Winners … Seminole members celebrate the purchase of Hard Rock in 2006. After acquiring the Hard Rock International brand in 2006, and pursuing an aggressive programme of global expansion, their income now stands at over $5bn a year. By 1999, gambling was generating about $96m a year for the tribe. “They went from being an extremely impoverished tribe, eking out a subsistence living, to being fabulously wealthy in a generation.” A year after the Seminoles’ bingo hall opened, revenue had reached $1m a month.

“The Seminoles really are the pioneers of Indian gambling,” says Professor Bob Jarvis, expert in gaming history at Florida’s Nova Southeastern University. It has since mushroomed into a $34bn industry. The legal battle that ensued ended with a district court ruling in favour of the Seminoles and ultimately led to the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, a federal law allowing all Native American tribes to operate casinos, as long as they shared some of the revenue with their state’s governments. They began their entrepreneurial endeavours by opening lucrative tax-free tobacco shops in the 1970s, then became the first tribe in the country to establish a casino, in the form of a high-stakes bingo hall in 1979. Since 1988, Native American tribes can operate casinos if they share the revenue with states. With a name that derives from the Spanish word “cimarrones”, meaning runaways or wild ones, the Seminoles have proved a force to be reckoned with ever since. But a couple of hundred Seminoles hid in the Everglades, led by such legendary chiefs as Osceola and Billy Bowlegs, where they camped out for decades and resisted government forces. Following the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the vast majority of tribe members were forcibly relocated to the Indian Territory in Oklahoma, over 1,000 miles to the west. Known as the “unconquered tribe”, they have long boasted of their status as the only Native American tribe to refuse to sign a peace treaty with the US government. In many ways, the flashy new building is a fitting symbol of Seminole defiance.

Following centuries of persecution and displacement, the tribe now has just over 4,000 members, scattered across six sites around the state and headquartered in the 500-acre Hollywood reservation, where the Hard Rock hotel now stands. The hotel is the work of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, a Native American group whose population on the peninsula numbered 200,000, when Spanish colonisers first arrived in the 1500s. And it is all the more remarkable given that it has been built by a community that was almost hounded from existence. It is an unlikely thing to find standing in the middle of this non-place of parking lots, dive bars and pawn shops.

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