The Mashantucket Pequots no longer depend on their white friends for favors. In just two years the tribe has used its casino monopoly to exert immense political and economic influence in the state of Connecticut. The Foxwoods casino in Ledyard brings in more than $1 million a day-that’s only the slot machines-and the Pequots have big plans for expansion, A new bingo hall and 5,000-seat concert arena are under construction, and the tribe may undertake an amusement park, a couple of golf courses, another casino and a third hotel. Under an agreement with Gov. Lowell Weicker, the 307-person tribe (which, as a separate Indian nation, operates tax-free) voluntarily contributes a minimum of $100 million a year to the state budget. That makes it Connecticut’s largest single contributor outside the federal government. In an area suffering from defense-industry layoffs, the casino employs more than 8,000 people.
But the boom has upset many local townspeople, whose rhetoric sounds a lot like what the Native Americans used to say about the white man’s encroachment. “We’re being pushed out of our way of life,” says Andrea Gialluca, who lives a few miles from the casino. “Our environment is changing.” Casino-bound traffic along narrow Route 2 can back up all the way to the GialIncas’ house. In one recent weekend 80,000 gamblers poured into the area, where fewer than 25,000 people live.
The Pequots are hoping to expand the original reservation to include more than 1,700 acres of surrounding land they have bought with gambling proceeds-a move that would take the property off the Connecticut tax rolls forever. The tribe offered to keep paying taxes at the current level, plus a lump sum of $5 million for each of the three surrounding towns, in exchange for annexation. The offer was soundly rebuffed. “No annexation, not one acre,” reads the poster on the Giallucas’ front fence.
Beyond the three neighboring towns, people feel less hostile to the casino. “From my point of view, [the casino] is a godsend,” said Harry Jackson, city council president of nearby Norwich, a graceful but decaying river town where thousands have lost jobs in recent years. “I don’t know, where we’d be without them.” Nonprofit groups in the area have come to regard the Indians as important benefactors. “Philanthropy has been redefined in light of the massive success of that casino,” says Steven Sigel of the Garde Art Center, a theater in New London. He remembers with relish the night one visiting performance group met their corporate sponsor’s representative: a local Pequot, in full native dress, named Laughing Woman.
The massive, brightly fit casino complex, with its jangling slot machines and lavender and teal decorator colors, rises like a spaceship out of the dark Connecticut woods. The crass pursuit of gambling seems a strange way for Native Americans to recapture their heritage. But the proceeds have enabled the tribe to hire its own archeologist to research Mashantucket Pequot culture, and to plan what will be the nation’s biggest museum of Native American culture, scheduled to open in 1996. The glitz and hustle have swept away what Terry Bell calls “the little stereotype of the Indian in the woods … That’s where white society has tried to keep the Indians. We’re not supposed to have power and do business.” The new stereotype of an Indian gambling tycoon has its drawbacks. too.
