Insight on the News: Brown won't gamble with Mohegan's' future: Mark Brown hopes the Mohegan Sun cas

Forty-four-year-old Mark Brown is chairman of the nine-member tribal council of the Mohegan Tribe of Connecticut. The Mohegans, he says, are the Indians that dames Fenimore Cooper called the Mohicans. But Cooper, who wrote The Last of the Mohicans, clearly was misinformed about their demise. The tribe did not come to an end with the death of its colonial-era chieftain, as Cooper claimed in his book. In fact there still are between 1,400 and 1,500 Mohegans, most living in eastern Connecticut centered around the town of Uncasville, where since the mid-1990s they've been building one of the world's largest gambling casinos and entertainment centers -- the Mohegan Sun.

The personable Brown, a former police officer, sat down with Insight on the day the Casino of the Sky opened. It's the newest addition to the tribe's spectacular gaming complex, the earliest being the Casino of the Earth. The planned opening spectacle was muted -- toned down to little more than a ribbon-cutting ceremony because of the national tragedy of Sept. 11, which had occurred two weeks earlier. Brown spoke about the enduring patriotism of Native Americans, who serve in the armed forces in impressive numbers. Earlier in the day, when he opened the new casino,

Brown had paused to look up at the large American flag hanging above and said: "Isn't that a great sight!"

Brown talked to Insight about what he hopes the $1 billion-plus project will bring to his tribe and surrounding Connecticut. Already more than 10,000 people of all races are employed at the complex. And, like other tribal leaders with whom Insight has spoken in recent years, he hopes that the tribe's new wealth from gaming will help re-establish his tribe's culture and language, as well as provide for health care, education and other needs. The Mohegan Sun has just donated $1 million to the fund for the families of those who died in the terrorist attacks on America. Recently, too, the tribe gave $10 million toward the National American Indian Museum, which will be built on The Mall in Washington.

Insight: You trace your Mohegan connection through your mother. How aware were you as a child of your inheritance?

Mark Brown: All of us who still lived in this area, in what we called Mohegan Hills, knew a lot about our heritage from the stories of the oral tradition because our grandparents told them to us. There never was a question about knowing who we were and where we came from.

A lot of things in the area carry the tribal name or that of Uncas, a famous Mohegan chieftain. Uncasville is the local town. There's Uncas Oil, Mohegan School, Mohegan Florists. People know us and that we've been here forever.

Almost from the beginning in the 1600s the Mohegans worked with colonists rather than against them, so there was assimilation, but we lived and belonged here and few thought anything about it. My earliest memory of standing up for our independent heritage was when I was going to nearby Mohegan School. We used to walk up to the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum, founded in the 1930s -- the oldest Indian museum in America run by Native Americans. I remember going up there with my class when Tommy and Gladys Tantaquidgeon, the founding curators of the museum, were there. Gladys was our medicine woman and is 102 now.

I was standing there with all my classmates and Tommy goes, "Mark, how are you doing?" And Gladys says, "Mark, come up here and give me a hug!" My classmates turned around and looked at me. "You know these Indians?" they asked. And I said, "I'm one of them."

Insight: Now that the tribe's a success, what are its priorities?

MB: Education is No. 1 for us. As soon as we started generating gaming revenues, we made sure money was set aside to send all our kids to college. If they need private schooling beforehand, that's paid for, too.

We purchase houses in the area as they come up for sale and make them available as rental housing for tribal members. We're ready to finish, probably in December, a housing project for the elder members of our tribe. Ralph Sturges [the current Mohegan chief, whose Mohegan name is G'tinemong] said we should take care of our elderly, and that is what we will be doing.

Health care is provided for everyone. If a tribal member wants to go out and start a business on his own, he doesn't have to worry about health care. We've got him covered. We cover his spouse as a tribal member as well because we're a tribal family and the couple are parents of tribal children.

We also are meeting our responsibility to our broader heritage. The reason we made the large donation we did to the Smithsonian [National Museum of the American Indian] is that we are committed to educating the public about the plight of Native Americans. There are more than 500 recognized tribes in the United States. Others are not as fortunate as we are -- we're in the forefront, and we should be helping any way we can, even in an indirect way.

Insight: Does it bother you that gambling is a major part of the entertainment offered at Mohegan Sun? Will gambling be dangerous to tribal traditions and well-being?

MB: Native Americans used to have a lot of games that were gambling-oriented, but there was concern when we began this venture. Take Gladys [Tantaquidgeon, the tribal medicine woman and materfamilias]. At the time we opened, Gladys was in her late 90s and we brought her down to the opening of phase one of our project before it got crazy inside and walked her around.

Before she saw it her comment had always been, "You guys going down to that gambling joint again today?" After we brought Gladys down here and walked her around she begins looking at the pictures of a lot of her relatives that are up on the walls of the casino and she stops and starts crying, and says: "I feel like I've come home."

We all broke down. It was acceptance by someone of great tribal esteem and reputation. Among many other achievements, Gladys Tantaquidgeon has honorary doctorates from Yale University and the University of Connecticut for her very serious research into herbal medicine and tribal traditions.

Insight: How is the tribal council chosen?

MB: We're elected by the membership every five years. There are nine people on the council. Last time around [in 2000], we had about 40 people running for those positions. We all come up for election at the same time. Eight of the nine previous councillors decided to nm and six of those eight were re-elected, which shows tribal confidence in the leadership. It also shows continuity.

What's happening now is that everyone's starting, to turn into a tribal politician, with campaign fliers and everything else. I would rather see it like it was before, campaigning more simply without all the sophistication! [Laughs.]

Insight: How is the tribal-council chairman chosen?

MB: The chairman is elected by the nine councillors in a room together.

Insight: Who gets to vote for the nine?

MB: All members of the tribe over age 18, so that means there's between 700 and 800 who vote.

Insight: If someone in the tribe has a grievance, how is that handled?

MB: It depends on what the issue is, but one thing I've always been very much for is open government, and the members have no problem telling me directly what they want. If they have a problem, they just call up about seeing me. They can scream and yell at me; they can turn blue in the face if they want to, but we'll get to the issue. Our whole council is accessible every minute of the day in the same way, so without the support of the tribal members there's not much that can be done.

Insight: Has everyone supported the move into gambling and entertainment?

MB: There were bits and pieces of opposition. My own younger brother, for example. But eventually he came around.

Insight: The use of the Mohegan language has died out, hasn't it? What have you been doing to revive it?

MB: The last fluent speaker of the language passed away in the early 1900s. There's no recording of any kind of the language being spoken, but Frank Speck [the late University of Pennsylvania anthropologist] wrote about our oral tradition. There is related information and interviews in old books done by travelers who visited the colonies and came into contact with the tribe. A great deal of this is preserved in the archives of England and France.

We started off with our tribal historian, Melissa Fawcett, concentrating on the problem. But the council of elders since has given the work to three linguistic professionals who are working with the material.

Insight: The goal is to have people learn to re-create the spoken language and teach it to the young?

MB: Absolutely. And we want the kids to learn it at a young age. When you're an adult, it likely will take forever to learn it, if it's possible at all. But our kids will pick it up and go on to teach their kids.

Personal Bio

Mark Brown: The chairman of the Mohegan tribal council, second from right, opens the Casino of the Sun.

Currently: Chairman, tribal council of the Mohegan Tribe of Indians of Connecticut.

Birth and family: May 28, 1957. Wife, Denise. Three sons and a daughter. Another child on the way.

Career: Officer in Norwich and Montville police departments in Connecticut for nine years. Retail manager.

Tribal work: Elected to five-year term in Mohegan Tribal Council, 1995. Elected tribal-council chairman, 2000. Before election to council, served on the tribe's Constitutional Review Board. Former co-chairman of the Justice Committee for the United Southern and Eastern Tribes Inc. and the Board of Trustees for the Eastern States Exposition.

Comment: "One thing that needs to be understood is that there's no way any tribe could do what we did here unless they had the support of the membership behind them. Without that, there's only so far you can go."

Stephen Goode is a senior writer for Insight.