Warriors Without War: Seminole Leadership in the Late Twentieth Century
424
Warriors Without War: Seminole Leadership in the Late Twentieth Century
424Overview
Warriors Without War takes readers beneath the placid waters of the Seminole’s public image and into the fascinating depths of Seminole society and politics. For the entire last quarter of the twentieth century, the Seminole Tribe of Florida, a federally recognized American Indian Tribe, struggled as it transitioned from a tiny group of warriors into one of the best-known tribes on the world’s economic stage through their gaming enterprises. Caught between a desperate desire for continued cultural survival and the mounting pressures of the non-Indian world—especially, the increasing requirements of the United States government— the Seminoles took a warriorlike approach to financial risk management. Their leader was the sometimes charming, sometimes crass and explosive, always warriorlike James Billie, who twice led the tribe in fights with the State of Florida that led all the way to the US Supreme Court. Patricia Riles Wickman, who lived and worked for fifteen years with the Seminole people, chronicles the near-meteoric rise of the tribe and its leader to the pinnacle of international fame, and Billie’s ultimate fall after twenty-four years in power. Based partly on her own personal experiences working with the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Wickman has produced an in-depth study of the rise of one of the largest Indian gaming operations in the United States that reads almost like a Capote nonfiction novel.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817385392 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 424 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Warriors Without War
Seminole Leadership in the Late Twentieth CenturyBy PATRICIA RILES WICKMAN
THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 The University of Alabama PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1731-7
Chapter One
An Alternate Universe
Imagine the beauty of a placid lake, amid dense woods, in the early morning. Imagine the dark water, as smooth as glass and so still that the first curved rays of the sun reflect brilliantly from a hundred shimmering points on its surface. The serenity seems all-pervasive. It also is deceptive. The peace is only as deep as that crystalline surface, and the serenity is belied by the teeming cycle of life and death that occurs and recurs everywhere beneath it. That submarine kingdom exists in purposeful contrast to its exterior and, moreover, is a world apart from all that happens on its shores and beyond. This is the functional reality of the Seminole world—a world apart from the gargantuan non-Native world that surrounds and unceasingly presses upon it.
The contrast between the facade created by the surface and the reality of the depths is a chosen one—a social construct that has served the Seminole people and their ancestors, the Maskókî peoples of the lower Southeast, for many centuries, at least, as an ongoing process of maintaining cultural distinction and social equilibrium. The water metaphor is apt, given their long imaging of their world as water based and water bound. The depths absorb the cycles and shocks of quotidian human existence and, as long as those cycles and shocks are not permitted to break the surface, the Seminole world continues in balance—and in apparent serenity. This philosophy is no mere whim or passing fancy. It is the keystone of the Seminole world and, perforce, of the world the ancestors created.
To carry the metaphor of the lake one final step further, it is important to realize that the placid exterior of the Seminole world was not created to impress or deceive those who looked at it from the outside. It was created as an internal mechanism, designed to contain and control all of the inherent centrifugal forces of Maskókî culture. Over the centuries these have been codified, element by element, as systems for perpetuating intra- and interclan relations, settling grievances, expiating and closing the grieving process, regulating even the most intimate of personal relations, recovering from the imbalances of illnesses and deaths and natural disasters, and regulating myriad other facets of life among the ancestors of today's Seminole society.
* * *
In the larger view, however, the single most essential force in the Maskókî world was, arguably, warfare. By the late pre-Contact period, in the 1400s CE, warfare among the Maskókî ancestors was, in fact, "endemic, widespread, and an integral component of many aspects of daily life." During the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the period of European colonialization and U.S. nation building, the most powerful of the centrifugal forces of the southeastern Maskókî character was, and remained, warfare.
This quintessential characteristic of Maskókî life in the Southeast ended abruptly, and unnaturally, in 1858, with the unilateral decision of the U.S. government to withdraw its forces from Florida and end the final or Third Seminole War. Even though the withdrawal of U.S. troops ushered in a period of military peace (absence of physical warfare) that has endured into the present day (in Florida, at least), the social void created by the loss of warfare as a principal element of the Maskókî world has been detrimental to the continuity of the overall Seminole culture. Despite the fact that we (as non-Native observers) may reason from the vantage point of our twenty-first-century attitudes that peace is preferable to war (despite our obvious determination to perpetuate it), no such fine distinction can be applied retroactively to the lives of the Seminoles' ancestors, either across time or space. "From time to time, the earth needs to drink blood," the Seminoles say.
This centrality and social utility of warfare has never been sufficiently appreciated by non-Native observers, however. A reductionist fallacy, based upon an overemphasis on the value of sedentary agriculture as the principal determinant in shaping southeastern Indian society, has institutionalized an external historical imaging of the Maskókî peoples in which warfare, although significant, has been assigned a secondary role. That is to say that Euro-Americans have, once again, transferred their own beliefs onto another culture instead of examining that culture closely to discover its own beliefs. The documentation, moreover, provides no basis for such an assumption other than an interpretive choice. While the value of sedentary agriculture (the ability to harness Nature for increased production and, therefore, increased human survival) should not be underplayed, the centrality of warfare in Maskókî life could hardly be overplayed. This latter understanding reverberates throughout the history of the Seminoles and provides the touchstone for the present work.
Warfare calibrated and recalibrated intertribal relations. It provided the single most valuable, and viable, path to preferment for males (and, in certain instances, for females), and mixed and remixed marriageability options for females, among other critical processes. The core and plurality of items wrapped into the Medicine bundle, the "ark of the covenant" in Maskókî spirituality, always were war-related items. The attrition of these war items, following the end of tribal warfare in the lower Southeast in 1858, has weakened the Seminole people in their own eyes even as the social memory of the void continues to occupy them, reverberating daily across the generations, in their discourse.
The numerous and militarily superior tribes of the lower Southeast had been the first North American Natives to meet and interact with the Europeans on a sustained basis. It was they who resisted colonialization the longest, and whom Euro-American social scientists today characterize as the Maskókî (var., Muscogee) peoples. The external relations of these tribes with the earliest European colonizers, the Spaniards, and with the later French, English, and European Americans, has been documented extensively by each of these powers, albeit within the framework of their own sociopolitical objectives. Historians and other writers, over time, have used and reused these early cross-cultural misunderstandings. As but one case in point, the Europeans' rhetorical attempts to image women in Maskókî society as second-class citizens have not yet managed to completely erode the power of Seminole women. Failure to understand on the part of the Europeans, obviously, has not necessarily implied a failure to sustain on the part of the Indians.
This ultimate series of the United States' Wars of Indian Removal east of the Mississippi River would be fought against descendants of many of these same Maskókî tribes, as the Creek War of 1813–14 (in Alabama); the Creek War of 1836 (in Georgia); and the First (1817–18), Second (1835–42), and Third (1856–58) Seminole Wars (in Florida).
These conflicts constituted a watershed era in the modern history of the Indian people of today's Florida. The effects of these Wars of Removal, perpetrated upon the Indian people in blatant determination to remove them from the paths of white settlement, were geographically definitive. At least three thousand of their Creek relatives were deprived of their ancient lands in Alabama and Georgia. During the second quarter of the century, several thousand were forced westward, completely leaving their ancestral homes for Indian Territory in the West. Following 1814, about three thousand or so moved southward into Florida, however, to join several thousand Florida Indians still surviving in their own ancient, peninsular, homelands. Euro-American politicians and historians would quickly begin to speak of them all generically as "Seminoles" despite the fact that the Indians themselves knew quite well that they were Coca, Abalache, Hitchiti, Yamassee, Yuchi, Calusa, and other members of the larger Maskókî cultural family of tribes.
These Wars of Removal were, inarguably, socially disruptive. Clans and nuclear families were ripped apart. Animosities between those who outfought the United States to remain in Florida and those who were removed to Indian Territory reverberate to the present day. Indeed, the former still view the latter as "traitors" for having left Florida, despite the fact that those who did so were either physically captured or so psychologically debilitated that they could no longer resist U.S. military power. We shall view the ongoing impact of this fierce and continuing antagonism, set in motion over 160 years ago, from events as relatively small as the ongoing interactions of the Florida and Oklahoma Seminoles at annual "Tribal Fairs" and "Nation Days," to those as large as the final disposition of the Indian Land Claims Case and U.S. government awards of millions of reparation dollars (in chapter 5).
The wars were not, however, either culturally, socially, or politically destructive in any definitive sense. The descendants of those who remained in Florida would take refuge in the southern peninsula and, ultimately, in the impenetrable Everglades and reemerge, in the middle of the twentieth century, in U.S. political terms, as three separate entities: the Seminole Tribe of Florida, a federally recognized (FR) tribe comprising mainly Miccosukee speakers, together with a minority of Maskókî or Creek speakers; the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, a politically separate FR tribe; and a tiny group of "independent Seminoles," who meet the requirements for enrollment in either FR tribe, but never have joined either, and are not federally recognized as anything other than individual Indians. Despite political differences, they are nevertheless all the same people, culturally. Since the 1950s, however, they have charted separate political and economic courses. All, nevertheless, have maintained the same overarching objective: the cultural survival of the people as Indians and as sovereign nations, politically separate from the United States.
Students of southeastern history will be familiar with numerous tribal "names" that have disappeared over the centuries, such as the Escampabas or Calusas, the Tequestas, Jeagas, Ais, Abalaches, Abalachicolas, and many others. Today, however, the surviving descendants of the southeastern Maskókî peoples are known to Euro-Americans, and recognized by the U.S. government, as the following separate FR tribes.
Seminole Tribe of Florida (governmental offices in Hollywood, Florida)
Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida (Tamiami Trail, Florida)
Poarch Band of Creek Indians (Atmore, Alabama)
Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians (Philadelphia, Mississippi)
Seminole Nation of Oklahoma (Wewoka, Oklahoma, a removed tribe)
Muscogee (Creek) Nation (Ocmulgee, Oklahoma, a removed tribe)
Chickasaw Nation (Ada, Oklahoma, a removed tribe)
Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana (Charenton, Louisiana)
Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma (Durant, Oklahoma, a removed tribe)
Thlopthlocco Tribal Town (Okemah, Oklahoma, a removed tribal town)
Alabama Coushatta Tribe of Texas (Livingston, Texas, a removed tribe)
Kialegee Tribal Town (Wetumka, Oklahoma, a removed tribal town)
Jena Band of Choctaw Indians (Jena, Louisiana)
Coushatta Indian Tribe (Elton, Louisiana)
Tunica-Biloxi Tribe (Marksville, Louisiana)
Some of these are tribal designators that have been used by the Indians for hundreds of years, at least. Others have been wholly applied by Europeans and Euro-Americans over time. Related by culture and speaking dialects of a core language (Maskókî, erroneously called Creek by English speakers since the eighteenth century), their villages, towns, and cities ranged across what are today five complete states (Florida, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi) and parts of four others (North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Louisiana). The Spaniards recognized immediately that these tribes were different from all of the other peoples whom they had met in the Americas, and that the systems of confrontation and control that had been successful for them (the Spaniards) in Central and South America would not be successful here because of these Natives' especially high degree of sociopolitical organization and their abilities and willingness to confront the Spaniards in battle.
Consequently, the title of this book, Warriors Without War, is meant to reflect a deeper and more fundamental imaging of the Seminole people and, particularly, their leadership, than could be conveyed by any other term. Without the critical outlet that war provided historically, male paths to preferment and power became attenuated during the century between 1858 and 1957, after which a new path opened up. From 1957 and the creation of the political entity, based upon the institution of a white-man's-style constitution and bylaws, the concomitant growth of a Euro-American-style bureaucratic infrastructure created brand new avenues to power and preferment for "politicians" in the new "Seminole Tribe of Florida." And although neither the form nor the function were their own, culturally, they accepted the form and began to adopt and adapt the function in order to fulfill the requirements of the U.S. government, as they imperfectly understood them.
The "fit" never was a good one. This new and imposed system of governance, accepted specifically to satisfy yet another pressure placed upon them by the U.S. government, was meant neither to augment nor to replace traditional forms of governance. In point of fact, not all FR tribes have agreed to accept written, U.S.-style constitutions. These tribes are known across Indian Country simply as "traditional government" tribes. And, even among those with written organizational documents, in recent years a number of tribes have reasserted their autonomy by removing from their constitutions former U.S. requirements that they obtain the formal approval of the U.S. secretary of the interior for various tribal actions.
Seen through Seminole eyes, their new constitution and bylaws preserved many elements of governance that appeared to be analogous or adaptable to traditional forms and ignored or buffered the people from those elements that were not understandable or were antithetical. In other words, the documents sheathed the Seminole world in a layer of bureaucracy that could protect it, for as one prominent Medicine man expressed it, "the Indian world and the white man's world are like two rivers, running parallel, never flowing together." As one result, there arose a new breed of warrior—not in place of a traditional style of leader but in addition to it. And, in limited ways, purely political warfare began to fill the void created by the end of military warfare. The major concern for the Seminole people, in the twentieth century as in the twenty-first, was whether these new warriors would, indeed, use the white man's political systems to protect the people, or be co-opted by the outside system to the detriment of the people and the demise of the Seminoles' culture.
* * *
With the advice of officials of the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the Florida Indians formed a two-headed government in 1957. Today, after some procedural modifications enacted over the years, the first of these, the Seminole Tribal Council, is led by a chairman elected at large by the tribal citizens, and by reservation representatives, elected by each of the three "big Res's," Big Cypress (BC), Brighton, and Hollywood. The council directs the internal affairs of the tribe as well as many of the external business affairs. The second, a Board of Directors, with a president and representatives elected in the same manner as the members of the council, was envisioned originally as the entity that would direct the external or business affairs of the tribe. This seemed especially viable in the mid-twentieth century when cattle raising was a central element of the tribe's burgeoning economy. Since the FR Indian tribes are acknowledged as sovereign nations by the U.S. government, the Board of Directors would (it was first thought) oversee the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Inc.—a corporate entity that would be able to enter into contracts without the complete legal shield of sovereign immunity that clothed the sovereignty of the tribe itself. To provide continuity of action between the two bodies (Tribe and Tribe, Inc., or, more simply, Council and Board, as they are known within the tribe), the council chairman sits also as the board's (voting) vice president, while the board's president also functions as the (voting) vice chairman of the council.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Warriors Without War by PATRICIA RILES WICKMAN Copyright © 2012 by The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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