Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History

13 Authenticity for Sale: The Everglades, Seminole Indians, and the Construction of a Pay-Per-View Culture

285 13 Authenticity for Sale The Everglades, Seminole Indians, and the Construction of a Pay-Per-View Culture Andrew K. Frank For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans viewed Florida as one of the last frontiers in the United States. Although long associated with the West, the Florida interior was routinely understood to be “frontier country.” Americans deemed the terrain—largely known for the wetlands known as the Everglades—to be unsuited for civilized life, with “a vast extent of country which is practically a wilderness.” Indeed, in his 1896 Hunting and Fishing in Florida, Charles B. Cory provided a chapter-by-chapter treatment of the “wildlife” in Florida, starting with a lengthy ethnography of the Seminoles and then following it up with chapters on panther, bear, deer, alligators, turkeys, and snakes. With few exceptions, he explained, only Indians and alligators dared to call the region home, and as a result it made for ideal hunting. The inclusion of Indians as part of natural history is certainly not peculiar to the Seminoles and the Florida experience, but the ways in which the Seminoles have historically capitalized on this connection through the tourist industry may have been. Indeed, it is impossible to tell the story of the remarkable rise of Seminole tourism without constant references to the Everglades and the natural environment in general.1 In reality, two Indian groups—the Seminole and Miccosukee, who have historic links and were rarely distinguished by the public—have creatively and continually been marketed through their connections to the Everglades .2 In essence, Indians and non-Indians have sold their history by 286 The Everglades, Seminole Indians, and Construction of Pay-Per-View Culture playing on the long-standing beliefs that they are unconquered peoples and that the Everglades are an equally untamed environment. South Florida tourism boosters routinely employed the Seminoles—both the people and as various stereotyped images—to sell tickets to specific tourist venues and the region in general. Seminole Indians, for their part, responded to the growth of Florida tourism by inserting themselves into and often taking some control of the process. In the end, the tourist sites offered audiences what they believed to be authentic cultures rather than unfiltered images of Seminole society. Pay-per-view performances that linked Seminoles to stereotypical images of the Everglades were both the most popular and the most enduring, even if they were designed for the tourist market. This history of playing upon the presumed primordial links between Seminole Indians and the Everglades began in the 1880s, came of age in the 1920s and 1930s, and continues to help shape the ways in which Seminoles and Miccosukees engage in the tourism economy.
For the past century, south Florida’s tourist market portrayed a series of connections between the “unconquered” Seminole inhabitants of Florida and the “Florida wilderness” known as the Everglades. In part, these linkages reflected inescapable realities. More than a century and a half ago, the U.S. military chased Florida’s Indians into the state’s interior during a series of three Seminole wars (1816–18, 1835–42, and 1855–58). There, in the region defined by Lake Okechobee and the Everglades, Florida’s Indians embraced the environmental realities of the area and necessarily altered their housing, diets, and village structures. They also harvested and traded animal pelts and hides as well as various bird plumes, primarily from animals that made the Florida wetlands their home, such as alligators and egrets. Seminoles adopted their agricultural techniques, consolidated their clan structure, and occupied the high grounds and prairies of the diverse ecosystem.3 In the early twentieth century, however, Americans tended to share two images of the Seminoles that betrayed the widely known specifics about the tribe. Both of these images revealed the importance of the Everglades to Florida’s Native Americans, and the region’s boosters and various tourist venues routinely employed these images. In the first image, the Seminoles appear as a timeless people. Despite widespread recognition of the lifestyle changes that migration required, the Seminoles were known as the original inhabitants of an ancient terrain. Unlike Indians who had undergone Andrew K. Frank 287 pacification and acculturation, the Seminoles remained an ancient people who were shielded by outside influence because of the Everglades. There, one turn-of-the-century writer explained, is “where the last of the Seminoles find sure immunity from...