Seminole from Hollywood, Florida
Betty Mae Jumper

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The Everglades of Florida conjures images of dark swamps, looming cedars hung with moss, and snakes, alligators and insects. The Everglades, however, were home and shelter to numerous native tribes. They lived peacefully within the boundaries of this huge swamp, resisting the white man’s ways.

Betty Mae Jumper, a Seminole woman, remembers living in a “chickee,” an open-aired, thatched structure common to her people. Her mother was a Seminole medicine woman and her father was white, a trapper and sugar cane worker that she only remembers seeing once when she was 12. She says “I ran and hid. I didn’t want to see him.”

Betty Mae only spoke Creek and Miccosukee until she was forced to attend a boarding school in Cherokee, North Carolina. Later, after getting a nursing degree and working with the health needs of the scattered people of the Seminole, in 1967 Betty Mae became the first native woman to be elected tribal chairman. When she came into office, the tribe had $35.00 in a bank account which, when they went to withdraw it, couldn’t be found. When she left office, the tribal coffers had over a half-million dollar surplus. This was before tax-free cigarettes and casinos.

Before we left, we bought one of Betty's Seminole dolls. When we set up a table at the American Library Association once, we brought her doll with us. We should have had 100 of them--everyone wanted to buy one. We'll have to see if we can put them on our Indian Market Page once we get it up and running.

The history of the Seminole natives of Florida is a long, complex story of resistance. At the time of the first Spanish contact with the natives of Florida, there were estimated to have been over 200,000 native people living in southern Florida. Archeologists have traced the existence of native civilization in the area back 12,000 years. Today, there are less than 3,000. After three wars known as “The Seminole Wars,” the government was unable to roust the Indians from their hiding places.

It was ultimately the land booms of the 1920’s, where white developers began draining the Everglades, and later the threat of termination by the U.S. Government in 1953 that brought them back to the fight. In 1957 the U.S. government formally recognized the Seminole Tribe of Florida.