Sacred Chance: Gambling and the Contemporary Native American Indian Novel

Abstract

The rise of high stakes reservation gambling has occasioned new interest in the role of gambling in Native American Indian culture. Since the late 1970s the fortunes of many tribal communities have been bound up with the economic, legal and cultural implications of the gambling trade. Contemporaneous with this development, Native American writers have explored the role of traditional gambling practices in the modern world. In three contemporary works of fiction, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Gerald Vizenor's Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (later republished as Bearheart: the Heirship Chronicles) and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, traditional gambling stories and their attendant practices provide a ritual site where the forces of assimilation are contested. In each, a good gambler is pitted against an evil opponent. The evil opponent is associated with both European American culture and the evil gamblers of Native American tradition. In this way, gambling stories provide a framework to assign value and difference. Because these values and differences are imagined within an indigenous paradigm that anthropologizes European American culture, the gambling ritual also provides a means to theorize about the role traditional belief systems might play