Tribal gaming has changed the life fortunes of many but not all American Indians and realigned legal, cultural, and economic relations between indigenous and nonindigenous peoples. Much is new in this story, but much is not. At first glance, the wealthy "gaming tribe" fits Michael Fischer's concept of an "emergent form of life," insofar as it involves a sociality of action that cannot be understood within existing analytical concepts and political orderings, it presents vexing comparative and historical questions, and it poses ethical dilemmas for indigenous and settler publics (Fischer 2003:37). Rather than taking for granted that new forms of indigeneity are emergent in the gaming era, however, I ask a related set of questions that can reveal patterns in how indigenous economy, political status, and cultural difference are organized by settler societies: Why does indigenous wealth so often appear to be emergent in the United States relative to indigenous poverty? With what effects and antecedents? And what might this tell us about structures of expectation-especially economic ones-that face indigenous peoples in settler states?Tribal gaming calls attention to the economic organization of indigeneity and, more generally, to the cultural politics of settler states. In this essay, I examine a double bind that faces indigenous peoples in the Anglophone settler states and that goes some way toward explaining why American Indian wealth often seems to be emergent. This is the double bind of need-based sovereignty. In the most general terms, this double bind works as follows: American Indian tribal nations (like other polities) require economic resources to exercise sovereignty, and their

This article reviews recent research in sociocultural anthropology that has been conducted in and about the United States. I show that anthropologists of the United States have been concerned to locate the anthropological field in three ways: spatial investigations of region, community, and territory; epistemological and methodological projects of cultural critique and defamiliarization; and reconsideration of the place of Native North America in the anthropology of the United States. Emergent inquiry into settler colonialism and the politics of indigeneity has the potential to strengthen the anthropology of the United States by accounting for the ways that being a settler society structures all American lives.

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In this article, I examine Florida Seminoles' governmental distributions of tribal-gaming revenues that take the form of per capita dividends. Dividends reveal the political and cultural stakes of money's fungibility-its ability to substitute for itself. From tribal policy debates over children's dividends to the legitimization of political leadership through monetary redistribution, Seminoles selectively exploit the fungibility of money to break or make ties with one another and with non-Seminoles. They do so in ways that reinforce indigenous political authority and autonomy, and they thereby challenge structural expectations in U.S. public culture and policy that would oppose indigenous distinctiveness to the embrace of money. [

With ongoing consequences for American Indians, the New World Indian has been a pervasive figure of constitutive exclusion in modern theories of money, property, and government. This paradoxical exclusion of indigenous peoples from the money/property/government complex is intrinsic to, and constitutive of, modern theories of money. What is more, it haunts the cultural politics of indigenous peoples’ economic actions. In Part I, I establish that, and how, indigeneity has been constitutively present at the foundation of modern theories of money, as Europeans and settlers defined indigenous peoples in part by the absence of money and property (of which money is a special form). In turn, and more to the point here, they defined money and property in part as that which modern non-indigenous people have and use. These are not solely economic matters: the conceptual exclusions from money/property were coproduced with juridical ones insofar as liberal political theory grounded the authority of modern government in private property (and, in turn, in money). To show how this formation of money and indigeneity has mattered both for disciplinary anthropology and for American public culture at several historical moments, Part II traces how the dilemmas expressed by these texts haunt subsequent debates about the function of wampum, the logic of potlatch, and the impact of tribal gaming. Such debates inform scholarship beyond the boundaries of anthropology and, as each case shows in brief, they create harms and benefits for peoples in ways that perpetuate the (il)logics and everyday practices of settler colonialism.