American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Recent scholarship argues that American Indian political activities are increasingly being understood in the context of gaming and that a growing "rich Indian racism" portrays American Indian nations as rich, greedy, and inauthentic. This article analyzes newspaper coverage on American Indian land claims to test the proposition of rich Indian racism. Data on national coverage show that language that references gaming has characterized much of the reporting on land claims. An analysis of newspaper coverage of land claims in central New York reveals a tendency to describe and characterize American Indian nations and their claims negatively, as greedy, threatening, or unfair.