Casino and Museum explores how the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center and the Foxwoods Resort Casino, both built and administered by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe of Connecticut, contribute to production and maintenance of tribal and Indian identity. Through analyses of the museum’s structure, physical setting, and exhibits and the casino’s architecture, décor, and art and other installations, John Bodinger de Uriarte examines how these contribute to creation of symbolic capital supporting Mashantucket Pequot self-representation and identity.
The book is organized into five chapters that include brief discussions of the setting of the work and of the Mashantucket Pequot tribal renaissance and longer, discrete treatments of the casino, the museum, and an exhibition of portraits of tribal members by Kwakwaka’wakw photographer David Neel that concludes the museum’s suite of exhibits. Analyses of the museum, portraits, and casino each draw on separate literatures, although these are not expansive, nor are the discussions well contextualized either with extensive descriptions, presentations of data, or within their particular geographies such as Native New England or American or Native casinos. For example, in a discussion of casino architecture and design characterized as spectacular suspensions of reality, the author refers to specific Las Vegas and other casinos as if readers are intimately acquainted with them. Further, despite the growing importance of architecture to Native casinos and other tribal buildings in the U.S. and Canada and increasing use of historical and cultural references in architecture, the author does not place the museum and casino within this context. Unfortunately, discussions of Mashantucket Pequot politics and identity also remain divorced from New England Native politics and history. Bodinger de Uriarte admits that he takes for granted that U.S. federal acknowledgment of Mashantucket tribal status is valid, and suggests that challenges to that status--or questioning of Mashantucket tribal identity--is based on race. However, this ignores that local resentments may stem as much from the fact that the Mashantucket Pequot, who received a settlement and federal recognition through the U.S. Congress, thereby avoided historical and genealogical investigations mandated by the acknowledgment process as currently carried out by the federal Bureau of Acknowledgment and Recognition.
Ironically, the book’s specificity is both a strength and a weakness. Treatments of museum exhibits or casinos are ordinarily carried out only in abbreviated forms such as conference papers, and the book allows the author considerable freedom to analyze these situations. However, by focusing solely on physical constructions such as the casino and museum, Bodinger de Uriarte avoids complicating his discussion by steering clear of challenges to Mashantucket identity and federal acknowledgment that have been posed by others, most of whom he does not cite, and other factors that would contribute to a fuller discussion and analysis of Mashantucket self-representation. Neither does he discuss other, less structured identity performances, such as individuals’ involvement in contemporary pan-Indian cultural practice such as powwows or more private expressions and how these might combine with highly structured, built entities such as the casino and museum to create a complete identity presentation.
While examination of complex tribal and other processes that created the museum and the Foxwoods casino would have been provocative and valuable, the author does not provide such analyses. He describes the casino and museum as “densely scripted public sites,” but the question is, scripted by whom? Unfortunately, the forces responsible for shaping and generating the casino and museum as physical entities are presented as amorphous collectivities: no voices or texts are presented to articulate the interplay of tribal members, tribal council, architects, designers, museum people, and others, and the ongoing decision-making that framed what the public sees in the museum and casino. This is especially surprising since the last chapter on David Neel’s portraits of tribal members acknowledges that such images are the result of implicit collaborations between the subject and the photographer; extension of this observation to development of the museum and casino would have immeasurably aided the author’s interpretations.
Since all individual perspectives and strategies have effectively been obscured and no agency is ascribed to any party--Native or non-Native--it is sometimes difficult to accept the author’s suggestion that the museum and casino are, in fact, intentional expressions of Mashantucket identity. Ultimately, closer attention to the actual play behind development of the museum and casino, as well as a comparison and contrast of the museum and casino presentations in terms of their power and effectiveness as self-representations addressing vastly different audiences, would have provided a more encompassing treatment.
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[Review length: 740 words • Review posted on August 2, 2007]