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.