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"Miccosukee
Appeal To ‘Public’ For Help!"
"Unsurrendered" Seminoles' Peace
Threatened!
Florida
Everglades
The executive Council of the Miccosukee
Tribe of Seminole Indians, in an
unprecedented action, appealed to the
American public for help.
In a letter they issued to the public
they wrote:
To the American people; Our unconquered
Miccosukee Seminole Nation is asking the
American people for help.
We want the American people to be told
what is being done to our people. That
the United States, and the state of
Florida are trying again to push our
people off our Everglades homeland.
We hope the American people will do
something to help our people once they
hear the truth. Over 100 years ago our
forefathers fought and died to save our
home country. You call this the Seminole
Wars. The whole United States army could
not conquer our people. They tried all
kinds of tricks and even trapped our
Chief Osceola under a white flag of
truce and held him till he rotted in a
federal dungeon. After that, in 1939,
the America public, and a brave Ohio
Congressman rose up and came to our aid.
They became disgusted with the
bare-faced federal policy of kill and
grab by brute force and public opinion
forced the United States to send the
commanding General of the United States
army, Alexander McComb, to Florida to
make a
Cont. on page 4
Cont. from page 1
peace
treaty with our people. He
promised to leave our people alone to
live in peace forever on our Everglades
land, our great-grandfathers signed this
treaty, and for over 100 years our
people lived in peace on our land under
it. Then we recently discovered
the United States was refusing to honor
this treaty. The federal
government is still trying all different
ways to push us off our land. In
1950 they even went so fat as to
encourage the filing of fake claims in
the United States Indian Claims
Commission, to make it look like our
people wanted to sell our land, and
would take money for it. These claims
are still there today. They
will take away our homes, but to this
government bureau they are just 73 and
73A. In 1954 our council finally
protested these injustices to President
Eisenhower in our Buckskin Declaration,
which we heard he still keeps in his
private museum. We asked him to send his
special representative to negotiate with
our people an agreement that would once
and for all let us live in peace on our
land.
For over six years our councils
negotiated in good faith with President
Eisenhower’s special representative, and
we thought agreements had been made,
because some of them were signed by the
United States Secretary of Interior
himself in 1960. Then the United
States got a new President, John Kennedy
and we heard good things about him.
He said good things about the rights of
small countries and the right of self
determination. He spoke like
a man of honor and integrity.
But his Secretary of Interior Udall
turned out to be one of the greatest
enemies of our people 100 years ago.
We do not have words to describe what he
is doing – except the words written by
United States Congressman, Joshua
Giddings 100 years ago is exactly true
again. In his book, "The Exiles of
Florida", he said:
"Florida was purchased;
Treaties with the Florida Indians were
made and violated; gross frauds were
perpetrated; dishonorable expedience
were resorted. . . bribery and treachery
were practiced towards. . . The
Seminoles; flags of truce were violated;
the pledged faith of the nation was
disregarded. "Men who wielded the
influence of government for the
consummation of these crimes,
assiduously labored to suppress all
knowledge of their guilt; to keep the
facts from the popular mind; to falsify
history of current events, and prevent
an exposure of our national turpitude."
These things are being done to
us again now.
After years of negotiating and
agreements they are still trying to push
us off our land push through a fake
claim of some lawyers that some
reservation Indians want to sell our
land. They haven’t gone to so much
trouble since 1832 when they made a fake
treaty at Paynes Landing.
Our people retreated into the
Everglades, and we believed we had a
treaty with the U.S. government that
said they would leave us alone in our
homes there. In the past ten years we
discovered this wasn’t so. We
found out that federal that federal
bureau people in Washington were trying
to work it so that the treaties the U.S.
Signed with our great grandfathers a
hundred years ago would be gotten
around. We found that they were
trying to get Indians to sell the
Miccosukee Seminoles land.
In 1957, our Miccouskee people who had
always refused to live on reservations
and be told what to do by Indian bureau
agents organized our Miccosukee tribe.
If you are an Indian and live on a
reservation a white our half-breed
Indian agent has the power to tell you
what to do, and the state or federal
government has the right to take away
your land, any time they want, for power
lines or anything.
When we reorganized our tribe, President
Eisenhower's Secretary of Interior
Seaton told us that we couldn’t organize
under what he called the Indian
Reorganization Act because we did not
live on a reservation but he did
officially recognize our tribe. He
said if we went on a reservation, or got
together with reservation Indians who
were organizing to get money, we would
get money for this and that from the
government. But all we wanted was our
land, with assurance that our people
could have it and live on it, for as
long as there is a Miccosukee tribe of
Seminole Indians.
President Eisenhower’s Secretary of
Interior also said we would have to be
on a reservation to get federal benefits
and protections.
But now, under President John F.
Kennedy, an Indian agent has been sent
to the Everglades to organize a small
group of Miccouskee Seminoles who do not
live on the reservation.
They never sent an agent before, it
sounds like what happened a hundred
years ago, when "bribery and treachery
were practiced towards the Seminoles."
Secretary of Interior Udall’s Indian
Agent is now trying to set up a third
tribe, is offering them various "federal
benefits" from a "revolving loan fund"
of the Interior Bureau and doing it
without a reservation. This agent
says that the recognition given our
tribe by Secretary of Interior Seaton
was illegal. To some hungry
Miccosukee Indians off the reservations
this has looked so good that they are
going along with Udall’s Indian Agent to
set up this third tribe that can receive
handouts.
On December 17, Udall’s Indian Agent is
going to get this group of Indians to
stage an election to set up this third
tribe, which has agreed to take money
instead of land. Because
there are so few of them we hear they
are even borrowing Indian’s from the
other reservation tribe in Dania to make
it look like a real election.
After the so-called election, we can see
they will try to tell the world our
tribe has agreed to sell our land for
money when it is not.
But what we, the council of the
Miccosukees do not understand is this:
When we reorganized in 1957 the Indian
Bureau people said:
"You can’t get any federal handouts if
you don’t organize under the federal
reorganization act, and you can’t do
that unless you live on a reservation."
We said, as we always did, "We don’t
want handouts, we want our land, and we
don’t and won’t live on a reservation on
welfare."
Now they say, to this third tribe they
are trying to organize under the Indian
Reorganization Act: We’ll help you with
loans.
We know from our children who have been
to U.S. schools about the idea of
"divide and conquer." We appealed
to President Kennedy about this policy
two months ago. He didn’t
answer at all. Our only hope now lies
with the American people.
There must be someone who will help us.
The Executive Council
"U.S. PLANNING
3rd FLA. TRIBE"
Scanned Image
Archive
(Re-typed for clarity)
p. 1
"The U.S. Interior
Dept. is pushing ahead with its plans to
organize a third tribe of puppet Indians
in an effort to wreck the many years of
negotiations and agreements with our
Miccosukee Tribe," charged Homer
Osceola, Co-Chairman of the Miccosukee
Tribal Executive Council.
"We predicted this when we gave this
story to the newspapers last October.
They obviously plan to try to trick the
public into believing that what their
puppets do has been authorized by our
Miccosukee Tribe.
"If they go through with this
shenanigan, it will be the biggest fraud
on the Seminoles since the fake
so-called treaty of Paynes Landing over
100 years ago. And we want the
American public to know what is going on
here."
"DEC. 17 ELECTION
A WASH-OUT"
By
Alice Osceola
Scanned Image Archive
(Re-typed for clarity)
p. 3
Fla. Everglades. The
so-called election called by the Tiger
family on December 17 in their effort to
organize a third tribe turned out to be
a complete failure.
Only 27 Indians turned out to vote, out
of the 300 they claimed. Of these
27, four were reliably reported to be
members of the Seminole Tribe in Dania,
and ineligible to vote. Earlier
this week, R. C. Miller, Interior agent,
had stated that no member of the
Seminole Tribe would be eligible to vote
in this so-called election.
Prior to the election, Miller was very
evasive when questioned about so-called
absentee ballots. At first
he said there were 11, then 14. Of
the 14, 8 were discovered to be members
of the Seminole Tribe in Dania,
ineligible to vote. And 4 of
those allegedly casting an absentee
ballot were seen in the vicinity of
where the election was taking place,
some of whom denied they were
participants in the election.
According to Miccosukee Tribal
Councilman John Osceola, there were, in
his words, "12 borrowed voters from the
other Tribe in Dania". Photographs
of the three of these "borrowed voters
were taken by the Seminole Indian News,
and appear at the right of this page.
From top to bottom, they are
Jack Kelly,
Johnny White and
Stanley Frank (running to avoid the
camera).
Pictured above, smiling jubilantly, are
Miccosukee
Tribal leaders Bill Osceola, Billie
Doctor, and John Osceola (L-R), who were
non-participating observers.
Although happy over the outcome, they
feared the U.S. Interior Dept. would try
to go ahead with a 3rd tribe with or
without a legal election. Pictured
below is the home of two of the Indians
who allegedly cast "absentee ballots",
located inside the election area.
Miller could show no regulation
pertaining to the casting of the
so-called absentee ballots. Tribal
Councilman John Osceola said, "As far as
I am concerned, they tried every way
they knew to rig their election.
They might have gotten away with it if
we hadn't kept a close eye on them!"
Stay tuned for more stories
in this issue.
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