Word: upon
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...Upon my return to Rainmaker Casino, I find the casino floor jam-packed with players. Families replace the Swingers wannabes from last night, but the end result is the same: high minimum bets and a long wait for a place to play. I make my way through Rainmaker Square, past the buffet hordes and to the high-stakes bingo game. It's a capacity crowd and a serious one inside. Despite the simplicity of the game, the players make of it both art and science. Watching multiple cards while smoking, eating, drinking a cup of coffee, the players eschew idle...
...search of that story, I leave the casino and visit the nearby Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, a structure that might be best described as architectural non-sequitor. It has been clear, thus far, that Foxwoods is at best a poor reflection of and upon Mashantucket Pequot culture. Calling the main casino "Rainmaker" or the frequent player's program "the Wampum Club" seems in exceptionally poor taste. However, I've been assuming that this can somehow be attributed to the general milieu of tackiness of the early `90s, when the casino was first opened, not to any failure...
...newly-revitalized community--one that has been realized by years of planning, hoping and hard work." Certainly, the will of the Mashantucket Pequots to revitalize the rez is undeniable. But what gets short shrift here is the largely contingent nature of this revitalization, what with it being based upon the gaming industry...
...However, at the end of the first exhibit hall, gaming does get some of its due. A brief series of panels on a wall describes the gaming operation and its impact upon the community. Next to these, a mocked-up slot machine stands as a model of what has brokered the reservation's transformation. As I read one of the panels, the whitest man I have ever seen, complete with massive gut, Boston accent and wife in tow, passes in front of me, headed for the slot machine. He looks around nervously and surreptitiously removes his wallet from his back...
...wonders, though, what the motivation is for recapturing indigenous identity, and how this motivation might be different without the presence of the gaming industry on the rez. It would be highly disingenous, no doubt, to say that Mashantucket Pequot identity is premised solely upon economic incentive. But at the same time, for many of those who have moved back to the reservation after years away or for those, like Regina Kirchner, who have little direct knowledge of their indigenous heritage, it is hard to posit much in terms of their motivation aside from enlarged economic opportunity...