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Beads
Reflections #145
By Patsy West
The amount of beads worn by Seminole women was a phenomenon
to all who saw them. Imagine the amount of stamina it took to conduct
daily
tasks, which were a lot more vigorous than sitting in front of a TV,
while wearing 12 pounds or so of beads!
Following the Third Seminole War, as trade again resumed in the small trading
posts on the rivers such as the Caloosahatchee, the Miami and New River, beads
were one of the first things that the Seminole women purchased, after groceries.
Recently, I discussed Aklophi (O-ce-lo-pee) and the prized string of beads that
she recalled buying as a young girl when she visited Miami with her family just
after the war in the 1860’s. She wore them the rest of her long life.
The necklace beads were glass, and about the size of a pea. Light blue, dark
blue, and red appear to have been the most favorite colors. The beads were made
in Italy and the country once known as Czechoslovakia where they were shipped
to bead distributors in the northeastern United States. New York City continues
to have a “bead District” which some ladies from the Reservation
visited last year!
Beads were an important part of a Seminole woman’s daily routine. Upon
waking, a woman would take the graduated bunches of beads from the basket to
which she had stored them the night before. Meticulously, she would gather them
around her neck, tying each bunch together with a string. Soon, they would be
mounded from shoulders to neck. Picking guavas, chasing after her hogs, cooking
over the fire, soon it was evening. At night the process was reversed. With scissors,
she would clip the strings holding the bunches, beginning at the neck and lay
them neatly in the basket. After a day in the southern Florida humidity, her
neck would be puckery like hands left too long in water.
Like Aklophi’s beads, a Seminole woman’s beads were bought any time
(not one strand for every year of her life like some insipid poem written by
a non-Indian woman years ago states!) that she had extra money, perhaps from
the sale of her hogs or from her manufacture of sacks of coontie starch.
Seminole Women had their own income and were independent in their wealth long
before non-Indian women were allowed to manage their own affairs. But beads were
also an important courting gift. When a man courted a woman, or brought her engagement
presents, he might bring silver combs, a mirror, and almost always, necklace
beads.
Beads were also a hazard. One account in the 1930s discussed a tragedy that occurred
on Barron’s River. A canoe with two women in it capsized and both were
drowned. A newspaper article attributed the deaths to not being able to swim
and the weight from the beads that they wore, which dragged them down. By the
1950s, some women who had worn such heavy weights of beads all of their lives
were diagnosed with severe neck and shoulder problems. However, they did not
want to give up their beads. Some put up with the pain, for the sake of fashion.
The next section talks about the different Seminole clans.
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