Samson Occom at the Mohegan Sun
Finding history at a New England Indian casino
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
IV.
Within the last decade, the emergence of tribal casinos has changed the American landscape and challenged how we have become accustomed to thinking about American Indian communities. Casinos spatially demarcate sovereign American Indian political domains within the United States. They materialize the new political and economic power of tribal communities assumed long gone. No doubt this is why so many Americans find them unsettling.
It is possible, then, to see the Mohegan Sun Casino as a renegotiation of practices of cultural commemoration, a reconfiguration of the intersection of historical time with contemporary space.Even people who know a bit about American Indian history and who support tribal sovereignty as an abstract principle find themselves troubled by tribal casinos, especially ones as spectacular as Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun. It can be difficult to reconcile these contemporary manifestations of New England Native American life with our historical imaginations, or to rectify our sense of what tribal sovereignty ought to mean with the ways living Native peoples actually decide to exercise self-determination. The cognitive distance between archives and casinos seems almost impassable.
But finding Samson Occom at the Mohegan Sun proves an exceptionally astute historical intelligence at work in casino design: the Mohegan have designed their casino to reflect public fantasies about Indians while maintaining their own tribal history. It is possible, then, to see the Mohegan Sun Casino as a renegotiation of practices of cultural commemoration, a reconfiguration of the intersection of historical time with contemporary space. Tribal casinos teach us what Samson Occom and other Native peoples in colonial times knew all too well: how chancy and random the turns of history can be, how strange and unimaginable its forms and outcomes.
Further Reading:
For more on Indian Casinos, Samson Occom, and the Mohegan, see David Kamper and Angela Mullis, eds., Indian Gaming: Who Wins? (Los Angeles, 2000); William DeLoss Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England (reprint Syracuse, 2000); Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon (Tucson, 2000).
