Seminole Women: Keepers of the Nation

The Seminole nation's survival through three wars with the United States is usually told as a story of military resistance: guerrilla tactics, terrain, endurance against overwhelming odds. That story is true. It is also incomplete.

The Seminole clan system is matrilineal. Children belong to their mother's clan. Clan membership determines kinship obligations, inheritance, and political relationships. In a social structure organized this way, women are not peripheral to the continuity of the nation. They are the nation's continuity.

As the Second Seminole War killed and captured and deported the male leadership, it was Seminole women who kept the surviving bands moving through the Everglades, who made decisions about where the camps would be and who would be included, who taught children the clan relationships and ceremonial knowledge that gave the nation its coherence. The patchwork textile tradition, the intricate geometric patterns that have come to be recognized as distinctly Seminole clothing, was developed by women in the early nineteen hundreds, a continuation of the textile leadership they had carried since the years the nation was hiding in the deepest parts of the Everglades.

After the wars ended, Seminole women sustained the nation's informal economy through trade with settlements in Key West and Fort Lauderdale, bringing crafts and agricultural goods to markets outside the Everglades and returning with metal tools and cloth. They were, in the language of the Seminole Tribe's own historical materials, the keepers of continuity.

The Seminole Tribe of Florida recognizes this explicitly. The matrilineal structure that preserved the nation is the same structure the tribe operates under today.