[pam] A program at the University of Miami aims to break Native American stereotypes by providing a better understanding of Indigenous culture and history.

We learn more about this initiative and look at some of the biggest issues facing Native American women.

What the tribe is here to do is to educate, to be a good neighbor, and to protect the Everglades.

[pam] We sit down with the Miccosukee tribe's, Curtis Osceola Jr, to learn more about their way of life and the tribe's spiritual connection to the Everglades.

We're proud of our culture, we're proud of our heritage, and I want for the public to know that we are still here.

[pam] Plus, we get a sneak peek at the latest History Fort Lauderdale exhibit, showcasing contemporary Native American art.

That and more, stay with us as we dive into "Your South Florida."

Hello and welcome to "Your South Florida."

I'm Pam Giganti.

November is Native American Heritage Month.

On today's program, we are paying tribute to the rich ancestry and traditions of South Florida's Indigenous people.

There are 574 federally recognized Indigenous tribes in the United States with South Florida being home to the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes.

They're a proud people determined to fight for both their land and their way of life.

It's a rich culture with its own unique foods, clothing and language at risk of extinction.

But it's being kept alive by the passing of oral history and traditions from one generation to the next.

Recently, I had the chance to visit the Miccosukee Indian Village on the edge of the Everglades about 40 miles west of Miami.

I spoke with the chief of staff for the Miccosukee tribe, Curtis Osceola, Jr to get a better understanding of their history and culture, what they most want us to know about the tribe and why they will never stop fighting to protect their ancestral land.

This stretch of land here, we call this the Miccosukee Reserve area.

We fought hard to get it, and we have about 450 people that live out here.

There's another 150 or so members, and they're all around South Florida, and some are in other parts of the country.

Most people think of Native Americans or the Miccosukee tribe, and they think, you know, Wild West or cowboys and Indians, like a Western movement, right?

And really we're modern people too, right?

You know, we wear, you know, jeans and tennis shoes, and we have homes, right?

We have homes with concrete, we have, you know, indoor plumbing, you know, so we have everything that, you know, everyone in Miami has.

What the tribe is here to do is to educate, to be a good neighbor, and to protect the Everglades.

And so I think that some people may be cautious about, you know, talking to natives or being around us, but you know, we're just people just like anyone else.

And I think most of us will be happy to tell you about, you know, the tribe and where we come from and our families.

And you know, we're very proud of where we come from and our history.

When you look at the land around us, we're in a big wetland, and back when the US government was trying to remove the natives from the South, they were trying to move them west to Oklahoma.

And so the Miccosukee, we resisted and we went into the swamps to hide and to protect ourselves.

And traditionally the swamp was our protector and our place where we have all our medicines and our cultural resources.

But what ended up happening is that it saved us from that removal and from that huge change in life that we avoided.

When you talk to other natives or you talk to Miccosukees, we feel that we came from the land and that we were born from it.

And so to ignore that and to not respect it and take care of it, what that will lead to is that you won't respect yourself and take care of yourself.

You won't respect others and take care of others.

So it starts with the relationship with the land.

That's kind of where our culture comes from.

To be Miccosukee is to be a fighter, right?

I mean, we're always fighting for something.

We fought for our lands, we fought for our sovereignty, we fight for the Everglades.

And I think that's probably the strongest character trait across the tribe is that everyone is a fighter.

Everyone wants to do the right thing for the right reasons, and so if you talk to any Miccosukee, they'll tell you they'll have a great sense of pride for their people and their culture and their language.

And that's what we fight for.

We make our own clothes, so we have a lot of seamstresses.

We have our own music and singing, that we have our own style and our own lyrics.

And then we have sort of our own food, things we like to eat every day.

Usually local stuff, corn, flour.

Between the tribes and their members there's a lot of trade.

And so we make, you know, patchwork clothing, other tribes, they're into, you know, metal working, you know, putting, making jewelry.

So between the tribes, you have different forms of art.

We have our belief in one creator.

So we are very alike the Abrahamic religions in that way, it is different because of our close tie to the land.

And so a lot of our beliefs are gonna be tied to the land, tied to the animals, tied to the plants.

So it's a very humble way of approaching belief in a higher power.

Do we like it better now with, you know, being modern, or would we rather be traditional?

And I think that it depends on who you ask, right?

Some people will tell you, I prefer the traditional way of life.

I don't want anyone to bother me.

I just want to be at my camp with my family, with my things, with the world around me.

I don't need all this outside stuff.

And then you'll meet other people who are a little bit more, I would say, contemporary minded.

And they would say, you know, yeah, you know, it's great.

It's good to have, you know, trade.

It's good to be interacting with all these people.

But for Native Americans, we always remember that where we came from was this land.

It's all we want.

We want our land and we want our lives.

And we just want to be able to live in that way.

Everything else is just sort of extra, you know?

And before the colonists came to the New World, to our world, it wasn't really new for us, right?

But it changed everything.

And some would say for the better, some would say for the worse.

But it depends on who you ask.

I think we're coming into an age where we wanna share our lives, we wanna share our culture, we want to share our identity so that people understand who we are and we can have that conversation.

The Seminoles and Miccosukee tribes are matriarchal societies tracing their lineage through their mothers.

But while women are revered within these tribes and others, American Indian and Alaskan Native women face particularly high rates of domestic violence.

According to the National Indigenous Women's Research Center, four out of five will experience violence in their lifetime.

This is part of the focus of a new course at the University of Miami's Native and Global Indigenous Studies program, or NAGIS.

The course explores Indigenous feminism and highlights the negative role colonization continues to play within tribal communities.

Joining me now to share more about this program and the violence against Native women is Caroline LaPorte, an immediate descendant of the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, an associate judge for her tribe.

Caroline is also a lecturer for the Native American and Indigenous Global Studies program at UM and director of Safe Housing for the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center.

Caroline, it is so wonderful to have you today.

Thanks for joining me.

No, thank you so much for having me.

I really appreciate the opportunity.

So we know you went to UM Law, but as a student there, you've said you noticed you were really the only Native American in your program.

So talk about what that was like for you.

Yeah, I think, you know, I wanna say, I think it's really challenging for most universities, or at least this is a challenge most universities could learn from, right?

And we need to find ways to address it.

And we also think we need to think about why it's an issue in general but for me, you know, as a native student, I just wanted native community.

You know, law school is challenging.

Law school is challenging enough and I think that, you know, if I had had a little bit of more peer interaction, right?

I might have felt more grounded throughout that whole process.

It can be really isolating not to have that, but it can also result in indigeneity if it's even represented on campus to be misrepresented or appropriated in harmful ways.

So I think as a native student, just generally, this kind of speaks to any university.

You have to struggle through having to explain some of that.

And that's difficult and also adds to a sense of loneliness.

So it's really all about educating people in the most part, don't you think?

I think it is, and I think it's about drawing people in, right, rather than kind of excluding people out.

I think that there is, you know, when you say that you need more representation to sort of feel seen, right?

I think there sometimes is this tendency to feel like that's a critique, and it's really not.

It's just sort of a, it's more of just a request, right?

But I think that it would've helped a little bit.

I think the other thing that it results in is that you end up right, without indigenous representation on campus, you end up without class options.

Talking about indigeneity, you represent you, you end up without club options, without access to native faculty.

Any sort of basic considerations around your cultural identity and those gaps sort of feed off of one another in different ways.

Yeah, we know you've become an educator in that space.

So talk about UMs Native and Global Indigenous Studies program or NAGIS, how did this all come about?

Yeah, it really came about to just address some of those gaps that I identified, right?

And I think as a student, I sort of had a unique perspective, or as an alumni, I had a unique perspective on it.

But weirdly, I had the opportunity to guest lecture at the law school right before the pandemic hit, which I know was sort of a weird and isolating time for all of us.

And Tracy Divine Guzman, who's a professor, was actually at the lecture.

So we went to lunch afterwards, we started talking about the need for representation and representation sort of being the lowest bar.

And then she and another colleague by the name of Will Pestle submitted a U-Link grant application that's part of their racial equity work that the university is doing, and the university awarded it.

What do you want students to learn?

What's the goal here?

What do you want them to walk away from this course knowing better that they didn't before going in?

You know, I think one of the big things is just thinking about the ways in which we learn differently, right?

So I really want them to understand that humor, land, kinship connection, right?

That those are all valid forms of learning.

I also, I mean, it's sort of a core part of my syllabus requirement, but they really need to consider who they are in relation to the material.

So I want them to be able to connect with what we're talking about.

I want them to leave really thinking about their own responsibility, about their own values.

And yes, obviously, I mean, it is a class that infuses history and law.

So they do have to understand US history as it has impacted Indigenous people and think about law in a different way.

But really the goal is to have them challenge some deeply and pervasively held perceptions.

And I want them to leave my class with empathy.

[pam] Yeah.

You know, I think a lot of these issues we talk about don't just impact indigenous people, they just happen to impact them disparately and exponentially and so if we can sort of talk about our shared experiences in that way, then it leaves people feeling, I don't know, more included in what they're learning about.

Right?

Yeah, no, absolutely.

And can, do you have any examples of things that students have revealed to you through this course that they've actually come to learn maybe about themselves or their connection to Indigenous people or to other minority groups?

I think the big thing actually has been students thinking about where they grew up.

And not that that's like, that's sort of a basic sort of intro thing that we do in our, in my class, is thinking about where people are from and whose land that they're on, right?

And sort of their connection to that space, because those spaces are important to my students, the places where they grew up, you know, they hold significance for them.

And I think if I can get them to think about things that have happened there historically, then there's that sort of an interesting entry point for people to gain.

But I also just think, you know, in general, people just have a lot of similar shared experiences, especially in regards to, I mean, for example, like violence, which it's not always the easiest thing to talk about, but I think to build trust in that way has been important for the class too.

Yeah, so let's talk about that.

In your work, focusing on violence against Native women and women, by the way, are revered in most tribal cultures.

I just went to the Miccosukee Village a few weeks ago and learned that when I did my interview with Curtis Osceola Jr. that really women are the center of the family, but research shows that four out of five American Indian and Alaskan Native women will experience violence in their lifetime.

So if they're so revered and are the center of the family, why is this happening?

And why do you think these rates are higher for Indigenous women?

Yeah, I think they're high for a lot of different reasons, right?

It's something that we've been exploring in my class.

But one of the things that I try to get my students to at least acknowledge in the beginning is that the experience of violence for Native women has two main root causes.

And you actually mentioned them when you were introducing, right?

They're genocide and colonization.

And like you said, most tribes were matriarchal, not necessarily all of them, but most were.

So when settlers came to this land, women and children were directly and strategically targeted for violence and separation.

And that was sort of a continued act of political violence against the sovereigns that were here, right?

Like long before the other sovereigns that sort of appeared.

And then these acts of violence then spread of course into law and policy.

One of the main reasons for violence in our community is actually jurisdiction.

So it's a legal issue.

So you know, you cited that four out of five Native women experience violence within their lifetimes.

That is true.

I myself actually am a survivor of sexual assault and stalking.

But 97% of those women from that same study, which was a Department of Justice study, will say that it was a non-native that actually perpetrated the violence against them.

And that goes back to that Supreme Court case that I was referencing, which is called Oliphant.

And in that case, the Supreme Court held that tribes had been stripped of their inherent authority to prosecute non-natives for crimes that they commit on the reservation.

It was somewhat addressed by the most recent re-authorizations of the Violence Against Women Act, but not entirely.

And I think the perception that this gives to people that would be abusers is that they can come to Indian country and they can act with impunity.

[pam] Yeah.

And I think that's, you know, that's a huge issue, right?

There's also like little to no law enforcement, there's general invisibility, there's a lack of prosecution, there's not a lot of services for individuals who need support.

And then we have sort of these ongoing other political issues like around the extractive industries that I think really add to the experiences of violence people have.

So are you saying that a lot of the violence, the majority of the violence against women is being done by non-native men?

It is being done by non-native men, particularly within regard to sexual assault.

And I know that that is definitely a difficult statistic to hear, but this was a Department of Justice study that was released in May of 2016, if anybody's interested.

It's actually called the Rose Study, and you can find that online.

We know too, you're the director of Safe Housing for the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center.

So we know how crucial providing safe housing and other resources is for survivors of domestic violence.

But there are many layers, as you've been mentioning, barriers unique to the indigenous communities.

So talk about some of these issues such as the ties to ancestral land, because some of these spaces and places are not on ancestral land.

So these women are being taken away from their land, if you will, correct?

That is true.

I think one of the biggest issues, and we just sort of see this in the work in general, is that housing is not available.

And that's really not like a, you know, that's definitely something that's historically been an issue in Indian country for a myriad of issues relating to things like the Dawes Act or the Homestead Act.

But housing is an issue everywhere.

Housing is an issue in all of our communities.

We partner with the National Domestic Violence Hotline, and so we have access to their referral database.

And one of the things we know from that database is that there are over 2,000 domestic violence shelters just kind of across the United States for people to access.

But for tribes and for Native survivors who want to maybe access a domestic violence shelter that's culturally rooted, there are less than 50 tribal domestic violence shelters.

That's not really meeting the need, right?

When you consider the level of violence that's experienced.

Plus, as you mentioned, there are 574 federally recognized tribes.

Another thing that I think impacts most everyone's community is the way we condition access to housing.

We have sort of come to view it as an individual.

An individual right, right or something that you might have access to based on your own sense of personal responsibility.

When in reality housing is is a basic human right.

And so I think a lot of what we're doing at the center at least, is having these conversations to shift people's mindsets around what housing access actually needs to look like, and what about our own mindsets maybe need to be adjusted a little bit to ensure that people have access to things that are their basic needs.

Yeah, so what are some of the resources then for Native women looking for a way out of a violent situation?

What can they do?

Yeah, so the first thing that they should do really is reach out to the Strong Hearts Native help lines.

It is a peer-to-peer hotline that is confidential and 24 hours that will connect a caller to an advocate who is also Native for a warm referral.

So, you know, getting you to either like a transportation voucher that a survivor might need, a hotel voucher connecting you to a program that can assist you with shelter access, for example.

Or maybe with finding any sort of alternate support you might need, like even even therapeutic support.

Other important resources, you know, NIWRC.org, where I currently work.

I would definitely say like Sovereign Bodies Institute, which does missing and murdered Indigenous women's data work and then your tribal coalitions.

So regionally there are tribal coalitions that will focus on these issues similar to mainstream or state coalitions.

Yeah and we'll list all of those.

We'll have those resources on our website for everybody so that they can easily access them.

Yeah, of course.

And before we let you go, what is it that you want people most to know about being an Indigenous woman, about Native people?

What is it that people should walk away with, especially in Native American Heritage Month?

I think that people should walk away with an understanding that our worldviews and our value systems are just as valid, right?

And that if anything they offer an additional lens for people to look at what they're experiencing or how they're experiencing it.

That it's just, you know, that it is something that is vibrant, that it is, we are people that are still here and that we are a resilient group of people.

Well, it has been wonderful and very enlightening to speak with you.

Thank you again so much for joining us and continued best of luck with all the work you're doing at the University of Miami and with everything else related to domestic violence, we really appreciate you.

Thank you so much for having me.

I appreciate it.

Take care.

And nestled in the big cyber Seminole Indian reservation, the mission of the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum is to celebrate and preserve Seminole culture and history.

Now the museum is teaming up with History Fort Lauderdale to do just that with the new exhibit, showcasing contemporary works by Indigenous artists with the hopes of sparking a new era in Seminole art.

Being of Native and English ancestry, I'm always trying to do what I can to learn about myself by learning about others.

The History Museum would feature historical artworks, you know, by painters who are dead or things that are a hundred years or more in the past.

But we know now that, you know, history is what happens every day.

And so contemporary art is, for me, a really profound way of capturing and sharing the current views that multiple generations of people have on their history, on the history of the city, on the history of the state and the nation.

What I'm working on is, I'm gonna put patchwork design pieces up here at the corners and the portrait of my mom and my granddaughter.

I was actually born on one of the small islands out in the middle of the Everglades, you know, similar to the painting there.

And my first five years, I just lived on a river in a complete paradise.

This is actually the first year that we're collaborating officially with Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum.

Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki has always, since its inception, been an advocate for Seminole history, Seminole culture, and Seminole artists.

Just now with their new director, Gordon Oliver Wareham, they're beginning to really take an active role in being that advocate for contemporary Seminole art.

The history of the Seminole tribal people in Fort Lauderdale, this is was one of our main places of living, surviving.

And so having our story here and having a great place of History Fort Lauderdale, collaborating with us to tell our stories is great.

I think it just shows that, once again, that that is very important for our communities to know each other.

It's been a really good exercise in bringing people together and learning about, you know, each other's cultures.

Even giving the artists themselves that motivation to want to create their best work is also a really important aspect and has been, I think, really good for the art community in general, and specifically the Seminole art community.

Our knowledge is passed down from one generation to the other generations through our art, through our language.

It's what makes it alive.

And so if that way of expressing ourselves ever came to the end, you know, that would be the end of the Seminoles.

So it is important to pass those traditions through our art, through our language, through our stories to those generations so we stay alive as a people.

This is Native American Flute Western style.

A lot of the songs I play are life experience.

They're, you know, I have stories to every song that I play, and so they will have sounds of people I love, and I would try to put that within my music, having their voice.

So you, you'll hear, almost like hear people speak.

Today is really our very first day of starting the installation.

There's multiple rooms, so there's the room that we're sitting in now, and then there's also two other rooms that will be installed with Seminole and Mississippi artwork.

The types of artwork are just as unique and varied as the artists themselves.

I'll work with acrylics, oil paints, and I do pencil, pen and ink.

As creative people, we look to our creativity and our past to survive today and hopefully to plant some seeds for our future generations to carry on.

I never went to art school myself, so I want people to understand, you know, where it came from and what it means and that it's important.

The work behind me is by an artist named Leroy Osceola.

He's a wood carver, also a painter, and a mixed media artist.

And his themes are very strongly related to his work as a traditional culture bearer within his community.

The other one is of one of my grandfathers great, great grandfather, and he's got the soldiers in his eyes, as a reflection.

And the title is, "I Will Not Run."

And that one's titled "America, See It Like a Native."

But I did that because I see a lot of native people in our country that's been put on reservations and their lives taken away from them.

And they have to learn how to live a new life.

So that's what the chain represents and who's doing it.

I'm hoping they see what I see through my eyes and not just judge anything from the surface.

So that's what I hope for.

Our pride is very strong and has always been, and I hope this is what you know, our visitors will see.

Our culture is alive.

We're proud of our culture, we're proud of our heritage, and I want that for the public to know that we are still here, that you know, we are thriving in this modern day.

You know, we get to share our stories and we're still here, but we're still living our traditional lives.

I hope that people will walk away with an added value and respect for the persistence, resistance, and continuance of Indigenous culture here in South Florida.

[pam] Chono Thlee Sparking a New Era in Seminole Art will be on display at History Fort Lauderdale from November 6th through January 10th of next year.

To learn more, visit historyfortlauderdale.org/museum.

And for more on everything covered on today's program, check us out on Facebook and Twitter at YourSouthFL.

I'm Pam Giganti, as always, thanks so much for watching.