Pequot Tribe Members Hit the Genetic Jackpot

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Tribal officials won't release details about the tribe's composition, including how many members have African American heritage. Defeated by Europeans in the 1600s, the Pequot lost their lands and were driven onto the Mashantucket reservation. Unable to make a living on the "rez," some left for nearby cities, where they were excluded by whites but accepted among African Americans.

By 1970, only two Pequot lived on tribal lands. One was Elizabeth George, the grandmother of former Pequot tribal chairman Richard "Skip" Hayward, 51, who was the Foxwoods casino mastermind. Local whites had begun to speak about the tribe in the past tense, but reports of its demise were premature.

In the 1960s and 1970s, many Native Americans began to identify more with their culture and tribal homelands. Dozens of Pequot returned from cities determined to restore their tribe and make the most of the semi-independent status Indian nations hammered out with the U.S. government more than 160 years ago.

"The first thing we have to do is move people back to the reservation," Hayward said in 1975, the year he became tribal chairman. "We can't have people spread out all over the country. If we are going to be a tribe, people have to be here."

In 1983, just months before Connecticut was to declare them extinct and confiscate their lands, Congress granted them federal recognition. Like other tribes, the Pequot tried farming and other industries. But frustrated by their lack of success and eager for quick economic development, they turned to gambling. Now the Pequot employ more than 11,000 people, half of whom are white. But that doesn't stop resentment of the tribe's wealth and power. And many question their racial authenticity.

"Locals do say, you know, that they aren't really Indians, that they are black and whatever. But I guess they, and the federal government, have their rules as to what is and is not an Indian," says Wesley J. Johnson Sr., mayor of Ledyard, Connecticut, where the reservation is located.

John Perry, the Pequot fire chief, says if outsiders use skin color to decide, they will fail. "If you look at the Pequot today you are going to see light-skinned ones, you are going to see dark-skinned ones," he says. "Some are going to look white, some black, but we're all related."

Yet there is a glaring absence of black-skinned faces in the official Pequot materials—in a brief tribal history compiled by the public relations department, for example—and even in television ads for Foxwoods. The subject elicits stony, uncomfortable silence from many Pequot.

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