What Patsy West found when rummaging through her great-grandfather’s attic over 30 years ago was as good as buried treasure. Seven glass plate negatives from the 1890s, all of Florida Seminole Indians, were, though she couldn’t have known it at the time, the start of a lifelong passion.
Soon after, West was working in Miami at the Historical Museum of South Florida. When three more files of old Seminole photos turned up at the museum, the plot thickened. Almost none of the pictures were identified. “It was just blank faces with no names,” she remembers.
And that’s what intrigued her.
The mystery was why the photos, many depicting Seminole people in their finest regalia, would have been taken in the first place. Says West a little sheepishly from her home in Fort Lauderdale, “I didn’t understand. I didn’t catch the drift.”
In 1973, West took photocopies of the images to Seminole Fair. With the blessings of Tribal Chairman Howard Tommie, she set up a booth under a tree and began what, for her, became a pilgrimage almost every February.
Seminole people would come by and look at the pictures. They put names to faces, some of them long departed, and West dutifully logged the results. Through a collective effort they began to piece together a forgotten chapter of tribal history.
Over the years, West copied photos in places from Washington, D.C. to Denver and brought them back for deposit in what has become, today, the Seminole/Miccosukee Photographic Archive, a private collection in Fort Lauderdale that has grown to over 10,000 images.
Slowly, it dawned on West what most of the photos were really about: Seminoles in the tourist business. Through the 1920s and ’30s, it turns out, they had participated in what West calls, apart from the gaming boom of recent years, “the most important thing that happened to the Seminoles” in the modern era.
They held archery contests, wrestled alligators, even performed weddings in front of crowds. By 1930, half the Florida Seminole were active in the business, and almost everyone in some way profited from craft sales in and around Miami. “That in itself told these people that they were of value,” West affirms. “All they had to do was basically be themselves.”
West, it turns out, hadn’t understood the pictures because she’d been listening to the wrong people. Her own great-grandfather, who hunted with the Seminole, and government publications from the period, she explains, had warned that Indian tourism “was a very, very bad environment. That [Indians] weren’t being Indians that they were being like monkeys on display.”
There were cross-cultural problems, admits West, who has written a book about Seminole tourism. But the tribe didn’t consider it a den of vice as some white people did. What’s more, her research would show, many Seminoles who worked at the white-owned establishments later looked back at them not with resentment but with fond memories of the “good old days,” which hadn’t always been so good.
After the draining of the Everglades began in 1906, West explains, the Seminole were denied access to water routes important for hunting. Many people, she notes, needed money for staples like coffee and grits that could only be bought with hard cash.
Tourism, better than handouts, was a way to survive.
“They didn’t want anything to do with the government,” says West, “and that had been for over 100 years.” The main group engaged in Miami (now called the Miccosukee) were adamant. “If they knew that something was from the government, they wouldn’t accept it. Here at the tourist attractions they could earn their own economy on their own terms.”
Besides, the Seminole were working, not just being exhibited. The government frowned on their activities, West suspects, because they hadn’t “rolled over and gone onto the reservation.”
It was at one Miami attraction, Tropical Gardens, later called Pirates Cove, where tribal members learned commercial alligator wrestling. Traditionally, the Seminole caught live gators in the Glades, West says, but never for show. Since the Seminole don’t believe in teasing an animal, young men had to first ask permission of a Snake Clan woman before they could start performing.
“Alligator wrestling was what really brought the tourists in,” says West. Seminoles still wrestle gators at Native Village (Hollywood reservation), Billie Swamp Safari (Big Cypress), and even at Seminole Fair, evidence that the legacy of the ’30s lives on. “You never know whether the guy is going to get bitten or not,” she says matter-of-factly. “I’ve had a couple of friends that have lost fingers.”
Indian tourism has its detractors. Traditionally, sites were owned or controlled by non-Natives. Garish spectacles were common and charges of exploitation frequent. But Seminole efforts have had many benefits, West believes, not least that of educating the community about traditional ways.
One event, the tribal rodeo, was a stepchild of tourism. Seeking federal recognition in the 1950s, the Seminole needed money to go to Washington and plead their case. Proven cattlemen in the past, they organized a tribal rodeo to raise expenses, what has since become an almost annual occasion.
With tourism, says West, an ethno-historian, Seminole “culture became a saleable product.” The trade even “made patchwork their national dress.” Though not produced as much today because dividends from gaming have decreased motivation, patchwork is not a dying art, she insists. “If anything, it’s being more refined.”
The Seminole had many things going for them. “It was location, location, location,” exclaims West. “The climate was right. The [Seminole] could come and go as they pleased. Their culture was very intact anyway because they had been isolated after the Seminole wars of the 19th century.”
Then the tourist boom subsided. But West lived the debate over tribal smoke shops in the 1970s with a sense of d?j? vu.
“People didn’t like the idea that Indians were selling tobacco,” she says wryly. “That was not something they thought Indians should do.” Never mind that Natives had long been associated with the plant. “They’re scared to death that Indians are somehow going to be taken advantage of.”
West used family money from her great-grandfather to found the archives, appropriately located in her grandmother’s house. A native of south Florida, she stresses the long tradition of cooperation between Natives and non-Natives in the area. She has consulted for the tribe and taught tribal history to Seminole children, grades K-12, on the Big Cypress reservation.
Her latest book, “The Seminole and Miccosukee Tribes of Southern Florida” includes 200 photographs from 1852 to the present. “There would hardly be anything available photographically,” she confides, “had it not been for the tourist attractions.”
Today, the Seminole and Miccosukee do tourism their way. The Seminole promote themselves at annual conferences in places like Iceland and Germany. The Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood is due to open in the coming months. Meanwhile, airboats and swamp buggies full of tourists roam the Glades.
“If it was packaged properly,” West says of eco-tourism, “I could see people going on any reservation, regardless of how isolated, to partake in what they have to offer.” She cautions that any tribe needs to look carefully at how tourism affects infrastructure and impacts local communities.
“It’s very much paternalism,” she describes the old attitudes about tourism, “when really it’s about survival.
“We’re the ones who put most of the Indians in the isolated areas they’re in, including the Seminoles in the Everglades. So … what else are they supposed to do?”