully porous and actively negotiated, are not necessarily mutually exclusive. At this point, our work yields the following 154 John Bodinger de Uriarte, Melissa Biggs: Wag(er)ing Histories, Staking Territories: Exhibiting Sovereignty in Native America as some key results. First, that self-representation - in Native and non-Native public spaces, and imagined primarily as elements of exhibition and narrative - has long been a Native priority. The variety of relationships between Native and non-Native exhibitionary spaces indicated by this project builds on a history of compromise and opportunity in the face of limited economic power. Continuing developments in post-IGRA Native American exhibitionary spaces provide a direction for fruitful future research: how will these spaces change, or be newly established, in the face of new economies? Second, that Native governments and institutions maintain complex relationships with a variety of state, local, regional, private, and federal museums and other spaces of public representation, such as state and national parks. Our findings also indicate that Native selfrepresentation through museums, cultural centers, and other exhibitionary spaces is not solely a post-IGRA phenomenon; the 1980s and 1990s saw a doubling in the construction of Native museums, cultural centers, and other exhibitionary locations (Cooper 2006: 8). Without clear tribal budget figures - outside the design and access of this project - it is difficult to do hard analyses on how casino profits have been used across a variety of exhibitionary opportunities or practices, or how fungible casino monies may be used to relieve other sectors of tribal economies thereby freeing otherwise encumbered funds that could be newly applied to exhibitions (Cattelino 2008). Third, the public exhibitionary spaces presented here are multifaceted locations for engaging larger audiences, to either introduce or reinforce particular understandings of tribal and Native identities. Over the course of the project, some active challenging of our thinking about Native museums and casinos as part of some sort of ongoing dyad of representational space unfolded: both offer immersive and thematic places for the presentation of specific kinds of identity-focused narratives, no matter how fantastic. The play between these admittedly ideal poles, the different places where these definitions failed to hold up, or where the mesh on their containing aspects was too wide to keep them from contaminating one another (Stewart 1991), were the really interesting places. The expanding influences and opportunities of entertainment and gaming spaces present promising arenas for future research, including the following questions: How are such spaces realized as sites for ‘ambient learning’, especially through immersive ethnic thematics as carefully considered design elements and environments? How do Native casinos, in particular, and ‘Indian Gaming’, more generally, form an accelerating focus for ‘ethno-enterprise’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009) as an expression of Native selfrepresentation and sovereignty? Received: 4 December 2012 Finally accepted: 1 July 2013 All photos by authors. Notes 1 We thank The Sycuan Institute on Tribal Gaming at San Diego State University for their generous support of this research project. 2 The Tantiquidgeon Museum is the oldest Native-operated museum in the United States. 3 Uncas was friends and allies with Captain John Mason, the leader of Connecticut colonial forces in the 1637 Pequot War. The 1638 Treaty of Hartford that followed the colonial victory terminated the Pequots as a tribe and solidified Mohegan power, even as Mohegans incorporated defeated Pequots into their tribe. While the Mohegnas allied with the Narragansetts in the Pequot War, they went on to open conflict with them in the resulting war over changes in and claims to territorial power. This lead to the 1645 attack on Shantok. 4 In addition to locations discussed here, we also visited the Grand Casino (Hinckley); Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Language and Culture Grounds; the Grand Portage Lodge and Casino; and the Grand Portage National Monument. 5 http://www.mallofamerica.com/shopping/directory/mystic-lake-casino-store Accessed October 25, 2010 Museum & Society, 11(2) 155 6 We use Twitchell’s definition of branding as the ‘commercial process of storytelling’ (2004). 7 For a complete account of the negotiations involved in creating the museum, see Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (U North Carolina P: 2012), Chapter Two, ‘Collaboration Matters: The Minnesota State Historical Society, the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, and the Creation of a “Hybrid” Tribal Museum’. 8 In California, we visited the following sites, in addition to those discussed: the Morongo Casino Resort and Spa; the Malki Museum (Moronogo Reservation); the Cabazon Cultural Museum; Indio (town historical mural project); and the Barona Cultural Center & Museum. 9 While Cody enjoyed a fairly extensive television and film career, he is perhaps best remembered as ‘the Crying Indian’ in the 1971 PSA for Keep America Beautiful. 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(1990) The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity Press. Cattelino, J. (2008) High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty, Durham: Duke University Press. Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J. (2009) Ethnicity, Inc, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Cooper, K.C. (2006) Living Homes for Cultural Expression: North American Native Perspectives on Creating Community Museums, Washington, D.C.: National Museum of the American Indian. Dorst, J. (1999) Looking West, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Eiland, H. (2003) ‘Reception in Distraction’, boundary 2, 30 (1) 51-66. Giebelhausen, M. (2003) The Architecture of the Museum, Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. 156 John Bodinger de Uriarte, Melissa Biggs: Wag(er)ing Histories, Staking Territories: Exhibiting Sovereignty in Native America González, M.J. (1997) ‘“The Child of the Wilderness Weeps for the Father of Our Country”: The Indian and the Politics of Church and State in Provincial California’, California History, 76 (2/3) 147-72. Harmon, A. (2010) Rich Indians, Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. James, M. (2008) ‘Barona resort is test grounds for 58 rose varieties’, San Diego Union Tribune, 5 October 2008. Accessed online November 12, 2012. Kilkpatrick, J. (1999) Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Libertus, S. (1996) ‘Preview: The New Mille Lacs Indian Museum’, Minnesota History, Spring, 32-39. Look, L. (1985) ‘Hearing to Air Complaints on Misuse of Tribes’ Bingo Revenue’, Los Angeles Times, 24 May 1985. Preston, W. (1997) ‘Serpent in the Garden: Environmental Change in Colonial California’, California History, 76 (2/3) 260-98. Scheper-Hughes, N. (2004) ‘Ishi’s Brain, Ishi’s Ashes: Anthropology and Genocide’, in Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Phillipe Bourgois (eds) Violence in War and Peace, 61-68, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Shipek, F.C. (1982) ‘Kumeyaay Socio-Political Structure’, Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, 4 (2) 296-303. Slotkin, R. (1993) Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, New York: Harper Perennial. Spilde, K. (2004) ‘Creating a Political Space for American Indian Economic Development: Indian Gaming and American Indian Activism’, in Melissa Checker and Maggie Fishman (eds) Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America, 71-88, New York: Columbia University Press. Stampe, J. “Narrating the Life-Sized: Memory, Representation, and Presence’, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Jose, California, November 15. Stewart, K. (1991) ‘On the Politics of Cultural Theory: A Case for “Contaminated” Cultural Critique’, in Social Research, 588 (2) 395-412. Thorne, T. (2010) ‘The Removal of the Indians of El Capitan to Viejas: Confrontation and Change in San Diego Indian Affairs in the 1930s’, Journal of San Diego History, 56 (1/2) 4366. Twitchell, J.B. (2004) Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld, New York: Simon & Schuster. Wood, W. (2008-2009) ‘The Trajectory of Indian Country in California’, Tulsa Law Review, 44 (2) 317-364. Zobel, M.T. (2000) Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Museum & Society, 11(2) 157 *Dr John Bodinger de Uriarte is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Director of Diversity Studies at Susquehanna University. He research specialties include cultural selfdefinition and self-representation in the public sphere. Specifically, he focuses on questions of identity, representation, and Native American sovereignty, and how such issues are engaged in contemporary museum, casino, and photographic practice. John Bodinger de Uriarte Associate Professor of Anthropology Susquehanna University 514 University Avenue Selinsgrove, PA 17870 (570) 372-4759 (voice), (570) 372-2774 (fax) bodinger@susqu.edu **Dr Melissa Biggs is a cultural anthropologist specializing in issues of ethnographic and historical representation and cultural heritage. She is program coordinator for the Difficult Dialogues Program at the Humanities Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, and teaches culinary history and cultures classes at the Culinary Institute of America in San Antonio. Dr. Melissa Biggs Program Coordinator Humanities Institute The University of Texas at Austin HRC 3.360/ Mail F1900 P.O. Box 7219 Austin, Texas 78713-7219 (512) 589-4293 (voice), (512) 475-9107 (fax) melissab@austin.utexas.edu