They have long had an entrepreneurial spirit. This past May, the state of Florida began negotiating new gaming compacts with the Seminole-in exchange for expanded gaming operations, the Seminole would contribute millions in revenue that would be tagged for education and thereby save the Florida school system. In Florida, the Seminoles are regularly called on to bail out the state when it experiences a budget crisis. It has given $82 million in funding for local government and nongaming tribes and has paid $60 million in payroll taxes since 2004. The Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians employs 5,162 people (directly) and 24,422 indirectly. But communities like Pechanga and Morongo, the Seminoles in Florida, and the Mashantucket Pequot in Connecticut make a lot of money, and rather than depending on the government, the government often depends on them. Only 40 percent of the 500 tribes in the United States have casinos, and only a very small fraction of those turn any kind of useful, sustained profit. One popular conception about Indian life and Indian tribes is that we would be nothing without help from the federal government. Contest powwows with large payouts for the winning singers and dancers have funded a burgeoning performance culture. Others have created tribal court systems or built hospitals and housing for the elderly. Several tribes have started language immersion schools with their new-found wealth. As the golf carts showed (and other enterprises around the country show better), casino profits have helped fund a dramatic renaissance in Indian culture and language. There are all sorts of unintended effects of Indian gaming. We were told right-I had the best steak of my life. We were told we’d never taste anything like the steaks we ordered. We were told that the cattle eat organic feed and are kept on the lot for twice the time most prime cattle are. We were told that they raise their own cattle. Feeling like a million bucks, or, rather-given the price tag on the Burberry jacket I bought-feeling like $931 ( the amount left from my bad beat jackpot), my wife and I went for dinner at the Great Oak Steakhouse, one of the nine restaurants inside the casino. I showered and got dressed in the new clothes I’d bought at the high-end outlet mall near Morongo. Despite the loss of my masculinity, the massage and scrub were great. My masculinity had already taken a hit at the golf course, and now the rest of it was sloughed off with my dead skin and dropped on the floor of the massage room. I don’t know what was Hawaiian about it, except that the salt scrub and the massage cream contained lime and coconut. I asked for the Ultimate Hawaiian Recovery.

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