Fifty Shades of Black by Arthur Black Read Free Book Online

Luckily we can do this without unduly taxing the resources of the Canadian Navy. You can build your own warship at home. Just root around in the attic or closet and find that old hula hoop you never got rid of. Next, insert a series of thumbtacks into the hoop perimeter, each one pointing inwards. Finally, put that hoop around your waist, crank up your Chubby Checker eight-track and gyrate vigorously.
    Hey, presto! Your very own navel destroyer.
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    You Wanna Bet?
    Gambling is a tax on people who can’t do math.
    â€”Anon
    I am driving through the pre-dawn murk of an early summer morning en route to Pearson International Airport, a couple of hours away. I’m on a gravel road, no traffic in sight save an obese raccoon that waddles grumpily off the shoulder and into the brush as I pass.
    No other signs of life, but a glow looms up over the trees on my left. I get past the trees and . . .
    What
    The Hell
    Is That?
    A neon fortress is what it is, huge and totally alien here in the Ontario hinterland. A sign in front tells me I’m passing Casino Rama and that Dolly Parton will be performing next week. My wristwatch tells me it is 6:15 in the morning. And my eyes tell me that the Casino Rama parking lot is nearly full.
    Full??? At dawn????
    You betchum, Lone Ranger. Casino Rama is the largest First Nations casino in Canada. It is run by and for the Chippewa of Rama First Nation and it is a right little gold mine. The facility boasts a hotel, a five-thousand-seat entertainment centre, ten restaurants and two lounges, but mostly it boasts twenty-five hundred glittering slot machines and one hundred and ten gaming tables, all dedicated to separating gullible patrons from their money.
    No shortage of either. Casino Rama perches on the geographical forehead of the Greater Toronto Area, close to flush urban centres like Barrie, Lindsay and Midland. Literally millions of potential customers live within a bus ride of Casino Rama. Not surprisingly, the owners run free shuttle buses pretty much around the clock.
    It’s a pattern that’s repeating itself around North America. The Mdewakanton Sioux of northern Minnesota used to be an impoverished and hopeless band of American Indian survivors existing on government handouts. Now they have Mystic Lake Casino, proceeds from which have financed a community and fitness centre, a hotel and an RV park.
    The tribe has done so well it’s been able to hand out more than half a billion dollars in loans and outright grants to other tribes for economic development. They even made enough from the casino to donate fifteen million dollars to the University of Minnesota for scholarships and a new stadium.
    The Sioux have also set aside money to return to their roots, restoring wetlands to promote waterfowl, fish and wild rice plantings. They’ve put in organic gardens and planted fruit trees. And they’ve started an apiary to harvest honey.
    But their most lucrative honey-making beehive is the glitzy Mystic Lake Casino, which attracts thousands of customers (overwhelmingly white) each week to lay their money down and watch it disappear.
    It’s quite a turnaround. Just a few hundred years ago First Nations people of North America lived in all the abundance they could handle. Then came the white man who, by judicious application of whisky, guns, syphilis and lawyers, changed all that.
    In 1626 some European sharpie showered a band of East Coast Indians with sixty Dutch guilders’ worth of trinkets, beads and hatchets. The Indians had no concept of land ownership, but they accepted the gifts. Later, they learned they’d just sold Manhattan Island.
    Chief Dan George put it more succinctly: “At first we had the land and the white man had the Bible. Now we have the Bible and the white man has the land.”
    The great irony is, First Nations people through agencies like Mystic Lake Casino and Casino Rama are slowly buying their land back.
    And they’re