More on casinos and culture
PBS film to explore Cherokee vitality in the 21st century“There’s been criticism of Indians and casinos. I think when Congress passed the law to allow this they just never in their wildest dreams envisioned what has happened with Indian gaming,” Joyce Dugan, the only woman elected principal chief and now a casino executive, says in the film. “Whether anyone likes gambling, whether they despise it, whether they agree with it or not, because of it we’re finally seeing a sense of independence that we have not seen in over two hundred years.”
Casino profits have swelled the tribal budget to $150 million dollars and made the community more self-sustaining. But it’s also raised some very contentious issues. To answer this, Howe delves into the complicated arena of tribal politics, where issues of absentee voting, blood quantum, and what it really means to be a Cherokee are being hashed out.
3 comments:
Writerfella here --
Having just watched the Eastern Band of the Cherokee's documentary special on PBS, I admit to being puzzled that, in a 90 minute space, the casino issue was discussed for less than 90 seconds. As well, though the nominal viewpoint narrator was a Cherokee from Oklahoma, the film seemed to pretend that only the Cherokees of North Carolina were worth any coverage. Then I saw the name 'Hanay Geiogamah' in the credits and I knew why. The man is HENRY Geiogamah, who is Kiowa but may not know what 'Hanay' really means in Kiowa. Aside from writing a small number of plays in the 1960s and co-founding a Native American theater company, this man has insinuated his way into movie and television production as a 'technical adviser' no matter what tribe or historical era is involved. He is a paid consultant even on book projects and holds a Native Studies chait at either UCLA or USC, despite having a poorly distinguished and unprolific publishing history of his own. Once he even shot down a writerfella project because the company believed his spiel that "Navajos do not allow themselves to be photographed because they believe the camera captures part of their souls," even though that belief more properly resides in Central Africa and not the US of A. After that, HENRY Geiogamah avoids crossing paths with writerfella and rightly so. Native American Public Telecommunications commissioned the documentary and thus it lacked scope, depth, and coherence.
All Best
Russ Bates
'writerfella'
Hmm. Sounds like the reporter should've watched the special rather than taken someone's word for it. The article implied that the show would cover gaming's impact in some depth.
I don't know much about Geiogamah, other than a vague sense of his credits. But he's called himself Hanay ever since I first heard of him. If his birth name is Henry, he hasn't used it for at least a decade or two.
Mr. Bates, what does "Hanay" mean in Kiowa? Altayhdi
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