Native peoples tell of their hardship, wars

Native peoples tell of their hardship, wars



PETER GUINTA
peter.guinta@staugustine.com
Publication Date: 11/06/09

St. Augustine's 450th Commemoration Commission's first historical presentation Thursday night was billed as a way for city residents to learn about the "Peoples Before Ponce de Leon," but the Timucuans were mentioned only briefly and in passing.

The presentation mostly focused on Native Americans in Florida who lived hundreds of years after the Spanish arrived.

Still, Flagler Auditorium's 800 seats were packed to overflowing, with people sitting on the floor. The program was laced with humor and was well-received by the audience.

In introducing this first event, St. Augustine Vice Mayor Errol Jones -- substituting for Mayor Joe Boles, who is out of town -- said, "We have a rich history and hope to tell it to the world over the next five years."

To begin, Dana Ste. Claire, executive director of the 450th Commission, introduced Seminole historian and cultural specialist Willie Johns and Herbert Jim of Tampa, who belongs to an independent tribe.

Johns lives on the Brighton reservation, one of seven Seminole reservations in Florida.

He told of his recent emotional visit to the site here where Osceola was betrayed and captured by U.S. soldiers while the Seminole chief was under the protection of a white flag of truce.

Osceola was kept captive at the Castillo de San Marcos. He died there three months later of malaria.

"The history (of the native peoples) is alive, and it's here," Johns said. "Not many people know about it."

Timucuan villages, here when Pedro Menendez arrived, disappeared, their people Christianized, he said, adding that some went to Cuba and some blended into tribes which later became the Seminoles.

He remembered his great-grandmother, who died in the 1930s at 95, coming to St. Augustine to buy slaves.

"My family has always owned slaves," he said. "Slaves were kept until the 1920s. Nobody told us about the Emancipation Proclamation."

Now the Seminoles have casino gambling, thousands of head of cattle and 97 restaurants around the globe.

"We've done all right for a tribe that was left for dead. We're going to take St. Augustine back," he joked.

He said the name Seminole comes from a mispronounced Spanish word meaning "untamed."

Herbert Jim, a storyteller, told of the poverty and hardships his ancestors had to endure and how the children of his tribe were told to only speak their own language and not to learn English.

"We survived," he said. "My great-grandmother died in 1993 at 103 years old."

A family story relates the burning of his great-great-great-grandmother's village by horse soldiers. She sent the children out the back of her dwelling into the woods while soldiers came in the front and killed her, he said.

"That story has been passed down," he said. "We came out of the woods. We had to fight back. We fought. We survived."

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