Nation, Corporation or Family? Tribal Casino Employment and the Transformation of Tribes

Since its modest beginnings in the early 1980s, tribal gaming rapidly developed into a $25 billion industry that generates over a quarter million jobs. However, the increasing employment of non-Indians in tribal casinos prompts new cultural and political challenges. This paper analyzes tribal and commercial casino trade publications in order to demonstrate how tribal casino employee relations play a significant role in transforming public policy and perceptions of tribal government in the United States

Tribal Sovereignty and Worker Solidarity: Casino Labor Relations & Tribal Self-Determination

In this Gaming Research Colloquium talk, the April 2010 Gaming Research Fellow, Theodor Gordon, explores the relationships between tribal sovereignty and unionization at Indian casinos

Closing Casinos during COVID-19\u27s First Wave: Comparing Tribal and First Nation Pandemic Responses to State and Provincial Executive Orders

Our project compared Tribal and First Nation casinos’ responses to the first wave of COVID-19 to their neighboring provincial and state governments. We evaluated whether Tribal and First Nation casinos closed earlier, at the same time as, or after their neighboring provincial and state governments issued orders closing bars and restaurants. We also evaluated whether Tribal and First Nation casinos reopened earlier, at the same time as, or after neighboring provincial and state governments began lifting restrictions on bars and restaurants. We found that in the United States, the median Tribal casino closure date was 1 day before the surrounding state closed bars and restaurants and the median Tribal casino reopening date was 21 days after the surrounding state allowed partial bar and restaurant reopenings. In Canada, the median First Nation casino closure date was 3 days before the surrounding province ordered business closures and the median reopening date was 27 days after the surrounding province allowed partial business reopenings

Genocide to gaming: Cahuilla activism and the tribal casino movement

What began with a poker club on an isolated Indian reservation in the California desert now rivals the commercial casino industry. While Indian casinos have rapidly transformed native and non-native communities across North America, their growth entails indigenous traditions practiced for millennia. For the Cabazon Band, who opened that first poker club and later defended it before the Supreme Court, gambling is linked to their tradition of self-determination. In fact, the Cahuilla nations, which include the Cabazon Band, continue to exert cultural practices that have significantly altered California\u27s development since the arrival of Europeans, even during state-endorsed genocide. After the California Gold Rush, most settlers assumed that all Indian communities would collapse due to perceived inferiority. However, by the early twentieth century the Cahuilla and other native nations began lobbying Congress to once again recognize their right to self-determination. Today, native nation revitalization efforts, especially tribal casinos, prompt more and more non-Indians to engage in economic and cultural activities initiated by natives. Yet, among the public there remains a dearth of knowledge about American Indians tribes; competing settler perspectives of native nations affect the processes of tribal revitalization. In this talk I link historical to contemporary Indian relations in Cahuilla territory, the epicenter of Indian gaming, in order to better understand how native and settler communities define themselves in relation to each other

Food Insecurity, Racial Diversity, and Reservation Land: Relationships with the Credit Security Index

The Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibit banks from discriminating based on race, gender, national origin, and other protected categories. Are these laws enough to mitigate the multigenerational impacts of discrimination experienced by these communities? To address this question, this project examined whether unequal access to credit persists in communities on or adjacent to Indian reservations, communities with high levels of racial diversity, and communities where women are a greater percentage of the population than men

Garotas de loja, história social e teoria social [Shop Girls, Social History and Social Theory]

Shop workers, most of them women, have made up a significant proportion of Britain’s labour force since the 1850s but we still know relatively little about their history. This article argues that there has been a systematic neglect of one of the largest sectors of female employment by historians and investigates why this might be. It suggests that this neglect is connected to framings of work that have overlooked the service sector as a whole as well as to a continuing unease with the consumer society’s transformation of social life. One element of that transformation was the rise of new forms of aesthetic, emotional and sexualised labour. Certain kinds of ‘shop girls’ embodied these in spectacular fashion. As a result, they became enduring icons of mass consumption, simultaneously dismissed as passive cultural dupes or punished as powerful agents of cultural destruction. This article interweaves the social history of everyday shop workers with shifting representations of the ‘shop girl’, from Victorian music hall parodies, through modernist social theory, to the bizarre bombing of the Biba boutique in London by the Angry Brigade on May Day 1971. It concludes that progressive historians have much to gain by reclaiming these workers and the service economy that they helped create

Stability in Cosmology, from Einstein to Inflation

I investigate the role of stability in cosmology through two episodes from the recent history of cosmology: (1) Einstein’s static universe and Eddington’s demonstration of its instability, and (2) the flatness problem of the hot big bang model and its claimed solution by inflationary theory. These episodes illustrate differing reactions to instability in cosmological models, both positive ones and negative ones. To provide some context to these reactions, I also situate them in relation to perspectives on stability from dynamical systems theory and its epistemology. This reveals, for example, an insistence on stability as an extreme position in relation to the spectrum of physical systems which exhibit degrees of stability and fragility, one which has a pragmatic rationale, but not any deeper one