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613 Joe Smith (b. 1956) Joe Smith grew up in the Mohegan area of Uncasville. He is the son of Norma (Schultz) Smith and William J. Smith, grandson of Loretta F. Schultz (1900–82), and great-grandson of Chief Matahga (1862–1942). He was surrounded by a large family of Mohegan aunts, uncles, and cousins during his youth, and he served as the organist at the Mohegan Congregational Church during his high school years. Following his education at the Mohegan Elementary School and Montville High School, he attended Columbia University, where he earned a ba in English and an mfa in film history. He wrote for the Columbia Daily Spectator between 1975 and 1978 and also published in Premiere magazine. After working in the film business in New York and Los Angeles, Smith returned to the Mohegan homeland in 2003, where he now works for the Tribal Communications Department, overseeing the production of the tribe’s weekly newsletter, Wuskuso. “Fade into White” is being published here for the first time. Fade into White My mother hovers at the edge of the frame of the photograph—white, like a ghost. It hangs now in my dining room, rescued from a Native American past that grows faint in the wake of one of the world’s biggest tribal casinos—but for me and many others, it’s a past that will never disappear. The rest of the people in the picture are in color—not in a literal sense in this black-and-white photograph perhaps, but I can imagine the earthy tan shades punctuated by splashes of black, red, white, blue—maybe even purple. They were Indians. She did not want to be. The town of Uncasville, Connecticut, is named after the famed sachem Uncas of the Mohegan Tribe, a man whose life has been popularized and heavily fictionalized. As I made my way in the world, the name of my place of origin inevitably got a blank stare or a giggle from a new friend or acquaintance. Sometimes there would be a glimmer of recognition from those who might have boned up on their James Fenimore Cooper. At one time Uncasville must have been a great wild watery forest—on the banks of a river, near Long Island Sound, and not far from the Atlantic 614 mohegan Ocean. Some Mohegans must have braved those many waters—some even sailed to England in the seventeenth century to petition the Crown for the land. Others stayed put and were probably most content with familiar territory in the state that is often called—with a trace of derision—the Land of Steady Habits. In the very late part of the twentieth century, the tribe’s lands were invaded by a new breed of men—moguls and managers of the gaming industry near and far. Mohegan Sun was the result, and the tribe will never be the same. The land that was once home to a stinking chicken roost in the summertime, and a nuclear parts factory in the Nixon era, is now a pleasure dome. Back to the lady in the picture. As a child, she was fair-haired in more ways than one. Born to a Native and Irish American mother and a Swiss immigrant father, she emerged as a towheaded baby—courtesy of the genetic lottery. This set her apart from her darker siblings, and her father singled her out as his Aryan Princess. He reserved a ruder name for the other children. This family unit didn’t hold together, needless to say. But on the day that the picture was taken seven decades ago, the Indians on Mohegan Hill were having their annual summer celebration. The celebration was in sight of the church that the white Christian missionary Sarah Huntington had built in 1832 with three Mohegan women, just one part of a long line of matriarchal rule in the tribe that continues to this day. My mother lived in a Cape Cod house just a stone’s throw from that church, and I try to imagine the ruckus that took place when Norma—the youngest daughter of Loretta Fielding Schultz—refused to put on her Indian regalia (her eldest sister, Roberta, was quick to remind people: “It is not a costume!”). As the husband and sons who lived with her later in life well knew, when Norma dug in her heels, you just best get out of the way and run for cover. I can imagine the little brow...

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