Gangs and Casinos Storytelling ABOUT Indians
BY JAMES RING A DAMS
A NEW INDIAN STEREOTYPE IS TAKING HOLD IN AMERICAN MASS CULTURE.
INSTEAD OF WAR BONNETS AND CAMPFIRES, INDIAN LIFE IN THE LENS OF CURRENT MOVIES AND TELEVISION IS MARKED BY CASINOS, GANGS AND LINKS TO ORGANIZED CRIME.
T
he beginnings of this trope were innocuous enough, but it began to take a vicious turn as tribal casinos flourished and stirred up mainstream envy and anxi- ety. The stock figure of Indian
as modern businessman might be traced to the later seasons of the great TV comedy Northern Exposure, which ran from 1990 to 1995. The recurring character Lester Haines, head of the council of an unspecified tribe and played by Apesanahkwat, then the actual chairman of the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin, made his mark as the only person ever to outwit the local tycoon Maurice J. Minnifield (Barry Corbin) in a business deal. The role was hardly a stretch for A.P., who in his eight terms as Menominee chairman led the drive for a tribal casino in Kenosha and influenced the drafting of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. In the hands of David Chase, then executive producer of the series, the role was new and refreshing. When Chase carried it over to his later project, The Sopranos, it became less so. In several episodes of the HBO drama,
Tony Soprano and his crew divert themselves at a tribal casino in Connecticut, where they are on chummy terms with the tribal chair- man. The scenes intensely irritated the then real chairman of the Mohegan Indian Tribe, Mark Brown, who saw them as veiled refer- ences to the tribe’s Mohegan Sun casino. “It was unfortunate,” he recalls. A former law en- forcement officer himself, he points to the lay- ers of supervision – Connecticut State Police, tribal police and Tribal Gaming Commission – tasked with preventing criminal influence at the casinos. But this apparatus, and its record of suc-
cess, was generally ignored in the fictions that followed. To be sure, the new wealth of tribal casinos generated a trove of seamy political news. The Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandals tainted Congress and the George W. Bush Administration and made a walk-on
34 AMERICAN INDIAN WINTER 2014
appearance in Kevin Spacey’s political drama House of Cards. Spacey played Abramoff him- self in the 2013 movie Casino Jack. The trope of an Indian casino–organized crime nexus has proliferated, however, without any similar support from hard news. This trope is now a staple of cable televi-
sion crime dramas. The twice-resurrected police procedural noir The Killing, set in Se- attle, included a subplot about a jurisdictional struggle with tribal police at a nearby Indian casino. In one scene, the tribal police give a severe beating to one protagonist, a Seattle policeman they find on their reservation. The irony of this plot line, a product of ignorance or outright distortion, is that one of the tribes in this area, the Suquamish, was the victim of what was possibly Chief Justice William Rhenquist’s worst Supreme Court Indian law decision, the Oliphant case, which denied tribal governments criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians, even within their own territory. To add real injury, these “Wapi Eagle
Casino” episodes began to run in May 2012, just as the House of Representatives was re- jecting the Senate-passed Violence Against Women Act. One sticking point was the House majority’s objection to extension of tribal jurisdiction to crimes against Indian women. It’s not clear what impact The Kill- ing’s misrepresentations might have had, and the bill eventually passed, a year later. But in stereotyping, every little bit hurts. The Cinemax series Banshee is set in an
exceptionally violent town in Pennsylvania’s Amish country, in which an ex-con and a retired jewel thief occupy the moral high ground. It brims with larcenous stereotypes, from the tribal casino manager to a renegade Amish crime lord to Ukrainian gangsters to a cross-dressing Korean, who steals every scene in which he appears. In the first sea- son, the chief of the fictional Kihano tribe was played by the late Russell Means (Oglala Lakota), whose son, Tatanka, continues in the
TV’S NEW INDIAN:
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