A New Reality: Seminole Perspectives on Florida’s Shifting Ecosystem
April is Earth Month! In Florida, we are fortunate to live in an incredibly unique, but fragile, environment. This month, we will focus on not only highlighting the beauty of the Everglades, but also threats to this incredible ecosystem, and what we can do to protect these important ancestral homelands. We will also feature an inside look into the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki’s Earth Day the Native Way event, which will be at the Museum on April 17th.
Unsurprisingly, Seminoles have long been strong advocates for Everglades and environmental protection and restoration. They have also had a front row seat for the massive changes seen in the ecosystem in the last century. This week, we will look back at the Everglades from a Seminole perspective, and how the landscape has shifted and changed in only a hundred years. Later this month, check back in on what the Seminole Tribe of Florida and contemporary Seminole activists are doing to protect and restore this unique environment.
In our featured image, you can see a cypress swamp, photographed sometime between 1910 and 1940 by ‘explorers’ interested in documenting and taming the Everglades (ATTK Museum, 2007.46.124).
“The Everglades became small” – Sam Huff
Taming the Water
As we have noted in previous blog posts, the water of the Everglades connected the peninsula for Seminole ancestors for centuries. Seminoles would use the Water Highway, canoe trails connecting them to various camps, coasts, and trading posts, to navigate inland Florida with ease. Their relationship with water was an intimate one, where they depended not only on the water itself, but the abundance of this incredible ecosystem to survive through hunting, fishing, and foraging.
Unfortunately, with the influx of white settlers in the decades following the Seminole war period, the idea of ‘reclaiming’ the Florida swamplands for agriculture began to take root. The earliest successful attempt at manipulating and augmenting the land in the name of progress happened in the 1880s. Hamilton Disston and the Trustees of the Internal Improvement fund built a network of canals connecting lakes in the Kissimmee Valley, north of Lake Okeechobee (West 29).
Disston’s experiment would start a deluge of drainage, canal, and road construction projects aimed at draining the swampland to make interior Florida more accessible by land, as well as free up valuable agricultural property. By the 1910s cities like Fort Lauderdale were launching their own dredging and drainage projects and channeling the water into canals.
Sam Huff, born in 1872 on Pine Island just west of present-day Fort Lauderdale, had a front row seat to Fort Lauderdale’s dredging project. Huff would relate it to William C Sturtevant in 1952: “Steam shovels began to make canals into the Everglades…Just as soon as they hit Okeechobee, the water was going to dry up. I didn’t believe it, until they hit Okeechobee. Then the water dried up, and even in Okeechobee it was dry too. The Everglades became small…” (West 31).
Cutting the Trail and Cutting off the Lake
Along with these drainage projects, extensive development of railways and road construction projects across Florida transformed the landscape. Previously, Lake Okeechobee would fill with water from the Kissimmee River, Fisheating Creek, Lake Istokpoga, and Taylor Creek, which would then freely spill southward during the Wet Season and feed the Everglades. The Herbert Hoover Dike, began in 1930, is a 143-mile-long earthen dike that surrounds the entire lake, built to control the water level and flow. The lake, which had before changed shape and size with the water, was now limited, unable to feed the River of Grass as it had before.
The Tamiami Trail, which opened on April 26, 1928, was another incredibly ambitious project that cut straight through the heart of the Everglades. Fraught with the dangers of the swampland, the project had been in the works for over a decade before it was completed. Over 2,000 workers toiled relentlessly, carving, blasting, and scraping their way along the route. The Tamiami Trail ultimately cost around $8 million at the time—equivalent to over $145 million in 2025 dollars.
Connecting Tampa and Miami, the road opened up a brand-new world for Florida travelers, while completely cutting off Seminoles from their previous ways of life. Seminoles were forced to adjust; eventually tourism would support many Seminole families, who would live in camps along the Trail.
Resistance and Resilience
In 1956, an elderly man identified as Pete Tiger was interviewed about how the drainage programs had impacted his environment, life, and folkways.
He shared that “In the old times we could paddle our canoes for many days and hunt the deer and the alligator. Now the white man has drained the Glades with his canals to make fields for his tomatoes and sugarcane. Our canoes cannot run on the sand and it is forbidden to cross the white man’s fences. And the deer and the alligator each day go farther away” (West 30). The change that Tiger identified was fast; only a handful of decades existed between fully being able to utilize the Water Highway and being cut off from their previous way of life. Before that, canoes had been a vital part of Seminole existence and survival.
In 1918, a group of reporters, accompanied by several professionals, including a civil engineer, set out to travel from Fort Myers to Miami, connecting the partially constructed Tamiami Trail. However, they were diverted along the way and attempted to locate a Seminole camp to ask for directions. During their journey, the author captured their efforts, noting: “A Seminole canoe trail was followed, along which several abandoned canoes were stranded high and dry. The day of the Seminole canoe is evidently numbered” (Jun 22, 1918, News-Press). The reporter, like Pete Tiger would echo decades later, could see even then that the Seminole way of life was irreparably threatened.
Above, Four Seminole men walk through the Everglades carrying palmetto leaves. By Ethel Cutler Freeman, circa 1940. (ATTK Museum, 2005.27.11)
Looking Back on a Changed Florida
In 1998, Jack Henry Motlow recorded an interview about his life, which is now part of the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum’s Oral History Collection. Born in 1923 near Miami, Motlow moved onto the Tamiami Trail as a young child. The Trail officially opened for use in 1928. This time was a period of incredible upheaval in South Florida, as road construction, canals, and drainage projects sought to transform the slow-moving river that was the lifeblood of the Seminole people.
With these big changes also came an influx of settlers, capitalizing on the “new” land. In a Seminole Tribune article detailing his interview, Motlow shares that his family was forced to the Tamiami Trail after the land was taken over by white farmers, and “Seminoles couldn’t use it anymore,” Motlow continued that “they used fertilizer and it ran off the fields into the water supply, so the water wasn’t good to drink anymore.”
“Before that the white people were going to built canal and our older people didn’t want them to be built but they did anyway. The older people say it will dry up the Everglades and it wasn’t good. That what happen. Today we have to buy bottle water to drink because of the fertilizer draining into the water. Today I think there law now to protection the Everglades from drying up. Back then you could see way off and nice breeze for the sail to travel with. Because of the drainage there are a lot of growth today.”
Looking Forward
Like those who came before them, Seminoles still maintain an important and intimate relationship with the environment. This relationship is increasingly threatened with climate change, sea level rise, and shortsighted projects in the name of progress. For the last century, Seminoles have been, and continue to be, a strong voice protesting the desecration of the Everglades.
At a symposium in 2016, Seminole and Miccosukee citizens joined over 100 climate activists and politicians at the third annual Love the Everglades Summer symposium. Many strong Seminole and Indigenous voices were there, including those who to this day continue to fight for the Everglades. Bobby Henry, who performed the invocation, stated “Water is the most important thing about the Everglades. It comes from up north and it used to flow every year. You used to be able to drink it, but today you’re afraid of it.”
Henry’s words echo those of Jack Henry Motlow from 18 years before. The Everglades has not just been changed, shaped, and reformed to fit the standards of progress; it has also been poisoned. Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee tribal member, describes the land as a living entity, one that has been abused. “We have amputated [the Everglades’] flow,” she said. “The Creator meant for this to be a swampland; nature always tries to reclaim and heal itself but man keeps trying to cut and scar it.”
Although it has been almost a decade since the symposium, and almost a century and a half since the first industrious entrepreneur began to augment the Everglades for his own profit, the fight for the Everglades does not end. For the rest of April, join us as we celebrate the beauty of our fragile Florida ecosystem, as well as highlight the ways the Seminole Tribe of Florida and other dedicated Indigenous climate activists are working to preserve and restore the Everglades. Additionally, next week, stop in to get an inside look at the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum’s “Earth Day the Native Way” event, held April 17th at the Museum.
Additional Sources
For the purposes of this article, the book below was accessed digitally. Page reference numbers may not align with paper and hardback copies.
West, Patsy. The Enduring Seminoles: From Alligator Wresting To Casino Gaming, Revised and Expanded Edition. 2008. University Press of Florida. Digital.
Author Bio
Originally from Washington state, Deanna Butler received her BA in Archaeological Sciences from the University of Washington in 2014. Deanna moved to Florida in 2016. Soon, she began working for the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office. Deanna was the THPO’s Archaeological Collections Assistant from 2017-2021. While at the THPO, Deanna worked to preserve, support, and process the Tribe’s archaeological collection. She often wrote the popular Artifact of the Month series and worked on many community and educational outreach programs. She lives in Lakeland, FL with her husband, two sons, and dog.
