Seminole Voices: Reflections on Their Changing Society, 1970-2000

2. Seminole Education

2. Seminole Education By the late 1960s the Seminole Tribe of Florida had made only modest strides in having its children attend k–12 schooling; very few members of the tribe had graduated from high school or attained a postsecondary education. Although Indian children from the Hollywood and Brighton reservations attended the local public schools, this was arranged after prolonged negotiations with local school authorities. The public schools in Broward County did not accept Seminole students until after World War II; shortly thereafter, Glades County admitted children from the Brighton Reservation. However, youngsters living on the very isolated Big Cypress Reservation, located almost at the geographical center of the lower peninsula, continued to attend a government-operated day school through the elementary grades until they were eventually accepted into the Hendry County schools. In none of these settings did young Seminoles make significant educational advancements that would be necessary if the tribe were to escape the poverty and lack of economic opportunity that marked its existence in the days before gaming came to the reservations. Nor were they being prepared to handle the sudden affluence that would come with bingo and other tribal business enterprises. It would take aggressive tribal leaders who placed a greater emphasis on education to turn things around over the ensuing three decades. In essence, tribal authorities initiated a Seminole educational renaissance that resonates within the tribe to this day. Unlike other tribes of the southeastern United States, such as the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Choctaws, the Florida Seminoles had no tradition of literacy in either English or seminole educ ation 67 the native languages. Throughout much of the late nineteenth century, the tribal remnant that had avoided removal to Indian Territory following the Seminole wars eschewed contact with outsiders. They rarely ventured from their camps deep in the Everglades and Big Cypress except to trade at frontier villages such as Fort Myers, Fort Lauderdale, or Miami. A few Indian men learned just enough English to facilitate trade, but for the most part the elders wanted nothing to do with the white man or his ways and ordered that children not learn English on penalty of death.1 Hunters and traders occasionally visited the Seminoles’ widely dispersed settlements, but they did not welcome missionaries until a delegation of western Indians, primarily Baptist Seminoles and Creeks from Oklahoma, visited in 1907. Thus young Seminoles had neither the interest nor the opportunity to learn to read and write. The rare exception was young Billy Conapatachee, a Mikasuki-speaking Seminole from the Big Cypress region, who went to live with Captain F. A. Hendry of Fort Myers in 1879. Hendry, the largest cattle owner in Florida at that time, had taken a liking to the young Seminole boy. Billy lived in Fort Myers for three years and attended the local “academy” with Hendry’s children. Billy also served as an interpreter for ethnologist Clay MacCauley when he conducted a survey of the Florida Indians for the Smithsonian Institution in 1880. The elders did not want Billy to learn to read and write English, however, and threatened to kill the young Indian because he had learned the white man’s ways. But Captain Hendry intervened and sent word that if anything happened to Billy, the tribal leaders would have to answer to him. Billy’s father also prevailed upon the elders to spare his son. He argued it was much better that the tribe have at least one man who could read and write English and Billy could learn what the white were doing and could then inform the tribe.2 By 1883 Billy had returned to his home at the Big Cypress 68 seminole educ ation region, and for a long time no other Indian came to the whites seeking an education. At least into the 1950s, some tribal elders forbade anyone from getting a white education, using whipping, ostracism, and ridicule to enforce their edict. After the Seminole wars, explained Billy Cypress, the Seminoles kept to themselves and had their own way of life and education, which was fine for them. Why should they go out to a foreign country to go to school? “That was their school for their children, we have our own school for our culture, too. So white man’s school was taboo and there were tribal punishments for people.”3 Mary Frances Johns held that a strange tale that circulated in...