The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (21 page)

The Shinnecocks have said that they will build roads to funnel casino traffic away from the LIE, but there are many people in the Hamptons—people who don't have the money to commute from Manhattan by helicopter but who are still rich enough to be accustomed to getting what they want—who are aghast at the prospect of more cars on the road, not to mention the unquaintness of a casino marring their manicured pastoral. Such people "do not want their idyllic environment hurt by the added traffic, congestion, and noise of a gaming facility," Senator Charles Schumer wrote to the Bureau of Indian Affairs several years ago. The state senator Kenneth LaValle said that the tribe was "blatantly threatening the quality of life on the East End."

But the Shinnecocks might be forgiven for considering their own quality of life, which is markedly different from that in the rest of the Hamptons. The median household income on the reservation, according to the 2000 census, is $14,055 a year. Only about six hundred people live on the Shinnecocks' eight hundred acres, which have the feel of a scruffy summer camp. During the day, you can hear the zoom of boys speeding along the bumpy roads into the forest on four-wheel ATVs. At night, jacked-up cars with hip-hop on the stereo cruise toward Cuffee's Beach, where kids go to hang out and hook up and get high. The land is green and wild, and most of the houses have an unfinished wall covered in white Tyvek house wrap or a roof draped in blue tarp. Because the land is held in trust by the tribe, it is impossible to get a mortgage on the reservation, where banks cannot foreclose, so young couples often add a room onto a family home, and houses grow into haphazard hugeness.

People still hunt in the forest and send their kids down to the water to collect buckets of clams, activities that the Shinnecocks view as part of their ancestral tradition. The tribe is indigenous to the spot. Since there is no evidence to suggest a large-scale migration onto or off Long Island, historians believe that the native people that Europeans encountered when they arrived, in the 1600s, were the direct descendants of the aboriginal inhabitants of the land, ten thousand years ago.

In the mid-seventeenth century, though, the Shinnecock population dwindled, when new diseases came ashore with the colonists. It became necessary to intermarry, and the Shinnecocks often married African Americans. Today, most Shinnecocks look black but feel Indian—an identity quite distinct from both the crisp Yankee austerity of Old Southampton and the flamboyance of its more recent summer immigrants. The reservation is an insular place, and nearly everyone there is related. If a member of the tribe was in the hospital, Marguerite Smith, a tribal attorney, told me, "two hundred of us might show up and claim we are immediate family."

The question of whether to open a casino—which many Shinnecocks see as inconsistent with their traditional way of life—has created the kind of disagreement you might expect from people living in what is essentially an endless family reunion. In 1996, at a tribal meeting in the cinder-block Shinnecock Community Center, a discussion about the possibility of building a casino exploded into a brawl. By the time it was over, people were throwing chairs at one another and one trustee's brother had bitten a woman's finger to the bone.

"You just look at this place," Mike Smith, who has been the pastor of the Shinnecock Presbyterian Church for twenty-five years, said, one afternoon a few months ago. He was walking near his house, on Little Beach Road, which he shares with his wife, three grown children, and three grandchildren. "You go down to Cuffee's Beach, the DuPonts and the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers are right there." Looking out on Shinnecock Bay, one sees the sandy spit of Meadow Lane, studded with grand old estates, just across the water. The Shinnecocks' parcel of forest and beachfront would be worth billions of dollars if it were ever for sale. "It makes no sense, no logical sense, for us to still be here in light of that," Smith said. "But here we sit."

 

Aside from three-card monte and Wall Street, Manhattan doesn't have much in the way of gambling. New Yorkers travel south to Atlantic City, or up to Connecticut, to gamble. Long Islanders take a high-speed ferry to New London or Bridgeport, near the Pequots' and the Mohegans' casinos, the two largest in North America.

This maritime movement of business from the East End of Long Island to Connecticut follows a pattern established centuries ago. The currency that sustained the fur trade between European settlers and native people was wampum—beads made from the purple interior of clamshells. The Shinnecocks produced wampum from shells found on the banks of Long Island Sound and brought it by canoe to Connecticut, where the Pequots, a more powerful tribe, controlled the local economy. Only when the Pequots were routed by the Europeans, in the Pequot War of 1637, did they begin trading with the settlers directly. A Shinnecock casino would, in a sense, renew that direct exchange.

The Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos are enormously successful, and their earnings have transformed the Indian nations that operate them. Before the Mohegans started their business, they were a scattered group of mostly impoverished individuals. Now they are a model of organized prosperity. If you could use a scholarship, health care, child care, or retirement benefits, it is far better these days to be Mohegan than it is to be American.

Since the inception of the United States, Indian governments have been recognized as sovereign entities, exempt from taxation. But the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 requires tribes to negotiate compacts with states in which they operate casinos, and those compacts almost always include a revenue-sharing agreement. Last year, the slot machines at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun were the Connecticut government's biggest private source of revenue, yielding $362 million. Foxwoods has eleven thousand employees, making it one of the largest employers in the state.

Once a tribe is federally recognized, it is eligible to open a casino, and the promise of wealth attracts financial backers to pay for the necessary builders, lawyers, and lobbyists. The Shinnecocks have been pursuing recognition since 1978—nine years before the Supreme Court ruled, in
California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians
, that states have no authority to regulate gambling on reservations. In support of their claim, they have submitted more than forty thousand pages of documentation substantiating their history and lineage. Meanwhile, tribes across the country have bloomed into thriving mini-nations, while the Shinnecocks, as Lancelot Gumbs, a senior trustee, said, have remained "stuck in the Stone Age."

This summer, after thirty-two years, the Bureau of Indian Affairs declared that the Shinnecocks had met the seven criteria for federal acknowledgment, and that their petition had been provisionally approved; after a thirty-day waiting period, they would finally have tribal status. One of the trustees, Gordell Wright, described a celebratory mood: "We're going to be doing a lot of singing and eating." But, a few days before the waiting period ended, a group calling itself the Connecticut Coalition for Gaming Jobs filed an objection with the Interior Board of Indian Appeals, arguing that "a new casino in Southern New York will mean job losses and higher taxes for Connecticut." The group's spokesman refused to disclose anything about its membership or its financing.

The Shinnecocks were shocked, but their financiers of the past seven years, Marian Ilitch and Michael Malik, were not. The two have started casinos with, among others, the Little River Band of Ottawas and the Los Coyotes Band of Cahuillas and Cupeños. "Every time we do this, some bogus front appears to delay the process," their spokesman, Tom Shields, told me. Both the Mohegans and the Pequots have denied any affiliation with the Connecticut Coalition for Gaming Jobs, but, Shields said, "it's obvious who benefits by having the Shinnecocks delayed."

Ilitch and Malik, for their part, have reportedly paid lobbyists more than $1 million to meet on the Shinnecocks' behalf with Governor David Paterson, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and Senator Charles Schumer's chief of staff; they paid another million to the Washington lobbying firm Wheat Government Relations. But their investment is negligible compared with the potential payoff. Ilitch owns a casino in Detroit that grosses $400 million a year. "In the twenty-two years we've been involved with Indian gaming, so far, knock on wood, we've not had anybody fail in the process," Malik said.

 

The Shinnecock reservation is bordered on the north by Montauk Highway, a two-lane strip that stretches west from the more glamorous parts of Southampton. During the past three decades, since the Shinnecocks began selling tax-free cigarettes, it has become crowded with businesses—Eagle Feather, Rain Drops, True Native—that have turned the edge of the reservation into a kind of theme park of Indianness and smoking. The largest of them, the Shinnecock Indian Outpost, has two totem poles in the parking area, and sells cigarettes, moccasins, and lobster rolls. There are also Navajo blankets, toy tomahawks made in Korea, and many varieties of dream catchers. Gumbs built the store on his mother's land allotment, and is regarded as one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the tribe.

On the day I visited him, Gumbs was wearing a button-down shirt with eagle feathers embroidered on the breast pocket, a gold necklace with a bear-claw charm, a big, gold-toned watch, and an assertive cologne. He is fifty years old, with a long black braid down his back, and he speaks at an unusual volume. In the deli section of his store, Gumbs told me that he grew up "on the powwow trail," visiting other reservations throughout the East for festivals and ceremonies. "I saw true governments in action," he said. "Whether it was education, whether it was health care—all of these things that we're talking about now—other tribes were doing that back then. And it always baffled me as to why we felt like we were there, when we were light-years behind." Gumbs has long been the tribe's most vocal advocate of gaming. "I guess that was the motivating factor, and just listening to the other men in the community saying, 'Damn, we don't have nothing!'"

Gumbs led me out of the store so that we could talk in private. We passed a series of burgundy cottages where children were playing with a baby raccoon in the yard, and walked toward a two-story building with a wooden Indian standing guard out front. Inside was a room the size of a high school gym, where Gumbs's yellow Hummer was parked next to a forty-five-foot RV. There was a bar in one corner, and the walls were decorated with Mylar tassels. High overhead was Gumbs's DJ booth, where he spins records when he rents out his cavernous bachelor pad for parties.

"Even though our children went to the public school, the majority of them were behind all of the ethnic groups. We're behind even the Latinos now!" Gumbs said. "You have these two tribes that spring up miraculously out of thin air right around us and create two of the largest casinos in the world." He did not believe that the Mohegans had anything to do with the Connecticut Coalition's efforts to sabotage the Shinnecocks, but he wasn't convinced about the Pequots. Gumbs said that if he found out that any Indian nation was involved, he would consider it an act of war. "We will go after them just like they came after us," he said. I asked him if he meant by creating competition. "There's a lot of other ways," he said, ominously, "but I'm not going to get into that."

 

Gumbs has been elected trustee eight times, and in that capacity has taken requests from dozens of prospective investors. In 2003, he helped make a deal with a man named Ivy Ong to develop a casino and resort hotel. The trustees chose Ong from many suitors, Gumbs said, because "being Chinese, he had a great appreciation and understanding of cultural values and cultural issues." (Gumbs is a firm believer in ethnic profiling. A few days after our meeting, I received an e-mail from him asking why I didn't have children: "Is it as I've been told a Jewish woman's lack of interest in sex?") Though the Shinnecocks lacked federal recognition, they planned to build a 65,000-square-foot facility in Hampton Bays, on an idyllic eighty-acre parcel of beachfront woodland that the tribe holds. Ong intended to run a bus directly there from Chinatown in New York City.

When this plan became public, it revived a dispute that has persisted for almost four hundred years. The Town of Southampton, the oldest English settlement in New York, was established when colonists purchased eight square miles of land from the Shinnecocks in 1640. In exchange, the Shinnecocks received corn from the settlers' first harvest, cloth coats, and a promise that particular areas would be reserved for their use; it was also agreed that the English would "defend us the sayed Indians from the unjust violence of whatever Indians shall illegally assaile us." This arrangement held until 1703, when the tribe sold its remaining land, for the price of twenty pounds, plus a thousand-year lease on a parcel that included 3,600 acres known as the Shinnecock Hills. The two groups cohabited fairly happily for the next 150 years, though the settlers complained that their livestock kept falling into holes that the Shinnecocks dug to store food through the winter.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, wealthy New Yorkers began to transform the area from farmland into a seaside resort. In 1859, a consortium of investors petitioned the state to break the Shinnecocks' lease, and an agreement was sent to Albany, signed by twenty-one members of the tribe. According to the Shinnecocks, the document was forged; some of the signatories appeared twice, and others were tribe members who had died. Days later, the tribe sent another petition to Albany in protest. The state legislature approved the transaction anyway, and the Shinnecocks were reduced to their current land base. They became the servant class of Southampton, cleaning homes, cooking, and caddying at the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club.

Over the years, the tribe has tried by various legal means to re- claim the land, whose value has been assessed at $1.7 billion. Marguerite Smith, the first member of the tribe to become an attorney, told me, "I went to law school with the message from the elders 'You have to do something for your tribe.' When I finished, they said, 'You go and get those hills.'" But Gumbs and others on the reservation have argued that the land, most of which is now privately owned, will never be reclaimed through the courts. The tribe will have to buy it back, and the casino will provide the means. "We lost our land through white man's greed, and we're going to get it back through white man's greed," Fred Bess said.