Is gambling the answer to reservation poverty—the “new buffalo,” as some Native Americans have called it? In some places, such as the Pequots' Foxwoods in Connecticut, small groups of American Indians have been enriched. In other places, such as the New York Oneida Nation in Upstate New York, gambling has provided a rather vaguely constituted polity the means with which to hire police who force dissident antigambling traditionalists from their homes. Among the Mohawks at Akwesasne, people have died over the issue.

Non-natives have always been prone to stereotyping American Indians. During the past quarter century, as many reservation Indians have parlayed their limited legal sovereignty into casinos and associated businesses, a new stereotype has emerged: the “casino Indian,” rich and slick, hobnobbing with the rich and powerful and sometimes corrupt, from Las Vegas mob dons to the K Street Project's Jack Abramoff. Never mind that the newly rich have been a tiny minority of all Native Americans, often members of small tribes cobbled together to take advantage of huge casino clienteles near large urban areas.

The main premise of Indian Gaming and Tribal Sovereignty, coauthored by Steven Andrew Light and Kathryn R. L. Rand, is that gambling involves compromise for American Indians. The book is mainly a legal analysis, and so the compromise is phrased in terms of federal regulation that has been required to permit gaming. Federal recognition (and some degree of control) is required in most cases in order to establish gaming operations. In some cases (an excellent summary of California's situation is provided on pp. 66–69), state interests often come into play. While Native nations' semisovereign status limits taxation, many of the more affluent casino operations have supplied payments to states, the most notable examples being the hugely successful casinos operated by the Pequots in Connecticut.

By 2003, according to the authors, more than 350 gaming venues were being operated under Native American auspices in 30 states. Indian gaming had expanded to $17 billion a year in revenues in the United States by 2003, as gambling has permeated the entire country, emerging from enclaves in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. By 2004, citizens of the United States were placing $70 billion in bets.

Chapter 4 (“Is Anyone Winning?”) contains an acute analysis of gaming's socioeconomic impacts. Discussion of gaming's impact on reservation quality of life (pp. 98–104) is especially penetrating, along with accounts of how gambling has supplied jobs and start-up capital for other enterprises. On some reservations, the authors say, gaming has helped reduce unemployment from 70% to nearly zero (pp. 87–88). Welfare expenses also have dropped sharply in such areas.

The book provides a salient description of controversies surrounding the Pequot casinos in Connecticut, Foxwoods, and the Mohegan Sun (pp. 108–10), which tap the New York City–Boston market and have become among the largest gaming venues in the world. Both are operated by small Native polities that have been widely criticized by some non-Indians (the best-known is author Jeff Benedict) as faux “Indian tribes” constituted mainly to profit from casinos. Casinos have brought problems, too, including widespread gambling addiction (pp. 93–96), domestic troubles, and crime (pp. 96–98).

As a legal analysis, this book does well. In a broader sense, however, it falls short. It has an institutional, antiseptic air about it—the feeling of motel meeting rooms and Powerpoint presentations—and so seems to lack a certain sense of reservation street smarts.

The authors miss a great deal of controversy surrounding gambling operations. The New York Oneidas' Turning Stone Casino, for example, is touted here as one of the most successful at converting casino profits into benefits for enrolled members. That is true—to a sharply defined political point. However, this account completely misses a great deal of internal dissent. A sizable number of New York Oneidas get no benefits at all because the government has disenrolled them for exercising their critical faculties.

This book also misses conflict over gambling among the Mohawks. Mohawks are mentioned once, and in error, on page 101, as subject to an agreement that was reached “to settle the tribe's land claims and to allow the Mohawks to open a casino in the Catskills.” That “agreement” fell apart.

Additionally (and this is hardly the sole province of this book), too-frequent use of the words tribe and tribal as generic terms for Native Americans can be irritating. Other cultures have been (or are) constituted as tribes around the world. A “tribe” is generally a small unit of sociopolitical, legal, and economic organization. The term is often used without thinking (in this book, with unusual frequency) for peoples better described as “nations” or “confederacies,” especially in an historical dimension. “Tribe” was used in the nineteenth century to justify replacement of Native peoples by “civilization” under the rubric of Anglo-American real estate law (“highest and best use”). Legal analysis should be more precise with language.

Yes, certain Native peoples have improved their material lives through casinos, but some traditionalists are concerned that the cooperative, egalitarian nature of many American Indian societies is being subverted by the hypercapitalistic, get-rich-quick assumptions that underlie gambling culture. Thus, while Native sovereignty provides a legal basis for casinos (and while such businesses have been used to jump-start other ventures), concern exists that the casino culture may undermine the attributes that make Native American ways of life unique.