Native American Tribal Gaming as Crime against Nature

Abstract

This essay proposes that the legal form of Native American tribal sovereignty lately deployed in the establishment of casinos and other risky enterprises is not simply an atavistic political‐legal curiosity. Rather, it is exemplary of contemporary forms of spatial governmentality which, as they emerge from layered mappings of spatial difference inherited from earlier ethno‐racial and colonial governmental forms, are being constructed as new privatized and market‐rationalized spatial regimes of enclosure and exclusion, mediated through environmental and other rhetorics of crime‐risk and control.