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Legal Gambling on Indian Reservations

In the 1980s the possibility of legal gambling on Indian reservations emerged as a potential means for many Native American peoples to revitalize their societies and pull themselves out of the dependency and poverty that reservation life had brought them. There were many variations in the process of instituting gambling on the reservations--but the primary differences were in the reactions and the efforts of the many tribes. Two examples of Native American groups who sought to institute gaming on a sufficient scale to revitalize their economies were the Mohawk of northern New York and the numerous tribes of southern California. In New York a terrible "Mohawk civil war," as the popular phrase put it, tore apart the Akwesasne, Kahnawake, and Kanesatake reservations (Johansen xxi). But in California the battle over gambling pitted the administration of Republican governor Pete Wilson (backed by Las Vegas gambling interests) against a well-united Indian front. On the gaming question, as in all interactions with the dominant society, long-colonized Native Americans react and change in ways associated with their traditional social and political arrangements and in accordance with patterns that have emerged during the competitive, hegemonic, and administrative phases of colonization. Differences between the experiences of the Mohawk and the various southern California Indians during colonization are, therefore, the source of the differences between their responses to the arrival of gaming on the reservations.

The Mohawk were the easternmost of the five member nations of the Iroquois Confederacy--an institution "characterized by the religious integration of segmentary national and kinship groups, and the nondifferentiation of polity, culture, and kinship" (Champagne 24). In this position they developed early intensive interactions with the newly arrived Europeans. In the early competitive phase of colonization the Mohawk, like the...

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Legal Gambling on Indian Reservations. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:32, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1690091.html