Mid-Michigan is an unfulfilled promise pockmarked with lingering traces of failed dreams. Road signs and family names commemorate the voyageurs, those first European arrivals, who traded beaver and wolverine pelts before they disappeared. Hundreds of bars and pubs serve liquid reminders of the area’s days as a rough-and-tumble land of lumber mills and coal mines—both of which withered as the 20th century dawned. Churches and bowling alleys canonize the European refugees who flocked to auto plants during the ’20s, long before the Japanese made better cars and sold them at lower prices.

This is the “crotch” of Michigan’s thumb—the Saginaw River Valley. Sugar-beet fields spread out in every direction from my childhood home in Bay City. In winter, the relentless flatness of the place is interrupted only by the silhouette of the Zilwaukee Bridge some 15 miles south, a soaring testament to the automobile that did so much to make and unmake this part of the world.

Centuries before industry found the Saginaw, the sprawling Ojibwe tribe—dubbed “Chippewa” by French explorers mispronouncing its name—lived under very different circumstances. From Ontario to North Dakota, from Ohio to Saskatchewan, the Chippewa controlled the largest domain of any First Nation. They ruled the Saginaw, with great and controversial chiefs like Pontiac leading them in their doomed but noble attempts to repel white settlers. When I graduated from high school in 1991, the Chippewa were known for their trailer parks.

This legacy would indeed be tragic, except that in the late ’80s the Chippewa, like many First Nations, struck gold—by building casinos. Now as the last of the big auto plants shut their doors, the Chippewa find themselves wealthy beyond belief, a former charity case preying on their onetime benefactors.

The Rise of the Rez
To fully appreciate the success of the Chippewa, it helps to have an idea of how far they’ve come in such a short time. In the summer of ’91, working a minimum-wage job in a culvert factory and looking for any kind of variety, I made my first drive west from Bay City to Mt. Pleasant with some buddies. Heading into Oil City, we noticed an unusual trailer park with rows of strange, unfinished houses. Each house had only three completed walls, the fourth a permanent installation of Tyvek. A federal program had given the Indians money for “half a house,” so that’s what they built: one-half of a house, leaving the rest to be finished later. The half-houses signaled our arrival on the Rez.

The Rez—the Reservation. Mt. Pleasant, dead center of our dead-end state. Home by treaty since 1855 to the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe. Home since 1989 to the Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort. What in ’91 was small pole barn like any K of C or VFW hall, with a few blackjack tables, some slots and a single humble card room, has since evolved into the largest casino between Atlantic City and Vegas. Today the Soaring Eagle is a palace, replete with marble floors and gold bathroom fixtures, luxury suites, a 10,000-seat outdoor amphitheatre and a summer concert series.

While most of the Saginaw Valley’s able-bodied white sons and daughters have left for Chicago and other more prosperous places, life on the Rez is booming. What’s more, the tribe, once living off federal handouts in half-houses, gave nearly $4 million in 2004 to local governments for schools and road improvements. All told, the tribe has distributed about $67 million to local governments since 1994.

The Saginaw Chippewa are not alone in their success. In 2004 alone, tribal gaming produced more than $18 billion in revenue and created over 500,000 jobs on reservations, according to the National Indian Gaming Association. Indian gaming is an industry that’s grown exponentially from its beginnings in late ’70s bingo parlors.

The ’80s were a pivotal time for tribes desperate to improve economic conditions in their often-isolated communities. In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in California v. Cabazon upheld the right of Indian tribes, as sovereign nations, to engage in any gaming activity allowed under a state’s law. A year later, under pressure from states, Congress affirmed the rights of states to regulate gaming operations.

This legislation further solidified the rights of tribes to run gaming operations and backfired on many states that saw tribal gaming success as a drain on government coffers. In return for small shares of the profits, many states agreed to allow Class III or “Vegas-style” gaming on tribal lands, and the race was on. Today, roughly one-fourth of all of the 550-plus federally recognized tribes run Class III gaming operations.

Once the laws passed allowing Indian tribes to offer Class III gaming, the Chippewa were quick to see their opportunity. As befits a place of great and shattered dreams, mid-Michigan is home to many gamblers. I grew up playing cards. For a while, I thought I’d pay my way through Georgetown playing euchre. Polack! Someone might’ve told me they don’t play euchre east of Cleveland.

In mid-Michigan, gambling is even considered a legitimate way of raising money for charities. To pay for our uniforms, the high-school football team worked bingo two nights a week at St. Joe’s Church. (Night after night, old emphysemics filed into the hall and ritualistically abused themselves in sad and ironic ways, playing with a cigarette in one hand and an oxygen mask in the other.) One of the great ironies of the Chippewa’s modern success is that many people, including a Catholic nun, initially justified gambling on the reservation by insisting that because the proceeds went to the poor, reservation gambling was somehow morally superior to other kinds of gambling.

Road to Riches
But while the Chippewa have grown wealthy, their former benefactors struggle. The drive to the Rez is a fitting juxtaposition of the old and new economies in mid-Michigan. Gone are the factories, and in their place stand hundreds of bars and a thousand Rite Aids—a service economy tailored for the sick and the dying.

The hour-long drive begins in the decaying heart of Bay City, where vestiges of the industrial past roll by. The GM plant where my grandfather died. The Hirshfield scrap iron works, an electric-arc hospice speeding a dying city to its inevitable conclusion. The rotting buildings of the Defoe Shipyard, former contractor to the U.S. Navy, now a collection of rusting hulks and decrepit warehouses leaking dioxins into the piss-trickle river Saginaw.

Drive a little further and you pass close to Visitation Church, where Madonna was baptized. Pass just north of the sugar factory, where sugar is extracted from beets, fueling the diabetes pandemic here. The crushed beet carcasses are thrown in a holding tank where they rot and stink. When the wind blows right, you can smell the awful remains at my house in the Crotch 10 miles east. Madonna once recalled that her birthplace was a “smelly little town.” The little part is obvious; the smell is the sugar factory.

Then you come into Midland, home of Dow Chemical, an isolated island of Michigan State grads who are looked on with envy by the truly left behind in Bay City and Saginaw. Due west out of Midland, you arrive in the land of gun shops and snowmobile dealers. A billboard here asks, “State DNR Regulations?” over a picture of Hitler giving the famous salute. Within 20 minutes, you’ll hit the Rez and, one can always hope, the jackpot.

These days, like many people in mid-Michigan, my mom drives to the Rez thrice weekly for her gambling fix, “donating my inheritance to the Indians” one quarter at a time. I might be upset by that, but I’ve got a secret that makes me almost encourage her in her habit—I’m (probably) a bit Chippewa. Most of the old-time Michigan Canucks were at least part Indian, and great grandpa Ouellette’s friends called him “Injun Joe.” I can only conclude that my great-grandfather was part Indian, too.

I don’t want to dwell too much on the sociopolitical implications of my newfound multiculturalism. Far from being a burden, I’d be delighted to learn I’m part Chippewa. The Chippewa, after all, are rich.

One of my buddies is an eighth Chippewa—and that’s a shame for him. By tribal law, members who are a fourth or more Chippewa receive twice-annual profit-sharing checks for their role in “managing” the tribe’s business. While the exact amounts are secret and vary with the degree of “Indian-ness,” his dad (himself a quarter Chippewa) received about $50,000 in 2000. He owns two homes, Red Wings season tickets and hasn’t worked in a decade.

Perhaps unsurprisingly there is backlash within the region, some of which may be racially motivated. In Detroit, two nontribal casinos opened in 1999. While the official records will show that these represented an attempt by the dying city to inject some new life into its decaying downtown, I clearly remember racist overtones in the debate at the time. In private, many whispered, “Why should the Indians get all the money?”

The Chippewa, in fact, were vigorous opponents of attempts to open nontribal casinos in Michigan. In the end, they paid protection money to the state to keep their operations open (a negotiated 2 percent payment of gross revenues to local governments) and had to concede their monopoly.

More than five years later, the Detroit casinos continue their struggle to find permanent homes, technically operating out of “temporary” facilities. Meanwhile reservation gaming operations continue to thrive. Soaring Eagle has completed two expansions since the casinos in Detroit opened and will finish a third this summer.

Not every tribe has enjoyed such a windfall. The top 20 tribal casinos, including Soaring Eagle, derive most of their business from their close proximity to population centers. Geographically isolated tribes, if they do have gaming operations, rarely generate the funds necessary to elevate their communities out of poverty. Some tribes, the Navajo, for instance, have cultural beliefs that prohibit gambling. (Recently, the Navajo have decided that the economic lure of gambling is too strong; they’ve begun to take steps toward becoming a gambling nation.)

In some cases, the influx of gaming money has ruined the traditional social structure of the tribe. Most famously, in the late 1980s, a heated rivalry developed within the Akwesasne Mohawks. Their reservation straddles the U.S.-Canadian border in upstate New York, and for many years cigarette smuggling generated the community’s income. Gaming proponents, representing a younger generation, clashed so severely with the older and more traditional Mohawks that eventually their differences devolved into a shootout between Indian paramilitaries and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

A Chippewa Off the Old Block
Still, the overwhelmingly positive impact that gambling and gambling revenues have had on Indian communities across the United States cannot be denied. For the first time since white settlers stole their ancestral lands, First Nations have the economic means to enforce their own laws, protect their own customs and defend themselves against the predations of the White Man.

As for me, every time I’m in a casino and I see the diabetes-needle receptacles, see the zombies pulling levers with oxygen feeds hooked up to their noses, see grotesquely overweight people eating cheap and horrid buffet food, I can’t help but think about the drive west and all the failed promise of previous generations. Whether gambling money goes to multinational corporations, organized crime or First Nations, the fact is that it’s still a giant wealth transfer from poor to rich, a last effort to break out of the crushing despair of a bleak and hopeless existence on a putrid shore.

These are my people, after all. The formerly comfortable giving money to the newly comfortable. The losers in the global economic struggle being preyed upon by the new winners. At least at Soaring Eagle, I take some comfort in the belief that the Indians, after centuries of oppression and crushing poverty, deserved some break. The desperate drive to the Rez at least sends someone to college.

So maybe this windfall for the Indians is just; it certainly was a long-time coming. A decade of growth cannot erase centuries of deprivation. Even as I write this a young member of one of the less fortunate tribes in Minnesota killed his grandparents and some schoolmates in a despondent fury. I also worry that gambling money will buy the First Nations a splendid isolation, forever eliminating the possibility of true integration with the rest of American society.

I only hope that increased wealth will encourage the Saginaw Chippewa to call more of her children home. If the tribe ever decides to expand profit sharing to members who are less than a quarter Indian, one of my friends will be rich. And someday, maybe, I might be able to cash in. Until then, I’ll sit on my couch with my firewater and my peace pipe, and hope that when the new-old masters of the Saginaw recede again into memory, they’ll leave more of a legacy than trailer parks.