Lady Luck or Mother Earth? Gaming as a Trope in Plains Indian Cultural Traditions

Gambling, or its more dignified terminological brother gaming, straddles that nebulous line between legal and illegal, moral and immoral, healthy and sick in the consciousness of many mainstream American citizens and policy makers. And nothing brings out that ambivalence in the American cultural mind more than Native American gaming. Indians continue to suffer the dichotomized thinking that would have them be simply good Indians or bad Indians. ¹ When associated with the "natural" ² world, Mother Earth, we are good Indians, but when we are involved in the business of making money from gambling, we are bad Indians. Following Lewis Carroll's wonderland satire of logic for a moment, I will attempt to illustrate how the American cultural logic toward Indians works. Lewis writes, "Babies are illogical. Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile. Illogical persons are despised" (Weaver, 34). Warren Weaver explains the links:

In fact, since babies are illogical (Premise 1) and since illogical persons are despised (Premise 3) it follows that babies are despised. And since despised persons cannot manage crocodiles (Premise 2), it follows that babies cannot manage crocodiles. (34)

Framed for my purposes: Indians are illogical. Nobody is despised who can manage a capital-producing enterprise. Illogical people are despised. It follows that Indians cannot manage capital-producing enterprises. We could use many interchangeable words for "illogical": "primitive," "spiritually centered," "intuitive," "unscientific," "uncivilized," or "unbusinesslike." Clearly, the premises of the logic here are faulty, but what may not be so obvious is that Indian loving is based on the same premise as Indian hating. We locate that when we expose the underlying premise that scientific thinking stands in opposition to spiritual beliefs that are rooted in an intuitive relation to the natural world. The idea that gambling might also be an "Indian thing" eclipses traditional tribal understandings of games of chance both scientific and spiritual. One way to flesh out a view of Indians is to define, however tentatively, indigenous concepts of the self--how and from where does a particular tribal person derive power? How does that person negotiate a place in the world, and what are the terms used to describe his or her epistemology? Contrary to the persistent popular belief that indigenous peoples react en masse to phenomena they witness, among indigenous peoples an authority is granted to the individual based on his or her experiences, dreams in particular. Reading dreams, like reading other aspects of experience and existence, comprises an indigenous science of probability.

In this paper I focus on the term "luck," a term that is prevalent in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Plains Indian autobiography and other ethnographic stories. Luck in those writings often appears as a metaphysical concept; roughly described, it is a "portal" to the spiritual realm where power--better termed "medicine"--can be obtained. Objects and language (particularly marked [sacred] words, including names as well as sequences of words such as chants and songs) figure ritualistically into enhancing the seeker's access to the realm (coterminous and cohabitant with present reality). I conclude by briefly tracing this concept in James Welch's Fools Crow in an effort to show how recovery of luck in (post)colonial identity portrayals compares and contrasts with pursuits of luck (medicine) in earlier, more "traditional" narratives (Combs and Holland, 66)

"Probabilistic thinking," Weaver's term (28), aptly designates an aspect of indigenous thought, I would argue, and while the cultural premises differ from culture to culture, they bear the common mark of belief in an agency that is "operating behind the scenes" (Combs and Holland, xi). For the sake of brevity, what I offer here is more descriptive than definitive, and, further, if you will allow me the generalization of "indigenous," what I say will be suggestive of a method, however incomplete and tentative, appropriate...