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Reviewed by:
  • Gambling on Authenticity: Gaming, the Noble Savage, and the Not-So-New Indian ed. by Becca Gercken and Julie Pelletier
  • Kathryn R. L. Rand and Steven Andrew Light
Gambling on Authenticity: Gaming, the Noble Savage, and the Not-So-New Indian.
Edited by Becca Gercken and Julie Pelletier. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2017. ix + 161 pp. Illustrations, tables. $29.95 CAD.

Indian gaming, or gambling operations owned and operated by American Indian tribal governments, is at the forefront of public discourse about Indian tribes and people. Academics, policymakers, popular media, and the general public now pay much more attention to tribes than ever before, forming opinions largely based on their perceptions of Indian gaming. Gambling on Authenticity both critiques and contributes to this phenomenon while offering crossnational perspectives.

This edited volume addresses Indian gaming in the United States and First Nations gaming in Canada (the editors use “Indigenous gaming” to capture both), with the goal of “clarify[ing] how gaming is used to talk about Indianness in both academic and non-academic conversations, . . . explor[ing] what the rhetoric surrounding Indigenous gaming reveals about perceptions of and anxiety over Indigenous sovereignty” and “asking readers to consider how Indigenous identity is being undone, reconstructed, and reimagined in the Indian casino era.” Thus, this is more of a scholarly project than one for general readers. This aim—clarifying how gaming frames modern perceptions of Indigenous people across borders—is important.

With perspectives from varied disciplines—art, anthropology, English, Indigenous studies, political science, poetry, literature—the book is ambitious, and a bit disjointed, in scope. Together, the chapters provide an overview of how Indigenous gaming might be viewed through various academic lenses, rather than a cohesive analysis. Curiously, scattered through-out are terms—like “Indian casino era” in the introduction, or references to “commercial” and “capitalistic” tribal casinos—that seem to reinforce exactly what the book is attempting to challenge: uncritical assumptions, shaped by perceptions of Indian gaming, about the authenticity of modern tribal economic development.

If, as a whole, the volume falls short of its goals, there is much to recommend it—for example, the idea that casinos have facilitated tribes’ use of more accurate tribal names, such as “Dakota” instead of “Sioux,” or the stark differences in the framing of the Cayuga Nation’s and Oneida Nation’s land-into-trust applications. Readers in the Great Plains likely will be interested in First Nations gaming, particularly the divergent law and policy approaches to tribal sovereignty and economic development in the US and Canada, and the recurrent theme of whether authenticity should be rooted in history and tradition for Native Americans—or any Americans.

Admittedly, the chapters connecting law, public policy, and politics to authenticity resonated the most with us, given our own areas of expertise. Yet the insights in examining how gaming is used in literature and art broaden readers’ understanding and reveal ambivalence from some Indigenous authors and artists. [End Page 91] These contributions illustrate how authenticity has many dimensions, further demonstrating gaming’s power as a cultural touchstone, and reinforcing the importance of sovereignty and self-determination—the ability of American Indian and First Nations people and governments to chart their own course, with gaming or without.

Kathryn R. L. Rand and Steven Andrew Light
Institute for the Study of Tribal Gaming Law and Policy
University of North Dakota
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