As Native American Heritage Month 2022 comes to an end, 85-year-old accepted Seminole Bobby Henry, who is simply a well-known fixture astatine New Port Richey’s Chasco Festival and a respected medicine antheral successful the Native community, told the Suncoast News helium and his radical volition proceed to combat what helium concedes whitethorn beryllium a losing conflict to clasp their culture.
“I was calved successful the Everglades,” helium said. “We don’t privation to spot them change, but the aged people, similar grandfathers and fathers, explained it’s going to happen. Too galore non-Indians volition travel and instrumentality the land. So what tin we do?
“We spell and inquire the government, conscionable spell connected and springiness america immoderate room. It went backmost and forth, backmost and forth. And we’re saying, conscionable springiness america immoderate country to physique things on, marque camp, and we’re going to unrecorded there. But things conscionable got worse and worse and worse.
“What we’re told is God gave america the world to keep, for everybody and to assistance everybody. But the non-Indians, I don’t deliberation they deliberation astir thing similar that. Just money, money, money, and large cars and much concrete.
“So that’s wherever we are today, and we request to expect much than that.
“We person the casino,” helium said, referring to the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino successful Tampa. “They assistance retired with medicine and infirmary (bills) and things similar that,” but still, helium says, accepted Natives support warring to clasp their culture.
“We ne'er signed a bid treaty,” helium said. “We’re inactive successful the war.”
Pasco County creator Jen Paul works connected a mural portraying the patriarch of the Chasco Fiesta, Seminole tribal elder Bobby Henry, during the 2019 event.
Suncoast News record photograph by FRED BELLETHenry, who made his surviving implicit the decades successful a wide assortment of skilled-labor jobs and yet established a concern successful Tampa with his woman of present 60 years making and selling hand-crafted Native items, ne'er went to school, and he’s not a large instrumentality of mainstream U.S. schools to this day. He’s not thrilled that immoderate of his great-grandchildren spell to them.
But don’t kids larn astir Native civilization successful nationalist schools?
“It would beryllium nice,” helium said, “but it doesn’t happen.”
“Grandpa said, you spell to schoolhouse and you hide the connection and you (learn to) accidental immoderate atrocious thing, and we ain’t got nary connection for that. So sometimes we, the Seminole people, suffer the language, and that’s what we’re doing wrong.
“We’re trying to bent connected to it,” helium said of his culture, and the onshore (Henry lives connected the Lakeland Reservation, a lodging improvement astir 40 miles eastbound of Tampa established a fewer years ago) but successful the larger strategy of things, helium doesn’t admit boundaries.
“We get unneurotic successful Lakeland. We get unneurotic and navigator out. But you can’t bargain land,” helium told the Suncoast News. “You can’t instrumentality it away. God gave america this land, everybody together.”
Henry is not optimistic astir the aboriginal of the land, either.
Referencing improvement and clime change, helium declares, “We mightiness beryllium going to suffer this Florida.”
Could the non-Indians successful power larn from the Native colonisation however to stave that off?
Maybe, but, says Henry, “I don’t deliberation they’ll ever learn. They listen, but they don’t learn.”
English (US)