Without Reservation (review)

Without Reservation by Jeff Benedict. HarperCollins, 2000

Racism is hardly news in Indian Country. Bias against Native Americans remains real and intense in many parts of the United States. Less often discussed, but equally real is the prejudice against persons of mixed Native and African-American ancestry on the part of other Indians themselves. In recent years, the Mashantucket Pequots of Connecticut, made wealthy by the profits of casino gaming, have become a lightning rod for such attitudes. A common joke was: "What's the only tribe to attend the Million Man March? The Mashantucket Pequot." Often there is an element of East versus West attitude involved—though not always. The Pequots themselves have sometimes experienced factionalism that appears to have a racial component to it. All of this forms a background to Jeff Benedict's Without Reservation.

Benedict, a writer whose previous book was Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play in the NFL, according to the dust jacket, "currently attends law school in Boston." (Clearly the publisher hopes readers will guess Harvard rather than the New England School of Law—the reality.) In his acknowledgments he describes leaving his wife at the beach in June 1998 while he spent the day in the library looking for an idea for a new book. Plugging "Pequot Tribe" and "Foxwoods" (the Pequot's casino) into the library computer, he was soon inundated by a pile of material. He spent the next seventeen months researching the "political and legal groundwork that led to the biggest casino in the world." By his own admission, the task took on an investigative zeal as he searched for "the truth" (357).

Once one of the most powerful confederacies in the Northeast, the Pequots' power was shattered by the Pequot War in 1637 and the massacre at Mystic Fort. Most surviving Pequots were dispersed among neighboring tribes or sold into slavery in Bermuda and the Bahamas. The Western Pequots were given a reservation at Mashantucket in 1660. The period from then through the nineteenth century was one of slow decline, as both their land base and membership dwindled. By 1907, anthropologist Frank Speck estimated, only twenty-five members were living on the reservation. In 1974, the tribe reorganized its government and began the federal acknowledgment process. In 1976, aided by the Native American Rights Fund, they filed a suit for land taken from them illegally. Events culminated in 1983 with the passage by Congress of the Mashantucket Pequot Indian Land Claims Settlement Act, which granted the tribe recognition, awarded $900,000 in damages, and settled the land claim.

The tribe opened Foxwoods in 1992. Today the Mashantucket Pequot are among the wealthiest Indians in the nation, and the tribe has grown to be the second largest private employer in the state of Connecticut. As defense industry cutbacks hit eastern Connecticut hard, Pequot activities helped buoy the local economy. Millions of dollars from taxes and payments in lieu of taxes from gaming operations pour into state coffers.

Seldom has a book about Native Americans gained so much attention or created so much consternation as has Benedict's. He calls the process by which the Pequot gained recognition political and flawed, based on inadequate, erroneous information. He contends that the surviving Pequots did not consider themselves a tribe—or even Native—until they were presented with the prospect of economic gain from a land claims action. He also avers that Elizabeth George, looked upon by current Mashantuckets as a kind of founding matriarch who remained on the reservation throughout the twentieth century and issued the call for members to move back to the reservation to hold the land, was not, in fact, Pequot at all but Narragansett. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he claims irregularities in the map used in passage of the 1983 Settlement Act to set the outer boundary of lands that could be taken into trust. According to Benedict, Foxwoods is not even within the legitimate boundaries of the reservation.

The book concludes with a call for a...