Miccosukee Indians Facing Crucial Crossroads in Florida Everglades Story-Date: 04:43 p.m. PST Wednesday, December 3, 1997 ------------------------------------------------------------ Miccosukee Indians Facing Crucial Crossroads in Florida Everglades By Paul Brinkley-Rogers, The Miami Herald Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News Dec. 4--Within an hour's drive of South Beach's Ocean Drive, Leroy Osceola lives in a chickee in the Everglades, where he teaches his son Mad Bear to spear fish. Osceola says he may be the last of the Miccosukees to know about the healing herbs and the secret life of the birds and fish that share his life in the Glades. Osceola, 38, a traditional Miccosukee who refuses to join his tribe, makes a living building chickees -- the traditional thatched hut -- out of cypress logs for non-Indian families. New prosperity wrung from casino profits is dramatically changing the Miccosukee tribal identity, Osceola says. It will make this small nation of resisters docile. The old ways will be lost. "The federal government can erase all these things in one day," he says. Stanley "Mick Jagger" Frank Jr., 42, lives in a modern home with the water of the Glades lapping at the turf of his homesite. He is a member of the tribe -- one of this gathering of Dolphins supporters, Marlins fanatics, small-business people, teachers and bureaucrats who call themselves Miccosukees. Frank is a Rolling Stones fan -- he is free to make that choice, he says -- married to a non-Indian. But he wears his hair long in the traditional style and always dons the colorful Miccosukee "big shirt" that makes him look like a National Geographic portrait. He also makes a living stripping cypress logs and building chickees. This is a critical moment for the Miccosukees, whose special relationship with the Everglades was recognized in original federal legislation designating it a national park. Although there is archaeological evidence of all kinds of habitation in the swamps before the Miccosukees' more recent arrival, the tribe's presence predates Everglades National Park's 1947 creation. Now the Miccosukees have cash, they have political clout, but where do they go from here? On a collision course with the National Park Service over their need to build more housing within Everglades National Park -- a fight that their political leaders say requires unity -- they are split between those nostalgic for their past and those who want to benefit from casino profits. Osceola is one of a handful of Miccosukees, perhaps 60 people, who have refused to enroll in the 630-member tribe, claiming that tribal government is a thing foisted on Indians by Washington so that they can be controlled. All those new pickup trucks, satellite dishes, vacuum cleaners and air-conditioned homes will put out the fire in the Miccosukee soul and sap the strength that enabled them to survive extermination or deportation to Oklahoma, he argues. "This reservation here is not really our land," Osceola says. "All these houses, the police station, the schools -- this is all a dream to make us forget who we really are, so we will finally go away." Their numbers are small, but they have influence, claiming to be the guardians of Miccosukee religious powers. Even the tribe's chairman, Billy Cypress, is careful not to be critical of these "independents," as he calls them, saying only when asked about them: "They have a right to their opinion." The tribe, Osceola says, is a "club," formed to divide up proceeds from gambling. The elected leaders of the tribe are "scouts" who do the bidding of the white man, like the scouts of old hired to hunt down Indians whom Washington called "renegades." But the tribe's long struggle to be free has made fierce individualists out of most Miccosukees, including those who choose to live in modern housing and not in small clusters of thatched houses with a central cookhouse, which is Osceola's style. Osceola's pessimism about the future of the Miccosukees may be unfounded, many tribal members say. Ask Miccosukees holding a tribal ID card about what Osceola foresees and they may agree. Or they may argue that they also are free to live a mix of tradition and the modern ways, and to wage a war in the courts and the news media to protect Miccosukee interests like any other aroused American minority. In discussing the tribe's battle with Everglades National Park over new housing, Cypress argues that the Miccosukees were there first. "This is Indian country," he says. Does that sound as if the tribe's chairman is a lackey of Washington? Cypress' fans ask. "My mom and dad did alligator wrestling all over the country," Frank says. "I was raised by my grandparents. We lived out in the Everglades. We were the last family to move out of the swamps (in about 1961). But now this house is my home. It's my choice." He laughs at Osceola's contention that Indians who choose to live where the tribal government tells them are "reservation Indians, defeated people." "I still do things the old way," he says. "I fish. I hunt deer. I still believe that because the deer eat the sawgrass, which gets energy from the sun, that when you eat that deer the sun gives you energy. That is my way." Buffalo Tiger, 77, was the tribe's first chairman. A man of great dignity who can talk for hours about how as a child he used to paddle a canoe for three days to make a shopping trip to Miami, he runs an airboat tour business and souvenir shop. He also is married to a non-Indian. The "independents," as tribal planner Ron Logan calls holdouts like Osceola, may call Tiger a "sellout" because he lives in the city and not in the Indian community. But they forget, Tiger's friends say, that before he was elected in 1951 as chairman, Tiger and his family led the fight to win federal recognition for the tribe. The Tigers did it Miccosukee style, they say. In other words, radically. "The government wanted to pay us money to shut up," Tiger says. "We wanted land set aside for us and to be left alone. No one in Washington would listen to us. So when (Fidel) Castro took over (in 1959), I went over there and smoked some cigars with him and Che Guevara and I asked them: `Do you recognize the Miccosukee Tribe?' "Castro said he did. He said that if the United States would not give us a place to live we were welcome to go over there and he would make room for us. When we got back, there were all kinds of phone calls from Washington. The government started dealing with us seriously then." To the Miccosukees, their bitter, five-year fight with the Park Service over how and where they should live is just one more chapter in their 200-year struggle to be free. Independents and tribal members all acknowledge this. They know the history. They remember the stories their grandparents told. This is the Miccosukee identity, they say: a people once hunted but undefeated. Despite massacres and wholesale burning of villages by the U.S. Army in the 19th Century, about 40 Miccosukees were able to use the Everglades as a natural fortress to survive further attacks. Congress gave the tribe most of what is now central Florida as a reservation in 1823, only to take it back some time later as farm- and ranchland for settlers. Treaties were made and broken. Other reservations were created and then dissolved. One of them, in Broward County, appears on modern maps as the Miccosukee Reservation, but no one lives there because it is, the tribe says, a place without resources. For years the Miccosukees were like shadows, living in tiny hamlets like Osceola's along the Tamiami Trail. They were poor hunters and guides with no official identity. But despite this, they knew who they were. When Congress passed legislation in 1934 that led to the creation of the national park in 1947, it made special mention of the Indians living along the Tamiami Trail, calling them a kind of natural resource whose right to dwell there should not be interfered with. But no one then could have imagined a Miccosukee Tribe flush with cash from a casino operation, with the muscle to fight court battles over its need to expand. There were no Indian-built tract homes, or tribal leaders backed by public relations consultants in Miami, or the kind of resources that permit the tribe to make monthly cash payments to families and to finance $150,000 homes, the title to which Miccosukees obtain after paying only $7,500. "At first Washington tried to kill us with guns," Osceola says. Now, he says, citing drug and alcohol problems among some young Miccosukees, "they are killing us with money." But June Tigertail disagrees. "We can use that money to go to college," says the teenager. "If you maintain a good grade average, the tribe pays for your education. You can have a degree and still know who you are." The Miccosukees are descendants of Hitchiti-speaking Creek Indians who were pushed out of Georgia into Florida by European settlement in the late 1700s. They were almost exterminated by Gen. Andrew Jackson in 1814. After they and their Seminole cousins resisted forced resettlement, Jackson's troops attacked their villages near Tallahassee and burned 300 homes. In 1819, after Florida became a U.S. territory, Washington decided to move the survivors to a large reservation in the center of the peninsula. A second forced resettlement resulted in the Second Seminole War (1835-42), during which some Miccosukees escaped to hide in South Florida. In 1853, the Florida Assembly voted for the removal of all Indians and, by 1859, the last of the Seminole wars had resulted in most of these survivors being forced to move to Oklahoma. The Seminole nation that exists there has minimal contact with its Florida brothers and sisters. About 40 Miccosukees, ancestors of today's tribe, never surrendered and made the Everglades their fortress. Today, the Miccosukee Tribe restricts membership to people with at least 50 percent Miccosukee blood. The Seminole Tribe, which also traces its origin to the Creeks, had more intermarriage with outsiders and also offered refuge to runaway slaves. Members must have at least 25 percent Seminole blood. TRIBE FIGHTING FOR MORE HOUSING IN THE EVERGLADES Fifty-year-old Everglades National Park, created to protect South Florida's unique environment, and the Miccosukees, a tribe whose occupation of a narrow strip of land just inside the northern boundary of the 1.5-million-acre wilderness predates the park, have long seen things differently. Billy Cypress, elected this month to his third term as chairman of the Miccosukees on the strength of his efforts to improve living standards, leads the tribe's effort to build 65 new homes on its Everglades land. It is an effort the National Park Service, concerned about all those thousands of tons of white limestone fill the tribe is trucking to these sites, strongly opposes. The expansion, the Park Service says, is affecting the fragile ecology of the Everglades: Sewage is leaking into the wetlands; the new construction is not aesthetically appealing. The Miccosukees live on this 333-acre strip, 5 and a half miles long and 500 feet wide, at the sufferance of the Park Service. That agency has issued them a "special use permit," good until the year 2014. Because the strip is not technically a reservation where the tribe has sovereign rights, the Park Service says it has first say. But Cypress says the Miccosukees were there first and that they have a right to decent housing. The strip, he says, is only .0002378 percent of the park. Maybe Congress should give the tribe jurisdiction over the Everglades so that it can hire what he calls "the new kid on the block" -- the Park Service -- to manage the park, he suggests. "This is Indian country," Cypress says in his office jammed with fax machines and photos showing him with political leaders. "North and south, as far as you can see and more. The Indians existed in this country before the Europeans. The courts have had a long time not understanding this." In October 1996, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt gave the tribe permission to build 30 homes. But even if the tribe gets the go-ahead from a federal judge to complete all 65 houses, some Indian families will still be on a waiting list. If the new housing is worrisome to the Park Service, if the tons of fill spilling into the swamps cause consternation, this all may be mild stuff compared with the tribe's needs in 20, 50 or 100 years. Its birth rate is almost double the death rate, tribal officials say. Many Miccosukees believe that Park Superintendent Richard Ring, whose staff recommended that the tribe build its houses in clusters instead of strung out along a road with prime views of the swamp as the tribe wanted, would prefer it if the Miccosukees would go away. Ring, citing the Park Service's duty to protect the park, denies this. "The tribe repeatedly contends that the National Park Service, and I in particular, have an agenda to remove them from the park," he said in a recent declaration opposing the tribe's housing plans. "This is absolutely false." Ring has been in charge of the park since 1992. That was, coincidentally, the year the tribe first proposed the 65 houses in addition to the 166 existing structures in the permit area. He says his task is to balance the tribe's needs against what is best for the Everglades, but that task has been made difficult because of the lack of a long-range plan and of any dialogue about the future. Ring says he talks frequently with Cypress. The Park Service, he says, works on a multitude of small projects -- for example, a new exhibit at park headquarters on Miccosukee life -- in cooperation with the tribe. But although future development by the tribe is inevitable, his agency has not been able to participate in that planning, if it exists, Ring says. "We have wanted to talk to the tribe about their long-range needs for a long time," he says. Bills introduced in November by Sen. Connie Mack, R-Fla., and Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., would do away with the permit expiration date on the strip and enable the tribe to make development decisions without seeking Park Service approval. Discussion of the legislation, which also would double the strip's size -- extending it south another 500 feet into the park -- will probably start in January when Congress reconvenes. Ring has not yet formed a position on the legislation, but he says still left hanging is the question, "How do you come to grips with development and still preserve the Everglades?" Cypress says, "The park's attitude is, don't build any more. That never changes. But they are newcomers, and newcomers should respect us." ----- Visit HeraldLink, the World Wide Web site of The Miami Herald, at http://www.herald.com ----- (c) 1997, The Miami Herald. 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