INDIAN ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

In cooperation with The Seminole Tribe of Florida

INTERVIEWEE: James Hutchinson INTERVIEWERS: John Mahon Tom King

DATE: August 1973

DORIS DUKE FOUNDATION SUMMARY

James Hutchinson and his wife, Joan from the Port Salerno area lived among the Seminoles on Brighton Reservation in 1959. They returned another year to continue their project of painting the Indians. This interview is his narrative of their experiences winning the confidence of the Indians, their living conditions, their observations on Indian attitudes, appearances, and living habits. He especially describes Billy Bowlegs. INDEX

Bedell, Deaconess, 22-24

Bowlegs, Billy, 8-10, 15, 18, 35-38

Cypress, Charlie, 13-14

DeVane, Albert, 9-10

dress (Indian styles), 27-28

''ear dogs'', 20-21

education, 30-31

Green Corn Dance, 32-33

housing (on Brighton)

Hutchinson (early experiences with Indians), 1-5

Indian federations, 44-47

Indian facial types (to Painter), 17 medicine bundle, 34

Miccosukees and Muskogees (apparent differences), 24-26

Osceola, Joe Dan, 16

Seminole attitude toward: authority, 29 BIA, 42-43 Hutchinsons, 7-8, 19-20 photographs, 28

Shore, Frank, 34, 37

Sturtevant, Dr. William (Smithsonian Institution), 1-2 tribal council, 40-41 M: Mr. Hutchinson, would you mind telling how you got started as an Indian painter?

H: I will. I had painted for years, in the Port Salerno area. Port Salerno is about thirty miles north of Palm Beach, on the east coast of Florida. All the subject matter had been Salerno fishermen, Florida backwoods, the rivers, that sort of thing. One afternoon, or one morning rather, my wife and I read in the Miami Herald about the Indians moving out of their thatched chickees and into cement block houses. We were curious as to how far this assimilation had gone. We held a very romantic attitude, I suppose lots of people do, of Indians, and we had always thought of them as living off the land, being the noble savage, the Hollywood version of Indians. And we had never thought of them, you know, living in CBS houses, going to the store for their groceries, and this sort of thing. So a friend of ours who had a very great influence on us, Mr. Steven Schmidt, was the director of our local museum there at Stuart, the Elliot Museum and the House of Refuge. We were with him and his wife one evening, and Joany and I mentioned that wouldn't it be nice. We wondered aloud if anybody had ever done a pictorial record on the Seminoles. Much along the same line as Catlin did with the Mandans. Steve thought not and none of us really knew, so he wrote to his friend, Dr. William Sturte­ vant, at the Smithsonian, director of ethnology, southeast­ ern Indians, and asked the question. He found out indeed nothing like that had ever been attempted before. So we went to see Dr. Sturtevant and chatted with him about the Seminoles. My background was absolutely zero on Indian history. The only thing I had to recommend myself was that I was interested and I was some kind of a painter. I thought it would be a very fine thing to do. To give you an idea of what little concept I had of the challenge that lay ahead, my idea was to waltz into the reservation for about six months, get all the information I needed, and have the en­ tire history of the Seminoles down.

M: Excuse me half a minute, when was this? I'm not sure you said.

H: This was in 1959, 2

M: O.k. thanks.

H: I had no idea of the condition of the reservations, what they were like. And indeed thought I might be trying to do something whose time had already passed. I might be romanticizing myself into a situation, rather than really being able to come to grips with something that was real at the time. Well, we knew none of this. We knew the truth about none of it, and Sturtevant had just come back in 1959 from doing a study on herbs, curing herbs of the Seminoles. He suggested we go to the Brighton Reservation, which is on the northeast corner of Lake Okeechobee. Those are the Muskogee Indians. He felt that the people there, number one, would be more receptive to the idea of having somebody come in amongst them; number two, there were some very old people who were still living in an Indian way. So we applied to the Indian Council once we returned. After about six months of receiving no answer, I called them up. I don't know if you know what I'm talking about.

K: Precisely.

H: In those days the headquarters was at Dania, as it is today, but it wasn't this big tourist job they've got down there now. However, they were getting ready for it, and they had a series of CBS houses, Indeed this is what the article had been based on. Their council room was held inside one of these CBS houses--and it was about one hundred and twenty degrees in there, I remember--and they invited us down on the phone. The president at that time was Billy Osceola, a great big fellow. Billy said come on down and sit in on the council with us, and when your time comes, you just stand up and tell us what you want to do. And so we did. We went down there, and we discovered that the Indians never argue about anything. They talk, and they talk, and they talk, and they talk until they've talked the problem out. And not only were they talking and talking, but they were talking in Muskogee, Miccosukee, and English occasionally. Finally, after many hours sitting in this place, they asked us to stand up. Wilted though we were, we stood up and told them that we wanted to go live on the reservation, preferably Brighton Reservation, and paint pictures about them, but we .didn't want to intrude. How I was going to do that I had no idea, 3

no training as an ethnologist. There was dead silence. I said too that I wanted to talk to some of their older people and paint some of their older people, so that my children and their children would know about these people. Because they were interesting, and they did things that were worthwhile; things perhaps that everybody ought to know about, look a little closer at. I thought it could be instantly apparent to somebody if they saw these things in a picture, in paintings. There was silence. So I thought, being a clever businessman, "I'll oil the wheels here, apparently I'm getting nowhere." I found myself saying, "And furthermore, any money that I make off these paintings for the first year, I will return ten per cent to the Indian Nation." I sat down and I thought, "Well, that'll really get them, you know, this will make things move." And around the table, "(Miccosukee) Hutchinson (Miccosukee) ten per cent (Miccosukee) fifty-fifty." And the next fellow would pick it up "(Miccosukee) Hutchinson (Miccosukee) ten per cent fifty-fifty." And I thought, "Oh God! here goes the whole thing. They want fifty-fifty." I was getting about fifty dollars for a painting in those days anyway, so I could see myself giving twenty-five to them and trying to live off of the other twenty-five. And I thought everything has gone down the drain, they're going to want fifty-fifty. But it finally came back up the circle, and Billy Osceola said, "Well, we think that's fine. We'd love to have you go out there." And they gave us an interesting document, you know, it amounted to a passport. I've often likened it to a passport, because indeed that's what it was. I was going into an area where the terrain was very different from where I live. I live on the east coast, and I was going into the center of the state, to the great prairie land, with the ham­ mocks scattered out, where you have exceedingly hot summers and tremendous afternoon storms. And the costumes that the people were wearing were different from where I was living, the language was certainly different, the color of their skin was different. Everything about them was different. On this passport, all of these gentlemen and ladies of the council signed their name, to let everybody know that we were welcome out there. Indeed, as we later found out, Indians are very independent, and you generally have to settle it on a one-to -one basis. I was in places where that piece of paper meant absolutely zilch. Th~y could have cared less what sort of 4

documents I was carrying. It only helped us, really, with white people, with the government, to show them that we were out there. We could wave that thing at them, and that was fine. Let's see, I'm rattling on here. You want me to just continue rattling on like this?

M: Exactly, that's what we want you to do.

H: Well, my wife and I were stony broke, this was our usual condition in those days. We borrowed five hundred dollars from an interested party in town, and I had never borrowed so much money in my life. I didn't know what was going to happen to me. I thought it was the end of the world. But I borrowed the five hundred dollars to start us off on this project. Clare and Dave Durant gave us a two-wheel trailer bed, on top of which I built a gypsy cart out of used masonite, screen and plastic. And we towed that thing over to Lake Okeechobee behind an old beat-up Volkswagon. We went into the reservation, and I think the Indians were horrified at the whole situation. It was a God-awful looking contraption. It was very comfortable, however. We had an enormous mongrel dog, named Andy. When we got there, we expected, I don't know, I suppose I expected some sort of fanfare or somebody to come out, you know, to greet me in a custer suit or something. But no one knew about us coming, and now that we were there they weren't particularly interest­ ed that we were. There was just nothing. I hadn't expected that. I had expected either a welcome or rejection, but not just nothing. You know, how do you deal with nothing?

M: Nothing. I would be upset.

H: I finally got one of the fellows, one of the Indians with a good Indian name of Harold Jones. I paid him, and Harold Jones took us out into the boondocks out there. At that time on the Brighton Reservation there were no paved roads, except for that one center paved road. The other roads, I guess you could call them that, were pretty poor things, trails mostly, and then the engineers had made these little rough roads beside dikes, that they had done for drainage, you know. They were just starting, on a very, very tiny scale, that field bit. Where you drain a field, plant things in it, dike it. Well, that was very small. Like any good Indian family, we picked out a hammock and moved in. Out in 5

the middle of nowhere. We later found out that Harold was delighted, and in subsequent years we found out an awful lot of things. We had a lot of jokes played on us, and this was one of them. The Indians all called that place Mosquito Camp, where we lived. And there was good reason for it. At dusk, you couldn't step outside. It was fantas­ tic. They made up for it, however, because they've given us a campsite on Indian Prairie Canal, right behind Billy Bowleg's old camp, where we did stay for a number of years, at a campsite there. And so there I was. I had absolutely no training. I wasn't clear in my mind exactly what in the world I was doing there. It was hot, it was in July, the bugs were bad, and we had very poor drinking water. The nearest water to us was about three miles up the road, at a cowpen, and that was a sulphurous kind of stuff. Joan used to wash our clothes at a hand pump. It was just a remote sort of dumb place to be in. There we were, and I had no idea what we were doing. Finally we said, "Well, why are we here, we're here to paint Indians, so we've got to go find some Indians." Well, they don't live, or they didn't in those days, in towns, you know. They live in family units. There can be anywhere from two people to possibly twelve in this family unit. They were all living in thatched chickees in those days, except for a few frame houses. As I recollect, in those days, there were no cement houses on the Brighton Reservation. They were all frame houses. We would go to one camp and you would instantly realize that you were intruding. There was just no question. You had no business there. I'd set my easel up and pretend to be painting a field off to my right somewhere, when in reality I was painting the camp off to my left. The Indians who were sitting in the camp off to my left knew that I was painting the camp to my left, and faking the field out in front. So they still didn't come out to talk to me. However, the one big thing ••• well, there were two big things. The one big thing is the children. The children, at that time too young to be prejudiced, would come out in sort of a curious way to see what the deuce I was doing. They had never seen a painter out there, painting like mad, swatting mosquitos, itching all over, and the sun beating down on me. Joan, my wife, used to carry little boxes of raisins and that sort of thing. She was a health buff and didn't carry candy. So she'd give the children raisins, and they started looking for her. 6

Then when the mothers would call their children to come back. They'd call them by the white name for some reason. You know, most Indians have two names.

K: Those that I've come in contact with do.

H: Yes.

K: Refer to each other by their white names.

H: Yes, that's right, even in conversation.

K: You know, even in their own society.

H: Right. That's right. Well, they'd call them by their white names, and Joan, very astutely I thought, would write down their names in a book and match it with the child. The next time she saw that child, she'd call the child, "Hey George, Hey Johnny," you know. It kind of impressed the mothers. Pretty soon, Joan and the children and the mothers were talking together. I was still out in the field, pretending to paint to my right and swatting mosquitos, but Joan start­ ed talking to the women. During the daytime there weren't many men around. They'd gone off to their jobs or whatever, So, a man, especially a white man, in camp was not a polite thing to do. However, Joan and the mothers became quite fri­ endly, and with the children. Pretty soon they had a rapport, I was tolerated. After that I made contact, or rather Joan made contact with Mercy Jones. Mercy was kind of a woman who has great stature in the camps, in the reservation, and she allowed me to do her portrait, for a price. Harold was her son. Mercy could speak very little English. Harold came to me and said, "My mother want to know how much you're going to pay her?" And I thought, "Well, I'll be grand. I'll make an impression on everybody." So I said, "Well, you tell your mother that I will pay her a dollar an hour to sit for me." Because in those days I had never paid a sitter a dol­ lar an hour, I thought I was being, generous. He came back and said, "She wants one-fifty," I had the feeling if I'd a said fifty cents, she would have said a dollar. I think the sum wasn't important, it was just getting the best of the bar­ gain was the important thing. I paid her that, and she put on a show for me. She dressed up in her beads, and had her hair combed beautifully, and had a gorgeous costume on, and sat for about three hours under a chickee for me. It was just great, 7

I had a great time with her. Well, we stumbled along in this manner, picking up a little conversation here, a little conversation there. We went to one of their, well, we went to both of their Baptist churches. The Baptist church they had erected, and half the members got angry at the preacher, so they moved across the street and built their own Baptist church. So they had two Baptist churches right like that. A very independent bunch, as I say. And we also found out that they had lots of family fights. For example, if you were looking for Tommy Tiger--these are fictitious names, I'm just making them up now to protect the innocent--if you were looking for Tommy Tiger, and you stopped at a camp and asked them if they knew where Tommy Tiger was, they said they never heard of him. Tommy Tiger could be living in the very next camp, except that they had just had a fight. You had lots of problems like that, that you somehow did not expect the pettiness of our society to be one of their involvements as well. You know. For some reason, you look upon another society as totally different from yours, and that often isn't the case. After a year there, I went home quite discouraged. I had a show, and we sold everything and made out all right on it, so that we could go back if we wanted to. I was seriously considering not going back. Because we had no cooperation and felt like I wasn't getting anywhere with the people at all. I felt unwanted by them, and I could understand and appreciate it. But we did go back. And when we got back, as soon as we got out of our car on the reservation--we'd changed our camp this time, to behind Bowleg's camp--women brought up their babies to show us how much they'd grown since we'd been gone, I had men, of all things, tell me how glad they were that we came back to the reservation. Hoped we'd stay a long time. They gave us this campsite, as I say, and then we were invited to the branding of the young calves. There were no other white people there. They don't call us white people incidently, we're referred to as non-Indians. There were no other non-Indians there, other than the veterinarian, who was required to be there to give innoculations to the cattle. We were treated as one of the gang. I was very excited about it and felt at home after that and had no prohlems. We seemed to be able to go anywhere we wanted to and at any time we wanted to. Indeed, one time we were looked after. We had a thrilling adventure of an escaped convict. Escaped from the 8

chain gang. One of the Indians rode all the way out to our camp to tell us if we saw anything it was probably this escaped convict. We said, "Well, he's probably more afraid of us than we are of him," but we thanked him very much. And he said, "Well, the only thing is, this guy is in prison for murdering somebody." So we had that, you know, somebody had come out to tell us about it, and we were scared out of our wits for a while. We found the poor fellow was caught very shortly, a thousand miles away from us or whatever. He was never around our area. So that was very good, we had broken ground, and things started to develop for us. Our very best friend on the reservation was Billy Bowlegs, who died, incidentally, two months short of a hundred and four years old if the 1960 Census is correct. The last time I saw him he was chainsmoking and cutting down an oak tree. Of course he was pacing himself, but he was cutting down an oak tree. He had suffer­ ed a mild stroke, I don't think he realized he'd had a stroke. It seemed to us he did. We brought him out a cane to operate on. I wish you'd jump in and ask me some questions, I feel like I'm just rambling, with no central point, other than Jim and Joan's adventures with the Indians.

M: Go ahead, we're enjoying it, continue. You tell a good story.

H: Well, do you have any questions you want to ask?

M: No.

K: I do have some specific questions, but if you'd like to go ahead and finish the story of your experiences with them, that might give me a few more to ask.

H: Well, I could keep you fellows here for days.

M: Well, you can't do that, but you can keep us here most of the afternoon.

H: Just rambling on about our adventures out there. As I say, Billy was our closest friend. In the third year of being out there, Billy would often have breakfast and supper with us. The reason for that was, we were in his path to his second field. He had a field within the hammock that he was living 9

in, and two miles over was another hammock where he had another field that he cultivated. He would walk from his camp, up through our camp, and get some breakfast. He ate anything and much. Yet he was very thin, tall, beau­ tiful man, very erect. You said, Dr. Mahon, you knew Albert DeVane. Marvelous man, I consider him •••

M: I knew him at the very end of his life.

H: Well, he was a marvelous man. He kept a room for Billy. Any time Billy was in the area or needed a haircut or his moustache trimmed, Albert would go out and get him in that Jeep he had and take him in to Okeechobee or in to --what's the name of the town on the other side of Albert?

K: Moore Haven. On the other side of Okeechobee?

H: Not Moore Haven. Well, it doesn't matter.

K: Lake Placid? Williston?

H: Lake Placid. He would take him in to get his hair cut and his moustache trimmed. Then on the way home, they'd just stop off and stay at Albert's. He had his own place. Or if Billy was out, had caught a ride some place, he never had to knock. He would come in the back door and just go to his room. It was his room, maintained for him. Mrs. DeVane is a marvelous, marvelous person and an incredible cook. We had luncheon there several times, but this one time, Billy, Albert, Joan, myself and Mrs. DeVane had luncheon. Mrs. DeVane had whomped up this enormous tureen of hogback. And Albert--you remember Albert--said, "Jim, them hogs been fed on acorns for near a year, best eating there is." We said, "Oh! very good." We pulled the lid off that thing, and there was this enormous hogback, indeed it was floating in this bowl of gravy. Mrs. DeVane had dumplings, and mashed potatoes, we had string beans, we had three kinds of salad, lima beans, there was corn, and just tons of food, you know, just an enormous thing. And this was our lunch. I had my share of it. If you took a portion of everything, your plate was absolutely staggered, just weighted down with these goodies. At the end of this, and it was mid-day, I was ready to collapse. I was ready to fall asleep. And that's when we had the tape recorder 10

with us. Billy polished off his plate and asked for another one. Billy got another one. These are enormous helpings. He ate enough for about five people there, ate everything, lean­ ed back in his chair. We turned the tape recorder on, and he sang like mad. I hardly had energy to turn the doggone tape recorder on. I was stupified. I could hardly keep my eyes opened. Albert talked to us in the tape recorder about the Macintoshes, and Billy sang a song about MacIntosh being burned down in his cabin, and about the Indian who spotted where he buried the money and was going to go back and get it after all the other Indians had left. That was a song that his grandmother had taught him. A fascinating man, Bowlegs was. And Albert too. Albert was terrific. He was a grass roots historian, marvelous man.

M: Do you call on Mrs. Devane from time to time these days still?

H: I haven't seen Mrs. DeVane in a year. I've been very remiss about it, and I intend to get over there as soon as I can. I haven't been in that part of the country in a long time either. But yes, we visited Mrs. DeVane after Albert's death.

M: Well now, when you go to paint, which you're doing all along now aren't you?

H: Yes.

M: What's your stand now? I take it it's changed from these first experiences you've been describing.

H: Yes.

M: What do you turn out in now to live among them?

H: I don't live among them anymore.

M: You do not?

H: No.

K: No? 11

H: I have much more interesting neighbors next door to me. They're living in cement block houses, and there's not a single standing chickee on Brighton Reservation. Not one. Even Oscar Hole's camp is completely gone except for a couple of hovels that two very old crazy ladies live in, with about twenty-seven crazy dogs, half-starved. But there's nothing Indian on the reservation any more.

M: So what's your present stance, if you go forth to paint a picture? What do you do?

H: Well, let me first say that for me to go forth, as you say, to paint a picture, isn't difficult.

M: You have a contract to paint for the University of Miami, have you riot?

H: Yes. Well, these are mostly research paintings. They will be done through reading and through old photographs and engravings and that sort of thing. For example, I could never have met Osceola. There are five portrait painters who did portraits of him that I know of. They're all differ­ ent. The only thing they have in common is his nose. So I've taken his nose and I've given him my interpretation.

M: There's a death mask, or a life mask of Osceola.

H: Where is that located?

M: Well, I saw a copy of it in the St. Augustine Historical Society.

H: You did? Boy, would I like to see that!

M: Dr. Welden or somebody took it at Osceola's death before cutting off his head.

H: Yes, probably before they took his head.

M: Yes, it's in existence. So the actual features are of record.

H: Oh! I'll be darned. That would be very valuable.

M: They've got it in St. Augustine, the St. Augustine Historical Society does. 12

H: Great. Great! I shall find that then.

M: Well are you out among the Seminoles much now?

H: Yes. I have lots of friends on the reservations. I go down to the reservations frequently, down to Big Cypress, and to Brighton. But I do very little painting out there. For example, our first camp, the famous.mosquito camp, is now a tomato field. They've leased out so much land that the character of the land is changing. You know, when my wife and I first went there, we would not pick an orchid from the live oaks, because we didn't want to interrupt or change anything. We did not want the land to know that we'd been there. We were just visitors, we didn't want to disturb any­ thing. And a year later a bulldozer came in there and tore the hell out of the whole thing, so it's all totally des­ troyed. It was ridiculous for us not to take the orchids.

K: Did you hear about the sable palms taken out of there without the permission of the tribe?

H: Oh, you mean the cabbage palms, for the cabbage?

K: No, they were running sable palms out, for landscaping pur­ poses.

H: Oh really? Oh no, I didn't know.

K: Putting them on flat bed trailers, and taking them out by the hundreds. And it turned out that finally one day one of the drivers stopped to say, "What's going on here?"

H: Somebody stopped them and asked them?

K: They got thousands, literally thousands of trees out of there before they were caught, stripped it.

H: Yes. Well, there were thousands more, believe me.

K: Sure, they had made a heavy •••

H: But the Indians themselves aren't all that hot on conservation, you know. One of their biggest businesses was cabbage, from the swamp cabbage. The bud from the sable palm. And in order to get 13

that out, you must destroy the tree, because it is indeed the heart of the young tree. Up to about five years old, I guess, you can get that. So the way I paint now, if my paintings involve a landscape in which a specific area is required, I can find that or something very close to it all the way around the glades. It doesn't have to be on the re­ servation. I lived on the reservation long enough to know what I'm painting about, so there's nothing phony or made­ up about it. If I'm doing something that is strictly histor­ ically researchable, that can all be done from materials that are at hand. I illustrate the materials.

M: Did you ever live on Big Cypress?

H: No, I didn't have a camp there, but we'd go out on forays. I stayed down there two weeks once. And got eaten alive. That place was uninteresting to us because at that time the majority of the Indians--it's a large reservation, but it's a very low one, very wet.

M: Forty thousand acres, or something like that.

H: Yes.

K: It's even larger than that. I think the whole combined reserv­ ation is close to a hundred thousand acres.

M: Yes.

K: They have a forty thousand acre tract for the Miccosukees.

H: Yes, right.

K: They live on the trail that's set aside. There's a state reservation or a federal reservation.

H: Well, when we had first gone down, the government had built, dredged up a lot of land, around the headquarters, and darn near the whole population was living around the headquarters. It was not an interesting situation. Now there were some very fascinating people down there whom we met, Charlie Cypress being one of them. I don't know if you saw the article that the Geographic did on Charlie. He built a canoe for them, and Charlie was one of the last really great canoe-builders. When I painted Charlie, I painted him from life, he was very ill. 14

His face was emaciated, he had white beard stubble, and he was no longer speaking any kind of English at all. He spoke to the boy who was my interpreter. The boy said that Charlie wanted me to make him look well, so I did. I made Charlie straight, clean-shaven, and with full cheeks. Incidentally, I used to do that in those days. I don't any more, but in those days, if I painted anybody, I treated them exactly as if they were a very fancy Palm Beach client. I would paint the picture and then show it to them. I never took a picture off the reser­ vation without getting their permission that it was o.k. to go. The only arguments I ever had were from their women, that I didn't give them enough beads. One time I did this portrait of a woman, painting her, and 1 counted the strings of beads she had. When the time came she said I didn't have enough beads. So I said, "Look, I counted them, now you count them. 11 And she counted them and she said, "But you didn't paint the ones back here." Rather than try to go through all this explanation, I gave her an extra string of beads to take care of the ones back here behind her neck.

K: That's very important.

H: Yes, she had them. She wanted to show them.

M: What is the medium, or whatever you call it, in which you paint? Is this oil or water colors--I can't tell looking at the photo­ graphs--or both?

H: Well, I'm an oil painter. I paint in oils, and I'm a represent­ ational painter.

M: Yes, I understand that. In the old days of egg tempera .•. is that still used or do you use some modern thing instead?

H: Yes, they .•.

M: I mean the medieval painters used the white of egg, I think.

H: Yes, well •..

M: The yolk or what have you.

H: Yes, tempera painters are around. Andrew Wyeth I suppose is the most famous painter who paints in egg tempera, and Hart Benton. 15

M: You never used this in dealing with the Indians?

H: Not in dealing with the Indians. I've done it as an ex­ ploratory thing in my field.

M: Do you have any problems working out in the hot sun, as you described it, with materials?

H: No, you become accustomed to your materials and what you're doing. Besides, I don't do as much of that as I used to. I tell you what happens. You learn how a sable palm looks in the late afternoon, with the sun slanting in on it. And it's not all that difficult to do, once you learn certain color combinations and so forth. I don't mean that you have formu­ las and that sort of thing. You don't, because each painting is different. But you learn how to create a feeling, or a mood. And sometimes it's not necessary to stand out in that hot sun to do it.

M: Yes.

H: It is to begin with. You've got to do it to begin with, because you've got to learn it. That's the only way you learn it.

M: Did you ever pick up any conversational ability with them in their own tongues?

H: No I did not. Billy Bowlegs tried to spend some time with me and taught me a few words like "pinuwaw."

M: Which was his tongue?

H: He was Muskogee.

M: I see.

H: Yes, all of the Indians in Brighton are Muskogee. The Miccosukee are in the south.

K: That may have been true when you were down there, it's no longer true.

H: Oh, is that right?

K: At least a quarter of them in the Brighton now are Miccosukee­ speaking. 16

H: Maybe they are marrying one another.

K: Yes, and quite a lot of them have married in the last ten years.

H: Well, that's probably. But it was amusing to us when we first went there that English was often used between the two.

K: Yes.

H: To communicate. Joe Dan Osceola--do you know Joe Dan?

K: Yes.

H: All right. I gave Joe Dan his first art lesson, and I helped him with his little newspaper on Brighton. He was very, very young and thinish then, as an Indian boy. This was before he was married, when we first met him. And now he's become what?

K: He was the president of the Seminole Tribes of Florida, Inc.

,H: He was the president of the tribe, and I think he's left that now, hasn't he?

K: He has. He went to U.S.E.T. first and was the President of the United Southeastern Tribes, and then he returned to the Seminole Tribe. He's now the ••• well, I can't remember the title exactly, but he's the Indian Bureau Service Director at the automotive station.

H: He told me he was going into public relations.

K: Oh really? His last attempt was trying to get back in to the government there, he wanted to get on the Tribal Council. They wouldn't allow him, told him he'd have to resign his position first.

H: Yes.

K: Which he wouldn-' t do.

M: In general, have you painted other subjects, human subjects, then Indians? 17

H: Oh yes, sure.

M: Well, what I wanted to ask you was this, is there any gimmick about painting Indians, I mean are there char­ acteristics you look for in making an Indian portrait?

H: A lot of people think it's totally a gimmick, no.

M: But I mean, for instance, you said that you knew what a sable palm looked like with the sun streaming on it.

H: Yes.

M: Is there something about an Indian physiognomy that you can follow invariably or not?

H: Well, no, not really. There's the classical type, but you see, we have so many racial types represented here. You can not take a Seminole Indian and say this is the type he is. You can take his brother-in-law, and he looks like he walked out of the hills of North Carolina someplace. There were families that had very strong, sort of classical Indianish. I'm talking about the very broad faces, cheekbones, and a darker coloring, that umberish color, sienna color, that they have. Of course I can distinguish an .American Indian from a Spaniard, from a Castillian, the olive-skinned Castillians, you know, and their black hair. I don't know quite what you are asking me?

M: Well, not anything really, just it was a matter of technique, whether there was some.

H: Well, there is as far as ••.

M: If you were to construct from memory an Indian head, is there •.• ?

H: Oh, I do sometimes. I do sometimes. I have commissions in which the people who are commissioning the painting do not want a particular individual.

M: They want a representative Indian?

H: They just want an Indian and would prefer rather that it isn't somebody. So I make up an Indian. And have a lot of fun doing it, a lot of fun. 18

M: Where do commissions of this type come from to you?

H: All over the world.

M: Really?

H: Yes.

M: I mean, communication would be opened to you, apparently you don't initiate it.

H: No, I have ••.

M: Somebody wants a picture of an Indian?

H: Yes, I have a gallery in Miami, that handles most of my stuff. I have a gallery in Taos, New Mexico, and then people seem to find their ••. No, no, leave it on. This whole thing reminds me. The first time we took a tape recorder out to the reservation, it was an electrical plug-in thing, so we had to do our interviews at the headquarters. We went out and got Billy Bowlegs, and we didn't know him very well. He agreed to cut some tapes with us. So I went in, just like you did, I said, "This is 1960, at the Brighton Headquarters, this is so and so inter­ viewing Billy Bowlegs, a Muskogee," and I said, "Billy is going to tell us about some of the old times." I couldn't think of a title, you know, I was desperately floundering around. I said, "Well, Billy you're going to talk about the old times, aren't you?" And all he would do was nod his head. Every question I asked him, it turned out to be a yes or no thing. I couldn't pose the question and he would shake his head yes or no. We didn't get a damn thing until much later. It was me, you know, I might as well not have had him.

M: A respectful silence.

H: Yes.

M: Well, could he talk pretty good English?

H: Oh yes.

M: No problem? 19

H: And indeed, he did spin a couple yarns for us, which was great.

M: Well, I want to ask you •••

H: The Elliot Museum has those now.

M: Where's the Elliot Museum?

H: In Stuart.

K: Maybe you can get copies.

M: Maybe we can.

H: Maybe you can. I don't know. I haven't listened to them in beaucoup years. But there may be something on them that you could use. I don't know.

M: When you came back to the reservation for your second hitch •••

H: The second year, yes.

M: ••• and were uncertain as to whether there was any future •••

H: Yes.

M: ••• the attitude of the Indians had changed so sharply.

H: Right, yes.

M: Would you comment on that a little? What is your analysis of what had happened?

H: Well, I think what had happened was that they recognized the fact that we were not "fly-by-nighters." We were not there to take advantage of them. After all, we'd spent a year with them, here we were back to spend another year. The mothers would run their children up to us to show us how much they had grown, and the men stopped me and said how glad they were we were back on the reservation, invited us out for branding of the young calves, in which we were the only non-Indians there, as I told you this story before. But I think there were a couple of reasons why we were so well received there other than that. It went into re- 20

inforcing this idea that we were not there to take ad­ vantage, that we were interested in them, and that we were people of good will. Joan and I had mounted, that first year, quite a large program. We got all the church­ es in, didn't matter what denomination they were. If I saw a guy that I knew was a preacher, I'd buttonhole him. I got these churches to put on drives. One of the drives was for clothes, clothing, because a lot of the Indians were so poorly clothed when we went out there. Many of the children had no shoes, We got shoes on I guess all the kids there. Another one was a program for innoculation against hook worm. That was one of the big problems. I recall talking to the nurse that used to visit out there once a week in those days. I knew that tuberculosis had· been a traditional enemy of all Indians, all Indian groups. I asked her about that, and she said, "No, most of these people are dying from hook worm." It's sapping them all the time. They're lethargic because of it. And that was one reason for the shoes, to start the thing with the shoes.

M: Yes.

H: Then the other thing that was very distressing to me. I suppose you have levels of interest and concern. One thing that upsets me very much is to see an animal mistreated. The Indians didn't give a damn about their dogs. If they could use the dog somehow, they had what they called ear dogs, I did a painting on it one time. I went out with a couple Indian lads, and these ear dogs were to go out and chase down pigs--pigs that had once been domesticated and then turned loose on the reservation--either for capture for slaughter or capture for marking. The qogs would run a hog down, grab him by the ear, force the hog into the dirt, and literally hold him there--these were good-sized mongrel dogs--until the Indian could get off his horse. One early morning, we ran barefooted. I was in tennis shoes, and we didn't have a horse. I thought I'd have a heart attack, but we ran the pigs down, with the dogs. It was quite a trick. The dogs would hold them there until the Indian came along with his knife. The Indian would 21

slit the ear, the free ear of the hog in such a manner that was like a brand. Anybody who saw that hog, no matter where he was, knew that somebody owned that hog. If it was his mark then he could kill it. If it wasn't his mark he couldn't kill it. Well, these dogs are fed during the times that they worked, but nobody was fed much just for being around. As a result of that, a lot of the dogs mated out in the woods. You'd have small packs of wild dogs roaming that area. As is the opposite case in Alaska. I saw a film once in which there were a bunch of wild dogs who hunted in packs and anything was fair game, including man. These dogs were fearful of peo­ ple, cowardly, and just miserable, miserable curs. Skele­ tonal creatures that roamed mostly at night and would come in and try to get your garbage. We'd hear them whin­ ing out in our camp. It was just a terrible thing. You know, you wanted to put them out of their misery or you wanted somebody to love them. It was a ghastly situation. I got to thinking about the natural thing of rabies. I was scared to death that if you get just one infected dog, it could have swept through the whole reservation. A lot of people could have died horribly from that, especially in those days, since--Tom and I were talking about a little while ago--a lot of the Indians didn't care too much for white medicine. I don't know what they knew about rabies. I don't think they had any treatment for it. If you know what a death from a rabies bite involves, it's a horrible, horrible thing, a particularly nasty sort of thing. So, we mounted this program to get the dogs either rounded up or innoculated. The last word I heard, we were successful in doing that. So I think those efforts that were goodwill, openfaced, people to people efforts, had no ulterior motive, could not possibly have had, were generally, after a while, filtered down and accepted as being such. The fact that we were still there, that they weren't getting rid of us. It seemed like opportunity after opportunity after that opened up for us. We had a very good time, that second year especially. Our last year.

M: With regard to the other animals, horses and cattle, would the Indian treatment of them be described as humane? 22

H: Well, I think that any cattleman's treatment of cattle is that they are a food source, period. They're not to be loved. The Indians had that same attitude,

M: How about the horses?

H: Horses were pretty well taken care of. The horses I saw were pretty well taken care of. Yes.

M: Well, I have one additional little question, not relating to what we've been discussing before. I heard you mention before thar you had known Deaconess Bedell.

H: Oh yes.

M: Would you be willing to comment about the deaconess, what­ ever you want to say?

H: Yes. We met Deaconess Bedell, first time in 1960, over at Everglades City. We had been camping out on Big Cypress Reservation. This one night the mosquitos got so bad it was unbelievable. We had retreated from our netted tent, gotten into our Volkswagen, rolled up the windows, and started sweating. Couldn't sleep. We had an enormous dog, our Andy, our mongrel dog. So we said, "Well, the hell with this." We were dying, you know. So we decided to drive out someplace to civilization and get a motel, be­ cause we were pretty flush by that time. I think I had sold two or three pictures. We started driving, wound up in Immokalee. No motels were opened, the couple motels that were there. I would get out of the car, and was pounding on the door of one of the motels, and Joan said, "I just got a glimpse of you standing out there under that light." She said, "I would no more come to the door if I was a motel owner, than the man in the moon. You look like some barbaric thing that came out of the swamp." And I did, I was pretty messed up.

M: You were out of the swamp.

H: Pretty grubby, and I had just come out of the swamp, and then, I'm not too civilized. So we decided to drive on, get out of Immokalee, and we woun1 up finally at first dawn's light in Everglades City, where there was no motel. We went on a- cross to Chokoloskee, where the causeway had just been put 23

in not too long before. We came to a place there, it was a little sign that said, "Ring the bell, and keep your shirt on while I get my pants on." We waited there, and finally we saw a light go on about a half a mile down the road. The fellow lived down the road, and he drove up and gave us this room. For the first time in weeks Joan and I slept on a bed, and Andy, our enormous mongrel, slept on the other one, with air conditioning yet. So it was a treat. We went on then, back into Everglades City, where we met Deaconess. We had heard about her, and we stopped. She had what she called The Glades Cross Mission, which consisted of a tiny, old-fashioned, cracker type house, wood frame house, with a cross out in front, a wooden cross. You know, she was one of those remarkable people, very slight, almost tiny, and yet you knew that she was made out of solid iron. She was one of the strongest-willed people I had ever met in my life, and the gentlest. And no messing around, there was only one way to look at things, the truthful way. You met Deaconess Bedell and you thought, "My God, here's the favorite relative I've always wanted to have." She was that kind. Some years later a couple wrote a book about her, called, A Woman Set Apart. They told her story. She had a remarkable history, with the Alaskan Indians, with the Western Plains Indians, and then the Florida Indians. By that time we had spent all our money, so she brought us some soup at the local beanery there for lunch. I asked her if it was true, I'd heard, I said, I asked her if she had never converted an Indian to Christianity, to the Episcopal con­ cepts of Christianity. And she said no, but she was in no hurry. She was in the service of the Master, the Indians were children of nature and loved by God. Besides the Bishop wouldn't build them a church down there, and she didn't see any reason to take something away from them, and have no place for them to go in return. Which I thought was pretty savvy of her. She never forced her ideals or her dogma on them, and yet in her own way, I think, was a great influence of goodness.

M: What did she do for them?

H: Well, she saw the poverty that they were living in and the fact that they had no way to enter into commerce. She organ­ ized a little co-op, I guess you would call it, with the 24

Trail Indians. These are the Indians that call themselves the Seminoles and Miccosukee. And she would get them to make things; dresses, jackets, toys, canoes, that sort of thing. But they had to be a very high quality. She often refused things that were brought to her, because the qual­ ity wasn't good enough. Which, in turn, worked in reverse, and gave the Indians some pride, if they were accepted by Deaconess Bedell. She would try to sell these things for the Indians or trade goods. And became a little co-op, a little middle-man for them, taking none of the profit for herself, The last time we saw her, was just before hurricane Donna came through and destroyed that whole place. Her back room was filled with the highest quality Indian crafts, Seminole craft, I'd ever seen, It's just tragic that that was destroyed in the hurricane.

M: King has some questions he wants to ask.

K: I would like to ask you some pretty specific questions, part­ icularly concerning some of the painting that you did. I think that perhaps the eye of an artist might be a little more perceptive than mine, and even those of the Indians themselves, concerning such things.

H: Only in visual content.

K: Well, the first question I'd like to ask is something that came up many times during conversations that I would have with both Miccosukees and Muskogees, concerning the differ­ ences between them. To the outsider, there are no readily apparent differences whatever, other than language. They share a pretty common culture. The clothing appears to be similar, and the physiognomy appears to be exactly the same. Yet all of them tell me that there are differences, and I could never pin them down as to exactly what they were. Muskogees would tell me that the Miccosukees dressed differ­ ently. I would say, "Well can you give me an example, because it appears to me that they dress exactly the same way you do. The traditional clothing is exactly the same as yours." And they would say, "Well, no, it's different." I'd say, "How?" "Well, it is." You know, this kind of thing. The same holds true for general physical appearance. Buffalo Tiger told me that he could tell a Muskogee by sight, whether he knew the man or not. He would tell me that he looked different physi- 25

cally, his appearance was different. And I asked him in what way, and again, no substantive answer at all. It was just that they were different. Did you, in your experiences down there, notice any differences either in clothing or physical appearance?

H: Yes, I know what you're talking about, because we ran across this too. They consider they're very different, as you say. One time I was trying to pinpoint it, as you did, and the nearest I could get, as far as their consideration of differences, is that they likened, the Miccosukee--which I think is kind of backwards, according to Dr. Mahon's book --the Miccosukee consider themselves the first occupants of Florida. And they consider the Muskogees something like Yank­ ees. It's a Southern-Yankee type thing. I think that they have never let go of the vast differences between the upper and lower Creeks. When they had such great animosity between the upper and lower Creeks. I think this thing is still going on, very much so as it is between Massachusettes and Alabama today. It's a cultural problem that they have. As far as the obvious differences, not really. I couldn't see anything. At one time, I thought I did, and maybe it is a difference, now that you bring it up. I haven't thought about it in a long time. I always thought that the Miccosukees' turban dress was a flatter, broader situation. And the Muskogees tended to have a cone shape. Now I don't know if that means anything or not, or I wrote it off at the time as individual preference for the design. Because I did find out--I remember I was so floor­ ed when I found out--that a lot of designs and so forth, per­ haps one day in the dim history of these people, had meaning. Today it doesn't have a lot of meaning, it's for decoration. I was also suprised to find out that their clothing, their styles, changed altogether as much as ours, In fact, much more rapidly sometimes, within a framework of style. I can take a photograph of an Indian now, of a Seminole, and tell you if it's 1900 or 1930 because of the style. It's like looking at fashion plates of the non-Indians, of our culture. But no, I didn't. They share the Green Corn Dance, their religions seem­ ed to be the same. I never found all that difference.

K: Physically did there appear to be any difference?

H: Yes. I thought they did, a little bit. And I was just coming into that. I was working at one thing at a time, in fashion, in religion. Now how the heck am I going to explain this. 26

Because it's really hard to explain. I thought, "This isn't going to make much sense at all. I don't think I ought to say."

M: Why not? Try it on for size.

H: Well. ••

K: It's better than nothing.

M: You artists have a right to intuitive judgements.

H: Well, that's all it is, see. It is kind of an intuitive thing. When he said he could tell the difference between a Miccosukee and a Muskogee,. I believe him.

M: That's intuitive.

H: I think I can tell the difference. Now, isn't that peculiar? There's something in the way they walk, there's a difference. It seems to me that the Miccosukees somehow look fiercer. Now that's a funny thing to say, but it does. They seem more fierce somehow, in expression, demeanor. They seem larger.

K: How so? Taller or broader or both?

H: Just larger. I'm sorry to be so obscure, because I never really sorted out my thoughts on that. I'll try to sort them out for you, but I can't pinpoint it. I'm sorry.

K: It would appear though that there •.•

H: But there is a difference.

K: You think there is?

H: Oh yes.

M: That's what he avers.

H: Um huh. 27

K: Earlier you mentioned that there was a difference between Indians that live near Miami and those that live near Fort Myers. This was when we were talking about the photographs, I think, that were available over here.

H: Oh yes. Those are in earlier days though. Not now so much. Well, those are in earlier days.

K: Perhaps you could go into that?

H: Well, you had on the west coast •.• now I'm talking about 1900 up to about 1930. O.k?

K: And you're going to base this on photographs that you've seen?

H: Right. Yes. I think I've looked at enough of them to get a feeling for it. And again, this just may be intuitive hogwash, but it's a feeling I have. For example, I think that some areas change styles more rapidly than other areas. Now the women's capes that they wear now, which comes down below the waist, evolved, as you may know, from a very short thing that was nothing more than a collar really, in which the women's breasts were often exposed, hung down below this collar thing. There was a great use of coin silver for decoration on the women's garments on the west coast, and very little of it on the southeastern part, or up around the eastern part of Lake Okeechobee, it seems like. I don't know why. I guess they had more contacts with people that could get more of it. There was a slight differ­ ence in hair styling. The women of the eastern section, it seems to me--boy I'll learn to shoot my mouth off, I have to explain things like this, won't !--used the. shaved band across the front part of the skull, separating the hair so that there would be bangs that came down, before the rest of their hair was drawn up into a bun in the back. And I didn't see any of that on the west coast, that I can recall. That's a very distinct difference. You had much more use of leggings on the west coast than you did on the east coast. Although, when they dressed up--I have a picture of Billy Bowlegs when he was twenty-one years old, leaning up against a palm tree down in Jupiter, and he's got leggings on. It was a dress up thing. The shirt skirt seemed to be preferred by the men 28

living more in the swamps than the upper reaches. What else? The turbans were different too, but I've mention­ ed that before.

K: Well, I wanted to ask you now about the actual painting of the portraits. I had some difficulty initially, when I tried to take any photographs, particularly the older Seminoles. We overcame this difficulty after a while, but some of them were genuinely afraid of having the photo­ graph taken, because of the old belief in taking something of the spirit with the photograph. And if they don't know you, this is what I was told later, if they don't know you, they don't know how you are going to use whatever it is that you've gotten. Frank Shore, in particular, was op­ posed both to having his photograph taken and having his voice taped until I got to know him pretty well. Did you run into anything similar to that with the painting?

H: Only in the Miccosukees, not in the Muskogees. Now the Miccosukees at that time were much closer to the old religion. The Muskogees were already branching off. There was some of that. But the neatest trick that I found--and I used it when I was in Morocco, later, with some Berber tribes--was the Polaroid camera. That thing is a modern miracle. I would take somebody's photograph and give it to him right now. He'd have it. I found that broke them down. Now what I found, that I was often reading superstition into, was not superstition or a religious belief quite often, but it was the fact that you were just being downright discour­ teous. They were used to people coming in there on Sunday afternoons, click-clicking away, and taking off in their car. They never saw the result of any of this stuff. I gave them the results. They had it, they knew what it was, they took it. I had a photographer come in who wanted to interview us, for a news­ paper. I said the only way that he could come in and interview us was to take photographs and then give as many copies as the people wanted to the people. He said he'd do this. He didn't realize what he was getting into, and I didn't either. I didn't realize it would cost him around seventy-five dollars, as it turns out, because everybody wanted them. I made damn sure everybody got them. It made all the difference in the world. I had no problem with cameras or drawing after that. I gave a lot 29

of sketches away. But that does exist, what you were talking about, the fear thing.

K: You mentioned earlier that you had been given something akin to a passport, that had been signed by all the mem­ bers of the tribal council, and that once you had gotten to the reservation, you found that that was not as mean­ ingful as you had thought that it was. I'm curious.

H: The first night, I found this didn't mean a thing.

K: Could you expand on that then, and generalize a little bit concerning their feeling for authority and so on?

H: Yes. Well, you lived down there, you know their feeling for authority.

K: Of course, but I'd like a statement on this.

H: They're independent. They're very independent. This business of having one head or a head man is almost nonexistent. Dr. Mahon's book mentions, in the description of the society of the early Seminoles, of having a Micco or a head man for a town, and war leaders, and leaders in time of famine or great crisis. Osceola was a classic example of a war leader. He was never a bloodline Micco. But you don't have this sort of thing now. Now they've turned over to govern themselves. Or we have made them turn over, so we can understand what's going on, into our form of government. Which is exactly like a little senate down there. They have representatives from various factors, not only political but religious representatives, as you probably found out. And they oftentimes disagree violently. Now they have more clear options than we do. When we send our taxes in to the government, we often have very little innnediate say on how that money that is coming from us is going to be used. They can withdraw. They have an option. And so you have people with some very definate ideas on who's going to tell them what to do, when, where, and how. And since they live on a reservation and don't have a lot of the mechanical problems of government that we have, they can take these options very thoroughly. No, I think they're very independent. I think you have a family who will decide their destiny pretty clearly, within the bounds of the reservation, and have nothing or very little to do with the council. 30

K: You were there in 1959 and 1960, right?

H: Yes. Well, 1960 we moved, in the summer of 1960. We started this whole thing in '59. The summer of 1960 we moved physi­ cally on to the reservation.

K: During the time that you were there, did you notice any social problems among the Seminoles themselves on the re­ servation?

H: Yes.

K: Could you ... ?

H: Yes. I think I mentioned before about the families, didn't I?

K: You did.

H: Did I do it on tape?

K: Yes. Other than that?

H: O.k. About the families being angry? Yes, right. That sort of thing? Yes. Also, the young people were having problems when we were there. Was it '65 when integration came to the boiling point? The government decreed ... was it '65? I think it was '65 •.. right around 1 64.

M: Well, Brown versus Topeka (Board of Education) in 1954, the decision is, but I don't know how long ..•

H: Well. .•

K: It never affected them down there for some years.

H: No, it didn't affect it. Well, at any rate, it was around '65 I think. I'm not clear. It doesn't matter, but it was around someplace in there. You see, the Brighton Reserva­ tion is right smack in between Moore Haven, which is the county seat for one county, and Okeechobee City, which is the county seat for Okeechobee County. I've forgotten the county Moore Haven is in. The government decreed that there 31

would be no more schools on the reservation, that they must go to white schools. It was about twenty miles either way. You had to be bussed. Moore Haven would not accept them. Flat out wasn't going to integrate with the Indians. Finally, Okeechobee was kind of ca- joled into it, and they said, "O.k. we'll take them." Well, Okeechobee started winning all their football games. And Moore Haven said, "Hey! Hey! Hold it there, you've got our Indians over there." You know, "By God!" So they wound up splitting the Indians right down the middle, by sending half of them to Moore Haven, and half to Okeechobee City. Now I don't know if that's still going on. I doubt if it is, but at that time, that's what happened. Because of football. The kids, the children, oftentimes the older people had no words for things like airplane, automobile, radio, and T.V. I'm sure they had some kinds of words for them, but there were no real Indian words for it. And the young people, the grandchildren, were not learning the tongue of their grandparents. You would have very difficult communication in a family, because they weren't speaking the same lan­ guage. It's like the old country people coming from Latvia, over here, and now the second generation, third generation, can't understand their grandparents. Well, you had the same thing happening there in communications, which was a prob­ lem. The other problem, which is a classic problem in the classic world view, was there just wasn't anything to do. So you had a lot of bored, lackadaisical kids standing around and just looking for something to do. My God, there wasn't anything for them to do out there that would inter­ est them that centered around that little school. The gov­ ernment would have these little free movies in, which were pretty poor for the most part. They were agricultural movies or how to grow tomatoes, something really great that a kid is interested in like that. That was a problem. I've mention­ ed the differences in religion, in church-going, before. That was another social problem.

K: What about crime and vandalism?

H: Well .•• 32

K: Anything along those lines?

H: No, I can't say that I saw any of that while we were there. I've heard later on of kids getting into trouble off the reservation. I heard of a couple of kids that swiped a car or something like that. But I've never heard of an Indian vandalizing. Except. No, that wasn't a real case of vandalizing either. That was thumbing their nose at our authority thing. But, no, I can't say I have.

K: Did you ever hear of any livestock thievery going on, any rustling among the Indians themselves, stealing one another's cattle or hogs?

H: Well, see, I've been talking from personal experience and things. Now, I've heard stories, yes, but I, myself, never saw any of that. I've heard, I know that it used to be, at the Green Corn Dance, they had a judgement day, jury day, in which offenders were punished for the last six months' or year's wrong doing.

K: Was that still going on while you were there? Were they still being punished?

H: That was still going on while I was there. Right. But I was never invited to the Green Corn Dance. I question, very strongly those people who say they were. Because, as you probably know, the Green Corn Dance, there're are several segments to it. There's a very light, peripheral time which I know Albert DeVane went to. And I know Louis Capron went to. You knew Louis Capron, didn't you?

M: We had him on tape before he died.

H: Oh good!

M: Yeah, Proctor got two days of talk with him.

H: Yes, I've got his work on the medicine bundle.

M: Yes, I've read it. 33

H: But they were invited to something which any close friend could have been invited to, which were the first two days of dancing. But you see, part of the Green Corn Dance, as much as we know about it, and then they were dismissed. Part of the Green Corn Dance, as much as we know about it, is a purifica­ tion ceremony, and ninety percent of the purifica­ tion is purification against the white man. So why the hell are they going to have a white man pres­ ent while they're doing this holy of holies, in the purification, the scratching ceremony. So I really strongly question anybody who ever says that he was really at that thing. On the other hand, how do we know about it? Some Indian must have told somebody something. Or, maybe indeed somebody was there. It would just seem illogical to me. But that was going on when we were there, yes.

K: Did you ever witness any of this punishment that was meted out? Did you ever see anybody who was being punished for anything? If so, could you tell me what the characteristics of the punishment were?

H: No, I never did. Joan's father knew Shirt Tail Charlie, who had an ear cut off.

K: Yes.

H: That's a famous case. I never saw anybody mutilated, never saw any nose chopped off or anything like that, like they used to do. The Plains Indians did, for infidelity. Women only I might add. To my knowledge, I never saw the result of any of that. No, I really didn't. So, did you ever see anybody do it?

K: No. And, as I understand it, this punishment is no longer meted out at the Green Corn Dance and has not been for several years.

H: Well, you see, that Green Corn Dance ••• Who has the medicine bundle?

K: Frank Shore. 34

H: Frank Shore?

K: Well, this year he couldn't handle it, since he's had his accident. I don't know who took his place at the Green Corn Dance at Brighton.

H: That thing has really lost its power, because it has to be held every year to be renewed, and there's a couple years it wasn't held, you know. So that kind of blew the whole thing right there. That bundle he has, I don't know how much power that thing has, be­ cause it wasn't renewed in those couple years when nobody knew where they were. Josie Billy was becoming a Christian and he gave up his bundle. Well, it was Frank Shore, Josie Billy and somebody else. There were three of them weren't there? Three bundles, or were there two?

K: Those are the only two that I know of now. There may be another one that I haven't been told about. Obviously, somebody •••

H: Does Frank hold both of them?

K: No.

H: The other one dissipated then. Must have. Because there's •••

K: Somebody had to be called in to take Frank's place, too. I don't know who it would have been. They didn't tell me. I know that the Green Corn Dance was held, even after he had been injured. But he was not there, he was in a hospital at the time it was held. I don't know what the story is on that.

H: I bet it was held with the Trail Indians, 'cause they're still pretty hot on that. That's your well of information. That's where you got to go if you're going to find out anything. But how you're going to do it is something else.

K: I tried. 35

H: Well, I hope you haven't stopped trying. As I told you, it took me a year of living there just to understand that I was o.k., and it'll take you a while. You've got the energy to do it. You ought to keep going at it if you can.

K: Well, one more small question.

H: Yes.

K: This concerns Billy Bowlegs. I understand from you, and from other white people who have known Billy Bowlegs, that he was pretty receptive to white culture. Not that he himself acted like a white man, but that he was one of the easiest Seminoles to get along with. And he was well liked by everybody who had known him.

H: Lovely man.

K: I'm wondering how well liked he was by the Seminoles?

H: They loved him. I don't know anybody who disliked Billy. He was just a grand old man. He was half black, you know.

K: Yes.

H: That didn't seem to make all that much difference. I'm sure it did for a while. Also, you noticed that Billy lived alone?

K: Yes.

H: I think that there was a social stigma about Billy, how­ ever, because of his black blood, I believe. He was the most handsome man out there, absolutely stunning man, just a marvelous man in every way. Very gentle, very kind, very bright, very humorous; you could spend a day with Billy. Eli Morgan, his only son •.• Did you meet Eli?

K: I met him to talk with him several times. I never got him on tape, though.

H: Well, Eli is very reticent, very quiet, and a little small voice, you know. He doesn't say hardly anything. I was out 36

there a year and a half before I knew that was Billy's son. One time I was in Eli's camp, doing Eli's wife's painting. What was her name? Lena? Well, I've forgotten. Billy came walking across the field and sat down, and they didn't say much. They just wanted to be near each other, I guess.

K: You were telling me about how he had come over to Eli's camp.

H: Oh yes. I don't know what prompted me to ask the question, but I asked Billy if he ever had any children. He said, "Eli is my boy." I said, "Is that right." He said, "Yes, Eli."

M: How was he named?

H: Eli grinning there. He's named after ..•

M: Why Eli Morgan?

H: Well, Morgan, you know, is a prominent white family around Indian Town. Apparently old man Eli was the top dog around there for a number of years, and I think he was named after him. They often did that.

M: Was that one of the families of traders?

H: Just like the Shores were.

K: I'm not familiar with that name. I don't know it.

H: Morgan?

K: Right. I know Eli Morgan, but I mean the white Morgans.

H: They're a family around Indian Town. I don't know anything about them either.

K: I know Frank Shore was named after a very prominent trader.

H: Yes.

K: But, his family is really interesting because each of them has a different name, seven brothers. 37

H: Yes, you're right.

K: And I got very confused.

H: Yes, it is confusing.

K: Before I found out they were all brothers.

H: Yes.

K: Because Frank would speak of them as if they were relatives, as if they were close relatives, you see, and they all have different names, all seven brothers.

H: Right.

K: All named after different white men.

H: Well, how many Osceolas do you know?

K: If you'd like to ask some more questions, I ..•

M: That what you wanted to say? Just a couple or three that have come up. One, you talked about how you were harassed by the mosquitos. Well, what do the Indians do!

H: Oh Man!

M: How do they overcome it? I remember they are supposed to have done it in earlier days, but I mean ..•

H: Yes, about smoking themselves, and,all of ,that?

M: Yes, and bear grease.

H: Well, you see now, curiously enough, out there the bugs aren't bad during the daylight hours. It's at night that it is so bad.

M: Yes, I've slept out in Florida.

H: Yes, at night. And Billy Bowlegs, I'll describe his littie trick first. Most of them did this. In his chickee, he had a mattress, a single mattress toward the rear of the chick­ ee. He had four blankets he would let down solidly, and 38

he'd crawl in there. Not a breath of air would get in there, and he'd lie in there and sweat the night away. It must have been a hundred degrees in there. Oh God! It was just ghastly. He'd crawl in there on that mat­ tress, and that was how they did it. The mosquitos couldn't come through the blanket, solid blanket, no air. Oh! It was just really an oven. He was used to it, I guess, and he fel.t pretty good about it all. Most of them used blanket or mosquito netting.

M: With regard to other varmints, did you ever encounter any Indian who'd been bitten by a rattlesnake?

H: No, curiously enough the only rattlesnake in all my time out there that I saw was a little pigmy rattler, and I didn't see that. We had a twelve year old boy that came out and wanted to spend the night with us, and we let him, and he was a snake buff. He found the snake and took it back home in a jar very proudly. We had never seen. I'm sure there were snakes all over the place. Now there was one time we had a deluge. A real frog-drowner. We were at headquarters at this particular time, for a very brief stay. Had our camp there, our trailer. Head­ quarters was kind of surrounded by a swamp. I walked from my trailer to the schoolteacher's house, and the high part of the road was alive with snakes. They'd come out of the waters all around, getting on a high place. That was the only. That was at night. I had a flashlight, and they were just everywhere. It was a Dante's nightmare thing. But that was the only time I saw beaucoup snakes;

M: Did you ever know of any occasion when an Indian was in­ jured by an alligator?

H: I know of one. I didn't witness one. Oh, sure. You know a lot of people think that it's a piece of cake to rassle those alligators down there in that tourist stand. You see those fellows walking along with two or three fingers missing. You've seen them, you know. Just put yourself in the place. Even though it's a lethargic, rather small al­ ligator, that's quite a piece of hide to throw around. The only other incident, we saw some wildcats in those hammocks. The incident was kind of scary to us one time, that caused 39

us to thatch our trailer. See, my wife and I thought it would be very romantic out there, sleeping under clear plastic so that we could look up at the moon.

M: Yes.

H: And we thought it would just be lovely, being on the reservation, watching the moon and all this business. One evening I had been working on a canvas, and I had built a table out of old odd pieces of wood we had there, and I had laid the canvas flat on it for the night. We had a tarpaulin across that. It was right next to our sleeping quarters. The next morning when we got up, there were puma tracks all across the can­ vas, and we saw from his tracks, the paint on his feet, where he had gone right by our sleeping quarters, had jumped to a branch which hung right down there--we parked there because it was so beautiful--and had sat up on that branch looking at us. Our thought was, he's a cat, he's curious, what if he jumped on top of the roof to take a closer look? He would have come through the roof, torn everybody to shreds just trying to get out of there, never mind trying to hurt us, just try­ ing to get out of there. And it was curious that night, because our mongrel dog, Andy, at one point I remember him standing up beside the bed with all his hair stick­ ing straight out, and didn't utter a sound. He was a watch dog; he never uttered a sound.

M: Guess he was terrified.

H: He was. He was terrified.

M: How about that.

H: Sure he was. So, right after that we thatched that thing to where it would take a Mac truck up on top. That was the only time that we had any really close thing.

M: When you had your earliest association with the council, were there any women on it?

H: Yes. 40

M: You remember who they were?

H: Yes, I'm trying to remember her name. She has since gone on to •••

K: Betty Mae?

H: Who?

K: Betty Mae Jumper?

H: Betty Mae Jumper.

M: Yeah she was Howard •.•

H: She was a secretary at the time.

M: She was Howard Tiger's sister. Do you know Howard Tiger? He was chairman following •.•

H: Didn't he die in an accident? Yes.

M: Yes, he.

H: Yes, he was a handsome man, I remember. Yes.

M: Indeed, he was one of the larger Seminoles that I think I've ever encountered, in size.

H: Yes. He was very Indian-looking type.

M: Well, was only Betty Mae Jumper on it at the time?

H: Yes. That was the only one at the time that I recall.

M: Yes.

H: She has since gone on to become president, or what is she?

K: She's nothing now. She was.

H: She was, right.

K: She was, let's see, she was chairman of the tribal council. 41

H: Chairman, that's what it was.

K: Joe Dan Osceola was president.

H: That's right. And now she's retired from that, has she?

K: Forcibly, yes.

H: Oh, I see.

K: She's out for the coming year.

H: They have some rather knockdown politics going on.

M: Well now, had you ever anything to do with the white officials, the superintendent and the BIA in general?

H: No, I kind of avoided it. I thought I'd make more friends. I wasn't studying them. I really wasn't after their opinion too much.

M: You think that'd make a good sociological study?

H: Yes, I sure do. Now, I tell you, I knew that I was an amateur, but I also kind of valued that. I thought that out of this will come maybe a fresh point of view. It might be pretty good to be an amateur in this case. I didn't want to get bogged down with all the little petti­ ness, which unfortunately seems to attend academicians.

M: You better watch that.

H: What?

K: A lot of them are going to be listening to this tape.

H: Oh boy, yes.

M: It won't make any difference.

H: No, but I encountered that, you know, and I thought, "Well, it's probably better if I just lay off." Now I met Boehmer, of course, the teacher there. He was the teacher at the time. 42

M: We have several tapes from him.

H: Yes, when I first went there. He was very helpful, when I first went out.

M: Have you ever seen his photographs? He's got a magnifi­ cent gallery of photographs, portraits, magnificent stuff.

H: No, I haven't.

M: Well, he's given his collection to the Smithsonian, a copy of it. He's got hundreds, they're magnificent.

H: Oh, I'd love to see them.

M: Well, they're reproducing them. I don't know whether he's got it. I think his originals are at the Smithsonian now.

H: Boy, well, that's good news.

M: They're terrific, you know, he's taken them well, and they're magnificent.

H: That is great.

M: Well, did you ever get any impression from talking to the Indians of their relationship with the superintendent and the BIA?

H: Yes.

M: I mean any overweaning impression that was general?

H: Yes, one of great suspicion. I tell you, I've encountered the same kind of attitudes in the mountains of The Great Smokies. Any place where you have a group of people who have a limited sphere of communication, there's a great deal of suspicion from anything that comes from without that circle. That existed very strongly at the time. I think it's broken down a lot now. Indeed, they couldn't have gone into all these programs that they've had if it hadn't broken down. But you would often find somebody who lived out on the reservations who didn't think an awful lot of people in any kind of position of government. Curiously 43

enough, the strongest kind of attitude like that came from the old women, not the men so much. But the ones who seemed to fan the fires to keep animosity going were the old women. Wouldn't have a damn thing to do with the government. It was no good, it never did any­ thing for them. In fact, it did bad things to them. And they didn't want people to forget it. They didn't want their kids to forget it.

M: Did you have the impression that the women exerted quite a bit of power?

H: Oh yes. Yes, it's a matrilineal society, as you know.

M: Is this the way it works? I mean the women don't talk much in the presence of the men, do they?

H: Well, sure they do. They talk like mad. That was one of the refreshing things that I came to learn. Well, that here were a group of people, and, amazingly to me, they were like anybody. They laughed, they joked, they played practical jokes on each other, they had the talkative old women who would talk your ear off, they'd have the camp clown, and they had the drunkard. You know, take the whole scheme of human characters, and you had them all. I think that, getting back to your question, women's traditional role has much lessened with the advent of the men going into our society and taking on jobs of dragline operators. Not the cowboys so much, but getting into commerce in one way or another. I think you had a breakdown of that deal where the mother used to own everything, and the father brought the meat in, and she skinned it and salted it down and so for.th. Now he brings home a pay check, and she gets in her beat-up Chevrolet, and goes to the A&P and buys her groceries. That whole hunting, gathering, farming society is broken completely.

M: Well, that really leads into my final question I think, and you don't •.•

H: Well, I don't know if I'd let it go at that.

M: ••• need to answer it if you don't want to. You earlier indicated that when you first went out there, you were 44

in the presence of a different society, and now they're living in block houses and so forth. What do you think is going to become of the Florida Indians? Fifty years from now, what will they be?

H: O.k.

M: That's just a •..

H: Yes.

M: An intuitive prognostication is all I'm asking for.

H: Well that's what I've been operating on so far, so that's good.

M: Well, you must have an opinion.

H: I do. I do. I have a very strong opinion what's going to happen. Let me explain it., You noticed, I don't give short answers. That painting that I did for the Seminoles of Osceola stabbing the peace treaty, I learned later, funnily enough, was to be used as a political leverage to impress all the other tribes that came to Florida--this is my opinion now I'm stating--from all over the United States. They had Tlinglit Indians from the northwest coast to the first meeting of the Indian Economic Opportunities, that was established by Vice-President Agnew. The Seminoles were hosting it. I was the only non-Indian invited to that thing, because of the painting. They were using me to im­ press these other Indians, which was o.k. with me. But curiously enough~ I found out that about ninety per cent of the representatives there, who were under thirty-five, were either lawyers or becoming lawyers. They're very much into the bureaucracy of Indian affairs. Working the laws, learning the laws to work it to their favor. Now the Seminoles, as you know, have just joined three other groups. The Micco­ sukees, who call themselves the Seminoles, the Cherokee, and •.•

K: Choctaw.

H: Choctaw. You know about this. 45

K: There's another one.

H: They're •••

K: There's another one that you won't believe, the Seneca.

H: Oh, really!

K: Yes, doesn't have anything to do with the United South­ eastern Tribes, but it's now a member of them.

H: Well, these kinds of federations, I think, are going to come about stronger through a lawyer type of an atmosphere and a manipulation. I think, indeed, that the Florida Seminoles will become doctors and lawyers, but no longer Indian chiefs. And I think they'll become farm hands. I think the younger people are going to abandon the reserva­ tion after a while and get into the mainstream of United States culture. At a very very low echelon to begin with, very low standard type thing. But, if they are ever to remain Indian, somehow they must unite with these other groups. I see this thing that they're doing now as kind of a forerunner to that. And because they're putting such em­ phasis on law and so many of the Indian groups are turning out lawyers, I think you're going to see a lot of the law­ yer Indian kind of confederation. Where Indians will get more things, still becoming more.like us, in the long run, through this very process. I don't think that there's any such thing as a 19OOs Indian left, you know. There's no room for them.

M: The Creeks up in Atmore, who of course are the Creeks that weren't forced to migrate, can't speak Creek any longer. There's no one there.

H: Right.

M: They'd have to import a Creek from Oklahoma or from down here that can speak it.

H: Right.

M: The Choctaws still can, but Catawba is gone. I mean the last person that could ever speak Catawba died some years ago. 46

H: Is that so?

M: I guess it's beyond reconstruction.

H: Boy!

M: But the Seminoles have at least kept alive, or the Florida Indians, their two dialects.

H: Yes, and they're increasing in number.

M: Are they?

H: The population is.

M: Yes.

H: But I don't know about the language.

M: But you are predicting that they will consider themselves Indian fifty years from now, but actually be less Indian?

H: Yes, I think they'll hearken back to their Indian heritage.

M: It'll be a lever, in other words, to elevate themselves in the rest of society. Is that the way you're saying it?

H: I think so. Yes, I think so. In the last fifteen years we've had--well, not even that, in the last ten years--this tremendous resurgence of soul searching among the rest of the populous of the United States about the Indian. This terrific romanticizing has welled up once again, to romanti­ cize the Indian all out of proportion. And now, for the first time, they have some smarties who are going to take advantage of that, get legislation passed, and work through the courts.

M: I had once heard that the Russians had an institute for the study of the North American Indians.

H: The Russians do?

M: No, I had heard that, which would seem to figure, since that would be a good way to demonstrate the corruption of capital­ ist society. 47

H: Well, they have an historical tie-in too, you know.

M: But I attended a meeting of World War II history one time, and a Major General in the Russian Army who was in charge of their history program was there. I asked him if this was true, and he said no, they didn't have. Whether he was telling me the truth or not, I don't know, but that's what he said.

H: Well, you know •••

K: An interesting ••• go ahead.

H: Well, I just wanted to comment on what the doctor said. We often forget, you know, that even though it was a bad deal, we did nothing more or less than what the Indians were doing to each other. Only they weren't quite as mechanized, it seems to me. The Tlinglit Indian that was at the meeting--now I'm in great sympathy with the Indians, but I think I'm somewhat of a realist about the thing too--the Tlinglit Indian was musing aloud to me, and he said, "I wonder what would have happened if what is now the United States had been left without the influ­ ence of the European." And I flippantly was being funny about it. I said, "Well, I think the Iroquois would have had a federation that went all the way down the east coast. The Sioux would have tied up the whole center part of the country, down to Navajo country, and the west coast would be a bunch of squabbling small tribes, killing each other off." And he said, "I think that's right." But this busi­ ness of raiding, dispossessing peoples, conquering peoples, and in some cases actually wiping out another tribe and taking their wives and impregnating them, absorbing them into their own tribes, was going on a long long time. The European came over here mechanized for it.

M: And?

H: And it's a rotten deal. It's bad news all the way around, I think.

M: Well, I suppose we've probably gotten to the end of the line. We've been at it a long time.

H: I think so.