Miccosukee
The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians is a federally recognized Native American tribe in the U.S. state of Florida. They are Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands and related to the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, and Muscogee Nation.
The Miccosukee, along with the Florida Seminole, speak the Mikasuki language, also spelled Miccosukee. The language has been referred to as a descendant of Hitchiti, a dialect of Hitchiti, and as another term for Hitchiti.
By the late 18th century, the British recorded the name Miccosukee, or Mikasuki, as designating a Hitchiti-speaking group centered on the town of Miccosukee, a tribal town affiliated with the Creek Confederacy. The town spanned sections of present-day Alabama, southern Georgia, and northern Florida. Under pressure from European encroachment into their territory during the 18th century, the Miccosukee underwent a period of increasingly frequent migration to Spanish Florida.
The Miccosukee were displaced during the Seminole Wars, a series of three military conflicts between the United States and the Seminole people. During this period, many Seminoles were forced to relocate west of the Mississippi River to Indian Territory, forming the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. A group of 200 or fewer Seminoles would stay in Florida.
Descendants of those who remained in Florida were concentrated in the central and southern parts of the state. In the 1920s and 1930s, many Miccosukee established communities along the Tamiami Trail, a roadway completed in 1928 that ran through the Everglades and connected the cities of Tampa and Miami. The Trail Indians, as they were called, generally kept more traditional practices. They were less interested in establishing formal relations with the federal government than the Cow Creek Seminoles to the north, who started moving to reservations around the same time.
In 1953, the Florida Seminoles were identified for termination of federal status. The Seminole Tribe of Florida organized and gained federal recognition in 1957. Due to political differences, the Miccosukee formed a separate group and gained federal recognition in 1962. The Traditionals, or Independents, are Indians living in Florida who are unaffiliated with either tribe. The Traditionals predominantly live in Big Cypress Swamp.
History
Historically, the Miccosukees were a group that moved between present-day Georgia and northern Florida, with an extended range for hunting, fishing, and trading expeditions stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to the Florida Keys. By the late 18th century, Miccosukee-speaking villages had been built in the Everglades. According to scholarship published in collaboration with tribal elders, multiple groups of Indians joined together to form the core group that became the Miccosukee Tribe in northern Florida; these groups included elements of the Oconee, Hitchiti, Eufala, and Appalachicola tribal towns in southern Georgia and northern Florida.19th century
Under continuing encroachment from European, and later, American, settlers, many Miccosukee ancestors from different locations found themselves in northern Florida by the early 18th century.The Miccosukee broke from the Muscogee Confederacy in Northern Florida after the First Seminole War of 1817 and 1818.
By the late 1830s, the dominant Indigenous language spoken in Florida was Mikasuki or other variants of Hitchiti. Muscogee was the dominant language within the Creek Confederacy, but Hitchiti had traveled with those who settled permanently in Florida and became the primary tongue, despite Muscogee often serving as the lingua franca throughout present-day Florida, Georgia, and Alabama whenever Indigenous people interacted with white people. For a time during the 19th century, the Miccosukee were part of the developing Seminole identity in Florida. This identity formed in the early 19th century in Florida through a process of ethnogenesis. The Miccosukees and the Seminoles, however, not only continued to see themselves as separate entities within Florida but also saw themselves as wholly separate from the Creek Confederacy that continued to negotiate with Europeans and claimed influence over Alabama, Georgia, and northern Florida. In 1765, a group of Native Americans in Florida known as the "Alatchaway", a Muscogee-speaking group led by Cowkeeper that was a precursor of the modern Florida Seminoles, rejected a meeting between the British and the Creeks at Picolata, the site of a Spanish fort about 13 miles west of St. Augustine in northeastern Florida. Cowkeeper and his band of Indians negotiated their own agreement with the British in a separate meeting. The spring of 1787 marked the first time that a group specifically known as Seminoles attended the Lower Creeks' annual meeting. In the 1796 Treaty of Colerain, the Creek Confederacy agreed that all Creeks in Georgia and Florida would return runaway slaves to their white American owners, an agreement that the Native Americans in Florida disputed because the Creeks did not speak for those living in Florida. Prior to 1812, the Creek national council was denying treaty annuities to the Tribes in Florida.
The Indigenous people in Florida were had separated from the Muscogee by 1818 at the latest, following Andrew Jackson's invasion of Florida. The Miccosukees eventually joined with the Seminoles in defending their Florida homeland against encroaching white settlers during the 1820s. Despite the need for such an informal alliance, the Miccosukees maintained their separate identity within the tribes of Florida. During this time in particular, the U.S. government and white settlers in Florida often viewed the Miccosukee Indians and the Seminole Indians as a single entity. About 2,000 Upper Creeks, known as Red Sticks, militant Muscogee-speaking Indians, joined the tribes in Florida after being defeated in the Creek War of 1813-1814. After this influx of people in the early 19th century, documented Indians in Florida numbered about 5,000. This entry of Muscogee-speaking Indians into Florida had the additional effect of pushing many Hitchiti-speaking people farther south. As early as 1827, and possibly earlier, Mikasuki-speaking Native Americans had a permanent presence in the Everglades.
Although East and West Florida were under Spanish control at this time, U.S. forces under Andrew Jackson invaded Florida in 1817 under the pretext of retaliation for Indian raids against settlers in Georgia. The true reasons for invasion included pursuit of runaway slaves and the realization that Spain was too politically and militarily weak to protect Florida. In addition to the destruction of Negro Fort on the Apalachicola River by American forces in 1816, these events were the initial conflicts in the First Seminole War.
Florida became a U.S. territory in 1821, and the American government soon increased pressure for removal against all Indians living in Florida. This was the period of numerous treaties between the U.S. and various bands of Indians living in Florida as white settlers increasingly pushed for more available land, and the government in Washington, D.C. sought to support those who wished to take advantage of settling the new territory. Treaties such as Moultrie Creek and Payne's Landing were agreements that attempted to aggregate the Native Americans in Florida into isolated tracts of land, first in central Florida, and later in southwestern and southeastern Florida. Despite the appearance of numerous agreements between the tribes of Florida and the U.S. government, these negotiations were never balanced between the parties involved because of the presence of the U.S. military at these negotiations and difficulties in translation and understanding. There also was never true representation of all of the Native Americans in Florida because the groups of men who represented the Indians during treaty negotiations did not represent all of the bands living in Florida at that time.
Following the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the U.S. relocated several thousand Seminole and hundreds of Black Seminoles, who lived in close association as allies, west to the Indian Territory. The U.S. government still believed that the Florida Seminoles were a part of the Creek Confederacy, and the American agents involved in relocation attempted to place the Florida Indians with land under the Creek administration. Eventually, the Florida Seminoles in Oklahoma gained their own reservation and federal recognition as the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma.
Those who remained in Florida fought against U.S. forces during the second and third Seminole Wars. Both of these conflicts resulted in groups of Indians being relocated to Indian Territory. The Second Seminole War began in 1835 after the Indians of Florida retaliated for repeated abuses by white settlers in Florida, including theft, violence, and illegal entry into Indian lands. One of the longest, most expensive, and most deadly conflicts between Native Americans and the U.S. military, the Second Seminole War is a nearly forgotten conflict that had an extraordinary impact on southeastern U.S. history, American military tactics, and modern development of the U.S. Navy. The Indians of Florida conducted a guerrilla-style war against a numerically superior and technologically advanced enemy. The result of the war was many more Indigenous people dead or deported but a U.S. failure at complete removal of Indians from Florida. By 1842, perhaps 300 Native Americans remained in Florida; more than 4,000 were forcibly relocated to Indian Territory between 1835 and 1842. The Miccosukee chief Ar-pi-uck-i, also known as Sam Jones, proved an effective leader during the Second Seminole War; his strategy of hiding the tribe on tree islands, or hammocks, in the Big Cypress Swamp and the Everglades ensured that the ancestors of present-day Miccosukees and Seminoles remained in Florida.
The Third Seminole War began in 1855 after a small band of Indians led by Billy Bowlegs attacked American encampments in response to repeated harassment and destruction of property by U.S. military forces. The result of this conflict was the removal of Billy Bowlegs's band for Oklahoma, having accepted a monetary settlement. The sole remaining Indians in Florida in 1858 were those sheltering in the swamp and wetlands in the south.
By 1858, perhaps 200 ancestors of the modern Miccosukee and Seminole Tribes remained in Florida. They survived by moving into central and southern Florida to take advantage of the topography of Big Cypress and the Everglades, which was largely unknown to the remainder of the U.S. The American Civil War during the 1860s meant that the U.S. let the Indigenous people in Florida live their lives as they saw fit as American military attention focused elsewhere.