Geography's Spin at the Wheel of American Gambling

Abstract

Gambling is hot! In the last twenty years, Nevada's monopoly on casino gaming has been broken by the spread of legalized gambling across the United States. The implications for aesthetics, health and pathology, commerce, architecture, economic development, and tourism are difficult to miss. Only in Utah and Hawaii do all forms of gambling remain illegal. Geographers, however, have only lately warmed to the theme of gambling. It has to date been approached mostly from the perspective of economic and recreational geography, as in two recent volumes, Casino Gambling in America: Origins, Trends, and Impacts, edited by Klaus J. Meyer-Arendt and Rudi Hartmann (1998), and Tourism and Gaming on American Indian Lands, edited by Alan A. Lew and George A. Van Otten (1998). Each volume emphasizes spatial analysis, particularly location, economic impacts of gaming, tourism development, and gaming's effects on local communities. Although these books are an earnest start, geographers who study gambling are still far from fully capitalizing on the potential of their field. The regional diffusion of gambling reflects roots as an activity of the frontier, creating new political and cultural boundaries and erasing existing ones (Figures 1 and 2). Rich economic prospects and an exponential increase of tourism on tribal lands produce distinctive cultural encounters. In other sites, the introduction of casinos broaches novel public-policy issues. That geographers' discussions of gambling are largely restricted to economic issues and a roster of impacts on host communities--and are, as a result, foreshortened within a straightjacket concept of boundaries and frontiers--is reflected in Casino Gambling in America and Tourism and Gaming in American Indian Lands. Illustrative of the blinders is the absence of the historian John Findlay's influential 1986 book, People of Chance: Gambling in American Society from Jamestown to Las Vegas, the most comprehensive discussion of gambling and frontiers, in otherwise rather extensive bibliographies. The generally narrow scope implies that politica l, cultural, and urban geographers have yet to discover gambling. INDIAN GAMING The amazing speed of casino development across much of Indian Country in the United States is evidence of gambling's elaboration of its boundaries. Indian gaming, and its sizable profits, have sparked a fresh round of conflict over the structure of federalism. Contested relationships among federal, tribal, and state governments put enormous pressure on long-standing legal and political divisions. These dynamic boundaries include the changing visibility of the federal government in Indian matters, potent conflicts between tribal and state sovereignty, and emergent, influential regional and national tribal gaming coalitions. Gaming also influences the persistence and adaptation of tribal sovereignty and Indian self-determination. Five chapters, in Casino Gamblingin America by Brad Bays and Roger Dendinger and in Tourism and Gaming on American Indian Lands by Joan Marie King and Elliot Mclntire, James Davis and Lloyd Hudman, and Eve Baron, begin this dialogue, examining the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and court decisions on Indian gaming. Geographers could contribute much more to an analysis of gaming's affects on tribal sovereignty and intergovernmental relations by extending their inquiries beyond descriptive and prescriptive accounts of Indian casino development. The influence of gaming is profound in a variety of cultural settings. That gambling is a longtime fact of American life is something that Findlay made clear, but its spread and legitimation, of late, are of a unique magnitude. Yet these two volumes are flawed by a form of gentle myopia: They see only a relatively small part of the issues and substance of gaming, rather than its full geographical dimensions. LEARNING PROM LAS VEGAS? Several chapters in these two volumes cite location as an element central to the success of a gambling venture. …