In last month’s column, we noted a key moment in the growth of our area: Seminole Tony Tommie entered a white school, the first of the Tribe to do so. Before that, it was forbidden – not by the whites but by the Seminoles themselves.
And so began a new era for the Native Americans who settled here before white (and Black) settlers. But education alone did not lead to the Tribe’s prosperity today. Every member born on the Dania reservation is reportedly a multi-millionaire when he or she turns 18, with a fully paid education guaranteed. It’s hard to overlook what the Tribe has achieved, especially with a massive, gleaming hotel in the shape of a guitar piercing our night sky.
The Tribe’s new era formally began in 1957 when it agreed with the U.S. to form a constitutional form of government. Ironically, this allowed the Seminoles to operate independently of the states and the federal government.
Another necessary factor in their success was their drive and industry.
It was not just the trade we saw with Frank Stranahan half a century earlier, as the Native Americans docked their canoes full of skins to exchange for goods at his New River trading post. Or the coterie of Indian women eagerly and quickly learning how to use the sewing machine Ivy Stranahan bought by mail order for $3.
The Seminoles’ mercantile reach extended beyond the Stranahans. Traders like Ben Hoggs in Fort Pierce, George W. Storter in Everglades City and W.M. Burdine in Miami trusted the Seminoles to such an extent that they would advance them up to $300 in goods for a hunt, and then settle up when the skins came in.
Traders even came down from Jacksonville before Frank Stranahan was posted here. They came in on a ship called the Cornelia, heaped with salt in hundred-pound sacks, as well as rice, beads and yards of calico, anchoring at a spot the Seminoles chose on the New River.
As the New River settlement grew, Ivy Stranahan took a greater civic role in matters such as suffrage, but also the welfare of the Seminoles, who eventually agreed to settle on a reservation in Dania.
As I noted in a previous column, writer Betty Mae Jumper recalled those early days in a Seminole Tribune article.
“The Tommie family led by old Annie Tommie and her son Tony Tommie were the first family to arrive,” she said, in what they called the “Big City” reservation in Dania. In the 1940s, as more families moved in, medicine men gave stern warnings. “I remember them coming to our camp in Hollywood and talking to my great-uncle Jimmie Gopher,” Jumper wrote, “telling him how [the government] could send us away anytime, once they had gathered us all in one place.”
But, as Jumper remembers it, Annie Tommie countered: “Who would buy us? We have nothing… The government promises to leave us alone if we pick the land and stay on it.”
They had nothing material perhaps, but they had their ingenuity and tenacity. After signing that 1957 charter, they fought for the right to sell cigarettes without taxes and won. Then they fought for bingo licenses. Then casinos. And before you knew it, that original band of 200 Seminoles grew to the 3,000 in today’s Seminole Tribe of Florida and have become a leading force in tourism (through their ownership of the Hard Rock Casinos), but also in raising cattle, with the fourth largest herd in Florida and the 16th largest nationwide.
And with proceeds from these and other industries, they fund government institutions including police and courts, as well as schools, medical care, early learning and senior centers.
It’s a far cry from those warriors who dashed back to disappear in the Everglades when chased by Maj. William Lauderdale and his Tennessee volunteers in the 1840s. They emerged later to eventually take part in the new city, still later settling on the reservation, keeping many of their native traditions, with some still living in chickee huts. Not only that, they share these traditions in festivals, museums and their five other reservations throughout the state.
In all this, they have become an acknowledged leader throughout the nation in Native American innovation and progress.
