[3] Critic Louis Owens considers this novel to be Vizenor "[i]n his best trickster-satirist mode" as he accomplishes "a brilliant appropriation of the master symbol of Euroamerican history".
The plot of the novel involves the attempts by the heirs to bring home and re-bury two sets of remains: Columbus's and Pocahontas's.
Within the novel, the Casino and its neighboring ships—the restaurant Niña and the tax-free market Pinta—are declared by a federal judge to be a sovereign tribal territory, "the first maritime reservations in international waters".
[7] After the Casino is destroyed in a storm, the heirs move west and form a new nation, named Point Assinika, at Point Roberts, Washington, a location that, like the Northwest Angle, is an exclave, belonging to the United States but situated on the tip of a Canadian peninsula.
[1] This novel also includes characters from Vizenor's other books, including Bearheart, Griever de Hocus, Nanabozho, Almost Browne, and the Trickster of Liberty, as well as numerous references to such historical figures as Louis Riel and Black Elk and to figures from contemporary Native American literary culture, including Arnold Krupat, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Thomas King, and James Welch.