Maggie Osceola and her daughter, Mabel Moses Osceola, tell of a time when the Seminole Indians would canoe from their hammocks in the Everglades’ sea of grass to downtown Fort Lauderdale. Here they’d trade at the Stranahan House, exchanging hides and frogs legs they had hunted for flour and coffee.
Mabel remembers living with her “family unit” _ often a group of 30 people or more including grandparents, parents and siblings.
As late as the mid-1900s, they had no running water and no electricity. And no air conditioning. So they lived in chickees that are roofs made from palm fronds supported by posts, not walls.
“We’d get up when the roosters crowed and go to bed when the sun set,” says Maggie, speaking in her native language as her daughter translates. Mabel is a language coordinator for the Seminole Tribe Culture Program that teaches preschool and grammar school students, as well as some adults, about Seminole life and traditions.
Today, there are more than 2,500 Seminole Indians and some of them, like Maggie and Mabel, remember a way of life that most of us can hardly imagine among the strip shopping malls and resorts. For the Seminoles, the food was as plain and simple as the living. Yet it was an important part of the communal spirit.
“We pretty much ate what we could hunt, gather or raise,” Mabel says.
The men fished for gar, mud fish, snappers and turtles. They went after deer, turtles, alligators, and birds known as iron heads, curlees and blue herrings. Wild hogs were hunted as well as captured to be bred and domesticated.
The meat and fish were grilled over an open fire in the chickee that served as a communal kitchen where the women worked together producing food for the extended family.
When the men brought back a deer or other bounty, excess meat was hung in the trees to dry and to keep it away from predators.
Herbs and seasonings were rarely used because they weren’t available. The Indians did have basil, but it was considered more medicine than an ingredient, Mabel says.
Land was cleared on the hammocks and they raised corn, beans or other foods they couldn’t forage.
There was plenty to eat from what grew wild _ mangoes, bananas, sugar cane, guavas, swamp apples (Mabel describes these as having lots of seeds _ like a pomegranate).
Oranges and sour oranges were made into jelly, marmalade or a popular “drink” called sofkee. This mixture of cornmeal and water with tiny dumplings is flavored with all sorts of things including fruits, pumpkin, tomato or corn. The liquid part would be sipped; the dumplings munched.
Coontee, which Mabel describes as looking something like a potato, could be poisonous if not handled properly so it was carefully washed, kneaded and dried until it was the consistency of flour. This and the wheat flour they got through trading was mixed with water, formed into a patty and fried in lard. Fry bread remains a popular Seminole food.
And Mabel says that she has trouble preparing fry bread in small quantities for her family today because when she learned to make it from the village women, they used five to 10 pounds of flour for one batch of dough. “We’d make a bunch to feed our big family,” Mabel says.
Vegetables included green beans, pumpkin, cabbage, corn, swamp cabbage and black-eyed peas _ some of which grew wild and some of which were cultivated.
For a special treat, when the women finished grinding corn, a very fine powder was left in the wooden grinding bowl (a hollowed out cypress log that stood about 3-feet high; two women would use a wooden pestle to pound the grain). They mixed this with corn syrup or sugar cane to make candy for the children. Chewing gum came from a “chewing gum tree,” says Mabel. It was the sap of the rubber tree.
If the Indians couldn’t get coffee from the trading post, they made a similar drink from wild coffee, a plant that had a sweet smell when brewed.
Eating and cooking utensils were primitive and much cooking was done on a spit over an open fire. For eating they used the spines from a sabal palm that had been sharpened to a point, Maggie says. These were used to spear food. And today, the Seminoles still make colorful baskets for which the bottom is a part of the palmetto _ a meshlike material that grows in the plant’s spikes or boots.
A lot of time went into food preparation and the day wasn’t broken down into meals such as breakfast, lunch and dinner. Instead, the women cooked in the morning and again in the afternoon.
They’d put out all sorts of dishes _ beef stew with dumplings, sofkee, grilled venison, black-eyed pea bread _ and cover them with a cloth to keep the bugs off. Then each family member would help himself when he became hungry. “The food was so fresh to start with we didn’t worry about spoilage,” Mabel says.
The girls learned to cook and the boys to hunt at early ages. “I remember playing with flour and water to make dough at age 5,” Mabel says.
Today, things are very different for the Seminoles. They live in houses on federal land in Hollywood, the cypress trees are gone and they have all the amenities of modern life.
But they still respect their past. And it’s people like Mabel and Maggie who are passing along their traditions to a whole new generation.
“People don’t appreciate what we had out there. They should appreciate it more,” Mabel says.
