The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Part 5

Fourteen months after the attacks, Indian and foreign news media continue to camp out at Arthur Road Jail, Mumbai's oldest and by every account its worst prison, where Kasab is being held in solitary confinement during his trial. For all the hatred directed at him by the Indian public-most of whom want to see him executed as quickly as possible both for the sake of justice and to keep from wasting any more of the taxpayers' money-he's also become an object of widespread fascination. The media still hang on his every word, and in his new career as a spokesperson for terrorism he has come as close to living "the good life" as he ever will.

Thus far Ajmal Kasab has accomplished two of the three goals he named in his schoolboy definition of jihad: he killed, and he became famous. He has yet to achieve the third goal-"being killed"-thereby completing, however inadequately, the terms of his contract with Lashkar. His imprisonment and trial have already cost the Indian people much greater effort and expense than the execution of an ordinary murderer, but it might be worth all the trouble. The trial of one man accused of "making war on India" is a far cry from what the designers of those attacks may have hoped for: another round of warfare between India and Pakistan. It has diverted national attention from Pakistan to a single, powerless Pakistani citizen, who has achieved greater fame as the surrogate object of national vengeance than he ever hoped for.

"I do not want punishment from G.o.d," he told the judge. As if he had any choice in the matter. "Whatever I have done in this world I should get punished for it by this world itself."

The guilty man betrays his innocence.

The Vanis.h.i.+ng Point.

Verlyn Klinkenborg.

FROM The New York Times Magazine.

AUSTRALIANS CALL THE NORTHERNMOST CHUNK of their continent the "Top End," a breezy moniker, as though Australia were a boiled egg sitting upright in an eggcup waiting to be cracked open with a silver spoon. Just how much Top End there is is open to debate, the kind that gets worried out with maps drawn in the dust. While I was there last September, I saw dust maps that gave the Top End most of Australia north of the Tropic of Capricorn-about a third of the continent. Others included only Cape York and the rather windswept-looking peninsula that includes the roistering town of Darwin, the capital city of the Northern Territory.

The Top End I visited was vastly narrower-the river flats and hill country just inland from Van Diemen Gulf. But it was still an imponderable slice of terrain, long ridges of sandstone giving way to the floodplains that edge Kakadu National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site and the largest park in Australia-bigger than Connecticut and Delaware combined. To Australians, Kakadu and the country around it feels like an ancestral reservoir, a cultural repository with Aboriginal roots and an oasis of native biodiversity. Here, the sandstone endures, the monsoon floods come and go, and then the fires follow-erratic and regenerative in the early part of the dry season, unforgiving in the later part. But this oasis is going dry almost unnoticed.

This is a landscape that seems to ask, "Why have you come here?" There's no hostility in the question, only the indifference native to a continent of punitive, natural harshness. Every traveler will have a different answer. Mine was mud, and also, more broadly, the difference between nature as a norm and nature as merely what is, whether it should be or not. Here, the grandeur of nature is well disguised by the impenetrable thicket of life itself.

For weeks after visiting Australia, I found myself thinking about mud: the living mud on the banks of Sampan Creek, which insinuates itself into Van Diemen Gulf, not far from Bamurru Plains, a safari-style eco-lodge that opened here a few years ago. When the wicked tide falls on the creek's lower reaches, it leaves behind long, sloping shelves of ooze. In December, the monsoon comes, and when it does, Sampan Creek and all its fellow creeks and rivers break their bounds and spread their mud-an originating mud-out over the coastal plains. It daubs the fur of Agile wallabies grazing on the floodplains. The water buffalo seem compounded of it. The magpie geese glory in it by the tens of thousands. I saw a similar mud in the billabongs at Kakadu and beneath the freshwater mangroves at Wongalara, a former cattle station southeast of Kakadu that has been converted into a nature sanctuary by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy.

On Sampan Creek, canoe-length salt.w.a.ter crocodiles come creasing down the banks, slicking their tiled bellies across the mud. They slip into the silted current, eyes like dark and watchful bubbles. You may be on dry ground, termite plinths all around you, the astringent scent of crushed tea tree leaves in the air, but a part of your mind will still be thinking of those estuarine eyes not quite looking at you, yet not quite minding their own business either.

One afternoon, I saw four young Australian men fis.h.i.+ng in a Kakadu billabong. They were standing in a small pram with plenty of beer. Meanwhile, around the corner, a line of crocodiles waited their turn at the carca.s.s of a water buffalo, which lay half in the water, its central cavity opened, its wet, white ribs showing. The crocodile at work seemed almost drugged by the turbid scent of decomposition. At long intervals, it drove itself up onto the ribcage, rolling sideways, then using its weight to tear free a ma.s.s of rotting flesh. It showed a white stump where its left foot had been, lost in some recent crocodilian controversy-the very ant.i.thesis of Captain Hook.

Throughout the Top End, I sensed an incoherence, an unresolved moral burden in the landscape. Take Kakadu National Park. It is a very recent creation, first proposed in the mid-1960s but not confirmed until more than a decade later. It is mostly escarpment country, gouged wilderness, a landscape of rock and time. And yet in some sense Australia has not yet decided what Kakadu should be-a reminder of just how new the conservation ethic is here and how hard it is to create coherent preservation schemes in a place where time collides the way it does down under. In some ways, Kakadu is an experiment in trying to resolve historical tensions rather than a place of natural conservation.

For one thing, Kakadu is one of the few truly national parks in the country-administered by federal, not state, authority, for the simple reason that it sits on Aboriginal land. One of the great sticking points in the park's recent history is whether Australians should pay an entrance fee. At present, the answer is best summed up by the empty site of the former east entrance station, expensively built and expensively bulldozed when fees were rescinded in 2004. The fees have just been reinstated.

Then, too, there is the critical shared management of Kakadu with its traditional owners, many of whom, mostly Aboriginal Bininj/Mungguy, still live within the park. They're conservators of the land and their traditions within it, visible in its rock art and its sacred sites, but the Aborigines hunt and fish throughout the park practically at will. They also harbor nonnative animals like buffalo and, notoriously, a herd of shorthorn cattle visible in the gra.s.slands around Yellow Water, for reasons that are both spiritual and carnivorous.

The park's Aboriginal heritage is also overlaid with the more recent history of white holdings within its boundaries. The strangest and most significant is the Ranger uranium mine, which is still being worked within the park's borders. And then there is Jabiru-a town established to service the Ranger mine. The streets are quiet, utterly domestic in feel. Apart from the vegetation, and the flying foxes hanging dormant in a tree at midday above the elementary school, Jabiru could be a suburb of Dallas.

Like much of Australia, the Top End demonstrates that nature favors invasive species over native ones, at least in the short term. They proliferate. They burgeon. But what matters isn't only what invasive species do to the balance of life in the wild. What matters too is what they do to our minds, since that's where the difference between native and invasive is finally a.s.sessed.

In their proper element, for instance, cane toads are no more loathsome than any other toad, though they are poisonous. On the floodplains east of Darwin, they will be cl.u.s.tering near the oil lamps by night, bobbing for insects and getting underfoot. Or they'll be lying tire-flattened on the Arnhem Highway (the east-west road between Darwin and Kakadu) or splayed out, on their backs in a dusty paddock somewhere, their digestible meaty bits eaten away by the few birds that have already somehow learned how to eat them without fatality. For cane toads are relatively new to Australia, which is not their proper element.

Cane toads explain the wistfulness you hear among some Australians when they talk about their roadkill. "You used to see a lot of pythons dead on the highway," said Sab Lord, a legendary bush guide, as we drove one day across the Top End toward Darwin. The toads have spread outward across the country from Queensland cane fields, where they were introduced to help control beetles, and they have decimated the reptiles and birds that have eaten them. As a result, the roadkill census-which is how most people see most wildlife-reveals fewer and fewer native reptiles and more and more cane toads, which hark back to the Americas. The first cane toad arrived in Darwin only recently, and believe me, it was not welcomed.

I didn't fly halfway round the world from New York to see cane toads. But then that's the point of flying halfway round the world-to see what you didn't expect to see.

I didn't expect to see swamp buffalo in the Top End, either, and yet there they were, some domesticated and bucolic, some feral and simply rancid with anger, but all descended from the few Indonesian buffalo brought by the British to the Cobourg Peninsula in the 1820s. In the 1980s and 1990s, the government tried to shoot out the buffalo, to control disease. But the buffalo are making their way back, crossing out of the Aboriginal reserves, where they were never shot out, into Kakadu and the floodplains north of it. There, on places like Swim Creek Station, where Bamurru Plains is sited, the buffalo are a cash crop, gathered by airboats and helicopters in February during the monsoon and s.h.i.+pped back to Southeast Asia for human consumption.

One night, I walked back to my tent-cabin from the lodge at Bamurru Plains through the corkscrew panda.n.u.s palms. The full moon was high, cane toads were cl.u.s.tering in the dim glow, and the wallabies were moving through camp nearly silently. The water buffalo out on the floodplain had receded from view-drifting at sunset for the night into the woods, just up the trail from me. From outside, the inward-sloping walls of the tent-cabin looked opaque. But when I stepped inside and doused the lights, the sheer canvas seemed to vanish, and I was left with only the faintest scrim between me and the outer world, which lay in silhouette under the moon.

Out there was a realm of exceeding flatness, where salt water and fresh water are fighti ng over the land. Each has its season. Fresh water has the monsoon, when rain drowns the country. Across the Top End, Aussies lead visitors to high spots, extend their arms, and say, like so many Noahs, "All this will be under water during the wet"-the local name for the monsoon. Salt water owns the rest of the year, and it's always seeking to work its way inland, always trying to claim another portion of solid earth. As the planet warms and the oceans rise, this coastal fringe will be one of the drowned lands.

But for now there's still a temporary truce between salt water and fresh. One sign of it is the chenier just beyond the lodge at Bamurru Plains. A chenier-the name is Louisiana French-is a historic, hard-packed ridge of sand and sh.e.l.l rubble laid down by the sea. At Bamurru, it looks like a slightly raised roadbed, a foot-high levee. During the wet, water fills the floodplains and advances right up to the chenier, where the guides park their airboats. You'd be tempted to say that the coastline, some three miles to the north, had wandered inland. But the floodwater is fresh-runoff from the rugged sandstone escarpment farther inland, which sheds water like oilskin. And in this harsh but delicate landscape, where the overriding ecological concern is the balance between salt water and fresh water, the buffalo trails act as unwanted capillaries, breaking through the all but indiscernible high ground and allowing salt water to infiltrate the swamps.

I'd spent the morning on an airboat with a Scottish guide named Kat, flat-bottoming our way into the paperbark swamps. It wasn't merely the mud that seemed primeval. It was also the abundance of life-the jabirus stalking the open shallows and the endless chatter of magpie geese. Ducks rose in whistling clouds, and from the tops of the paperbarks, sea eagles watched us, drifting among the shadows. So did the crocodiles disguised as floating swamp sc.u.m.

This was nearly the end of the dry season, and the shrinking floodwaters had concentrated the flocks and extended the gra.s.sland, where buffalo and horses grazed in the distance. And because large mammals are endemic in the American imagination of nature-in my imagination, that is-it was hard to perceive them as historically "unnatural." There they were, after all, their presence as undeniable as that of the wallabies and striated herons.

But the horses are wild, the feral relics of white men who came to this district for the buffalo shooting in the late nineteenth century. The horses-"brumbies," in Australian-stand hock-deep in water and develop swamp cancer: tumorlike, pustulant growths on their legs and bellies and noses. This is the northern edge of a continent-wide herd of feral horses and donkeys-about 300,000 horses and more than 5 million donkeys nationwide.

At Wongalara we flew low over the brush, stirring a small herd of horses and donkeys. They loped ahead of our helicopter, casting scornful glances in our direction. The true work of restoration can't begin until these animals are gone.

At Wongalara, too, I watched a pitfall trap being set for small, nocturnal marsupials-which is mostly what the Top End has for native mammals. The trap is a long wall of toughened rubber belting. Mammals run into the wall and scurry down its length, only to fall into a plastic bucket set into the ground. In the morning, they're weighed, counted, and released. But scientists are finding almost nothing in the traps anymore. The marsupials are ideal prey for feral cats, millions of them, which are also devastating small reptiles and ground-nesting birds. There are now indications of a full-blown population crash.

Wherever I went, I felt I was looking at a hidden landscape. What I needed most were guides to what could not be seen, to what was invisible. I don't mean the Aboriginal spirits inscribed in the rock of Kakadu itself. I mean the species that had gone or were going missing. As the days pa.s.sed, I found myself becoming more and more a tourist of the vanished and the vanis.h.i.+ng. Salt.w.a.ter crocodiles have rebounded since hunting was banned in 1971, and they now pervade nearly every body of water in the Top End. But for many other species, time in the Top End is now over. What makes it all the harder is this: the species becoming invisible through extinction were largely invisible to begin with.

Perhaps it would be easier just to take the Top End at face value: the uranium mine, the cankered horses, the missing mammals, the plague of toads. Perhaps it would be easier just to give in to the "naturalness"-to stand, as I did, one day, on a sandstone ridge with Sab Lord and look out over a beautiful gra.s.sland enclosed by rugged hills. Out on the plain, a herd of horses grazed beside a copse that might almost have been aspen. It looked more than natural. It looked like a pictorial vision of natural completeness, or would have if we'd been in New Mexico. But as we walked down the hill, Sab and I saw a small monitor-a type of native lizard-peering out of the stony shade. "That's the first one of those I've seen this year," Sab said, and there we were, back in the extinction we had never left.

Reservations.

Ariel Levy.

FROM The New Yorker.

DO YOU LIKE SAND, quaintness, twenty-eight-dollar salads, parties under white tents, investment bankers, hip-hop stars, Barbara Walters, locally grown produce, DJ Samantha Ronson, and lovely tablescapes? Then Southampton is the place for you: a land of natural splendor and immodest indulgence. A Victorian cottage on Hill Street-nowhere near the beach-rents for $100,000 a summer. (The website advertising it says that it's "perfect for your staff or overflow guests.") A s.p.a.cious place with a water view will set you back about $500,000. The real cost, though, isn't money; it's time. To get to the Hamptons, just east of Manhattan, you must sit on the Long Island Expressway-the biggest parking lot in the world, as they say-for hour upon hour of overheated immobility.

And it's only going to get worse, because the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k Indian Nation, based on a reservation just minutes from the center of Southampton, intends to open a casino-or several-on Long Island. A set of architect's renderings, picturing a great room with burgundy banquettes and rows of s.h.i.+ning slot machines, is already hanging on the walls of a trailer that the three tribal trustees use as an office. The s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks want a "high-cla.s.s Monte Carlo-type" operation, a member of the tribe's Gaming Authority said, somewhere "near our homelands in Southampton," and perhaps another, less posh facility in Na.s.sau County. "If the Mashantuckets can have the highest-grossing casino in the world in the woods of Connecticut," a former s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k trustee named Fred Bess told me, referring to the Mashantucket Pequots' Foxwoods resort, "just think what we could do twenty miles out of Manhattan."

The s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks have said that they will build roads to funnel casino traffic away from the LIE, but there are many people in the Hamptons-people who don't have the money to commute from Manhattan by helicopter but who are still rich enough to be accustomed to getting what they want-who are aghast at the prospect of more cars on the road, not to mention the unquaintness of a casino marring their manicured pastoral. Such people "do not want their idyllic environment hurt by the added traffic, congestion, and noise of a gaming facility," Senator Charles Schumer wrote to the Bureau of Indian Affairs several years ago. The state senator Kenneth LaValle said that the tribe was "blatantly threatening the quality of life on the East End."

But the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks might be forgiven for considering their own quality of life, which is markedly different from that in the rest of the Hamptons. The median household income on the reservation, according to the 2000 census, is $14,055 a year. Only about six hundred people live on the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks' eight hundred acres, which have the feel of a scruffy summer camp. During the day, you can hear the zoom of boys speeding along the b.u.mpy roads into the forest on four-wheel ATVs. At night, jacked-up cars with hip-hop on the stereo cruise toward Cuffee's Beach, where kids go to hang out and hook up and get high. The land is green and wild, and most of the houses have an unfinished wall covered in white Tyvek house wrap or a roof draped in blue tarp. Because the land is held in trust by the tribe, it is impossible to get a mortgage on the reservation, where banks cannot foreclose, so young couples often add a room onto a family home, and houses grow into haphazard hugeness.

People still hunt in the forest and send their kids down to the water to collect buckets of clams, activities that the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks view as part of their ancestral tradition. The tribe is indigenous to the spot. Since there is no evidence to suggest a large-scale migration onto or off Long Island, historians believe that the native people that Europeans encountered when they arrived, in the 1600s, were the direct descendants of the aboriginal inhabitants of the land, ten thousand years ago.

In the mid-seventeenth century, though, the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k population dwindled, when new diseases came ash.o.r.e with the colonists. It became necessary to intermarry, and the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks often married African Americans. Today, most s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks look black but feel Indian-an ident.i.ty quite distinct from both the crisp Yankee austerity of Old Southampton and the flamboyance of its more recent summer immigrants. The reservation is an insular place, and nearly everyone there is related. If a member of the tribe was in the hospital, Marguerite Smith, a tribal attorney, told me, "two hundred of us might show up and claim we are immediate family."

The question of whether to open a casino-which many s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks see as inconsistent with their traditional way of life-has created the kind of disagreement you might expect from people living in what is essentially an endless family reunion. In 1996, at a tribal meeting in the cinder-block s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k Community Center, a discussion about the possibility of building a casino exploded into a brawl. By the time it was over, people were throwing chairs at one another and one trustee's brother had bitten a woman's finger to the bone.

"You just look at this place," Mike Smith, who has been the pastor of the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k Presbyterian Church for twenty-five years, said, one afternoon a few months ago. He was walking near his house, on Little Beach Road, which he shares with his wife, three grown children, and three grandchildren. "You go down to Cuffee's Beach, the DuPonts and the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers are right there." Looking out on s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k Bay, one sees the sandy spit of Meadow Lane, studded with grand old estates, just across the water. The s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks' parcel of forest and beachfront would be worth billions of dollars if it were ever for sale. "It makes no sense, no logical sense, for us to still be here in light of that," Smith said. "But here we sit."

Aside from three-card monte and Wall Street, Manhattan doesn't have much in the way of gambling. New Yorkers travel south to Atlantic City, or up to Connecticut, to gamble. Long Islanders take a high-speed ferry to New London or Bridgeport, near the Pequots' and the Mohegans' casinos, the two largest in North America.

This maritime movement of business from the East End of Long Island to Connecticut follows a pattern established centuries ago. The currency that sustained the fur trade between European settlers and native people was wampum-beads made from the purple interior of clamsh.e.l.ls. The s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks produced wampum from sh.e.l.ls found on the banks of Long Island Sound and brought it by canoe to Connecticut, where the Pequots, a more powerful tribe, controlled the local economy. Only when the Pequots were routed by the Europeans, in the Pequot War of 1637, did they begin trading with the settlers directly. A s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k casino would, in a sense, renew that direct exchange.

The Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos are enormously successful, and their earnings have transformed the Indian nations that operate them. Before the Mohegans started their business, they were a scattered group of mostly impoverished individuals. Now they are a model of organized prosperity. If you could use a scholars.h.i.+p, health care, child care, or retirement benefits, it is far better these days to be Mohegan than it is to be American.

Since the inception of the United States, Indian governments have been recognized as sovereign ent.i.ties, exempt from taxation. But the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 requires tribes to negotiate compacts with states in which they operate casinos, and those compacts almost always include a revenue-sharing agreement. Last year, the slot machines at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun were the Connecticut government's biggest private source of revenue, yielding $362 million. Foxwoods has eleven thousand employees, making it one of the largest employers in the state.

Once a tribe is federally recognized, it is eligible to open a casino, and the promise of wealth attracts financial backers to pay for the necessary builders, lawyers, and lobbyists. The s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks have been pursuing recognition since 1978-nine years before the Supreme Court ruled, in California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, that states have no authority to regulate gambling on reservations. In support of their claim, they have submitted more than forty thousand pages of doc.u.mentation substantiating their history and lineage. Meanwhile, tribes across the country have bloomed into thriving mini-nations, while the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks, as Lancelot Gumbs, a senior trustee, said, have remained "stuck in the Stone Age."

This summer, after thirty-two years, the Bureau of Indian Affairs declared that the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks had met the seven criteria for federal acknowledgment, and that their pet.i.tion had been provisionally approved; after a thirty-day waiting period, they would finally have tribal status. One of the trustees, Gordell Wright, described a celebratory mood: "We're going to be doing a lot of singing and eating." But, a few days before the waiting period ended, a group calling itself the Connecticut Coalition for Gaming Jobs filed an objection with the Interior Board of Indian Appeals, arguing that "a new casino in Southern New York will mean job losses and higher taxes for Connecticut." The group's spokesman refused to disclose anything about its members.h.i.+p or its financing.

The s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks were shocked, but their financiers of the past seven years, Marian Ilitch and Michael Malik, were not. The two have started casinos with, among others, the Little River Band of Ottawas and the Los Coyotes Band of Cahuillas and Cupenos. "Every time we do this, some bogus front appears to delay the process," their spokesman, Tom s.h.i.+elds, told me. Both the Mohegans and the Pequots have denied any affiliation with the Connecticut Coalition for Gaming Jobs, but, s.h.i.+elds said, "it's obvious who benefits by having the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks delayed."

Ilitch and Malik, for their part, have reportedly paid lobbyists more than $1 million to meet on the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks' behalf with Governor David Paterson, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and Senator Charles Schumer's chief of staff; they paid another million to the Was.h.i.+ngton lobbying firm Wheat Government Relations. But their investment is negligible compared with the potential payoff. Ilitch owns a casino in Detroit that grosses $400 million a year. "In the twenty-two years we've been involved with Indian gaming, so far, knock on wood, we've not had anybody fail in the process," Malik said.

The s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k reservation is bordered on the north by Montauk Highway, a two-lane strip that stretches west from the more glamorous parts of Southampton. During the past three decades, since the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks began selling tax-free cigarettes, it has become crowded with businesses-Eagle Feather, Rain Drops, True Native-that have turned the edge of the reservation into a kind of theme park of Indianness and smoking. The largest of them, the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k Indian Outpost, has two totem poles in the parking area, and sells cigarettes, moccasins, and lobster rolls. There are also Navajo blankets, toy tomahawks made in Korea, and many varieties of dream catchers. Gumbs built the store on his mother's land allotment, and is regarded as one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the tribe.

On the day I visited him, Gumbs was wearing a b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rt with eagle feathers embroidered on the breast pocket, a gold necklace with a bear-claw charm, a big, gold-toned watch, and an a.s.sertive cologne. He is fifty years old, with a long black braid down his back, and he speaks at an unusual volume. In the deli section of his store, Gumbs told me that he grew up "on the powwow trail," visiting other reservations throughout the East for festivals and ceremonies. "I saw true governments in action," he said. "Whether it was education, whether it was health care-all of these things that we're talking about now-other tribes were doing that back then. And it always baffled me as to why we felt like we were there, when we were light-years behind." Gumbs has long been the tribe's most vocal advocate of gaming. "I guess that was the motivating factor, and just listening to the other men in the community saying, 'd.a.m.n, we don't have nothing!'"

Gumbs led me out of the store so that we could talk in private. We pa.s.sed a series of burgundy cottages where children were playing with a baby racc.o.o.n in the yard, and walked toward a two-story building with a wooden Indian standing guard out front. Inside was a room the size of a high school gym, where Gumbs's yellow Hummer was parked next to a forty-five-foot RV. There was a bar in one corner, and the walls were decorated with Mylar ta.s.sels. High overhead was Gumbs's DJ booth, where he spins records when he rents out his cavernous bachelor pad for parties.

"Even though our children went to the public school, the majority of them were behind all of the ethnic groups. We're behind even the Latinos now!" Gumbs said. "You have these two tribes that spring up miraculously out of thin air right around us and create two of the largest casinos in the world." He did not believe that the Mohegans had anything to do with the Connecticut Coalition's efforts to sabotage the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks, but he wasn't convinced about the Pequots. Gumbs said that if he found out that any Indian nation was involved, he would consider it an act of war. "We will go after them just like they came after us," he said. I asked him if he meant by creating compet.i.tion. "There's a lot of other ways," he said, ominously, "but I'm not going to get into that."

Gumbs has been elected trustee eight times, and in that capacity has taken requests from dozens of prospective investors. In 2003, he helped make a deal with a man named Ivy Ong to develop a casino and resort hotel. The trustees chose Ong from many suitors, Gumbs said, because "being Chinese, he had a great appreciation and understanding of cultural values and cultural issues." (Gumbs is a firm believer in ethnic profiling. A few days after our meeting, I received an e-mail from him asking why I didn't have children: "Is it as I've been told a Jewish woman's lack of interest in s.e.x?") Though the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks lacked federal recognition, they planned to build a 65,000-square-foot facility in Hampton Bays, on an idyllic eighty-acre parcel of beachfront woodland that the tribe holds. Ong intended to run a bus directly there from Chinatown in New York City.

When this plan became public, it revived a dispute that has persisted for almost four hundred years. The Town of Southampton, the oldest English settlement in New York, was established when colonists purchased eight square miles of land from the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks in 1640. In exchange, the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks received corn from the settlers' first harvest, cloth coats, and a promise that particular areas would be reserved for their use; it was also agreed that the English would "defend us the sayed Indians from the unjust violence of whatever Indians shall illegally a.s.saile us." This arrangement held until 1703, when the tribe sold its remaining land, for the price of twenty pounds, plus a thousand-year lease on a parcel that included 3,600 acres known as the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k Hills. The two groups cohabited fairly happily for the next 150 years, though the settlers complained that their livestock kept falling into holes that the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks dug to store food through the winter.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, wealthy New Yorkers began to transform the area from farmland into a seaside resort. In 1859, a consortium of investors pet.i.tioned the state to break the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks' lease, and an agreement was sent to Albany, signed by twenty-one members of the tribe. According to the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks, the doc.u.ment was forged; some of the signatories appeared twice, and others were tribe members who had died. Days later, the tribe sent another pet.i.tion to Albany in protest. The state legislature approved the transaction anyway, and the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks were reduced to their current land base. They became the servant cla.s.s of Southampton, cleaning homes, cooking, and caddying at the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k Hills Golf Club.

Over the years, the tribe has tried by various legal means to re- claim the land, whose value has been a.s.sessed at $1.7 billion. Marguerite Smith, the first member of the tribe to become an attorney, told me, "I went to law school with the message from the elders 'You have to do something for your tribe.' When I finished, they said, 'You go and get those hills.'" But Gumbs and others on the reservation have argued that the land, most of which is now privately owned, will never be reclaimed through the courts. The tribe will have to buy it back, and the casino will provide the means. "We lost our land through white man's greed, and we're going to get it back through white man's greed," Fred Bess said.

At the time of the Hampton Bays development, Gumbs and the two other s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k trustees took out a series of full-page ads in the local papers, trying to drum up enthusiasm for a casino. They hired a public relations firm and started a website. ("FAQ: Traffic is a big problem in our region. Won't this add more traffic congestion? A: Any Indian gaming facility would be part of the traffic solution, not part of the problem.") On March 5, 2003, they held a press conference in the woods, alongside a phalanx of bulldozers. "This is about the preservation of our people," a trustee named Charles Smith announced. Then the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks held a "turtle walk," a procession through the forest to relocate box turtles so that they wouldn't be crushed. The machines rumbled after them.

When they were finished, a five-acre chunk had been denuded, and many people in Southampton-and on the reservation-were horrified. "That was ridiculous-you don't make a political statement with a bulldozer," Pastor Mike Smith told me. "You don't go desecrating one of the most pristine pieces of property on the East End of the island out of pure greed, which is all that was, because then you lose all credibility and integrity about being, quote unquote, stewards of the land." Several environmental groups sprang up to oppose the project, and Patrick Heaney, the town supervisor at the time, accused the tribe of trying to "absolutely destroy the community character not only of Hampton Bays but of all of Southampton."

Gumbs was irate. "n.o.body asked us anything as to whether we wanted the big mansions around us, whether we wanted these big roads, the traffic!" he told me. "Now, all of a sudden, when we want to do something that's economically viable for our community to help sustain the people, you're saying no?"

The town and, eventually, the state sued for an injunction and forced the tribe to cease construction. Ivy Ong vanished, leaving the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks in debt-as, it turned out, was his habit. Not long after the Hampton Bays debacle, the Seminole tribe submitted a statement to the BIA, claiming that its partners.h.i.+p with Ong had cost nearly $20 million in fines and lost income. Ong was sentenced to more than three years in federal prison.

But in Gumbs's view Ong was never the antagonist; his neighbors were. "The elders thought, Well, we have a good relations.h.i.+p with the town and they're our friends," Gumbs said. "I said, 'You don't understand! This is the new Southampton. You've got new money, new people. They don't give two c.r.a.ps about the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k Indian Nation.'" He added, "The old Southampton, yes, there was probably a lot of mutual respect and understanding there-even though we were the housemaids and the dishwashers and the lawn-cutters. Of course you're going to have a nice relations.h.i.+p if you're the servants. Yes, suh, mastuh." In any case, Southampton's opposition to a casino in Hampton Bays galvanized the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks, which some members of the tribe think was Gumbs's intention all along.

The acquisitive ethos of the Hamptons, where even the purchase of a copper faucet is an opportunity for self-expression, does not extend to the reservation. The s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks' professed values are communal and anti-materialist, and "for the benefit of the tribe" is a kind of mantra. The s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks could sell even a small piece of their reservation for millions of dollars, but to do so would be unthinkable. Every decision the tribe makes is meant to be in the service of the collective and the land.

"We don't separate ourselves from our surroundings," the trustee Gordell Wright told me. "That's a connection that native people have to the land itself. It's just, like, you." Wright, who is thirty-eight, was brought up in New York City and in Germany and did not move to the reservation until he was an adult, yet his pa.s.sion for the place is his primary qualification for leaders.h.i.+p. The trustees.h.i.+ps are volunteer positions; Wright is currently unemployed, having left his job as a deliveryman for Home Depot.

The s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks' group-mindedness has been reinforced by the process of applying for federal recognition, which entails an exhaustive inquiry into who belongs to the tribe. The BIA requires proof that every person listed as a tribe member is the direct de- scendant of someone who lived on the reservation in 1865. According to the tribe's own policy, babies born to s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k mothers are automatically included on the tribal roll. But if a baby's parents are unmarried and only the father is s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k, the child is ineligible for enrollment. "There's a saying," Fred Bess told me. "Mama's baby, Papa's maybe."

The question of legitimacy has been particularly vexed, because most members of the tribe do not look the way American Indians are expected to look. "That's what this whole federal-recognition process has been about," Roberta O. Hunter, a s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k lawyer, told me. "Are you who you say you are? Are you really authentic?" Hunter majored in anthropology at Bennington, and she said that in the twenties scholars got "interested in the 'red man' and the 'vanis.h.i.+ng race,' and everybody raced out West." The academics, she suggested, were in pursuit of motion picture Indians. "Those stereotypes of who's an Indian and who isn't an Indian, those were based on all those groups west of the Mississippi. I don't look anything like that," Hunter, who has dark skin and kinky hair, said.

Anxiety about being perceived as insufficiently Indian was one of the reasons why it took the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks so long to gain federal recognition. The BIA's history of the tribe's efforts at recognition is shot through with allusions to its ambivalence. "I don't think the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks are much interested in pet.i.tioning," the executive director of the Indian Rights a.s.sociation wrote to the Office of Federal Acknowledgment in 1984. "I think they believe they've managed all right so far, and they're not anxious to diddle around with a system that is working." Some tribe members were fearful of submitting to the process. "You had people who were older that were just, like, 'Be quiet. Don't make any waves,'" Hunter told me. "There was a voice that said, If you step up, you're going to get knocked down, because you know they just think we're a bunch of n.i.g.g.e.rs."

Long Island's Native Americans have been marrying African Americans since the seventeenth century, when the Dutch started bringing slaves into New York. John Strong, the premier historian of Native Americans on Long Island, told me, "Slave status was defined by law in terms of the woman-a child becomes the property of the mother's owner. If you're a slave and you want to make sure your children are free, you marry an Indian woman."

But if slave status was defined by maternity, racial status was defined by color. "If the father was black and the mother was Indian, or vice versa, and the child comes forward with a claim to Native American ident.i.ty, the white arbiters say, 'Oh, no, you can't jump up a notch in the hierarchy-you're black,'" Strong said. "When I came here, in '65, you'd go in any of the local bars and they would talk about the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks as 'monigs': more n.i.g.g.e.r than Indian." It's a slur that you still sometimes hear in the Hamptons.

Hunter and Lance Gumbs represent a generation of s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks who came of age in the sixties. College-educated and influenced by the era's movements for social justice, they started to question what the tribe was ent.i.tled to. "I really had such a vision about being able to come back to this community," Hunter told me. "I said, How perfect is this? Because you've got a landma.s.s, which is what so many other groups"-the Black Panthers, lesbian separatists, certain pa.s.sionate vegetarians-"wanted: a place to really infuse with whatever those cultural values were."

But Hunter feels that that kind of idealism has not prevailed. She calls Gumbs a "real exploiter," and says that the procession of cigarette shops on Montauk Highway is the result of unregulated greed. "Nicotine, the most addictive substance that we've got going on-this is what we want to hold up as our sovereign right?" she said. Though she has no objection to the idea of a casino, she feels that the way Gumbs and others have pursued their objective has been unethical. "What I am always focused on is process," she told me. "Are you having full partic.i.p.ation of our members.h.i.+p? Do you have accountability and transparency? No."

Every major decision that the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks make is put to a vote before the entire tribe. But elections can be compromised. For many years, the annual votes for tribal trustees were public, and, many s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks told me, there was retribution for the wrong vote and bribery for the right one. "All of this to me is so connected to why things are still so screwy here, and you can have someone get elected like Lance Gumbs," Hunter said. In 1992, Hunter was elected to the Southampton Town Board, and is the only nonwhite person to hold elected office in the town. She has also run for the office of tribal trustee three times, but no woman has ever been elected.

Gumbs believes that he is putting his tribe first, too. He thinks that the profits from the casino should be used to develop infrastructure and improve education; his priority, he told me, is avoiding the creation of a welfare state. "You cannot take vast sums of money and put it in somebody's hands who's never had money and expect them to know what to do with it," he said.

Some tribes pay out casino profits in per capita disburs.e.m.e.nts, which can be substantial; the Chumash Indians of California, for example, reportedly received $428,969 apiece in 2005. As the prospect of a casino has become increasingly bright on the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k reservation, an unusual number of people have been contacting the enrollment office. "Everyone is coming out of the woodwork," Winonah Warren, the seventy-one-year-old president of the board of directors at the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k museum, told me. "Oh, everybody wants to be s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k now."

One night in August, Pastor Mike Smith sat s.h.i.+rtless in denim cut-offs in a sweat lodge in the woods behind a cousin's house. Twenty people, most of whom were drumming and chanting with ferocious abandon, were packed in tight around a pit of red-hot rocks under a frame of branches draped with heavy blankets. Though Pastor Mike, as everyone calls him, is a Christian, he comes to these traditional ceremonies once a month. He does not join in the chanting or the drumming, just the sweating and, silently, the praying. He prays that he will stay sober, as he has for the past twenty-four years. He prays that the young people in his tribe will resist the drugs being sold down at Cuffee's Beach. And he prays for the men selling the drugs, who, after all, are s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k, too.

Pastor Mike is against gaming. "We're already dealing with alcohol and drugs, and we're dealing with it over pennies," he said, when the ceremony was fini shed. "Can you imagine what would happen with the influx of cash?" Organization and discipline, he believes, are what's missing from his community, not money. "If you look at Mashantucket, if you look at Mohegan, if you look at anyplace that has a casino, the only thing you hear about is the glorification of the wealth," he said. "They don't talk about the social upheaval that comes as a consequence."

Pastor Mike is a traditionalist. When the women of s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k gained the right to vote in tribal elections, in 1992, he was one of only four men to vote against it. Smith, who is sixty-one, is nostalgic for the reservation that he grew up on. He remembers "sleeping out in the woods as kids," and a sense of absolute freedom, safety, and belonging. "Look out there," he said, motioning toward the green expanse in the moonlight. "What more do you need?"

But Gumbs is not alone in thinking that the tribe has more to lose by remaining poor than it does by risking radical transformation. Robin Weeks, who for many years sat with Hunter, Gumbs, and Bess on the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.k Economic Development Committee, has been a strong proponent of gaming. He grew up with his mother, who is blind, and five siblings, in a house on the reservation that had no running water. "We had an old potbelly stove with coal and wood and whatever else we could burn-newspapers, old clothing," he told me. "Sometimes it would get so cold in the house the water would freeze and we'd have to put it on the stove to heat it up so we could wash for school." Weeks was born in 1955. "I tell people, 'You can see all of these things-the pump, the outhouse-in old movies. This is what I grew up in.'"

Weeks is now a senior admissions adviser at Stony Brook University. While completing a graduate degree in education, at Hofstra, he studied abroad, and the experience was transformative: "I got to travel all over Europe, and it just opened up the world to me. I could always see it from a distance in terms of looking across the water at all the millionaires in their mansions-I always saw a glimpse of it, but I was never a part of it. I wanted to bring this back to my community; there's more to life than we saw growing up, than struggle and sadness and violence." Weeks attended public schools in Southampton-as most s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks have since their one-room schoolhouse closed, in 1951-and he worked as a janitor at lunchtime and after school. "I saw that there was unfairness," he said. "I saw that there was inequality. And, in fact, by the time I was fourteen I got involved in some very negative, destructive things. Looking back now, it seems like a rite of pa.s.sage: the more you could drink and the more you could fight, the more of a man you were."

Today, the words "rez mob" are scratched into chairs and bathroom stalls at Southampton High School. In 2006, a group of college students who were home for the summer in Southampton were a.s.saulted in one of their families' back yards. One of them told me, "A group of guys, thirty of them from the reservation, walked into the yard and started attacking everyone. They had a problem with some white kid who wasn't even there." Though the attackers wore bandanas over their faces, he recognized one of them as someone he had known since childhood. "The first thing I did was say, 'What's going on, man, what are you doing?' And he just started swinging at me."

In 2007, in the largest coordinated law enforcement effort in the history of Suffolk County, state troopers and DEA agents raided the reservation and arrested fourteen people for possessing guns and selling heroin, marijuana, and cocaine. One of the young men incarcerated after the raid was Awan Gumbs, Lance Gumbs's son, who had been conducting at least part of his business from his father's deli. This past August, a seventeen-month-old baby named Roy Jones was punched to death on the reservation, allegedly by his mother's boyfriend, who explained, "I was trying to make him act like a little boy instead of a little girl."

Pastor Mike thinks the problems persist because of "an att.i.tude that because this is a reservation we're untouchable, so we can do whatever we d.a.m.n well please and there are going to be no consequences." He tells his congregation, "Our problem isn't employment; it's employability." I asked him if he thought the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks should have their own tribal police force once they've gained federal recognition, and he laughed. "Some folks would say fine, but, see, I know us," he said. "I know us. And I wouldn't trust n.o.body with a gun."

One day this fall, Lynn Malerba, the first female chief of the Mohegans, spent the morning meeting with Connecticut's gubernatorial candidates, and then visited her parents for coffee at the retirement home that her tribe built with casino profits. "There's a gym downstairs, and a Wii," Malerba said, walking through the bright entry hall. Malerba's mother showed me her apartment: the laundry room, the two bathrooms and bedrooms, and the view of a courtyard of well-tended rhododendrons and hostas. In the eighties, she was among a group of Mohegans who pooled their money to pay for the tribe's only telephone: "We hooked it up in the church closet!"

Malerba drove to the Mohegans' burial grounds, past dozens of kids holding tennis racquets and baseball bats, on their way to camp-which the tribe pays for, along with day care for the children of its members and employees. Nearby is a huge gla.s.s building, overlooking miles of countryside, that the Mohegans are erecting to house their government and cultural offices. At the tribal museum, a team is working on reconstructing the Mohegan language. The wealth generated by Mohegan Sun pays for the tribe's health care and college scholars.h.i.+ps, too, and for a.s.sistance to first-time homeowners. Each tribe member also gets a cash payment; Malerba told me that the amount was "a private family matter."

Malerba said that she hoped the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks succeeded in opening a casino, even if it hurt her business. "We're ten miles away from the Pequots, and we've been able to coexist," she said. "I could never take that philosophical stance, to fight another tribe. Wouldn't that be disingenuous to say that we as tribal nations are all one, and to then work aggressively against a tribe achieving economic independence as we have been able to do?"

The Mohegan nation is like a tiny Scandinavian country-a peaceable kingdom where the young are educated, the old are cared for, and everyone has help with medical care and housing. "Casinos are great in terms of an economic engine and if the revenues are provided for good purposes," Malerba said. She sounded just one cautionary note. "Whether tribes have a business or not, you always have to be really careful about how you choose your leaders," she said.

This fall, a judge dismissed the Connecticut Coalition's pet.i.tion, and the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks became the five-hundred-and-sixty-fifth federally recognized tribe. Gumbs e-mailed me, "This Nation of people will always remember October 1st, 2010, as our independence day," and signed off with a celebratory "Ah! Ho!" The tribe can begin construction on a casino as soon as it negotiates a compact with the state. Until then, the annual powwow remains the s.h.i.+nnec.o.c.ks' only source of tribal income.

At one difficult point in the nineties, the powwow was rained out two years in a row, and all services had to be suspended owing to lack of funds. But this year the weather was crisp and bright, and there was a line of cars along Montauk Highway waiting to turn onto the reservation. On the powwow grounds, a cleared field behind the Community Center, thousands of people shopped for wampum jewelry and stood in line for succotash and fry bread while they waited to watch the traditional dancers and drummers. Pastor Mike sold soda with the medicine man, a friend of his.

Pastor Mike introduced me to his aunt, who wore a deer-hide dress and a necklace of sh.e.l.ls. She told me that in the early fifties the Great Cove Realty Company tried to build a subdivision on a strip of the reservation. Great Cove got as far as pouring foundations before the trustees, including her husband, persuaded the district attorney to intercede, and the developers were forced to abandon the project. The memory of it pleased her. "My husband worked in a restaurant kitchen, and one night the Great Cove guy came in drunk and said, 'I'm going to kill that savage!'" she recalled. " Those were the kinds of things that happened. It sounds strange, but we were poor but happy-all one big family, maybe four hundred of us." She wrinkled her nose. "Now they're out for money. Money is the root of all evil."

Lance Gumbs, Gordell Wright, and the third trustee, Randy King, wore eagle-feather headdresses, pelts, and beaded, purple-fringed tunics, as they led a procession of Indians from across the Northeast. A representative from the Mashantucket Pequots stood just behind Gumbs; war had apparently been averted. As people chanted and danced for hours, Harriett Crippen Gumbs, Lance's mother, sat selling silver jewelry and children's tomahawks, next to the snow cone stand. Despite the economic transformation that a casino would likely bring, she did not think federal recognition was going to change anything. "You've got to know the white man wants this reservation," Crippen Gumbs said, her white hair shooting out from under a baseball cap. "You know what their excuse would be now?" she asked, and leaned in close over her jewelry counter. "'You've intermarried too much. You're no longer Indian.' Well, who the h.e.l.l are we?"