November 23, 1999

A Day In The Life Of Big Cypress, Florida

On Nov. 23, 1999, an army of photographers, including staff members of the Seminole Tribune, Seminole Tribal members and Ahfachkee Indian School students spent 24 hours documenting life on the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation. The result was a stunning portrait of "how the Indians live today," a common question received in the mailboxes of the Seminole Tribe of Florida. The work was published in a full color magazine titled "A Day In The Life Of Big Cypress" and originally sold at the huge Phish NYE 2000 music concert staged at Big Cypress over New Year's weekend. The first purpose was to produce a document that would show the 80,000-plus Phish fans what life at Big Cypress was normally like when there wasn't a giant rock festival going on. We found, however, that this project has an even greater value in its honest and intimate portrayal of life on Big Cypress, a very historic, unique and special part of Florida and American Indian Country. Every photo in this work of art and literature was taken on Nov. 23, 1999. Sho naa bish.

"A Day In The Life Of Big Cypress" may be purchased from our Seminole Internet Marketplace under BOOKS.

Take me back to the swamp, let me go
Back to the swamp where nobody goes
Take me back to the swamp,
Let me free my soul
Back to the swamp and here I go

Chief Jim Billie
© Bird Clan Music

BIG CYPRESS - No one knows exactly how Abiaka died out here in the swamps. But the great Seminole war leader, also known as Sam Jones, was not taken down by the bullets or sabers of the United States militia.

The U.S. exhausted tens of millions of dollars - the most costly military campaign in the young country's history - to find, defeat, capture, control, cheat, move, starve-out, put on boats, force-march, annihilate, kick the hell out of, torture and dehumanize Sam and his kind - the Seminole Indians - to no avail.

Once the Indians of Florida took refuge within this vast area of swamp and hammock known as Big Cypress, and to the south and east on the tree islands and wet sawgrass prairies of the Everglades, thousands of the world's top fighting troops were no match for a few hundred men, women and children with their canoes and chickees . . . and gators, mosquitoes, snakes and panthers.

Late at night, while soldiers slept, a medicine man could "call up" dozens of panthers to attack and wreak havoc on horses and livestock. That's what Sonny Billie of the Panther clan says and he should know - he's a medicine man respected by Seminoles and Miccosukees today.

Fact is, there was nothing in the government war manuals to deal with this place and these people - some of the most famous generals in U.S. military history had their resumes ruined by their failures fighting the elusive Seminoles and their wanton precious land. In letters, soldiers referred to this place as, simply, "hell."

The Big Cypress Swamp is more than 2,400 square miles of subtropical Florida. A lush mass of wetlands muck, forest strand and palmetto prairie over marl and limestone aquifer, a full third covered by cypress trees. It is located inland where that wide patch of nothing exists on the road maps of South Florida.

This is a strange and mystical place. You've heard of Big Foot? Sasquatch? Big Cypress is where their cousin the Skunk Ape lives. There are people out here who claim to be UFO abductees. Catfish out here can walk. The fish have teeth. The grouper is often square. The B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber takes practice flights low over this land. You don't believe that? Ask the Department of Defense. They won't tell you.

There are Bible tracts taped up on trees next to bullet holes. The land is pocked with gator holes and permanent buggy tracks. In the heat of summer, the fog can be blinding in the morning. Some say Jimmy Hoffa is buried out here. Others say he's further to the south.

Maps from the 1800s use a crude X to mark the ruins of a place called Sam Jones Old Town very close to the location of the Big Cypress Community where today's Seminole Indians live. Surveying this part of the world was difficult in those days, however. The Third Seminole War began in 1855 when Seminole leader Billy Bowlegs and gang clashed with government surveyors in these parts and didn't end until Bowlegs was caught and the government gave up (again) in 1858.

No surrender.

The X marks where they "think" Sam hung out. No government agent ever saw him there. They didn't even know what Abiaka looked like. There are no known photographs, no reliable sketches and the man wouldn't pose for those oil portraits of Indian leaders in dress regalia that eventually hung in the Smithsonian. "Sam Jones liked to stay in the background. He did not want to be seen," says Billy Cypress, director of the Seminoles' Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum. "He was our backbone in Big Cypress. He was a medicine man."

The Museum is the soul of the tiny Big Cypress Community village. Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki means "something to learn, something to remember" in the Seminole language and is located at the main intersection in the swamp, where Snake and West Boundary Roads intersect. Instead of a stoplight, there is a tall plywood Indian pointing the way to go. If you go too far, the road ends and you are lost in the last frontier east of the Mississippi River - the last stand of the wild panther, the world's most endangered mammal.

Known by the Seminoles as simply "B.C.," the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation occupies but a fraction of the whole swamp area - a ruggedly beautiful 52,160-acre landscape held in trust for the Seminoles by the federal government since the 1930s.

Longitude: 80.59.34; latitude: 26.19.58. Where garfish and great blue herons can live. To the north is the McDaniels Ranch and Devil's Garden. To the south is the Miccosukee Indian Reservation. West is the National Park Service's Big Cypress National Preserve. Directly east are the state of Florida's Water Conservation Areas - the man-managed sawgrass lakes that once were the natural "river of grass."

Humans occupy less than 2 percent of the Reservation. The tiny Big Cypress Community or "village" is about 75 minutes by car from Fort Lauderdale and more than a century from the minds of most people.

Each day Tribal Internet e-mail (tribune@semtribe.com) bringsthe same question from students, professors, children, researchers, web-surfers all: How do the Seminoles live today?

Only in recent times have people begun to brave desolate, curving Bureau Of Indian Affairs (BIA) Road 1281 - A.K.A. Snake Road - to visit Big Cypress, the most rural of the Seminole Tribe of Florida's six reservations. Most people seem to have a feeling that the Tribal members live in chickees, hunt for their food, and walk about barefoot as wards of the U.S. welfare state. Most know that Indians make some money from gaming; in fact Seminoles were first to profit from large-scale gaming back in 1979. But, people aren't sure how the money and culture balance. So they ask: What are the Indians like today?

Schoolbooks, where most people get their knowledge about American Indians, don't help out much. The great strides American Indians have made since the 1950s are barely presented, and never with the same flavor as the colorful accounts of the frontier past. The same conflicts between America and its indigenous peoples still exist, but the battles are fought in courtrooms now instead of the marshes of Kissimmee Billie Strand or the cypress domes of Bear Island.

An idea was born one clear night, after a campfire singing session with Seminole Chief Jim Billie. A dozen people were singing Good Night Irene and watching the sparks sail high from the cook fire. An alligator gar and vegetables were roasting, as always, on the grill. A wild water buffalo came crashing through the Billie Swamp Safari courtyard, an escapee through the same fence that had eight-foot ostriches running through the day before. "People would not believe what goes on out here in just 24 hours," someone mused.

This was just after it was announced that the musical band Phish would stage a New Year's Eve concert for more than 70,000 fans in a reservation cattle pasture just south of the Big Cypress Community. Inquiring minds among Phish fans also wanted to know about Big Cypress and the discussions grew dramatically over the Internet as the concert approached. Will alligators hurt us? Will it be all right to videotape the Indians in their huts?

But the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Community that hordes of concert-goers experience is not the same as the one where only 507 people live and 321 people work, where two women are over 100 years old (Susie Jim Billie and Tommie Jumper) and where Willie Frank has been the oldest man (somewhere between 80 and 90 years old) ever since 100-year-old Buffalo Jim died in 1996.

A giant concert field and miles-long traffic jams are not the Big Cypress where 400 vehicles pass though the reservation on an average day. That includes bicycles. It does not include the souped-up all terrain vehicles many of the 142 Ahfachkee students use to go to and from school each day.

All right then, let's pick a day, we said, any normal day, and document it in photographs and words. Midnight until midnight. From the moment Seminole Police Department (SPD) Officer Jo Ann Barton pulls her cruiser out of the SPD parking lot at midnight until SPD Officer Tony Del Pozzo pulls his back in, 23 hours and 59 minutes later.

The chosen date was Tuesday, Nov. 23, 1999. Two days before Thanksgiving. A normal day. The date wasn't totally born of serendipity, however. We knew that was a day the most well known and visible resident of Big Cypress would be in town.

Chief Jim Billie has lived in and around the Big Cypress area most of his life. Born on the grounds of a chimpanzee farm in Dania, he was orphaned as a child and raised in numerous families all over this part of Florida. He spent countless hours exploring this wilderness by foot and swamp buggy and later, as a pilot soaring over the unforgiving refuge that saved the Seminole Tribe.

In his haunting song Buzzard Dance, Billie recalls his days as a soldier in Vietnam, imagining that helicopters were buzzards returning to roost back home in Big Cypress - a countryside he likens to the equally wet jungles of 'Nam.

Returning home from war, he decided to dedicate his life to helping his impoverished Tribe. Jim Billie has been Chairman - Chief Executive Officer - of the Seminole Tribe of Florida for more than 20 years now and Big Cypress is his home.

On Nov. 23, the Chief took care of business most of the day, talking on the phone and signing requisitions at the Billie Swamp Safari log cabin office, from the hood of his pickup truck, from the bar of the Swamp Water Café. He went to his cattle pasture and tried saddling his new wild stallion, and posed for the Chief's annual Happy Holidays! photo. Then played his old Guild guitar with Raiford Starke during suppertime at the Swamp Water Cafe. A frequent traveler, he spent much of this day at home with wife Lesley and sons Micco and Kwoko.

We knew the other Tribal leaders - Tribal President Mitchell Cypress, Councilman David Cypress and Board Representative. Mondo Tiger - would also be in the swamp. They are always out here, solving problems and administering to the needs of their unique community. Mitchell Cypress, who oversees the Tribal cattle business as one of his duties, was there to hand out awards at the Ahfachkee Thanksgiving program.

David Cypress began the day at an 8 a.m. Swamp Water Cafe breakfast meeting with road developers and spent the rest of the day visiting the members of his community, stopping in to chat with Dr. Gaffney in the Ahfachkee parking lot.

For Mondo Tiger, physical labor was the order of the day. He supervised the 33 employees at his Big Cypress-based Blue Top Construction Co. in six separate projects, including the Phish Field roads and the Big Cypress Airfield expansion.

He still had time to visit the Ahfachkee pre-school for a Thanksgiving party.

Planning for The Day In The Life project was uncomplicated. No plans. Except sunrise and sunset. Our goal was to document what happened, naturally. Then we would assemble the photos and distribute this publication to those who wish to know how the Indians live today.

More than 50 photographers participated; students at Ahfachkee and Tribal members were armed with cameras and asked to take pictures of "your world." A lot of photos were taken at school - even in the girls' room! Reservation dogs, living rooms, friends and home, horses and cars, teachers and grandmas. We roamed the community at all times of day and night, snapping away

The result is this limited edition 52-page keepsake magazine. Every photo, except for some aerials, was taken on Tuesday November 23, 1999.

Correspondent Tommy Benn of Okeechobee was asked to ride the back roads and see what happens. Nothing happened. Tommy brought back beautiful photos, however, of the many long and lonely dirt roads in the reservation outback. Rows of citrus and bell peppers, the edge of the swamp, nothing going on. Just a normal day in the life of Big Cypress.

It was definitely a full moon, which photographer Bob Kippenberger caught on our cover photo. That's why it was quiet, said SPD officer Jo Barton. "New moon is usually when it is jumping and weird stuff happens." Officers at nighttime check the reservation gates, such as those at Billie Swamp Safari and Seminole Farms and make sure no one has vandalized the water gauges at the various pump stations.

Officer Del Pozzo, however, adheres to the belief that "things do tend to happen on a full moon night." North of the reservation, Del Pozzo slowed near "Duck Curve," as the old-timers call it and shined his searchlight in the bushes along the perilous roadside - looking for metallic reflections indicating crashed vehicles and unconscious drivers.

Newtimers call it "Deadman's Curve."

Later, Del Pozzo took a water bottle and extinguisher to douse a fire near the reservation residential area - the site was littered with beer cans and liquor bottles from a teenage party. Out near "Confusion Corner" (where Palm Beach, Hendry and Broward Counties meet) pea-thick fog turned Del Pozzo back toward the Community central: "SPD officers have reported strange sightings of human figures walking around this area on foggy nights than vanishing," he said.

Strange lights in the sky and a momentary red glowing atmosphere were caught by the camera of Seminole Tribune reporter Libby Blake. UFO?

"Either that or the Southern lights," said Libby.

Cattle loose from a fence near Mondo Tiger's house and an eerie scream that turned out to be a bobcat fighting a raccoon - and the strange appearance of a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig in the Billie Swamp Safari parking lot - proved the top excitement during the nighttime hours of Nov. 23.

The Gaffneys, Ahfachkee Principal Pat and his wife, Assistant principal Dr. Sharon Byrd, arose at 4:30 a.m, and drove from their Hollywood home to open the Ahfachkee parking lot gates by 6:50 a.m. By 7, the cooks were cooking and the classroom doors were being opened; high school teacher Lee Zepeda, a Seminole from Naples and one of 12 Ahfachkee teachers, drove to school an hour from Naples. He probably passed resident Martha Doctor out running the rez at the crack of dawn.

If the Museum is the soul of Big Cypress, Ahfachkee (which means happy) is the reservation's heart. Subsidized by the Seminole Tribal Council, the school provides accredited K-12 education for all reservation students (and 7 non-Seminoles who live on or near the reservation). On this day, there was a field trip to Pompano Beach, patchwork sewing classes, computer learning: "How To Surf The Internet," outside hula-hoop recreation, math, biology . . . and an awards program officiated by Tribal President Mitchell Cypress. And, of course, learning as usual.

Before Ahfachkee opened, Seminole youth had to endure bus rides of more than an hour to reach schools in Clewiston. Now the bus ride may only take a few minutes. Kids who do not ride the bus, ride their ATVs or bikes and some are dropped off and picked up by parents; on a typical day, this passes as Big Cypress' rush hour.

High school graduates who maintain a serious commitment to their education are given full college scholarships, including living money, from the Tribe's coffers. "One time we weren't even allowed to go to the white elementary schools," says Betty Mae Jumper, who was the first Tribal high school graduate in 1940. "Now our children are all going to college."

Big Cypress' oldest resident, Susie Jim Billie (108) and her 56-year-old son Pilot had chicken wings for lunch. They were brought over by granddaughter Jeanette, who visits every day. If she doesn't, Susie and Pilot will walk to the corner and wait for her. "I'm worried someone will kidnap her," jokes Jeanette.

The matriarch of the Panther clan, Susie is a powerful medicine woman and respected by all.

"She is living history," says Jeanette, who remembers when her grandmother was in the hospital and had to remove the numerous rows of beads that cover her neck. "She felt naked without those beads."

The Pre-school (Head Start) kids went to the library on Nov. 23 to hear Seminole storytelling. It was also the day Dr. James Van Gelder and dentist Dr. Michael Sofianos and hygenist Belkys Bueno were at the clinic. Several seniors took a trip to the Clewiston WalMart for supplies and a luncheon.

Tribal member Ingram Billie carved a little canoe out at the Museum living village and Henry John Billie carved on a big dugout from a single cypress log in his front yard. Rev. Frank Billie checked on his New Testament Baptist Church and Moses "Big Shot" Jumper Jr.went hog hunting. Later, Rodeo Arena foreman Benny Hernandez readied the arena for Happy Jumper and others to practice team calf roping. Cattlemen gathered at Paul Bowers' pasture to give pregnancy tests to his cows. Each was putytt into aq "Squeeze Chute" and examined. Sounds of cow moos resounded into the Big Cypress air.

Clouds formed. Skies threatened. But it never did rain on this day. Six months after a giant South Floirida wildfire burned 130,000 acres of dry sawgrass and 40,000 acres of swamp, a full wet season has come and gone.

The deep Snake Road canals, only weeks ago swollen with Hurricane Irene's tears, have dropped considerably. Still, 7,000,000 cubic meters of water pass through the reservation canals each month, much of it laden with phosphorus, mercury and other metals from the agricultural activities of Big Sugar and Big Vegetable to the north.

Before noon, Tribal Water resources employee Linda Billie took water samples from the L-28 Interceptor Canal out near the Preserve boundary. The dying Everglades ecosystem problems are of critical concern to the Seminoles, who are inextricably linked with it all; traditional beliefs say that if the land is ill the Tribe will be ill.

"If the land dies, the Tribe dies. That's what the elders say," says Linda. So the Seminole Tribe has committed more than $36 million for its share, so far, of Everglades restoration. The irony is not lost on Chief Billie: "They came in here and put in roads and canals and power lines and pipelines without asking our permission.

"Now they want our money to help fix their mistakes!"

Bulldozers and dredges caused the problems; njow bulldozers and dredges must fix it. Grant monies help pay the bill.

Only one person was pulled over by the police all day, a Tribal member who was given a verbal warning for speeding. Seventeen seniors were served at Hot Meals. There was pool playing at the youth center, basketball at the gym and a whole lot of meat hanging at the slaughterhouse.

At the Big Cypress Airfield, pilots Peter Vedel and Ken Dunn installed a bulletin board on the office wall and worked on paperwork, a rare off day when none of the Tribal aircraft were in the air. from annihilation would someday provide security and prosperity for his grandhildren?.

No way. An old man, even during the Seminole conflicts, Sam Jones may have simply died in his sleep, weary from the stress of constant survival. He may have been taken far into the swamp and his body placed upon a thatch and cypress riser. Dead Sam would have been surrounded with the physical possessions he loved on earth, armed with his weapons and dressed for his journey to cross over. And then he would have been left alone. No one would have visited him again. And nature would have taken its course.

So, there is no monument, way out here, to mark the passing of the wise man and war hero who symbolized the Seminoles' legendary resistance to surrender. Abiaka's legacy is stronger than any marble and granite memorial, however. For, the direct descendents of his band of resistors are today's proud Seminole and Miccosukee Indians.

And this is how they live.
In the garfish latitudes.
Way out here.
Tuesday, November 23, 1999.

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