Seminole

For thousands of years before the coming of Europeans to southeastern North America, perhaps as many as 400,000 of the ancestors of the Seminoles built towns and villages and complex civilizations across the vast area. After 1510, when the Spaniards began to explore and settle in their territory, disease killed many of these people, but they were never "destroyed" or "conquered" as so many of the white men's history books proclaim. The survivors amalgamated across the peninsula of Florida and continued their lives.

When the first English speakers entered the area of the Southeast that is now Florida, in 1763, they found many of these survivors - from tribes such as the Euchee, Yamasee, Timugua, Tequesta, Abalachi, Coça, and hundreds of others, living as "free people" across the head of the Florida peninsula, on the Alachua savannah (the area now known as Alachua County). In Maskókî, the core language, istî siminolî meant that they were "free people" because they had never been dominated by the Spaniards or the English interlopers. In the Hitchíti dialect of Maskókî, today known as Mikisúkî, the same phrase was yat'siminoli. English speakers ignored their separate tribal affiliations and just called them all Seminolies, or Seminoles.

Further north, in the area now known as Georgia, English traders, who had begun to settle in 1690, found many other Maskókî tribes living along low-lying creeks, especially the Oconî and Ogichî tribes, and, once again ignoring the realities of the Natives' lives, they began to refer to these and, soon, all of the Maskokî peoples across the Southeast just as "Creeks."

With the end of the American Revolutionary War and the creation of the United States in 1784, white settlers moved steadily southward into the Spanish and former English colonies. It became more and more obvious that a clash between white immigrants and the Native inhabitants of the land would take place sooner or later. The new US began a concerted policy of taking or buying land from the Native tribes in the Northeast and the Atlantic seaboard states. By 1813, some of the Maskókî tribes in Alabama rose up against the white settlers and against those other tribes that supported white setlement. This conflict, known as the Creek War of 1813-14, was disastrous to the cultural relatives of the Seminoles. General, later president, Andrew Jackson, brought US troops to crush the uprising and forced a treaty on the Creeks that took over 2,000,000 acres of land away from his foes and his allies alike. Several thousand Maskókî people, warriors and their wives and children, lost their homes and migrated southward into Spanish Florida where they and the Seminoles increased their resistance to continued white settlement.

Over the next few years, Jackson illegally entered Spanish Florida to burn Native villages and kill resistance leaders. After the first series of encounters, known as the First Seminole War (1814-18), many Native families moved further into the peninsula. By 1820, the year before Spanish Florida became a US Territory, there were at least 5,000 Seminoles, "Creeks," and Mikisúkî people living in Florida. But a series of treaties made in the 1820s and early 1830s failed to protect the rights of Florida's Native people and, by late 1835, war broke out again.

This one, the Second Seminole War (1835-42), would be the longest, most costly, and the last of the US's Wars of Indian Removal fought east of the Mississippi River. It would be the first "guerilla"-style war fought by US troops. Not until the US entered a tiny country in Southeast Asia called Vietnam, more than a century later, would US soldiers fight again under such profoundly difficult conditions. The Natives were aided in their resistance by runaway slaves, who received protection from their Seminole allies (and, in some cases, owners) in return for a portion of the agricultural staples that they grew. These so-called "Black Seminoles" were fierce fighters who were also determined to preserve their freedom.

After the US withdrew from the fighting, in 1842, an uneasy peace lasted for fourteen years. Then, in 1856, Billy Bowlegs and his followers were directly provoked by US soldiers, and they retaliated. The ensuing series of skirmishes is known as the Third Seminole War (1856-58). When the US again made a unilateral decision to withdraw - and, again, with no treaty or victory, the Seminole Wars ended. Over 3,000 Natives had been forcibly removed from Florida to the Western territories of Arkansas and Oklahoma. Possibly as few as 300 remained in Florida, and those had taken refuge inside the inhospitable swamps of the Everglades.

Their descendants remained isolated in the Everglades until the late 1800s, when white traders, Christian missionaries, and US government agents began to enter their territory once again. From the 1920s onward, as the development Boom exploded in South Florida, the Seminoles lost more and more of their hunting lands to tourists and settlers and were slowly forced into a wage economy. They became agricultural workers in the vegetable fields of South Florida, and tourist attractions, in their unique and colorful patchwork clothing, producing souvenirs and "wrestling" alligators for the tourists.

In 1934 the US Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act, reversing earlier policies and encouraging tribes to form their own governments. By the 1950s, Congress also set about cutting off aid to tribes across the country and, faced with a loss of support at a time when they were not yet ready to compete in a capitalist economy, the Florida Seminoles chose to adopt a Constitutional form of government that could interface with the non-Native world. On August 21, 1957 a majority of Seminoles voted to establish an administrative entity called the Seminole Tribe of Florida. Not all of the Seminole people in Florida chose to participate in this new organization, however. In 1962, after several years of negotiations, a group of Mikisúkî speakers with camps along the Tamiami Trail created the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida.

Today, there are about 500 members of this Tribe. The Seminole Tribe of Florida has almost 3,000 members, living on five reservations across the peninsula at Hollywood (formerly Dania), Big Cypress, Brighton, Immokalee, and Tampa. The Tribe obtains significant annual gross revenues from such diverse economic sources as agriculture, citrus, aircraft production, gaming, tobacco sales, land leases, cattle, and aquaculture.