Book Review

Casino and Museum: Representing MashantucketPequot Identity. John J. Bodinger de Uriarte. Tuc-son: The University of Arizona Press, 2007. 241 pp.

CAROLYN R. ANDERSON

In 1972 two elderly residents lived on the 204 re-

maining acres of the Pequot reservation, which the

state of Connecticut intended to turn into a state

park. When one of these women died, her grandson

moved to the reservation with the explicit goal of

repopulating it. By 1974 the tribal government had

been reorganized and research to locate potential

tribal members was under way. In 1976 the tribe

filed a federal lawsuit for recovery of lands, which

resulted in the 1983 Mashantucket Pequot Indian

Claims Settlement Act, resolving the lawsuit and

awarding the tribe $900,000 to buy back land. The

Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation was also cre-

ated as a federally recognized tribe. In 1986 the tribe

opened a bingo hall, which by 1992 had developed

into Foxwoods Resort Casino, the largest and most

profitable American Indian gaming enterprise in

the United States and Canada. By 2005 the tribe

owned 5,000 acres and had almost 800 members.

In 1998 the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and

Research Center (MPMRC) opened, encompassing

308,000 square feet and costing $193 million. Ar-

chival materials and artifacts have been and

continue to be acquired, and an ongoing archaeo-

logical research program was established. Over

85,000 square feet of MPMRC space is devoted to

permanent exhibitions.

Having worked as a professional photographer,

John Bodinger de Uriarte was employed as a con-

tract grants writer for the Mashantucket Pequot

Tribal Nation (MPTN) and then as a contract pho-

tographer, researcher, and writer for Design

Division, Inc. of Amherst, Massachusetts, the firm

that developed and built the MPMRC permanent

exhibits. While he describes his experience as par-

ticipant observation fieldwork, this book is not

really an ethnography. Rather, it is what he de-

scribes as a ‘‘careful hermeneutics of the casino and

museum as productive spaces that offer con-

structed public representations of Mashantucket

Pequotness and Indians for [public] consumption

. . .’’ (p. 6). Elsewhere he says he ‘‘aims to provide a

critical analysis of how the Mashantucket Pequots

represent themselves in the public sphere’’ (p. 24).

In this book Bodinger de Uriarte undertakes a tex-

tual reading of the casino and exhibits, primarily

the spatial, visual, and aural elements, utilizing an

essentially cultural studies approach. Theorists

providing a conceptual framework and vocabulary

for a formal critical interpretation include Roman

Jakobson, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Jean

Baudrillard, Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin,

Michael Taussig, Tzvetan Todorov, Raymond Wil-

liams, et al. Very little of the exhibition information

provided as written text, through Acoustiguides,

accessible on computers, or provided through film

is included in the analysis, although the author

notes that supportive, scholarly authentication is

provided through these media. There is no discus-

sion of human guides in the museum.

Bodinger de Uriarte conceives of the casino and

the museum as industries that produce material and

symbolic capital for the Mashantucket Pequots. In

the latter capacity, they are ‘‘productive spaces be-

tween reference and performance’’ (p.10) that are

central to the tribal project of identity. He frames this

project in terms of the referential legal fact of MPTN

federal recognition versus the public performance of

that identity, particularly within the dominant dis-

courses of Indianness rooted in racial and cultural

difference. The work of representation becomes the

process of producing an authenticating historical

narrative, one that substantiates historical continu-

ity. Bodinger de Uriarte argues that the MPMRC

utilizes oppositional, counter-hegemonic discourse to

refute and authoritatively replace the dominant his-

torical narrative of the disappearance of the Pequots.

The central representation of Foxwoods Resort

Casino, The Rainmaker, is an enormous fountain

with a central figure of a giant translucent Indian

140

& 2009 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1379.2009.01049.x

archer on one knee, bow and arrow at the ready. At

regular intervals an awe-inspiring light and water

show emanates from this fountain, accompanied by

sound effects and a narrative invoking a primordial

Native American existence. ‘‘Casinos,’’ the author

states, ‘‘can also be understood as allegories, as

sites of intensified representation creating compel-

ling narratives of exotic and bounded cultural

space’’ (p. 70). The Rainmaker plays the represen-

tational role of a ‘‘localized legend’’ (p. 75), drawing

from popular narratives and stereotypes of Indian-

ness, but also evoking a primordial connection to

place as a mythic theme.

What Bodinger de Uriarte calls the thematic

construction in the casino draws upon a ‘‘popular

imaginary’’ that continues throughout the huge ca-

sino and resort complex and includes animatronic

Yankee figures and Victorian facades combined

with generic ‘‘Indian’’ imagery and ‘‘the natural [as]

a repeated element in the material design’’ (p. 87).

Nostalgia, ‘‘a desire to fill the gap between signified

and signifier,’’ says the author, creates a tension, a

seductive longing, that ‘‘drives the themed history

that is the casino’’ and also is ‘‘deliberate’’ (p. 89).

While 40,000 people per day frequent the casino

complex, 25,000 per year visit the MPMRC, making

it logical to assume that the representations of

identity in the former have a larger impact than

those in the latter. The MPMRC, however, is more

important in terms of its role as a generator of sym-

bolic capital through the production of narratives

and representations authenticating Mashantucket

Pequot identity. Poetics, ‘‘a production of meaning

differentiated from the referential through form and

style’’ that ‘‘carries communicative performance be-

yond referential signification’’ (p. 121) characterizes

the evocative in contrast to the evidential aspects of

the Mashantucket Pequot identity production pro-

ject. The museum ‘‘generates meaning by using the

narratives and exhibitions to create an experiential

force’’ (p. 122). It is ‘‘a resonant space of allegorical

meaning’’ (p. 122). The master narrative is that of a

continuous Pequot history located at Mashantucket,

authenticating the nation building, community be-

longing, and cultural revitalization of the recent past

and present and opposing the dominant discourse of

Native American history, culture, and race.

The first exhibition, the ‘‘Mashantucket Pequot

Tribal Nation,’’ introduces the contemporary com-

munity, including objects representative of modern

life that have been ‘‘museumized’’ into artifacts and

a miniaturized model of the reservation. Here also is

the only mention of gaming at Mashantucket. Visi-

tors descend into ‘‘The World of Ice’’ via an escalator.

This exhibition represents an ancient, post-glacial

world of Native American life at Mashantucket, in-

cluding a life-size diorama of caribou hunters, ‘‘Life

in a Cold Climate.’’ Native artworks depicting cre-

ation stories extend history deeper into the past. A

22,000 square-foot Pequot Village brings the narra-

tive into the early contact period. Acoustiguides

assist visitors in becoming ‘‘assertive knowledge

consumer[s]’’ (p. 136). Bodinger de Uriarte asserts

that ‘‘exhibitions are fundamentally theatrical, for

they are how museums perform the knowledge they

create’’ (p. 136). He speaks of ‘‘the dialogic nature of

consciousness,’’ ‘‘resonance,’’ and ‘‘wonder’’ in refer-

ence to the evocative experience of this performance

of knowledge (pp. 138–139), as well as ‘‘the nostalgic

myth of contact and presence’’ and ‘‘the liminal

space between contact and imagination’’ (p. 141).

‘‘Life on the Reservation’’ presents the lives of

various Pequot individuals, using Disney animated

figures, representing life on the reservation from

the mid-1600s through the 20th century. The his-

torical characters are contextualized within

historical moments well known to non-Native visi-

tors, although emphasizing particularized Pequot

experience and meticulous research. A farmstead,

representing the adoption of Euro-American agri-

cultural life, extends from the interior of the

museum to the outside. The last section, ‘‘Bringing

the People Home,’’ focuses on the 1970s when the

repopulation, reorganization, and revitalization of

the reservation and community took place. A fur-

nished trailer home like those used by Pequots who

returned is featured, augmented by excerpts from

recordings made during an extensive oral history

project in the 1990s. Tribal members reflect on the

grassroots effort to rebuild their community and

nation, working toward ‘‘self sufficiency and self-de-

termination’’ (p. 158). Bodinger de Uriarte contends

that this exhibition succeeds in an ‘‘unsettling of ex-

isting stereotypes about Indians in history and in

the present,’’ presenting the Mashantucket Pequots

as ‘‘agents, rather than subjects of history’’ (p. 160).

Bodinger de Uriarte devotes an entire chapter to

‘‘A Tribal Portrait,’’ a gallery devoted to portraits of

Mashantucket Pequot individuals and families by

Native American photographer David Neel. Oral

BOOK REVIEW 141

history excerpts provide the connecting narrative.

The author is primarily concerned with ‘‘reading’’

the portraiture and comparing it with historical

American Indian photographs like those of Edward

Curtis as images that created dominant represen-

tations and ‘‘the vanishing Indian’’ narrative. He

also discusses at length the evidential/referential

and evocative/performative aspects of photographs.

The voices, although not tied directly to the por-

traits, provide evocative ‘‘stories of origin, family,

tribal identity, and strategies for cultural and

pragmatic survival’’ (p. 164). They speak of coming

home, feeling connected to the land, and fighting

for the rights of the people. The portraits, portray-

ing the diversity of the MPTN, ‘‘transgress a variety

of anticipated signs and genres to unsettle popular

understandings of Indianness, formal portraiture,

and identifications of race and ethnicity,’’ according

to the author, and ‘‘the overall impression is one of a

diverse but familiar community’’ (p. 189).

Throughout the book Bodinger de Uriarte speaks

of the appropriation of the dominant institution

of the museum as a generator of symbolic capital,

including research-based authoritative representa-

tions, state-of-the-art representative technologies,

and the use of both ‘‘stabilizing and destabilizing

discourses,’’ to create ‘‘a tension between hegemonic

and counter-hegemonic representation [that] plays

throughout the Mashantucket Pequot project of

identity’’ (p. 213). ‘‘The Mashantucket Pequots

spend a lot of time and money,’’ he concludes, ‘‘cre-

ating projected representations designed to confirm

themselves as Native Americans and Mash-

antucket Pequots, recognizing that this public

terrain is a key battlefield for articulating tribal and

Indian identities’’ (p. 215).

What Bodinger de Uriarte’s book represents is

how he, steeped in the academic literature of cul-

tural production and representation, as well as the

oppositional narratives, representations, and poli-

tics of Native American identity by Native peoples

themselves, might ‘‘read’’ and interpret the Fox-

woods imagery and MPMRC exhibitions after a

long period of immersion and involvement in their

production. Nevertheless, he feels free to speak

about ‘‘the visitor experience’’ throughout the book.

If there is one thing that visitor research in muse-

ums confirms, it is that what visitors experience

and how they interpret what they experience can-

not be understood without asking visitors. Bodinger

de Uriarte also invokes a monolithic ‘‘dominant dis-

course’’ about Indians and Indianness that non-

Natives are presumed to share. Moreover, he as-

sumes that the questioning of the authenticity of

Mashantucket Pequot identity is predicated on race

and the MPTN’s participation in modern projects.

This greatly oversimplifies the complex politics of

Native American identity, sovereignty, and rights.

The author occasionally alludes to the internal

politics of the MPTN, the intentional omission of

race from the exhibitions, the museum adminis-

tration as not ‘‘comfortable with making the

relationship between the casino and museum obvi-

ous’’ (p. 117), specialized exhibit maintenance cut

out of the budget (p. 128), ‘‘conflict between tribal

factions, a tribal council power structure that shif-

ted in frequent elections, and a tribal council whose

power waned’’ (p. 152), resulting in cost reductions,

etc. However, the decision-making process regard-

ing the exhibitions is left opaque, as is the design

process. Why is this story left untold? Why and how

did the MPTN decide to invest in a museum on this

scale? Are the authenticating representations of

MPTN identity produced by the museum for the

community as much as for the wider public?

Bodinger de Uriarte does not discuss the simi-

larities and differences between the MPMRC and

other tribal museums, nor does he place it within

the larger discussion of the role of museums as in-

stitutions. Nevertheless, he makes many asser-

tions about museums as ‘‘poetic generators’’ of

symbolic capital, cultural industries, engines of

knowledge production, theatrical performance

structures, hegemonic institutions, ‘‘intensifying

chamber[s] that necessarily transforms [their]

subjects’’ (p. 127), ‘‘powerful contextualizing regis-

ter[s]’’ (p. 180), etc. In the end, after ruminating

over the highly intellectualized and abstracted

representation (in itself an authenticating narra-

tive?) of the MPTN identity project at Foxwoods

and MPMRC, I turned to the tribal and museum

web sites, the Design Division, Inc. web site, and

other reviews of the MPMRC exhibitions for repre-

sentations more intelligible to the average visitor.

Carolyn R. Anderson is an Associate Professor of

Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Sociol-

ogy and Anthropology at St. Olaf College. An

ethnohistorian and ethnographer, she has undertaken

142 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 32 NUMBER 2

field research in Sweden and conducted ethnographic

and archival research related to the Dakota in Minne-

sota. A former staff member of the Minnesota

Historical Society, she worked extensively in historic

preservation and museums prior to joining the St. Olaf

faculty. Her book, Dakota Persistence: Sustaining

Identity at Prairie Island, will soon be published by the

University of Nebraska Press.

BOOK REVIEW 143