The Miccosukee: A Separate Nation on the Tamiami Trail

The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida is not the Seminole Tribe of Florida. The distinction matters. It was important enough to the Miccosukee that they spent forty years insisting on it, from the first petitions for federal recognition in the nineteen twenties through the formal recognition they finally received in nineteen sixty-two, deliberately and permanently separate from the Seminole Tribe, which had been recognized five years earlier.

The two nations share ancestry and the experience of survival in the Everglades through three Seminole Wars. They are not the same people politically, culturally, or linguistically in the ways that matter to each group's self-understanding. The Miccosukee, whose traditional territory runs along the Tamiami Trail corridor and the northern Everglades, maintained their own council, their own clan structure, and their own language program through decades when federal Indian policy was devoted to encouraging assimilation. They did not assimilate. They are still here.

The Miccosukee Tribe has been an active participant in negotiations over Everglades restoration policy, and not always a satisfied one. Restoration plans that rerouted water flows proposed by the Army Corps of Engineers and state and federal agencies have sometimes been opposed by the Miccosukee on the grounds that they would flood traditional village sites along the Tamiami Trail, replacing one form of ecological damage with another form of cultural damage. The tribe's position has been that restoration should not be done to the Everglades over the objections of the people who have lived in it continuously for two centuries.

The Village Museum on the Tamiami Trail is where that history is interpreted by the people who carry it. It is not a theme park. The living community around it is not a demonstration. They are the continuation of the nation that the Everglades made unconquerable.