Like ourselves, American Indians had many differing viewpoints. It would be absolutely safe to say that every Indian had their very own perspective. As a culture though, they shared viewpoints. In North America alone, there were about 500 nations when Columbus arrived in 1492. That was one of the largest cultural and social experiments in our planets history. Each nation was experimenting with political, economic, cultural concepts. Of course they would never have looked at it that way. They were adapting to their environment and its resources and the cultural pressures of their neighbors. Fully modern, they shared our intelligence and some of our hierarchy of needs.* Their historic involvement with the land had built up lessons over thousands of years.
Why so many nations? The answer is largely one of transportation. Because the people of North America didn’t have an animal like the horse, they were limited to the distances in which their feet could carry them. Ancestral Europeans gained the use of the horse from the steppes of Central Asia. The steppes are a vast ocean of sameness in which resources are spread out across the landscape. Without help, the distances between resources would be beyond human ability to achieve.
The American Indian was not totally restricted in traveling long distances. Where water connected environmental systems, boats (dugout canoes) helped long distance commerce develop. But for the most part, American Indians' local resources were vital and defining. So with the natural limitations of the North American landscape and the absence of horse-like transportation, the people living here couldn’t afford that kind of attitude that pits man against nature. The "man against nature" perspective destroyed the landscape and moved on. So, although American Indian cultures differed from each other, the common thread of "man within nature" rans through the various nations of North America.
Let's look at who the Florida Indians were. Starting in the northwest panhandle, there Pensacola, the Chatot, and the Apalachee nations. The Timucuans were a confederation of states that extended from southeast Georgia all the way across to the Big Bend area on Florida's west coast. From north of Crystal River to almost Charlotte Harbor in the south, stretched the Tocobaga confederation. From Charlotte Harbor southward, was the realm of the Calusa. On the east coast, from the Keys to the area of modern Miami, was the land of the Tequesta. Traveling northward along the east coast, were two smaller nations, the Jeaga and the Ais. Oddly, the Mayaimi people lived around the shores of Lake Okachobee.
This is only a partial list at best taken from a European description at the time of contact. How these people were arranged and how they saw their territories and affiliations is a bit more difficult to ascertain. Herein lies the problem— sometime between 1500 and 1528, plague raged across Florida. The plagues which descended on North America were made up of a number of pathogens from Europe. Those living in crowded cities would have been the most vulnerable. Many, many thousands died. Imagine something equal to a nuclear holocaust. Therefore the native people of Florida, described by those early conquistadors, were recovering from the devastation of disease. These nations, their enemies, and allies probably reflect a dynamic time of political uncertainty and restructuring.
The Apalachee were part of a Mississippian mound building culture. The Timucuan confederation was not. Archaeology can help us visualize a thread of material culture, but it cannot hope to illuminate the fabric of culture and society. When fragile cultural information disappears, we are left with only a fragments of what a society may have been like. Like worn and very tattered clothing, it is difficult to ascertain the shape or the true color of the original garment. We are left guessing at the possibilities.
Is there another way to attempt an impression of Florida’s original people? Although our lives are brief affairs, the landscape retains a memory.
When we enjoy banquets of shellfish and discard their remains on the landscape, calcium carbonate enters the soil and influences the kind of plant communities which can utilize it. Our homes and the living spaces around them changes the environment. When we plant lawns, put in watering systems, and build roads, we are leaving a somewhat lasting impression. Everything we do changes the world around us. People have always influenced their environment, just like every other living thing.
When we look at Florida’s native plants, we are also seeing the relationship between the ancient people and their landscape. Like us, they too influenced their environment. The coastal people harvested huge quantities of fish during the winter mullet and mackerel runs. The waste from all that fish returned to the environment in two ways; as human waste and the inedible discards. From New England comes the story of Squanto, who told the Pilgrims that fish were placed in the same hole with corn seeds as fertilizer.
To toss waste from fish into the marine environment would cause a great deal of pollution with associated pests and pest related illness. It's easy to imagine clouds of flys at the height of fishing season. Allowing that the coastal people around Florida had human intelligence, they would have made it to their benefit to enrich the poor local soil with this natural fertilizer. It would have increased agricultural bounty while eliminating the problem of waste products.
That brings us to the next possibility for viewing the ancient Floridians.
Contact period descriptions and recent studies of American natives can offer some illumination. First we must recognize the cultural bias of those Europeans at contact and the probability that an encyclopedia of information vanished when those early plagues wiped tribal elders. Florida Indians were described as tall, well-proportioned, robust, and healthy. This physical description is at absolute odds with the Spaniard's cultural description of lazy, violent, backward, and savage. How can a people be so physically fit and culturally unfit at the same time?
The diversity of Florida’s natural communities speaks volumes about our original people. The richness of Florida’s estuaries describes the Florida Indians relationship with the world around them. In a short period of two hundred years, within our stewardship, those same estuaries and environments are in an absolute state of collapse. The fabulous food resources that we inherited are fast vanishing.
I believe that most American Indians practiced "milpa" agriculture, which is based on mimicking plants in their natural settings. They planted in environmentally sound clumps using a variety of plants in the same cluster. The plants are placed to enhance each other's potential.
Another environmentally sound practice was fire ecology. Fire returns a certain percentage of plant material back to the soil as fertilizer. The other side of fire ecology is that it kills some of the insects that eat human crops; it reduces the fuel load of a forest so that the fires intensity is reduced and much less harmful; and it increases quality habitat for deer, turkey, quail, and fox squirrels. Fire ecology also reduces the chance of wildfires burning a community whose homes are built with thatched roofs.
For the Native Americans who once inhabited this land, the thing which lent itself toward health and quality of life, was "medicine." For American Indians, there are many kinds of medicine and medicine is found in many things. For instance you are "medicine" to the folks you love and care for. It was natural for the plains people to refer to the horse as a "medicine dog." The bow, which sends its arrow straight and true, has good medicine. The plants and creatures we eat offer us their medicine. Medicine is also the healing arts.
Why, you may wonder, did so many Indians die from European introduced diseases, if they were so good at healing? Before contact the native people, limited by transportation and a population spread out across a large landscapes, diseases were denied the required vectors along easily traveled paths. American Indians looked at the livestock around them very differently than Europeans. By maintaining a healthy environment, they ensured an abundance of deer and other wildlife to harvest. There was no need to keep animals in pens. Because American Indians didn’t develop animal husbandry in close proximity to human populations, there were no vectors for bacteria and viruses to breed and spread.
Their medical practice could therefore focus on the treatment of parasites and the environment. Medicine men and women studied treatments for worms and other internal parasites, for physical and emotional illnesses. Because their view of medicine was holistic, their treatments were holistic. They viewed people as many parts come together. The Calusa put it this way: They believed that people have three spirits—the spirit within the eye, the spirit of the shadow, and the spirit of one's reflection in the water. Our cultural prejudice has tossed that Calusa belief into the bin labeled nonsense. I would like to offer this interpretation.
There is something about the eye, an inner light, if you have ever watched something or someone die, you can’t help but notice that inner life vanish. There is definitely something to the spirit of life within the eye.
The spirit of the shadow may be more difficult to understand. Everything that rises up above the surface of the earth cast a shadow. But our shadows can have an intent as well. When we point, when walk, mow the lawn, our shadow is acting accordingly. Shadows are imbued with our intent, but they usually go unnoticed. When we are in love, in hate, or focused on a goal, we can forget your shadow. It rolls or bumps over things we don’t even notice. Our overtures of love to one person can leave another standing in the sidelines. Hatred leaves collateral damage. In other words our shadows effect the world around us with out our knowing it. Our shadow is in all the things we touch without realizing it. But, whether we know it or not, our spirit is in our shadow.
The idea of a spirit in our reflection is more straight forward. It is the spirit of how others perceive us. Medicine people fully understood the power of metaphor. For the Calusa, any one of these spirits could get sick.
Humans have always appreciated the differences between the sexes. The idea that they donn’t know how reproduction works is modern nonsense. When we look at the world around us, we bombarded by reproduction. Flowers shout the story. Pines and oaks fill the air with their pollen in the spring. Animals are obsessed by it. It’s how life renews itself and adapts to change.
Native American medicine acknowledges that their is a split along male and female lines. Because European civilization was oriented toward male dominance, we tended to look at male medical practices within a culture. American Indians not only recognized that medicine is divided along male and female lines, they saw that medicine itself has a tendency to be male or female. Certain plants are male and certain plants are female. Some plants change in their preference during their yearly cycle. Medicine men did not need to understand the female side of medicine. Native people believed that "feminine medicine" could sap the medicine of a medicine man. There are even tribes in South America today, who would consider you crazy if you asked a medicine man about "female medicine."
Our male-oriented society simply lost the feminine side of North American medicine by always talking to medicine men. After all, what could women have to say? On top of that, most of our of our native people were matrilineal. Oops. In most of the contact Florida’s nations, men and women shared equal status. From the Timucua there is evidence that women became great chiefs. The women’s economic contribution of gathering in a rich estuarine environment helped cement equality between the sexes.
Why should all this matter? Why should we find interest in a people who vanished hundreds of years ago? Because their lessons are our lessons. What we don't learn will be to our detriment as citizens of this Florida landscape in the future.
