Seminoles sit at a chickee at Pirates Cove.
Photo courtesy of the Boca Raton Historical Society
By Deborah S. Hartz-Seeley
Seminole and Miccosukee Indians take center stage at the Boca Raton Historical Society and Museum through Dec. 20. Here you can browse an exhibit curated by ethno-historian and author Patsy West.
She has spent the past 40 years researching and collecting artifacts and information about the culture and history of these tribes.
West admits she “likes to spread out,” so she’s done her best to make the most of the display cabinets and hallway space dedicated to her collection. She devoted a large portion of it to the women who are the decision makers in this matriarchal society.
To this end, there’s a showcase filled with patchwork clothing the Indian women proudly create to this day. “It is a major art form,” says West, who has written Seminole and Miccosukee Tribes of Southern Florida (Arcadia Publishing, 2012). But the patchwork artistry really didn’t come into its own until the late 1800s, when the women acquired sewing machines.
You can see the silver bangles and necklaces that the women made from Murano beads traded for pelts. Many of these are strung with silver coins that have been beaten thin and carved with stars or other shapes.
The exhibit also emphasizes the women’s basket-weaving skills. Made from split palmetto stems, the baskets were for daily use such as sifting and storing food.
Coiled sweetgrass basketry was a creation of the 20th century when the women started to sell their crafts at road-side attractions where tourists came to see alligators being wrestled and buy souvenirs.
In a pre-Disney Florida, these villages attracted crowds. And the exhibit features a whole case of the crafts the Indians made to sell at these tourist stops including carved animals and drums made from rawhide and then painted.
Sabal palmetto-husk dolls dressed in patchwork clothes were eagerly snatched up. “Every little girl had to have one of those,” West says.
These tourist attractions, beginning in the 1920s, offered the Seminoles and Miccosukee a viable place to produce and sell their native crafts. In fact, by the mid-1930s, over half of the population was involved in some aspect of tourism, Wells tells us.
For this exhibit, the museum’s central hallway is lined with blow-ups of vintage postcards that depict the Seminole camps, tourist attractions and life in the Everglades. These are just some of the 1,500 cards that West has collected since 1972 into the Seminole Miccosukee Archive.
There’s even a photo of a cigar-smoking James E. Billie holding onto his horse. He looks pretty cocky and self-satisfied. And no wonder. He is responsible for bringing gaming to the Seminole reservation in the late 1970s and hooking up the Seminole Tribe of Florida with Hard Rock International, which they purchased for $965 million in 2006. The rest is history.
If you go
Native Floridians: Seminole and Miccosukee Art and Culture at the Boca Raton Historical Society and Museum, 71 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton; Monday-Friday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; exhibit admission for adults $5, students $3, members free; 395-6766.
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