Betty Osceola

Partial Transcript: My name is Betty Osceola. I’m a member of the Panther Clan and also a member of the Miccosukee tribe of Indians. And I’m a grandmother. What I do now is I educate people. I’m big on education about the environment and understanding. One of the ways I do that is I take people out into the surrounding areas, the Everglades, because that’s a wonderful classroom. It’s much more impactful. And it’s either walking into the Everglades or we use airboats. You know, different mechanisms – using that as a way to – our people over time we have to live in the world that we’re in now. And we have this huge connection to our natural surroundings, to nature. And we’re finding that in order to keep who we are as a people, we have to start educating the other cultures about why it’s important to us and, in the end, important to them to protect the environment in which they exist.

Partial Transcript: Well you know I grew up in an Indian village. And ours is a matriarchal society so a lot of what we learn is from our mother’s side of the family and our father’s. For myself, you know, I’m half Miccosukee and my father was a non-Indian so I learned, you know, both cultures. But because my mother is actually Seminole Indian. That’s another whole story. Seminole Indian, you know, basically everything that I mainly follow is from her family’s teachings. And growing up, you know, I think my generation is maybe one of the last generations that had the opportunity to have subsistence living. You know, what we ate, my mother always had a garden. My grandmother took us out into the Everglades to harvest berries. We learned how to fish without a hook. My brothers at a young age learned how to hunt. So whatever we ate, because my grandmother didn’t really eat anything from the store, everything was what we could find from off the land. It wasn’t until the later 1970s where we started getting notification about the water having too much mercury and not to drink or eat the fish from the water for more than once a week. So that kind of started changing our diet. So we went from subsisting off the land to having to adapt to more store-bought foods. My mom still grew her crops. And we still got game as much as we could, but we started supplementing it with different foods. And, you know, from my mother and my grandmother, you know, my mother always talked to us about a time when Florida didn’t have roads in this area. When she was a girl, all the travel was either they walked. When the periods of high water in the Everglades, they traveled by dugout canoe, or sometimes when it was dry, they had an ox-drawn cart. It was more of a nomadic lifestyle. They followed the seasons where the game was. They followed the seasons where whether it was winter or summer, sometimes it was much cooler to live in the northern part of Florida. And when it was too cold in the northern part of Florida, they migrated down to the south. So it was a seasonal migration. And she talked about a time when Miami didn’t exist. I usually say it was just Indians and animals.
That, over time, as more people started moving into Florida, they started having to get more permanent homes because she talked about – and even my grandmother – how where they used to live, there was a house there. Because our people didn’t – we still don’t have a concept of ownership of the land. And out of that, the places that they used to go back to their seasonal homes, someone else was occupying it. So as time progressed, they were placed in a situation where when they tried to hunt or fish, they were being told that, you know, they couldn’t hunt or fish. That there were laws which they never heard of before because they just fished for their living. So they went from a people with a nomadic lifestyle, living off the land, to realizing that they needed to organize to protect their way of life. And then you started seeing them taking on parts of other cultures, forming governments and having to learn how to read and write to be able to exist in the outside world. And not being able to live off the land like they used to, start having to -- they didn’t need money. And they found themselves having to find jobs to get money to buy food, also to make their trips to Washington or wherever to protect their rights. Over time, you saw more assimilating with other cultures. And what I see today from when I was younger is that, you know, it makes me sad that my grandchildren and the children of today can’t live off the land like we used to. We kind of mimic what we used to. And I’m kind of getting tired of saying “what we used to do” and would prefer that we be able to say “what we do.” That’s one of the reasons I do what I do is I would hope one day our future generations could live off the land again. Could be stronger in their culture, because when you’re having to come out of the woods per se and live in another environment, that also impacts how you relate to that environment. Because for being Miccosukee and Seminole, everything you do is tied to the land. And when you lose that – there’s a disruption in that connection – there’s a disruption in your overall wellbeing. You get loss of language and culture. It’s all – for us, it’s all tied together. You can’t separate one from the other.

Partial Transcript: Well, we still live in an Indian village. I still live in a chickee hut and as do, you know, my grandchildren. We still cook over an open fire. We take our children out into the Everglades to harvest food. We show them how the chickee huts – the traditional style house – cause we live in one, you know, how they’re made. We speak the language in the home. And because, you know, I educate about it, you know, my children and my grandchildren from a young age have been listening to grandma spill. And taking them out into the Everglades and always talking to them about it, about respect. And doing the different ceremonies, trying to get them to participate, too – and also that translates into pride of who we are as a people. And not to be embarrassed to live as our people live

Partial Transcript: Well, the Everglades has natural fruits and berries. You know you have custard apples. You have coco plum. Even the saw grass is edible at the root. There’s wild potatoes in the Everglades. The fish – you had garfish, you had bass, certain times of the year, you would have the saltwater fish when they migrate for spawning. You’d have mullet and snook, tarpon. You’d have deer, the wild hogs. You’d have the different wading birds -- the great blue heron, the wood storks, the ibis, the ducks that come down from the north during the wintertime. You know, you harvest the ducks. So those were the types of food. Even the swamp cabbage comes from, you know, the small scrub palmettos. Harvesting that to eat and also the cabbage palms. Also, you can harvest the heart to eat as swamp cabbage. So there’s two different kinds. It’s learning the plants that are edible and the animals that are edible in nature because we don’t eat all animals. There’s certain animals that we’re restricted from eating for religious reasons.

Partial Transcript: Well, you know, over time because a lot of the farming that occurred, occurred in the hammocks. The hammock or tree island -- some people refer to – is the consistency of that soil over time started getting bitter and it got harder. Even today we notice when we plant on the tree islands – which we still do tha,t you know -- things sprout out really beautiful but then they die off. Versus when you hear, you know, when my grandmother and my late mom and even my husband when he was younger how you would plant something and everything would be very bountiful. Now the consistency of the soil has changed. Also even in my own lifetime, which is what, 51 years, when I was younger, there were a lot more birds. Today you’re not seeing, you know, maybe within four years, I’m not seeing the birds. Maybe I’m seeing not even half the birds I saw four years ago. And four years ago, I wasn’t even seeing a quarter of the birds that I saw as a young kid. And then, you know, my mother and my grandmother talked about it when I was a kid, they were seeing less birds than what they were seeing. And even the deer, because of the roads and how the water is managed. Sometimes the water is too high. The deers can’t live in high water. They’ll drown. They’ll starve. So you’re not seeing as much of the deer, the fur-bearing animals. In the mornings, you used to see the marsh rabbits all the time. It’s hard to see a marsh rabbit now. The wildlife seems to be disappearing. Also, the plants aren’t as healthy. Sometimes they’re really yellow and sometimes, you know, areas that we used to go harvest sweet grass to make the sweet grass baskets. Or to go harvest berries. Now there are subdivisions there. And so all that development and man trying to control nature has really impacted how nature lives. For Indigenous people, you know, I was taught that you look at nature like you look at yourself. It’s a living being. And when you look at the planet, every aspect of the planet kind of resembles what you see in yourself as a human being. There’s different aspects of it – the heart, the hair, the lungs – the same thing as a human being. So when you look at it that way, you know, if you don’t take care of your own body, you know, you’re going to get diabetes. You’re going to get heart problems. You might get an amputation, or whatever. The same thing happens to the earth, to nature. If it gets too much pollution, too much scarring of the land, too much of its natural resources extracted, you’re actually hurting the body of nature. When you look at it that way – when you simplify it that way, it’s easy to understand. So what we do to ourselves, we’re also doing that to nature. So it goes hand-in-hand.

Partial Transcript: We have. This year and even last year, we’re noticing that there’s more, especially severe, lightning storms, and also the rain seems to be much lower. You know, the clouds are much lower to the earth. There seem to be, you know, more severity and even the hurricanes. The hurricanes when they come, they give the appearance that they’re more intense. But the people are saying maybe climate change, sea level rise, is all contributing to that. It is. But when you also think about Florida and what it used to be in its wild, natural state. It didn’t have all this concrete and pavement. It had a lot of natural buffers that could actually absorb that impact. But today you have concrete and metal and steel structures that aren’t as flexible, and they’re not going to absorb that impact. So when a hurricane or a tornado comes, you see much more devastation. When Hurricane Irma came through last year, we went out the day after the hurricane. We knew what the landscape looked like. But if you didn’t know what it looked like the day before the hurricane came, you would think that a hurricane didn’t go through there. You didn’t really notice that much change. We did because we knew what it looked like. We saw some trees down. We saw the grass flattened out. But if a person wasn’t familiar with the area, they wouldn’t have ever known a hurricane had passed through. But go to Fort Myers, Naples, the coast that got really hit, you saw all that devastation in the homes and the flooding. So the altering of the natural environment is increasing more of the flooding when these events come versus the environment back historically would absorb it.

Partial Transcript: Well, water; just like any element of the natural world, it’s a being. It has its own life. And we’re taught that, you know, water has its own spirit because it has its own life force. You know, water, you know, when you listen to the stories before there were cars, before there were roads, in periods of high water, our people traveled by the dugout canoe. You could cross, you know, the state of Florida in a canoe if you knew the natural water channels. You could cross the Everglades through the high water, and our people tell of stories of sailing around the coast of Florida and even off to some of the islands off the coast of Florida. Water is life. You can’t exist without water. You could exist for a bit without food, but you can’t without water. We understand that water is in every part of your body. Just like any other element of nature, we’re taught to protect it. You know, we talk to the water, just like we talk to the birds and other plants and animals. And we recognize and acknowledge, if we’re going to take water to drink, if we’re going to take water to whatever – to cook with, like any other plant or animal, we ask that water’s permission for what we’re going to use it for. We just don’t go and take it. Because it’s another being. So we have to offer it that respect. And we also understand that the health of the water is important to the health of everything else on this planet. The fish that we eat. We understand that for it to be bountiful in fish, it has to be healthy. There’s different songs and stories that relate to water, but, for my clan, we don’t share those stories with the outside, you know, just with our children. But I will say that, with water, if you listen, whether you’re indigenous or not, or anything in the environment, if you just slow down and listen, and if you learn to listen, you can hear it. It speaks its own language, just like that bird is just speaking to us right now. It speaks its own language just like the wind is speaking to us right now. And you hear the crickets in the background – the different things. They all have its own language. If you learn to slow down, observe and actually listen, you’ll start understanding what it’s saying. For me, that appears to be the problem that I see with other cultures. They don’t take the time to slow down and listen. I think they’ve forgotten that they’re a part of the natural world, too, because we’re natural beings in a natural world. We’re not humans in nature. We’re one and the same. It’s recognizing that everything has its own hierarchy. It has its own culture. Water has its own culture. It has its own way of existing. Plants have their own culture, their own language. Animals, when I talk about people, in that statement of people, it’s the plants, the animals, the water – not just the two-legged people. It’s ALL of them. When I talk about the human being, I’m talking about this blade of grass as well. That’s the big difference that I notice, that indigenous people and how we relate to the elements around us. We recognize that these exist as people.

Partial Transcript: Panther Clan. I was taught that the Panther Clan are the warriors of our people. They uphold the laws. The Panther Clan is responsible for all the clans. To protect all the clans. And I will tell you that the different clans, the way I was taught, is that we represent the animal as well. That your behavior is some ways mimics the actual animal and people in Panther Clan tend to be strong-willed. We tend to be comfortable with ourselves. We don’t need to be in a group of people. And we’re very protective and defensive of what we consider is our responsibility. We’re very strong-willed. We have a lot of determination and drive. You think about the animal. It has those same traits. And we’re also the healers of our people, as well.

You have Otter Clan. You have the Snake Clan. You have the Wind Clan. You have Bird Clan. You have – there’s not too many of them – you have the – there used to be a Wolf Clan, Alligator Clan. Over time, some of the clans have gotten real small. You have Big Town Clan. And each of the different clans have different roles because everyone has to work together so each one has different roles and also working together as a whole society. You know, Bird Clan tends to be more of speakers. Otter Clan, they tend to be very mellow and easy-going and very creative people – playful people. Wind Clan – they’re quiet and reserved people, just like the wind. It can be quiet and reserved, but it also can be fierce. We all have the different elders. In those clans as well, there’s healers. Some clans are known to be healers. Some clans are known to be more of the -- have the speaking skills so you’ll see them, when different things occur, there’s some clans that are designated to open up if there’s a meeting. That they need to be the first ones to kind of preside and open up, and then everyone else speaks. So we all have our different roles.

Partial Transcript: Well, our new year isn’t in January, like everyone else’s. We celebrate our new year in the beginning of the American year because we have seasons. We have planting seasons. We have seasons for rebirth. We have seasons where there’s death. So in the middle of the year, we bring in the new year to start the new seasons of growth. And, you know, we plant corn as a symbolism of that. We participate in – during that time, there’s different songs and dancing that occur that we don’t really share with the public. Sometimes of the year, we have fasting. Sometimes of the year, when we get close to where we have the rebirth of the season towards the end of the year, you know, there’s certain foods that we don’t eat to bring that in. Water, you know, it depends on what’s occurring. You know, hear of other tribes having, you know, water songs and water blessings, you know. For us, it’s almost like you use those instances if you’re trying to heal – like if water is unhealthy. You know, you sing to it. You talk to it to try to heal the water. To try to heal the air. We learn how to communicate that way. And we learn how to – our people today – not so much the younger generation – how to understand and speak to the clouds. How to read the clouds, and read the stars, which is one of the things we’re trying to with the younger generation have them realize, you know, you don’t need to watch Channel 7 to know what the clouds or rains are going to do and to understand those patterns because our forefathers learned how to listen to the elements and understood what was going to happen in the different seasons. And even like the snake, you know. The snake can harm you or it can help you. And you learn how to communicate for yourself. If you’re not there to harm it, it normally leaves you alone. And it’s communication not necessarily with verbalizing those words. There’s also mental communication.

Partial Transcript: It’s not just – today it’s a lot about the Everglades because going from the nomadic lifestyle to more of a permanent home. This is where we’re at. And also during the – in the earlier years of the United States, you had the time where they were trying to remove the indigenous people from here – from Florida. You have the first Seminole War, the Second Seminole War, you know, then the Third Seminole War, and all these attempts at removal. During that time, our people had been to this area, to the swamps of Florida, and they knew what existed out here. So they escaped to the swamps to get away from the soldiers and the cavalry. That’s how they were able to – eventually, you know, we came to a truce. You know, today we have paper wars. You know, everybody has their attorney, right? They’re fighting that way. So the bloodshed stopped. We have, you know, our elders told us that, in our time of need, the Everglades helped hide us. It helped provide us food. It provided us shelter and comfort. Now that she’s in need, it’s our turn to help protect her, to help shelter her and to take care of her like she did to us. So it’s our time to reciprocate that. For us, that’s why we’re so now getting more verbal about what is happening here in the Everglades, and even other parts of the state of Florida. Because, for us, it’s not just the Everglades, it’s the entire system that we’re concerned about because I was taught that you came from the earth. She’s your mother. And whatever happens to the earth, happens to you. If she hurts, if she bleeds – you hurt, you bleed. And people might think, oh, you know, how can that be? but because we’re so connected to the earth and the environment around us, when it’s in distress, we feel it. We can sense it. And we feel that pain.
We also know, too, that because we’re so connected to the environment, that for us to plant our crops, for us to have our ceremonies, that the nature has to exist. For us to continue to live off the land, to get back to it, we have to protect it. If the waters are unhealthy, like they are no -- from the 70’s our people have been told the water is toxic. And we’re noticing that there’s a high rate of illnesses with our people – cancer. So it all, you know, it’s a domino effect. And us trying to protect and help get the Everglades to hopefully more people to understand the importance of it. To want to start cleaning up that pollution. Start restoring the Everglades. Is not only it helps them, but it helps us to be able to exist here in the Everglades. Because if anybody can buy a house in another state and pick up and move. We can’t. To be who we are, we have to be here.

Partial Transcript: Well, a few years back, one of my elders, one of my uncles, was concerned about a project that they were going to develop here along the Tamiami Trail. Basically, essentially building another road parallel to the Tamiami Trail. The Tamiami Trail is recognized that they actually built a dam when they were building a road. So which inhibited water flow. And also because there’s a lot of medicinal plants and a lot of, you know, sensitive cultural sites along the area, that development would have gone through that area even very near through some of the Indian camps that reside along the Tamiami Trail. So three years in a row, we’ve walked across the Everglades to bring attention to it, to educate. We attended meetings that the Miami Dade County was having. Collier County was having. And we learned in that process, being engaged in that process, we learned that these counties thought, you know, that the Indigenous peoples were all in favor of that project because apparently, someone was misinforming them. And once we started – education is key. I always say I don’t protest, I educate. You know, anybody can protest, but if you educate, and people start realizing maybe what they thought was a good idea wasn’t such a great idea. In this case, after educating -- you have to continually educate and reach out to the people. Also, by doing that walk, the people that walked with us, was receiving an education in how to reconnect with the land. Because not only – you know, we call it activism, but it’s bringing yourself back to the environment is actually what we did because people have a saying, you know, “physician heal thyself.” Here we, in order to heal the environment – in order to save the environment, you have to save yourself first. It really brought out the fact that there needs to be more education or more activism done to reconnect people with nature. We got the project -- Collier County actually pulled out from the project. Miami Dade County as well, but it took a lot of us going to these meetings and doing the walks. And actually many of the participants from doing the walks actually in their own personal lives made changes on, you know, if they were going to not buy bottled water anymore. They changed their lifestyles, and that, in turn, helps the environment. Not only, helps them. We – myself and a few others – when the Dakota Access Pipeline up north in North Dakota, when all that was going on, and when they called out for help, we did gathering of supplies. We put out, you know, a Facebook page and collected supplies and took two truckloads of supplies all the way up to North Dakota and dropped it off. And there was the following year when Louisiana experienced all that flooding, the same group of people, we put out a Facebook page, collected all these supplies and we drove it to Louisiana to the parishes there to distribute it. Even locally, you know, when they have the Hands Across the Sand event, we did a Hands Across the Land event to educate about the pipeline in the Everglades that exists, because a lot of people – and we did a clean-up. We participated in some of the clean-ups that some of the other groups do. On a tribal level, some of our tribal members, myself included, we pay attention to what’s going on out there, and if the tribe – because we’re a small tribe. You know, only about maybe 600 people or so – we help read documents. If we hear about something that’s going on, we let the tribe you know, say hey, this might be of interest. This might impact our lands – impact our water. Myself, the tribe has an environmental committee, and myself and some others are a part of that to attend meetings, to do reading, and to bring our council up-to-date on what’s happening. Or even if it’s a part of helping put together comments on environmental impact statements. I do a lot of reading. And learning a lot, too, which is great. Even now with the water here in Florida and the Send It South campaign, the Senate Bill 10 where it was passed to telling the water management they have to build this big reservoir. Trying to educate people that, you know, that it’s not necessarily a good thing that what’s proposing to be built because of the footprint of it. Also, with Lake Okeechobee, treating and trying to educate people that Lake Okeechobee – keyword, it’s a lake, but they’re trying to treat it like a reservoir. The estuaries – a lot of people on the estuaries are having these, you know, bacterial blooms. It’s not algae. It’s bacteria. Trying to educate the systems that they’re worried about their economy, worried about, you know, their homes, their property values. Trying to educate them that they need to worry about the water and the environment. To protect the water and environment because what is it to have an economy? The original definition of economy was taking care of home and trying to bring people back to understand economy is taking care of home. And trying to change that mind-set that it’s about, not only your health, because everybody’s talking about their health. But they’re not focusing on the health of the water and the environment that’s being polluted. The health of your children, the health of the economy. They’re not getting tourism. All those different things is they’re focusing on me, me, me, me, me.

Partial Transcript: Symptoms of the bigger problem. They’re not addressing their problem. And trying to educate, well if you have a nutrient loading problem and also telling people nutrients – when you hear it, it sounds like a good thing, like it’s nutritious. But too much of a good thing is not so good, right? It’s trying to teach them that if you have a nutrient-loading problem, maybe you need to address the laws. You need to change those laws that allow the excessive chemicals into the waters. And also understand that you know, it’s not just what you do – and also educate that what you do impacts the rest of the system because it all has to work together. But right now the big focus is, you know, the immediate backyards -- what they don’t want. They don’t want the polluted water, but they have no problem sending that polluted water to somebody else. So they’re, in essence, in trying to solve their problem, they’re creating another problem. Trying to educate that we have to all work together. And we don’t like seeing pollution up north of us, but we also don’t want them sending it to us either. So how can we solve that? How can we work together? And right now there’s a lot of division. Nature doesn’t care if you’re a Republican or a Democrat. It doesn’t care. It exists. It lives. What is sad is that you can talk till you’re blue in the face, but sometimes people – maybe because they’re so many years in that system – they didn’t have the opportunity to connect with nature, to understand it. That seems to be the problem. One of the problems is people grew up in buildings. And I try to remind people, “Your people was kind of like mine in the beginning. You lived off the land. You understood the land. But somewhere along the way, you forgot.” So I was trying to bring people back to remembering that – trying to educate them to come back and remember that they, too, once connected with this land. Until they reconnect with it, they’re still going to keep making the same mistakes.

Partial Transcript: It takes a lot of patience, one. It’s understanding that they have a problem, or a sickness. But they grew up in a system that was designed that way – the values. You do notice that those that live more of a simple life, that are in rural communities are maybe, you know, they are fishermen, and not a big commercial operation, and they understand their water because they have that connection to it, but it takes a lot of patience, and it can be frustrating. But then I have to remind myself: they grew up in that system. That’s all they know. So it’s about educating to reconnect them with the natural world. It also translates into a lot of depression and all the problems you see going on in the world because they’re looking for something. You know, for myself, I’m thankful I had the opportunity to grow up the way I was raised because we were taught that you have to value who you are, and once you love yourself, and value who you are, you don’t need to go off looking for other things. You don’t need to go off for, you know, the new I-phone, the new car, the new this to try to fill that gap. Because that’s also a part of the problem. Because when we’re off looking for all those things, it takes resources from the environment to produce those things so we make further degradation of the environment. And one of the ways that, when we did the walk, we found that getting people to – it was detoxifying them from the city. You know, no cell phone use, no talking, because when you force them to not talk, you force them to look around. Because the mind is always trying to occupy itself. After a few days of not being able to talk for hours, and not focusing on me, me, me, me, they started actually looking around and paying attention to what was around them. Getting that focus back. You know, sometimes in the fourth day, they were starting to be more aware. Sometimes it took five days. But it’s regrounding them back to that. But it’s always a continued cycle. Even for us, you know, for me to be grounded in who I am, I have to get back into nature. Because we have a saying – if you’re feeling ill, whether it’s sad or anger or whatever, is to go out into nature and heal yourself. And even for myself, if I’m a week from going out into the swamp, you know, I tell my husband, “I need to go out there.” And I’ll go out there alone or sometimes we both go. We just both need to go and just be – exist, right? And, you know, science evolved from nature – observations from nature, right? People trying to understand what was going on. And that seems to be one of the issues is that I hear this, “Oh, well, where’s the science? Where’s the science?” So today people present the science but now you have people say, “Well, that’s bad science.” They don’t even want to accept the science. So what are they going to accept? And if you actually observe what’s going on, and pay attention to water patterns, pay attention to what the animals are doing, the plants are doing, and what you’ve seen occur, you start learning that. Isn’t that how science evolved? I think that technology that you have today is realizing that’s to help. Prove it. You know you’re seeing something, and you need technology to give you the numbers. You know, if you have water samples to tell you how much of a quantity of a chemical is in there -- what’s going on? You know there’s something wrong. And the technology isn’t there to tell you what’s wrong. Just like when you’re trying to predict water patterns. And you have computer modeling. People tend to forget that water is alive. It’s going to do what it wants to do. It’s not going to say, “Oh, yeah, they made this computer program. I got to do exactly what it says.” No, it’s going to do what it’s going to do. You may, over time, say OK, in these conditions, this happens but we have a saying: No one told God not to make it rain. No one told God it’s supposed to be dry this time of year. And now people are seeing the different changes in the environment – the rain, the different patterns. What they thought they could always predict, now it’s, you know. I said Mother Nature decided to try to wake you up a little bit. Because ultimately you, you know, I like to joke that Mother Nature’s a woman. You never know what she’s going to do. You think you know what she wants to do, and then she surprises you. Think of nature that way. Think of water that way. You think it’s going to do this, and it might do totally the opposite. It’s having to bring people to the realization that when a disaster happens, and you don’t have access, to that technology, what do you have? You have to rely on your skills and what you learned from nature. Rely on understanding nature because we have a saying: There’s going to come a point in time – it’s a prophecy – where we say the end of life as you know it. There’s going to come a time where there isn’t the technology anymore. The earth is going to come back to -- in its cycle where you’re going to have to do what your ancestors did. Survive on the land. You know, people talk about the end of the world. We talk about it as life as you know it today, which is, you know, another life cycle of the planet, whether it’s sea level rise, whether it’s all these severe droughts. Because it’s coming. And we teach our children how to pass on that knowledge. How to exist and survive with it.

Because when growing up, I grew up in times where, part of my life, we didn’t have electricity. And I’m ok with that. No TV. No anything. No air conditioning. You know, the water came out from the ground, whether it was from the canal, or digging a hole or having a hand pump. No refrigerator, so you gotta know how to, you know, cure your meat or whatever. And we have a saying that in this evolution of the planet, it’s going to get back to that. So whether it happens in my lifetime, in my children’s lifetime or my grandchildren’s lifetime, we don’t know, but it’s to learn those things and pass on that knowledge so, when it does happen, there’s a chance that -- you’re giving them the tools to survive. Because there is going to come a point in time where you’re not going to have the technology. And even in Florida, we have a prophecy that says Florida will either break off and sink into the water or it’s going to be destroyed by fire. And growing up, I used to think, “How did they know that? Why did they say that’s going to happen?” And then when I look at today, when I think about fire, I think about all these natural gas pipelines they’re bringing into Florida. Ok, so the fire was going to be this explosion from the pipelines, right? The sinking of Florida. Everybody is talking about deep well injections and ASRs, and you’re like, OK, how is Florida going to sink? Then now when I see all these different projects and the things that are being done, and Miami dredges its ports. The erosion of the land, just like Louisiana is losing land all the time because of dredging of their areas for their exports of oil and all that kind of stuff. And Florida trying to do the same with their dredging. You have Florida pumping their – hiding their sewage in the ground, right? They got too much of it, so they have to shoot it into the earth. Florida having these water crisis, so they want to shoot their polluted water into the earth. So underneath Florida, you think, OK, everything is going to start crumbling away because it’s porous, right? And shooting all that stuff into the water is going to take away from the integrity. And I’m like, OK, so that’s how Florida is going to sink. And also, too, with all the development of Florida. What happens when land gets too heavy? It starts going down, right? So they’re developing, and developing and developing. OK. And all the natural areas that used to absorb water and the shooting the water into the ground, and then the availability of water is getting less. So you’ve got the salt water coming more inland. All these different things, that’s how they’re going to make it sink. It’s going to explode and sink. It’s going to go down like the Titanic.

Partial Transcript: I remember seeing her when I was younger – once in my lifetime. I remember hearing about Marjorie Stoneman Douglas that she used to interact with the Miccosukee and Seminole people a lot. And she used to talk to – now they’re elders – but, you know, she used to talk a lot and come visit the people. I feel that – and the elders would say she was always asking about the Everglades and trying to learn. And they would talk to her about, you know, the environment and different things and the understanding of it. I think what our people had a great part in doing is helping her understand the nature of the Everglades, of Florida. And understand that the Everglades was a river. We always knew it was a river. And her being vocal and writing about it and speaking up about it because that was a time, too, when our people – we’re still reserved – but we’ve come to a point where we have to be more vocal about it. But at that time, you know, the elders weren’t going to be up in public and on newspapers and doing all these things. And, in a way, she kind of helped -- gave our people a voice on the need to protect the Everglades. I always heard stories that she was a friend, you know, to our people and I think, you know, she helped us, and we helped her by giving that understanding of what this system actually is and how it needs to work.

Partial Transcript: Now we have a saying: In order to know where you’re going, you need to know where you came from. And if you forgot where you came from, you get lost. You have to have a connection to place. And also throughout time, you know, through different experiences, they were learning experiences. And if you don’t know what occurred before you, you can end up making those same mistakes. You know, events happen for a reason. And also knowing where you came from as a tribe is also remembering that tribes came from the earth. That connection all the way back to the very beginning of time. Because otherwise you’re going to get lost. You’re going to be sinking. You don’t know where you want to be. You’re going to get depressed. You’re always going to be looking for something, and you’re going to do something that isn’t going to be good as a people to the environment, to your people. And being a – knowing who you are – because my mother, my late mother always told me: If you don’t have your language and your culture, you really don’t have anything. You can have a house. You can have a car. You can have millions of dollars. But all that can be taken away from you. The most valuable thing that you can have is who you are as a person, regardless of what culture you’re in. That is the most valuable thing. Also, if you don’t know where you came from, you’re easily led. And she always told us – and even my grandfather would say – you have to know who you are. Otherwise, somebody else is going to come along and tell you who you are.

Partial Transcript: Yeah, I think, for me, to understand -- regardless of where you are in the environment, and if you – you have to foster that connection with environment, no matter where you’re at in the world. Understanding that it’s a living being just like you’re a living being. You have to co-exist with each other. There’s some give and there’s some take. And understanding that the environment, when you’re long dead and gone, is still going to be here. That it doesn’t need you to live. It will probably live even better without you. But in understanding that you need to choose life because if all you’re going to do is pollute your water, pollute your environment, keep running around in circles, you’re not really living. You’re just, you know, existing. And need to understand that you cannot control nature and understanding nature is there to exist. It’s not there for you to abuse. It’s not there for you to, you know, rape the land and take out the oil and go all of this. To understand that the natural world around you, just like you talk about your rights, it has rights. It has the right to exist. And if you want your future generations to exist, future generations of all life to exist, you need to take care of it. Also realize that maybe you don’t need all this stuff that everybody tries to tell you that you need to have to be, to be happy. My grandfather didn’t wear shoes, lived in a hut, didn’t have electricity, and, you know, people would probably think of him as homeless and how, you know, sorry they felt and thought he needed to have this or that. But then his view would have been the same thing. They saw the person without the culture (???) a third language and loss, and he probably felt bad for them. Also respecting who you are as a person. And also respecting all the cultures that exist and quit trying to make other people do what you think they need to do. And other people, I mean the plants, the animals, the water and the two-legged people and just – you need to co-exist. They need to quit fighting the natural world and they need to start living with the natural world.