High Stakes

In 1979, Florida Seminoles opened the first tribally operated high-stakes bingo hall in North America. At the time, their annual budget stood at less than $2 million. By 2006, net income from gaming had surpassed $600 million. This dramatic shift from poverty to relative economic security has created tangible benefits for tribal citizens, including employment, universal health insurance, and social services. Renewed political self-governance and economic strength have reversed decades of U.S. settler-state control. At the same time, gaming has brought new dilemmas to reservation communities and triggered outside accusations that Seminoles are sacrificing their culture by embracing capitalism. In High Stakes, Jessica R. Cattelino tells the story of Seminoles’ complex efforts to maintain politically and culturally distinct values in a time of new prosperity. Cattelino presents a vivid ethnographic account of the history and consequences of Seminole gaming. Drawing on research conducted with tribal permission, she describes casino operations, chronicles the everyday life and history of the Seminole Tribe, and shares the insights of individual Seminoles. At the same time, she unravels the complex connections among cultural difference, economic power, and political rights. Through analyses of Seminole housing, museum and language programs, legal disputes, and everyday activities, she shows how Seminoles use gaming revenue to enact their sovereignty. They do so in part, she argues, through relations of interdependency with others. High Stakes compels rethinking of the conditions of indigeneity, the power of money, and the meaning of sovereignty.

“High Stakes is a work of great ethnographic and theoretical power, written in prose of great clarity. It is also a model of sensitive and thoughtful writing with respect to American Indians, who have long been rightly suspicious of the ethnographic gaze and ethnographic representation. High Stakes shows what ethnography can, indeed must, be and do in the twenty-first century.”—Sherry B. Ortner, author of Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject, “High Stakes tracks to the core of contemporary North American settler society today—the economy of value that structures expectation and possibility for indigenous peoples and the state. Here Jessica R. Cattelino examines with great ethnographic care and rigor the expectation that Indians be poor even where they have wealth, that wealth portends a diminishment of culture, and that indigeneity then stand before this process in an unrelenting and unchanging way. With a nuanced, careful, and precise ethnographic eye to and with the Seminole Tribe of Florida, this very important book proves so much otherwise.”—Audra Simpson, Columbia University

Jessica R. Cattelino is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.