1937 SEMINOLE INDIAN FESTIVAL AT BOK TOWER The first picture, with Bok Tower at the vanishing point, is one of our greatest photos. For several years, my grandfather would go to the Big Cypress and gather a group of Indians together and then take them around the state of Florida to festivals or other events. In these pictures, they are at Bok Tower, near Lake Wales in the center of the state and near the Ridge. The Indians consider this place to be very spiritual and the Ridge to be the backbone or spine of the peninsula. On one occasion, they were returning from a trip and stopped to spend the night in Sarasota. Mr Ringling had large circus tents set up for the group to stay at. My dad said a man and a woman walked by one of the Indians and asked him if he spoke English. He turned and said, No. Apparently, that was par for the course. After one of our first photo exhibits, an Indian woman stood before the picture I mentioned above and tearfully said that those were the trees and we are only the leaves on the ground. Had they not suffered and endured, we would not be here today. On the last day, February 29, 2008 (so special it only comes around every four years), I came out of the theater at the Alliance of the Arts after speaking with a group from the Big Cypress Indian Reservation. I told the group that the exhibition or pictures were for them and they could do with it/them as they chose. Several individuals spoke English and after a discussion in Mikasuki, informed me that they wanted that. When asked what wanted that meant, I was told it meant the whole thing and exactly they way it was, they would build a building just like the one we were in. They agreed not to take any of the photos and to keep them together as a complete exhibit. All that changed, as did my perception of the value of these images. As I walked out of the theater, I noticed a small Indian woman who had not been in the theater with the others. She had not moved an inch and was frozen in time as she stared into the face of her mother. I became aware that she would look at me and when I acknowledged her she would quickly turn around and look at the picture. This happened over and over, until her friend Elaine Agulera (sic) from the Immokalee Reservation came over to speak with me. As I knew, a Seminole Indian woman will not look at a white man, particularly his eyes. Thats why she kept looking at the picture and then turning around to glance at me, as if to let me know the picture was very special to her. Elaine asked me if she could have it and I said of course. Elaine said the woman in the picture was the mother of the woman looking at the picture and she had never seen a picture of her mother and she had died almost a half-century earlier. Literally, tears poured down the Indian womans face as I took the picture off the wall and gave it to her. She held it tight, with her arms folded across it, and then went and sat by herself on the bus. I was later told that the woman I had given the picture to had died several weeks later with the picture in her arms. I knew it before, but then I was knew it for sure. These wonderful people did not keep written records as a result of cultural practices that they adopted during the times of the Seminole Indian conflicts (that is the last time I will ever make reference to the term Seminole Indian conflicts, it was Andrew Jacksons conflicts and a lot of white folks, the Indians were protecting their homelands, the burial sites of their ancestors). So, there I was on the last day in February during a leap year and a picture my friends and I had scanned, enlarged and spray mounted on foam core board for a total cost of less than $10.00, made a woman cry tears of joy and then held the picture even until the last gasp of air was taken from her by The Breathmaker. Goose bumps.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 01:45:17 +0000
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