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  One night, I walked back to my tent-cabin from the lodge at Bamurru Plains through the corkscrew pandanus palms. The full moon was high, cane toads were clustering in the dim glow, and the wallabies were moving through camp nearly silently. The water buffalo out on the floodplain had receded from view—drifting at sunset for the night into the woods, just up the trail from me. From outside, the inward-sloping walls of the tent-cabin looked opaque. But when I stepped inside and doused the lights, the sheer canvas seemed to vanish, and I was left with only the faintest scrim between me and the outer world, which lay in silhouette under the moon.

  Out there was a realm of exceeding flatness, where salt water and fresh water are fighti ng over the land. Each has its season. Fresh water has the monsoon, when rain drowns the country. Across the Top End, Aussies lead visitors to high spots, extend their arms, and say, like so many Noahs, "All this will be under water during the wet"—the local name for the monsoon. Salt water owns the rest of the year, and it's always seeking to work its way inland, always trying to claim another portion of solid earth. As the planet warms and the oceans rise, this coastal fringe will be one of the drowned lands.

  But for now there's still a temporary truce between salt water and fresh. One sign of it is the chenier just beyond the lodge at Bamurru Plains. A chenier—the name is Louisiana French—is a historic, hard-packed ridge of sand and shell rubble laid down by the sea. At Bamurru, it looks like a slightly raised roadbed, a foot-high levee. During the wet, water fills the floodplains and advances right up to the chenier, where the guides park their airboats. You'd be tempted to say that the coastline, some three miles to the north, had wandered inland. But the floodwater is fresh—runoff from the rugged sandstone escarpment farther inland, which sheds water like oilskin. And in this harsh but delicate landscape, where the overriding ecological concern is the balance between salt water and fresh water, the buffalo trails act as unwanted capillaries, breaking through the all but indiscernible high ground and allowing salt water to infiltrate the swamps.

  I'd spent the morning on an airboat with a Scottish guide named Kat, flat-bottoming our way into the paperbark swamps. It wasn't merely the mud that seemed primeval. It was also the abundance of life—the jabirus stalking the open shallows and the endless chatter of magpie geese. Ducks rose in whistling clouds, and from the tops of the paperbarks, sea eagles watched us, drifting among the shadows. So did the crocodiles disguised as floating swamp scum.

  This was nearly the end of the dry season, and the shrinking floodwaters had concentrated the flocks and extended the grassland, where buffalo and horses grazed in the distance. And because large mammals are endemic in the American imagination of nature—in my imagination, that is—it was hard to perceive them as historically "unnatural." There they were, after all, their presence as undeniable as that of the wallabies and striated herons.

  But the horses are wild, the feral relics of white men who came to this district for the buffalo shooting in the late nineteenth century. The horses—"brumbies," in Australian—stand hock-deep in water and develop swamp cancer: tumorlike, pustulant growths on their legs and bellies and noses. This is the northern edge of a continent-wide herd of feral horses and donkeys—about 300,000 horses and more than 5 million donkeys nationwide.

  At Wongalara we flew low over the brush, stirring a small herd of horses and donkeys. They loped ahead of our helicopter, casting scornful glances in our direction. The true work of restoration can't begin until these animals are gone.

  At Wongalara, too, I watched a pitfall trap being set for small, nocturnal marsupials—which is mostly what the Top End has for native mammals. The trap is a long wall of toughened rubber belting. Mammals run into the wall and scurry down its length, only to fall into a plastic bucket set into the ground. In the morning, they're weighed, counted, and released. But scientists are finding almost nothing in the traps anymore. The marsupials are ideal prey for feral cats, millions of them, which are also devastating small reptiles and ground-nesting birds. There are now indications of a full-blown population crash.

  Wherever I went, I felt I was looking at a hidden landscape. What I needed most were guides to what could not be seen, to what was invisible. I don't mean the Aboriginal spirits inscribed in the rock of Kakadu itself. I mean the species that had gone or were going missing. As the days passed, I found myself becoming more and more a tourist of the vanished and the vanishing. Saltwater crocodiles have rebounded since hunting was banned in 1971, and they now pervade nearly every body of water in the Top End. But for many other species, time in the Top End is now over. What makes it all the harder is this: the species becoming invisible through extinction were largely invisible to begin with.

  Perhaps it would be easier just to take the Top End at face value: the uranium mine, the cankered horses, the missing mammals, the plague of toads. Perhaps it would be easier just to give in to the "naturalness"—to stand, as I did, one day, on a sandstone ridge with Sab Lord and look out over a beautiful grassland enclosed by rugged hills. Out on the plain, a herd of horses grazed beside a copse that might almost have been aspen. It looked more than natural. It looked like a pictorial vision of natural completeness, or would have if we'd been in New Mexico. But as we walked down the hill, Sab and I saw a small monitor—a type of native lizard—peering out of the stony shade. "That's the first one of those I've seen this year," Sab said, and there we were, back in the extinction we had never left.

  Reservations

  Ariel Levy

  FROM The New Yorker

  DO YOU LIKE SAND, quaintness, twenty-eight-dollar salads, parties under white tents, investment bankers, hip-hop stars, Barbara Walters, locally grown produce, DJ Samantha Ronson, and lovely tablescapes? Then Southampton is the place for you: a land of natural splendor and immodest indulgence. A Victorian cottage on Hill Street—nowhere near the beach—rents for $100,000 a summer. (The website advertising it says that it's "perfect for your staff or overflow guests.") A spacious place with a water view will set you back about $500,000. The real cost, though, isn't money; it's time. To get to the Hamptons, just east of Manhattan, you must sit on the Long Island Expressway—the biggest parking lot in the world, as they say—for hour upon hour of overheated immobility.

  And it's only going to get worse, because the Shinnecock Indian Nation, based on a reservation just minutes from the center of Southampton, intends to open a casino—or several—on Long Island. A set of architect's renderings, picturing a great room with burgundy banquettes and rows of shining slot machines, is already hanging on the walls of a trailer that the three tribal trustees use as an office. The Shinnecocks want a "high-class Monte Carlo—type" operation, a member of the tribe's Gaming Authority said, somewhere "near our homelands in Southampton," and perhaps another, less posh facility in Nassau County. "If the Mashantuckets can have the highest-grossing casino in the world in the woods of Connecticut," a former Shinnecock trustee named Fred Bess told me, referring to the Mashantucket Pequots' Foxwoods resort, "just think what we could do twenty miles out of Manhattan."

  The Shinnecocks have said that they will build roads to funnel casino traffic away from the LIE, but there are many people in the Hamptons—people who don't have the money to commute from Manhattan by helicopter but who are still rich enough to be accustomed to getting what they want—who are aghast at the prospect of more cars on the road, not to mention the unquaintness of a casino marring their manicured pastoral. Such people "do not want their idyllic environment hurt by the added traffic, congestion, and noise of a gaming facility," Senator Charles Schumer wrote to the Bureau of Indian Affairs several years ago. The state senator Kenneth LaValle said that the tribe was "blatantly threatening the quality of life on the East End."

  But the Shinnecocks might be forgiven for considering their own quality of life, which is markedly different from that in the rest of the Hamptons. The median household income on the reservation, according to the 2000 census, is $14,055 a year. Only about six hundred peop
le live on the Shinnecocks' eight hundred acres, which have the feel of a scruffy summer camp. During the day, you can hear the zoom of boys speeding along the bumpy roads into the forest on four-wheel ATVs. At night, jacked-up cars with hip-hop on the stereo cruise toward Cuffee's Beach, where kids go to hang out and hook up and get high. The land is green and wild, and most of the houses have an unfinished wall covered in white Tyvek house wrap or a roof draped in blue tarp. Because the land is held in trust by the tribe, it is impossible to get a mortgage on the reservation, where banks cannot foreclose, so young couples often add a room onto a family home, and houses grow into haphazard hugeness.

  People still hunt in the forest and send their kids down to the water to collect buckets of clams, activities that the Shinnecocks view as part of their ancestral tradition. The tribe is indigenous to the spot. Since there is no evidence to suggest a large-scale migration onto or off Long Island, historians believe that the native people that Europeans encountered when they arrived, in the 1600s, were the direct descendants of the aboriginal inhabitants of the land, ten thousand years ago.

  In the mid-seventeenth century, though, the Shinnecock population dwindled, when new diseases came ashore with the colonists. It became necessary to intermarry, and the Shinnecocks often married African Americans. Today, most Shinnecocks look black but feel Indian—an identity quite distinct from both the crisp Yankee austerity of Old Southampton and the flamboyance of its more recent summer immigrants. The reservation is an insular place, and nearly everyone there is related. If a member of the tribe was in the hospital, Marguerite Smith, a tribal attorney, told me, "two hundred of us might show up and claim we are immediate family."

  The question of whether to open a casino—which many Shinnecocks see as inconsistent with their traditional way of life—has created the kind of disagreement you might expect from people living in what is essentially an endless family reunion. In 1996, at a tribal meeting in the cinder-block Shinnecock Community Center, a discussion about the possibility of building a casino exploded into a brawl. By the time it was over, people were throwing chairs at one another and one trustee's brother had bitten a woman's finger to the bone.

  "You just look at this place," Mike Smith, who has been the pastor of the Shinnecock Presbyterian Church for twenty-five years, said, one afternoon a few months ago. He was walking near his house, on Little Beach Road, which he shares with his wife, three grown children, and three grandchildren. "You go down to Cuffee's Beach, the DuPonts and the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers are right there." Looking out on Shinnecock Bay, one sees the sandy spit of Meadow Lane, studded with grand old estates, just across the water. The Shinnecocks' parcel of forest and beachfront would be worth billions of dollars if it were ever for sale. "It makes no sense, no logical sense, for us to still be here in light of that," Smith said. "But here we sit."

  Aside from three-card monte and Wall Street, Manhattan doesn't have much in the way of gambling. New Yorkers travel south to Atlantic City, or up to Connecticut, to gamble. Long Islanders take a high-speed ferry to New London or Bridgeport, near the Pequots' and the Mohegans' casinos, the two largest in North America.

  This maritime movement of business from the East End of Long Island to Connecticut follows a pattern established centuries ago. The currency that sustained the fur trade between European settlers and native people was wampum—beads made from the purple interior of clamshells. The Shinnecocks produced wampum from shells found on the banks of Long Island Sound and brought it by canoe to Connecticut, where the Pequots, a more powerful tribe, controlled the local economy. Only when the Pequots were routed by the Europeans, in the Pequot War of 1637, did they begin trading with the settlers directly. A Shinnecock casino would, in a sense, renew that direct exchange.

  The Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos are enormously successful, and their earnings have transformed the Indian nations that operate them. Before the Mohegans started their business, they were a scattered group of mostly impoverished individuals. Now they are a model of organized prosperity. If you could use a scholarship, health care, child care, or retirement benefits, it is far better these days to be Mohegan than it is to be American.

  Since the inception of the United States, Indian governments have been recognized as sovereign entities, exempt from taxation. But the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 requires tribes to negotiate compacts with states in which they operate casinos, and those compacts almost always include a revenue-sharing agreement. Last year, the slot machines at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun were the Connecticut government's biggest private source of revenue, yielding $362 million. Foxwoods has eleven thousand employees, making it one of the largest employers in the state.

  Once a tribe is federally recognized, it is eligible to open a casino, and the promise of wealth attracts financial backers to pay for the necessary builders, lawyers, and lobbyists. The Shinnecocks have been pursuing recognition since 1978—nine years before the Supreme Court ruled, in California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, that states have no authority to regulate gambling on reservations. In support of their claim, they have submitted more than forty thousand pages of documentation substantiating their history and lineage. Meanwhile, tribes across the country have bloomed into thriving mini-nations, while the Shinnecocks, as Lancelot Gumbs, a senior trustee, said, have remained "stuck in the Stone Age."

  This summer, after thirty-two years, the Bureau of Indian Affairs declared that the Shinnecocks had met the seven criteria for federal acknowledgment, and that their petition had been provisionally approved; after a thirty-day waiting period, they would finally have tribal status. One of the trustees, Gordell Wright, described a celebratory mood: "We're going to be doing a lot of singing and eating." But, a few days before the waiting period ended, a group calling itself the Connecticut Coalition for Gaming Jobs filed an objection with the Interior Board of Indian Appeals, arguing that "a new casino in Southern New York will mean job losses and higher taxes for Connecticut." The group's spokesman refused to disclose anything about its membership or its financing.

  The Shinnecocks were shocked, but their financiers of the past seven years, Marian Ilitch and Michael Malik, were not. The two have started casinos with, among others, the Little River Band of Ottawas and the Los Coyotes Band of Cahuillas and Cupeños. "Every time we do this, some bogus front appears to delay the process," their spokesman, Tom Shields, told me. Both the Mohegans and the Pequots have denied any affiliation with the Connecticut Coalition for Gaming Jobs, but, Shields said, "it's obvious who benefits by having the Shinnecocks delayed."

  Ilitch and Malik, for their part, have reportedly paid lobbyists more than $1 million to meet on the Shinnecocks' behalf with Governor David Paterson, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and Senator Charles Schumer's chief of staff; they paid another million to the Washington lobbying firm Wheat Government Relations. But their investment is negligible compared with the potential payoff. Ilitch owns a casino in Detroit that grosses $400 million a year. "In the twenty-two years we've been involved with Indian gaming, so far, knock on wood, we've not had anybody fail in the process," Malik said.

  The Shinnecock reservation is bordered on the north by Montauk Highway, a two-lane strip that stretches west from the more glamorous parts of Southampton. During the past three decades, since the Shinnecocks began selling tax-free cigarettes, it has become crowded with businesses—Eagle Feather, Rain Drops, True Native—that have turned the edge of the reservation into a kind of theme park of Indianness and smoking. The largest of them, the Shinnecock Indian Outpost, has two totem poles in the parking area, and sells cigarettes, moccasins, and lobster rolls. There are also Navajo blankets, toy tomahawks made in Korea, and many varieties of dream catchers. Gumbs built the store on his mother's land allotment, and is regarded as one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the tribe.

  On the day I visited him, Gumbs was wearing a button-down shirt with eagle feathers embroidered on the breast pocket, a gold necklace with a bear-claw charm, a
big, gold-toned watch, and an assertive cologne. He is fifty years old, with a long black braid down his back, and he speaks at an unusual volume. In the deli section of his store, Gumbs told me that he grew up "on the powwow trail," visiting other reservations throughout the East for festivals and ceremonies. "I saw true governments in action," he said. "Whether it was education, whether it was health care—all of these things that we're talking about now—other tribes were doing that back then. And it always baffled me as to why we felt like we were there, when we were light-years behind." Gumbs has long been the tribe's most vocal advocate of gaming. "I guess that was the motivating factor, and just listening to the other men in the community saying, 'Damn, we don't have nothing!'"

  Gumbs led me out of the store so that we could talk in private. We passed a series of burgundy cottages where children were playing with a baby raccoon in the yard, and walked toward a two-story building with a wooden Indian standing guard out front. Inside was a room the size of a high school gym, where Gumbs's yellow Hummer was parked next to a forty-five-foot RV. There was a bar in one corner, and the walls were decorated with Mylar tassels. High overhead was Gumbs's DJ booth, where he spins records when he rents out his cavernous bachelor pad for parties.

  "Even though our children went to the public school, the majority of them were behind all of the ethnic groups. We're behind even the Latinos now!" Gumbs said. "You have these two tribes that spring up miraculously out of thin air right around us and create two of the largest casinos in the world." He did not believe that the Mohegans had anything to do with the Connecticut Coalition's efforts to sabotage the Shinnecocks, but he wasn't convinced about the Pequots. Gumbs said that if he found out that any Indian nation was involved, he would consider it an act of war. "We will go after them just like they came after us," he said. I asked him if he meant by creating competition. "There's a lot of other ways," he said, ominously, "but I'm not going to get into that."