ATERBURY, Conn. - In a small house with ruffled curtains, in the company of a black-and-white kitten, James P. Lynch bends over the historical research that has led some to dub him ''the Indian killer.''
At 54, Lynch is soft-spoken and has the face of a Campbell's Soup kid. As a boy, he was an arrowhead-collector, entranced by the Indian tribes who walked these woods, but in adulthood his interest has taken him in a different direction. Today, he sells heating systems for a living, shuttles his son to soccer practice, and has a sideline debunking tribes.
In this rural corner of Connecticut, tribal legitimacy has become a billion-dollar battleground. Since federal recognition now carries with it the right to operate a casino, the government's stamp of authenticity is not just a matter of Indian pride, but the key to enormous fortunes.
In Connecticut, the two tribes that have passed the government's test - the Mashantucket Pequots and the Mohegans - are raking in an estimated $5.8 million in revenues a day. Some dozen other groups, many backed by eager casino developers, invest millions hoping to prove that they, too, are legitimate tribes.
So began the latest Indian war - the war of genealogies. Once the territory of a academic researchers, the federal recognition process has come under pressure from millionaire investors who want to speed it up and angry state officials who want to stop it cold. Liberal-minded Yankees are commissioning opposition research on tribes with casino plans. Obscure chiefs have learned to play hard-ball with Las Vegas moguls. And anthropologists have found themselves in demand as key players in high-stakes dealmaking.
In the meantime, tribes face an epidemic of doubt that they are who they say they are. It's a historical challenge as threatening to tribes as Holocaust denial, but as logical to outsiders as checking a drivers' license at a liquor store.
''Next time you go to a bank, try saying, `I'm going to take some money out of my account,''' Lynch said. ''They'll say, `Can I see some identification?' And you say, `I know who I am.'''
Since they were recognized by a special act of Congress in 1983, the Mashantucket Pequots became America's most notable Indian gambling success, and a remote spot in the Connecticut woods became the world's most desirable casino location. The tribe also became the target of mounting criticism from nearby townspeople, who began to fear that in that one piece of well-meaning legislation they had forever lost control of their land.
While some are grateful for the job base the casinos have created, many complain about social blights - of children locked in cars in the casino parking lot, of the financial losses of local residents who find they can't stop playing the tables. Most of all they worry about losing more taxable land into the tribe's reservation, where fantastic wealth is building on itself, just out of reach.
This spring, when Jeff Benedict, a Newton, Mass., lawyer, published a book charging that the Mashantucket Pequots were not really descendants of the original Pequots, the neighbors' whispers went national. To Kevin Gover, the country's highest official on Indian affairs, this challenge is nothing less than race war.
''If they want to stir up trouble, we will meet them on the field of battle. But they are kidding themselves if they think we will abandon Mashantucket,'' said Gover, a Pawnee Indian who as the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs oversees the tribal recognition process. ''We tribes believe that if one is defrocked, if you will, then it sets a precedent for all the others. The Mashantuckets are part of the family now, and the tribes will look after them. What's the alternative? To let outsiders decide who is a tribe and who is not? The fear is that my tribe is next.''
In fact, there is both reason to doubt the tribes in this region, and reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.
BUTCH LYDEN, a member of the unrecognized Schaghticokes, wearing ceremonial regalia. (Globe Staff Photo / Evan Richman)
|
New England tribes bore the brunt of colonization and were mourned as obliterated peoples 300 years later. The Pequots were an example: Wracked by smallpox, hunted by settlers, their village was decimated in the Pequot War of 1637. As a child in Greenwich, Conn., the historian Alvin Josephy used to gaze at a sad, turn-of-the-century museum photograph labeled ''Connecticut's last Indian.''
One by one, the Northeastern tribes reappeared on the country's radar screen in the 1970s with a defiant message: We were here all along. James Cunha, Jr., chief of the Paucatuck Eastern Pequots, a Connecticut tribe seeking recognition, recalls rushing home from high school after a teacher had declared the Pequots extinct. His grandfather dressed in tribal regalia, walked to the classroom door and glowered, ''Tell me that I don't exist.''
Twenty years later, townspeople are telling tribe members just that. The reason is Indian gaming, which has made some citizens see any newly recognized tribe as a threat. Lynch developed his avocation in Indian genealogy on a morning in 1994 when he first learned that land claims by the Golden Hill Paugussetts threatened his mother-in-law's house. For six years he has been amassing documents to audit the claims of Connecticut tribes, a job that he said the Bureau of Indian Affairs no longer does thoroughly.
The story he tells about the Pequots - and the one that Benedict reinforced in his book - contends the Pequots were wiped out as a tribe in the 17th century. The few people who were living on the Pequot reservation at the dawn of the casino age, and who form the blood link to the modern-day tribe, could claim Narragansett ancestry, but not Pequot, he said.
Lynch denies that he sets out to undermine tribes, and says he was shocked, when his investigations began, to find how tenuous their proof of ancestry was. Though he found cause to challenge all four tribes he was asked to investigate, he said each accusation pained him.
''I take no enjoyment out of ruining somebody's personal identity,'' he said. Sometimes, he added, ''it bothers me, to think that these people really believe they are who they say they are.''
But he would never call anyone a liar: ''I would never go up to a Native American and be that crude. That would be tacky to the extreme, to go up to someone and say, `You aren't who you say you are.' But what about the landowners being affected? It's not racist, it's self-defense.''
For the most part, the tribes have responded with stony silence. In the eight months since Benedict's book made fraud allegations into a national story, the Mashantucket Pequots have responded with two documents - one in April and one in September - purporting to prove that the Pequots are real. Even that, they say, is more than they should have to do.
''We don't have to respond to that kind of garbage,'' said Michael Thomas, a member of the Pequot tribal council. ''We know who we are.''
But doubts about tribes continue to buzz in Connecticut, especially among opponents of casino expansion. At Ledyard High School, ''Without Reservation'' appeared on a student reading list. Down the road, schoolchildren tromp through the Mashantucket Pequot Museuem, absorbing a different version of events.
Robert Bee, an Indian expert in the anthropology department of the University of Connecticut, said he is beginning to doubt whether enough evidence exists to settle the matter once and for all.
''There ought to be an answer. It ought to be provable,'' said Bee. ''Have the stakes risen to the point at which for every piece of evidence that has some revelation, there's going to be a frantic searching, a high-stakes searching, for some piece of evidence that refutes it? I think so. I think that's what's going on.''
Even staunch Indian defenders concede that the riches attached to federal recognition have given the people of Connecticut reason to be skeptical.
As soon as Foxwoods opened, the unrecognized tribes with land near the Pequots' had corporate suitors. Throughout the early 1990s, casino backers arrived dangling checks, offering to hire dream teams of genealogists and anthropologists to speed the recognition process. Richard Velky, a former print shop worker and chief of the unrecognized Schaghticokes, recalls being ''taken out on a few walks'' by envoys from casino backers - 24 of them, including Harrah's, Bally's, and Steve Wynn's La Mirage.
''It was scary,'' he said. Every now and then he would turn to the tribe's attorney and say, ''You know, we're going to wake up in the trunk of a car some day.''
Realizing that his location in the Northeast, rather than the more isolated West, made his tribe a desirable casino partner, Velky cut to the chase: He needed at least $10 million to get recognized.
''I would say, `If you're not interested in providing $10 million, let's finish dinner, or lunch, or breakfast, and get back on the plane.' So that was the beginning of the conversation,'' said Velky, who is 50. ''I'd say, `I'm sure you can make a deal with a tribe out West if you want to pay less than that.'''
As the four major unrecognized tribes teamed up with financers in the mid-'90s, gambling industry money flowed into the recognition process. It had been designed in 1978 as a small-scale procedure; James Wherry, an anthropologist now on staff for the Mashantucket Pequots, recalls sketching guidelines for a Connecticut tribe's petition on a placemat. Later he heard from a BIA staffer that the tribe had submitted the placemat.
But gambling changed all that. Although the BIA estimates that the process should cost about $300,000, expenditures on lawyers and experts have become so high that they ''do the process ... a great injustice,'' said Christine Grabowski, an anthropologist who has worked on numerous petitions. By the time the Mohegans were recognized in 1994, they had spent $10 million, and neighboring tribes are assuming they will have to follow suit.
With the stakes so high, the researching of tribes grew nasty. Kay Davis, a researcher for the BIA from 1992 to 1996, said she was threatened numerous times while she was researching the Golden Hill Paugussetts. Just before she submitted her finding, she walked into a BIA bathroom and found a towel dispenser that had been booby-trapped with mace, she said. Quiet Hawk, the Paugussetts' chief, calls her allegations ''a bunch of lies.''
Velky, meanwhile, is convinced that the Schachticokes' recognition is being fought by one of the state's two established gaming tribes. He said the rival tribe filed Freedom of Information Act requests for thousands of pages of documents in hopes of hanging onto their near-monopoly for that much longer.
Fighting over history
Local opponents can also be effective saboteurs, said Quiet Hawk, who still blames Lynch's ''inappropriate research'' for causing the BIA to reject the tribe's petition in 1996. Grabowski, who did an evaluation of that decision for tribal members, agrees, although she says petitioning tribes have a dizzying variety of enemies. ''Don't assume it's the obvious [opponent],'' she said. ''It can be the state. It can be non-Indians. It can be another Indian tribe that doesn't want another competitor down the road.... There are unbelievable political interests out there.''
Occasionally, groups literally fight over scraps of history. One morning last April, Velky arrived at his office to find an envelope containing photocopies of Schaghticoke tribal rolls from the 18th and 19th centuries - ancestors, said a note, that the Golden Hill Paugussetts had claimed as their own. [Quiet Hawk has denied the accusation.] Asked who might have anonymously delivered the envelope, Velky shrugged.
''Someone who doesn't want the Golden Hill Paugussetts to get recognized. To say who that is, you could throw a dart,'' he said. ''The list is too long.''
But the man whose name surfaces most often as an enemy to the tribes is one who seems the most unlikely. Over tea, in a house festooned with seasonal decorations, Lynch explains that his childhood ''fascination and love for Indian culture'' was sparked when the remains of an Indian village were discovered in his hometown. Years later, he gravitated to the anthropology departments at Wesleyan and the University of Connecticut, where he did some doctoral work.
To Lynch, whose parents didn't graduate from high school, the academic world was both enthralling and uncomfortable. He fondly recalls the ''no-sleep weekends'' of the annual Iroquois conferences in the 1980s, wistfully listing famous anthropologists he met there.
But the Paugussett land claims sent him hurtling away from that universe. On the morning his mother-in-law called, frantic, about land claims in her home town of Stratford, Lynch's wife commented, ''Now, they're messing with our tribe.''
Since then, the scholars that Lynch once admired have come to speak of him in terms that are hardly printable. Wherry calls Lynch's anthropological work ''trash'' and James Axtell, a colonial historian at the College of William and Mary, dismisses him as ''sort of a hired gun.'' At a Washington hearing on tribal recognition in August, Virginia DeMarce, the BIA's top historian, called Lynch's work so sloppy that she ''could not rely on the validity of anything in it.'' And the academics are generous compared to the Indians. Cunha, who has watched Lynch pick apart his family tree, derides Lynch as ''someone who works for a plumbing supply store who has a degree in history.''
But those who are fighting new tribes charge that the real hired guns are the credentialed experts who are too sympathetic - or too beholden - to challenge tribes. That's a bias many admit freely in the field of anthropology, where doing anything to harm indigenous groups is often seen as an ethical breach - as Axtell said, ''you don't make an academic specialty out of denying tribes.'' And even some within academia wonder if there are any disinterested experts left.
''The people who do care [about a tribe's authenticity] care because'' they oppose the tribes or their casino plans, said Christopher Collier, Connecticut's state historian. But ''there are also a number of esteemed and established knowledgeable academics who are on the Pequots' payroll.''
The history wars show no sign of abating, with town tax money pouring into tribal investigations.It is a strategy supported by a growing number of state officials.
''One of the BIA's problems is its occasional arrogance about its own expertise,'' said Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. ''The public has a right to know, and it has more than sufficient intelligence and awareness to understand what's at stake in these decisions.''
To members of the tribes, Wherry said, such challenges from the citizenry are as ignorant as the ''brown bag test'' the government used in the 1930s to determine Indian ancestry: eyeballing a person's skin to see if he or she were dark enough. It's humiliating enough to have to prove that your tribe is genuine to the government, Velky said, without having to trot out ancestors for hostile neighbors.
''My question is, `How dare someone ask us when they can't pass the test themselves?' I would guess there's not a town in America where they have the kind of social continuity that we are asked to prove,'' said Melissa Fawcett, tribal historian for the Mohegans.
These days, it's not enough for Indians to know who they are. As long as there are casinos in southeastern Connecticut, they'll have to get through Lynch first.
''If you're real and can't prove it, that's too bad,'' he said. ''People are going to get hurt in the process.''
Next: Criminal inroads at casinos
JAMES P. LYNCH, who debunks tribes, says he was shocked to find the Pequots' proof of ancestry so tenuous. (Globe Staff Photo / Evan Richman)
