The casino’s main level, housing nearly two acres of gambling machines, incorporates designs based on Potawatomi beadwork and weaving, along with floral and woodland motifs. The lobby’s Circle of Life multimedia sculpture reaches into the 100-foot glass tower banded by traditional designs. Ribbons of stepped masonry sheathing the three-level facility draw on woven design.

Local Native Americans identity the Potawatomis as the “Keepers of the Sacred Fire,” so a flame crowns the casino’s exterior glass entrance tower, and flame motifs appear throughout the building. Louis, to create a building rich in cultural symbolism. When the Forest County Potawatomis expanded the Potawatomi Bingo Casino, they asked Zimmerman Design of Milwaukee and Thalden Boyd, a Native American architectural firm in St. Profits from the casino fund tribal programs for housing, health care, education, day care, youth and elder services, and environmental protection.Īfter Congress enacted the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988, many of Wisconsin’s Indian gaming facilities opened in steel-pole buildings thrown up next to reservation smoke shops. Their Milwaukee casino transformed a former industrial brownfield into a mixed-use urban space and reclaimed their historic place in this region. Potawatomis populated the shores of Lake Michigan as long ago as the sixteenth century, and while the tribe ceded most of its lands to the federal government in the early 1800s, the ancestors of the Forest County Potawatomis refused to leave the Great Lakes region.

Potawatomi casino bingo