major funding for this program was provided by a grant from Browad County and the Seminole Tribe of Florida [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] every time I work on a canoe because of the chipping noise I always uh have some woodpeckers come around and I always refer it to them as the original wood carvers so I I have a great deal of respect for them because I also am a member of the bird clan what the creator mentioned to us when he came and gave us how to live and take care of the land one of the things that he said about the fire was um in my language the Miccosukee language is that uh that translates to one of the laws of nature the fire signifies that we're still holding on to the beliefs to the instructions of taking care of the land and when he sees the fire as he looks down it signifies to him that we're still doing what was instructed to us so that's why the fire is um valuable to me and I need to have one of the elements I can't uh function without the four elements so I think it's firing up now so it's coming along pretty good [Music] [Music] what's interesting is when the Spanish arrived here they saw the people of South Florida as being very primitive uh heathens of course in their minds uh primitive because they didn't have Agriculture and most uh tribes in North America even at that time had agriculture including uh corn agriculture but not South Florida and so therefore they saw the South Florida people in in a very low way but not understanding that the maritime resources were so plentiful that even though agriculture was available was accessible they had no reason to adapt it because there was enough uh with the sea turtles and with the fishing and the shellfish uh just was not an important resource to have to exploit and only in South Florida as well as in the Pacific Northwest did indigenous people reach a level of social complexity in art uh without agriculture based totally on the Marine economy the sea turtle uh the sea turtle shell was actually excavated from inside the Miami Circle it was near the center of the circle and it was aligned East West like the other animal burials and it shows the importance of these animals to the Tequesta the fact that they were deliberately intering them probably as a ceremonial uh offering of some sort well Tequesta is the name of the tribe so associated with Southeast Florida particularly with the mouth of the Miami River and that name comes from a visit of Ponce de Leon in 1513 to uh Biscayne Bay now we don't know precisely uh what was uh said or what occurred because the log book has disappeared but the maps that occurred directly after uh his visit uh and mentioned by the Spanish historian Herrera indicate that the name of the place name and the tribal name at the mouth of the Miami River was called Chequesta with a c and they are obviously it's the phonetic spelling of what they heard as being the name of that group and that eventually became Tequesta with a t [Music] [Music] the canoes were the main transportation like anywhere else in the world if there's men tools log and water you're going to have a canoe if you look on the State of Florida you will see there's a lot of um rivers canals now they're all a lot of man-made stuff but back then um there were channels that connected to each other and the way to travel that was through a canoe actually around 1929 the highway between Naples and Miami was completed and that disrupted the natural flow of the River of Grass and that was kind of the sign of the beginning of the end for the canoes these canoes have been around the oldest one that's been carbon dated thus far is 11,000 years old and it's uh it resides in Brighton reservation back then we weren't known as um Senecas uh Navajos or any other tribe I think we were just refer to each other as the people towards the end of our canoe carving era they were up to 30 foot that's cause there were trees of that significant size and if you could get a 30 foot out of that log that log was the tree was huge in the 1940s they came first they cut the huge Cypress in Louisiana and they made their way down here to what is known as Big Cypress National Forest built the train tracks that came all the way down to Ochopee which means field corn field it doesn't specify what but Ochopee is field so they made the train track to Ochopee the trees were huge they were 25 ft in circumference they were huge huge 150 ft tall 500 years old plus so it was kind of like a lost art and I just decided that I should be doing something so I got into back into my reenactment and start carving canoes you know when I was working on um on a canoe I always thought the high end was the front and the low end was the back I was talking to my mom one day I was showing it to her and she was holding it like this where the higher ends here and the lower ends back here and she was telling me Grandpa was here grandma was up front and the rhree sisters the daughters were in the in the middle and going this way and um I thought Mom it's supposed to go that way but I didn't say anything so and I'm glad I didn't because later on as time went by I found out that both sides were front and back this side the higher end would be the front if you were in any areas that was vegetated maybe sawgrass uh lily pads uh cat tails what have you and this side the lower end would be more suitable for calm waters um so that you this side will work as a bow for you to easily control and if you got stuck somewhere you know you didn't have you didn't have to turn the canoe around you just turned yourself around and you could pull yourself out of there I like being out here and the quietness and the still and to be around other animals um to be to have the sun on me to feel the um the breeze coming through to have the fire going and for while I had water here so I had all four elements surrounding me at one time and there's still water right in there but it's not as much as it used to be so if I'm far as I'm concerned I think I'm doing a good job so I'll just keep on chipping away one chip at a time have you guys ever seen New York City out in the in Big Cypress Indian Reservation well here it is right here New York City found in Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation [Music] oh yeah you can see how it was actually a Long Island oh yeah right here mhm that's funny it goes uh east to west well especially down here I mean you there's only certain trees that you're going to be able to make canoes from and you find that in the prehistoric canoes too that there's um Cypress you know quite a few Cypress canoes that are in that archaeological record so it's knowledge that's been accumulated over generations skills and arts and trades literally a direct line to your teacher and their teacher and their teacher yeah I mean you know people t.. uh remake some of these old tools is they actually pretty pretty sturdy you ever seen these when you were younger those cone points for the arrows I've never really viewed the knowledge as something that like belongs to me as an individual you know it's just something that I carry for a time before I uh pass it to somebody else to carry that knowledge with them as well hey you man it's been a while yeah how you doing good to see you that's cool that's cool Apiaka had one of his villages at what is present day Long Key yeah and in the 19th century maps they called it uh Sam Jones's Seven Islands uh and there's a wonderful map from 1897 where you can see each of the island actually has a village depicted as well as a boat landing so that's on display there at the museum um that was one of the last holdouts of the Seminoles and the Miccosukees uh during the Seminole war and it was the uh attack by I'm not sure I remember the military man was it Captain Bankhead I'm not sure who it was uh but he came using the South Fork of the New River yeah to uh surprise The Apiaka who uh fighting as they allowed their children and the women to retreat fought a rear end action uh against the soldiers you know people are surprised you know our knowledge of this land because a lot of people tend to think Seminole kind of just showed up to Florida late in the game but uh the amount of local knowledge we had I think shows a longer connection to this place than many people think I think so too and you know better than anyone that there's a lot of misconceptions about what Seminole life was like everybody assumed that they were only always living in the Everglades that was not true because in the beginning they were on the Atlantic coastal ridge and it was only because of the Seminole Wars that they were pushed deeper away from the coast I know you're now the master of making the dugout canoe and I know you've got a toolkit but I thought you'd be curious to see what the pre contact the prehistoric Tequesta and the Calusa what they were using for making the canoes yeah so this is just a replica model and it's taking a shell with an axe like blade and the idea was you would be chipping away what would be the charred wood from the log creating the canoe now I have no idea how long it would take for someone to make a canoe using a shell tool but this is an example of what they actually were using so this this particular one is broken you can see it was it was intensely used until it was broken you can see got a notch on one side in the hole yeah and you can feel the weight of that uh you know there's no Home Depot back then so they had to make their tools from what was available but what a lot of people don't know is that they didn't have hard stone in South Florida all of us are kind of intrigued to see how long would it take us to make one with pre-steel technology at least pre-steel here this is another typical tool this is an axe again and you can see it's from the lip of a conch shell the blade is broken because it was used oh yeah it's pretty heavy it'd be very difficult to find a shell today that size because they they're very diminished in size and they're very rare but here's the blade you can actually see the edge and you can see why it works so well as a woodworking tool yeah probably dating from 1 to 2,000 years old wonder if this was almost an ads yep that's exactly cu the bubbles that's exactly to one side so the the woodworking tool as you know as in ads is that they're cutting towards them and yeah shaving the wood so these come from like is that queen queen conch specifically yes that's correct yeah gosh I don't know if I've seen one so thick huh oh it's very long as well that's really neat cuz then it would have been a little bit yeah just a little bit longer yeah and I always tell people like I think we did a quite a bit of carving and not just the burning and scraping because there's cross North America there's probably millions of carving tools that have been found in the archaeological record yeah and uh so I don't think they were for decoration no no I agree with you yeah cuz I've heard of stone axes upwards of like 40 lbs and that's definitely not an axe you'd swing sideways that's one you'd lift and drop like and say like a canoe you know they say it takes the right tool to do the job and I agree however in carving it's not just the right tool cuz if the right tool is not sharp it'll bounce right off you know these guys you can't find them in Ace Hardware store I have to go to antique stores so I find myself pulling over nowadays on 75 95 interstates turnpikes cuz I'm looking for these guys the tools of the past you know they're kind of forgotten about but us in the carving world these are invaluable like they once were the dugout canoe is a very important artifact for indigenous people because this is the one artifact that bridges centuries in fact millennia of time in Florida for indigenous people it is the important artifact that connects the coast to the interior this is the way of transportation that was principle for all indigenous people and if you want to understand that you just think of the Miami River or you think of the New River in terms of those were the I95s of its time this is how you got from the Atlantic Ocean to the Everglades it was just critical and of course part of having a canoe is having a the paddle and the paddle is also made out of wood uh the trees generally were made out of uh the trees used were generally cypress trees sometimes pine trees and in North Florida uh but they were carefully carved out uh with a long process as part of creating the canoe this particular paddle was actually found in an Everglades tree island and it's been burnt and it's probably one reason that it was so well preserved so the most important part of the prehistoric toolkit are shell tools and that's because uh these were something hard enough that you could actually use for manufacturing what's unusual here is this cut piece of the shell that's missing and that missing piece is actually this this is a selt or an axe made out of shell and this is a woodworking tool very important in terms of making canoes and also making houses and structures and in this particular one you can see there's actually grooves for tying this onto a wooden handle and a particularly interest is the fact they could actually make a knife out of a shell this is a Cassius shell and this is actually being sharpened into a blade like scraping or cutting tool and finally the most important of the woodworking tools is the buscon adze and you can see that this has a chisel-like beveled Edge uh these holes of perforations are for tying it onto a wooden handle then you could go to the canoe this is what was use it was actually cutting or shaving the wood uh using a wooden handle going through these perforations that's how the handle was attached to the wood I think what I find fascinating about the dugout canoe is that not only is the predecessor for the modern canoe oh yeah but the canoe has been around for such a long time yeah I mean it's definitely you know intriguing that uh you know dug outs have persisted through today you know you know continuous and unbroken in in their use in making you know just changing in tools of technology over the years but uh still a dugout and that is the one aspect of culture of indigenous culture that is similar through thousands of years and not just of course in in South Florida but all over the Eastern United States that was just the the way of getting around I used to tell people that for prehistoric people if you couldn't get there by canoe you didn't go yeah they had walking trails but the water trails were really an important part of their world and the idea of connecting in particular like Biscayne Bay uh with uh the Everglades and the New River uh with the Everglades all of those were the major arteries going into the Everglades and the only way to get there in a practical sense was by canoe oh yeah definitely the waterways were the highways of Florida before uh modern pavement [Music] we see Fort Lauderdale today as a large thriving growing city with construction going on all around us um that was not the case obviously it was not the case a 100 years ago never mind 200 300 2,000 years ago when the Tequesta were here but our understanding and of the Everglades and of all the waterways that we see and use today to the our greatest benefit really does stem from the seal tribe and the Tequesta and the legacy that they inherited from the original indigenous tribes down here the inner connectivity of all of these waterways including the New River was a connection for all the various trading posts that were around this area including Stranahan here in Fort Lauderdale the Smallwood in Chokoloskee and the Storter as well these connections have been going on for thousands of years between the Seminole and our pioneers between the Tequesta and the Spaniards between the Spaniards and the Seminoles it has been going on as long as Fort Lauderdale has been habited we have what we call the Stranahan collection and obviously it is because of Ivy Stranahan so when Frank Stranahan first started operating his trading post and we first started operating the ferry he was living along the New River he had this closest neighbor was John Jumper and John Jumper was a Seminole man he was living in what is today Colee Hammock and the Seminole started coming down the New River and they stayed overnight on his land and the relationship was harmonious at the beginning and throughout his life they realized that they needed each other it was a good place to start trading it was a good place to bring their furs their skins especially alligator skins so these various trading posts they functioned as access points and portals into the indigenous culture my grandpa he's always referring to if you have a little parcel of land you have to take care of it regardless what size it is in this case it's a place where I'm working on my canoe all the things that I can't buy at Walmart are right here within my vicinity of ear sight and um listening um so that's all I need all I need is to be out here to be in nature to be with one of where I came from [Music] the fact is the principal tribe during the contact period was the Tequesta and their site the largest site was at the mouth of the river there's many sites hundreds of sites all through uh Miami Dade County all through Broward County through the Florida Keys and it's a matter of wherever there's a great location of uplands near the water near the ocean these were places that attracted people to live just as it does today and these sites extend all the way into the interior into what's now Everglades National Park and there were trails that went through uh parts of the Everglades as well as the rivers and creeks but to understand these sites you have to look at them as this mosaic of activities and things just like we do at our world today that we're all connected by highways but during prehistoric times in Miami uh the Miami River was the was the I95 of that of its time but the water access was critical all I am is one grain of sand that's all I am and all my ancestors before me were also a grain of sand that help to form and what I walk on today what I call Earth where the air comes from where the fire comes from all of this is part of not only my ancestors but the human race we all came from somewhere we're all from one tribe we all are created by the creator who has the last say so [Music] major funding for this program was provided by a grant from Broward County and the Seminole Tribe of Florida