(Contains 4 figures and 83 notes.Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut unveiled plans for a new multi-million-dollar casino on the island of Puerto Rico on Tuesday. The article concludes with a discussion of insights gained into the new power relations between the whites and the Native Americans of southeastern Connecticut. Two conceptual frameworks are used for this analysis: Michel Foucault's assertions of how statements or discourses determine the representations these groups create of each other, together with Jean-Francois Lyotard's discussion of incompossible (because of an incalculable, unrepresentable difference) translation of languages/discourses used by different social groups. The purpose of this article is to explain, from a critical social science perspective, the continued antagonistic relations between the Mashantucket Pequots and the white residents of surrounding townships. In July 2003 neighboring towns started another attack on the tribe because of state support for a Mashantucket Pequot water district. Yet their accusations of wrongdoing by the Mashantucket Pequots have little validity. These residents have expressed their resentments in various surveys carried out by academics as well as by local newspapers and in continued litigation against any form of annexation of land by the Mashantucket Pequots. Many white residents from these small, rural communities in southeastern Connecticut also rushed, in the late 1990s, to testify against any form of Indian gambling in the nearby states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

They have flared up on numerous occasions and especially since 1982 when the Mashantucket Pequots considered building a gambling venue on their reservation.

Conflictual relations between the owners of Foxwoods Casino and Resort, who are American Indians, and the white residents of Ledyard and nearby Preston and North Stonington townships in southeastern Connecticut are long-standing.

Foxwoods casino owner