Dressing In Feathers by S. Elizabeth Bird

Author:S. Elizabeth Bird [Bird, S. Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367315443
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

Past the chickees showing how Miccosukee families live, cook, eat, and make traditional crafts, I found the Miccosukee Museum (founded in 1983), a modest but modern, air-conditioned museum displaying the material culture and early history of the Miccosukee and Seminoles, as well as the natural history of the Everglades. The museum was a refreshing break from a village that could have been Musa Isle in the 1950s, but a return to the outside brought me to the alligator pens and the alligator wrestling pit. The self-guided tour ends with the gift shop again, where Miccosukee clothing and beadwork mingle with other American Indian arts and crafts.

As I left the culture center and Indian village, I was struck by how trapped the Miccosukee seemed by the older conventions of representing the Seminoles. Control over the representation had changed hands, but otherwise there was little difference I could detect between this commercial village and the Musa Isle I recalled from my childhood in the 1950s and could see in the printed and visual materials from the 1920s through the 1940s. The Miccosukee were "getting themselves up" for the tourists in an old manner, and as I drove away I wondered if the Seminole Museum at Big Cypress would be any more successful in breaking away from the older visual and performance formulas. Had the Seminoles and Miccosukee offered a counterinterpretation of their cultures and their everyday lives? Had they really spoken back to nearly a hundred years' worth of white representations? What would it mean, even, to offer a counterinterpretation in public space?

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