Pequots on Display: Foxwoods Resort and Casino and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center
By this point, everyone has heard the story of the Mashantucket Pequots. A little-known tribe on 200 acres of woodland near Ledyard, CT, the Mashantucket Pequots gained federal recognition and the right to run a gambling enterprise on their reservation in the early 1980s. What began as a high stakes bingo hall has become, in the year 2000, the largest casino in the Western Hemisphere. Comprising three hotels, numerous restaurants, and almost 6,000 slot machines, it employs 11,500 people and, in 1998, sales through the casino topped $1,000,000,000. The Pequots have used a fraction of their new wealth to build the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, a museum and research facility dedicated to northeast woodlands Indian culture, specifically that of the Pequots themselves. As spaces used to define, display, and deploy notions of Pequot heritage and identity, Foxwoods Resort and Casino and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center have become the primary routes through which the Pequots have gained control over their own image in both history and the present day.
The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, which opened to the public in 1998, is an enormous structure set away from the casino and surrounded by woods. Its many galleries lead the visitor through the ice age (replete with fiberglass glaciers, rushing water, and a wooly mammoth) to the present day, ending in a display of large-scale photographic portraits of many of the tribe’s current members. The gallery I would like to focus on is the 16th - 17th century Pequot village, a 22,000 square foot life-size walk-through diorama that recreates daily life as it was lived at the time of contact with the Dutch and British. Before entering the display, visitors are given an acoustiguide on which they listen to recorded presentations explaining the various scenes they see as they walk through the space. Special machines have been installed that recreate the smells of the forest and campfire, and 110 tiny speakers constantly remix the sounds of dogs, geese, and crickets. The display is obviously modeled after the ethnographic life groups and the hugely popular wildlife dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History, although with its recreated smells, sounds, and walkthrough capabilities, it does them one better. As with its precursors, however, the results are highly problematic.
Paradoxically, the great strength of the diorama/life group is also its Achilles’ heel. Its ability to render fragments of data, whether they be objects or recorded facts, into a comprehensible, illustrative whole has made it a highly effective conveyer of meaning and vehicle for education within the museum setting. In its theatrical presentation of interacting items and things in a lush and realistic setting, the diorama encourages the viewer to consume the material in a sensually seductive and mentally stimulating way. The diorama serves as documentary, investing its various components with a sense of "life," a moment of which is captured and conveyed as truth to the public. (Seeing, as they say, is believing.) It is this very quality of effortless reality, however, that makes the diorama so troubling. Its final form, so sleek and "natural," tends to obscure the marks of its manufacture and suggests a kind of authorless truth. The viewer cannot see the seams and gaps of knowledge that are part of all historical narratives, and as a result simply assumes there are none.
It becomes quite clear as one moves through the galleries at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center that little authentic Pequot material has survived to the present day. Despite an ambitious archaeological campaign and exhaustive archival research, Pequot artifacts and ethnographic information have provided only a partial picture of Pequot life at the time of contact. Gaps in the material and ethnographic record have therefore been filled with products and traditions of other, related cultures from neighboring locales, notably the Great Lakes region. All cultural attributions are clearly registered on the labels; nothing is obscured. However, at the moment of synthesis in the immersion display, there are no labels, and the highly fragmented past is unified and recreated into a glossy, complete vision.
The possibility to present a reassembled history as visual truth provides a unique opportunity to infuse historical circumstances with meanings that are in fact quite contemporary. As Donna Haraway has indicated, historical recreations are hardly the results of dispassionate processes. The appealing dazzle of the highly consumable product tends to obfuscate the ideologies that guide its manufacture. If, for instance, groups of stuffed animals in naturalistic environments at the American Museum of Natural History illustrate behavior in the wild, they may also subtly suggest the fundamental virtues of the nuclear family. Should we be surprised, then, that the Pequots portray their ancestors as inhabitants of a virtual arcadia, suffused with the golden glow of health, wealth, and familial harmony? As newlyweds set about building their wigwam, (fig. 1) three generations of women work together on domestic tasks. (fig. 2) Men and boys return from the hunt laden with fish, wild turkeys, and squirrels (fig. 3) as their elders enjoy a game of hubbub back at the village (the tribe’s first foray into organized gambling?) (fig. 4) One wonders, rhetorically, why waste smells have not been included among the repertoire of scents that are so expertly recreated. And why the only reference to violence comes at the end of the display, as the Pequot mannequins (cast from molds of non-Pequot bodies) busily construct a timber stockade in response to looming European persecution. The Pequots, conquerors of the southern New England shoreline whose very name means "destroyers," were as much the source of aggression as its target.
The Mashantucket Pequots have presented a vision of their history that is meant to reinforce the image of themselves they have deployed in the present. Faced with the disapproval of neighboring non-Indian communities who question their ethnic legitimacy and resent them for the increased traffic, rising crime rates, and devaluation of their property, the Pequots have attempted to portray themselves as a cohesive community firmly rooted in both New England and Indian traditions. These messages are certainly broadcast at the museum, through displays of Civil War heroism and the cultural hybridity of the 19th century Christian Brothertown movement, but they are more interestingly deployed through the décor of Foxwoods Resort and Casino.
Messages of identity are developed through the capture and manipulation of themes and images and then deployed in the casino to be gently imposed upon the visiting public. I would argue that Foxwoods harnesses the power and economic potential of "symbolic capital," to use Bourdieu’s term: publicly valued symbols of such things as honor, truth, justice, and morality are used by those who can claim them to generate a desired effect. While the woodlands imagery, waterfalls, terrariums, and a trout-filled aquarium (fig. 5) found throughout the casino reflect back at us our own stereotyped notions of Indians as the original conservationists, this practice is perhaps best illustrated by the other main category of imagery found at Foxwoods: Yankee New England Americana. This is embodied in the series of federalist and Victorian-style facades that form an arcade along the casino’s main pedestrian artery. (fig. 6) The area is strongly reminiscent of Disney’s Main Street USA: quaint, picture-perfect buildings hearken back to a pre-urban Anglo America and all its hallowed institutions, ice cream parlors, fire stations, and town halls among them. Like its Disney counterpart, this Main Street is largely commercial. The buildings house gift shops full of Foxwoods merchandise and Indian-style souvenirs such as dolls, dream catchers, and woodcarvings. It also serves as a liminal space between the area devoted to gambling and the one oriented toward other diversions such as video games, concerts, and virtual reality rides.
My belief is that this infusion of what appears to be patently non-Native imagery represents a strategic use of Bourdieu’s "symbolic capital." By referencing commonly held, resoundingly patriotic cultural values of innocence, simplicity, and belonging in the casino context, the Mashantucket Pequots may hope that these qualities will be incorporated into their own image and that of the casino. The strange hybrid that this recontextualized imagery produces is perhaps best exemplified in the "Mashantucket Town Hall," which to my knowledge is not drawn from any actual model. (fig. 7) The brick and clapboard façade, replete with star and American flag, presents a realistic fiction that inspires romantic notions of New England Yankee heritage. The Mashantucket community, it intones, is traditional, upstanding, and old, holding the same sort of apple pie values as many other quaint little towns in the region. One is tempted to reword the slogan used on advertisements for the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, "Our Legacy is Yours," to "Your Legacy is Ours."
The Pequot Indians employ a shared symbolic vocabulary to promote their own ties to the land, cast themselves as conservationists, and recall the imagined virtues of a pre-urban Anglo America, whereby they generate a kind of moral momentum that gains them acceptance within Euro-American culture and helps to legitimate the gambling enterprise. What it fails to do is convey the social and political power imbalances the Pequots have experienced until quite recently; in fact it works toward denying them. By presenting this happy Yankee-Indian hybridity in the casino, the Pequots have undermined the historical messages they so strongly displayed in the museum, burying the complexities of the encounter under a heap of Disneyesque scenery. Of course, no sensible business would alienate its customers by accusing their ancestors of cultural violence and destruction. Given that far more non-Indians will visit the casino than the museum, however, the disjunction between the two institutions’ messages is nonetheless surprising. The Mashantucket Pequots have evidently decided that a neutral rhetoric of identity is better for business and for their ultimate acceptance by the non-Indian community than an accusatory one that resurrects unpleasant memories.