Way back in the 1700s there was this fucked up little place called Florida, or at least that's what the Spaniards called it. The original natives of the region had multiple different names for this untamable swampland but most of them were wiped out by slaughter and disease from the Conquistadors who declared the wild mess, Florida. They didn't last long though. In fact, those butchers only managed to build and populate a few colonialist missions before their glorious Catholic empire collapsed in the tall grass surrounding them and, in spite of such efforts, most of Florida remained a verdant wilderness teeming with all kinds of shit that freaked white people the fuck out- snakes, alligators, mosquitos, humidity...
But there was one tribe of Indians just wild enough to call this no-man's-land home.
The colonialists called them the Seminole, which was believed to be derived from the Spanish word "cimerones", meaning "untamed" or "runaway." It had originally been used as a pejorative for Native Americans who rejected mission life and Roman Catholicism in order to flee and live "wild" in the snake infested forests. But this wasn't just any tribe. The Seminole were a nation of refugees, the product of ethnogenesis, a collection of different disparate ethnicities joining together to create a new one.
Most of their original members were renegades and outcasts exiled from existing tribes, most significantly the Muscogee Creeks of what is now called Georgia and Alabama but also Choctaw, Yamasee, Yuchi and eventually free Africans, escaped slaves and even a few disenfranchised white colonialists. They all came together in the wilderness to live free, and they thrived where white men feared to tread, building an identity over the centuries defined by their collective refusal to be governed by any force but nature.
They organized themselves into autonomous, self-governing, villages called Italwa that cooperated for mutual defense and built a thriving trade network on the largely abandoned ruins of the Spanish Empire. It was their diversity that set them apart though and made them far more independent than the other local Creek based tribes. It was also this diversity that would eventually make them a target of another burgeoning empire known as the United States of America.
By the 19th Century, the Seminoles had accepted so many escaped slaves from nearby plantations that these darker skinned refugees formed their own distinct band dedicated to preserving their own unique culture under Seminole protection while also enjoying the right to bear arms. They called them Black Seminoles, and they quickly established an alliance between wild Indians and escaped slaves that threatened the monopoly on force held by white Southern planters with a growing network of underground railroads.
In other words, the Seminole had to go and thus began the Seminole Wars.
Three conflicts were fought between the years of 1816 and 1858. The first was also America's first major military intervention on foreign soil lead by a sadistic General named Andrew Jackson for the express purpose of recovering escaped slaves, and it was Andrew Jackson who would lead America into the second and deadliest of those wars about a decade later when he was elected president. For nearly 7 years, less than 2,000 Seminole warriors schooled over 30,000 heavily armed American troops in swampland guerrilla warfare, picking them off like mosquitos in hit-and-run attacks and then disappearing back into the stags like ghosts.
It was the longest, deadliest and most expensive Indian War this empire has ever engaged in. As many as 2,000 American troops died in that filthy black water, a population of corpses that matched the size of the entirety of the Seminoles' armed forces. The Americans only won the war the way Americans have ever won a war, by targeting and starving their adversaries' families and subjecting civilians to genocide in order to force real warriors to surrender.
However, while most of the Seminoles begrudgingly agreed to flee the land they made their own for the glorified concentration camps of Oklahoma, a few small bands never surrendered, choosing to retreat even deeper into that fucked up little place where they remain unconquered to this day in what has now become known as the Everglades. The Southern planters even attempted to reach out to these bloodied but unbowed renegades in a desperate hunt for allies during the Civil War. The Seminoles told them to fuck off. They remained neutral.
This is one of my favorite stories in the often-depressing pantheon of American history for a number of reasons. As a Queer person, any story about a band of outcasts forging a new identity in resistance to their oppressors is kind of like hyperfocus candy for my distinctly neurodivergent brain. But more than anything, the story of the Seminole Nation is a story that proves that ethnicity or tribal identity is mutable and that bioregionalism is far stronger than traditional Westphalian nationalism. It is historical proof that the American Empire is a mirage built on totally manufactured constructs like race and borders, and that these constructs can be destroyed.
The fatal flaw at the heart of both the left and the right in this country is the nightmare known as the American Dream. A contrived notion that any form of political universalism writ large over such a vast and diverse physical space can ever lead to anything but tyranny regardless of what label you put on it. Perhaps the most devastating label of all is the western concept of race as a biological construct with its deadliest byproduct being that godless religion known as whiteness. The very notion of white people was invented for the express purpose of homogenizing the entirety of the European diaspora into a single globalized master race.
I guess it kind of worked, at least for a while. America is still the deadliest empire on earth and much of that empire is built upon the bedrock of white supremacy. But just like the Spanish Empire before them, America is rapidly collapsing into the abyss beneath the weight of its own sins, leaving a vast population of 'white people' without any form of ethnic identity other than conquest to cling to. And cling they do, to Proud Boys and Heritage Foundations and vile technofascist juntas. To a very polluted and historically color blind form of tribalism. But we shouldn't let this sickness pollute the word 'tribe' any more than we should let it pervert the word 'God.'
That would be truly tragic because the solution to this problem, of how to free people from being the willing hostages of a thrashing international leviathan as it drowns in its own blood, may actually be to turn to a sort of historical bioregionalism based on the kind of tribalism which has always been natural to this region of the world. This doesn't mean indulging in cultural chauvinism or cultural appropriation. It means doing what the Seminole did and building new nations in contradiction to these things.
The indigenous people of these so-called Americas are still here and still fighting to define themselves but if any of us are going to live peacefully on this land with them after the inevitable collapse of the empire that failed to extinguish them, we should probably start looking to them for more influence than the host of dead white men still worshipped by both sides of academia.
As noted above, I believe that the best way to do this is by embracing bioregionalism, a philosophy of green localism that calls on societies to organize themselves small around the natural boundaries of bioregions and to actively engage with a process of becoming native to these environments by learning and embracing their ecological and cultural history. This is precisely what the Seminole did in the wilds of colonial Florida, and they did it in a way that didn't involve them forcing their will upon anyone. They built a vibrant new cultural identity by uniting the shards of the many ethnicities that joined beneath their flag and adapting them to the environment that offered them sanctuary.
The Seminoles were not alone. Many indigenous nations existed in small, decentralized, non-hierarchical, societies long before some white dude declared this anarchism. The Iraquois Confederacy and the Navajo Dine developed complex societies that united many cultures in harmony with nature through cooperation and collective responsibility. Europeans once did too in places like Medieval Iceland and Gaelic Ireland. You can also detect streaks of this stateless spirit among the outliers of post-colonial Euro-American culture such as the Cajuns of the Bayou and the numerous sects of Anabaptists across America's badly scarred heartland.
This is what I seek to achieve with my own community of mostly pale-faced rural Queer folk on the ruins of the Appalachian rust belt. A borderless confederacy of autonomous and anti-colonialist tribal communities built around our shared traditions of multi-ethnic Queerness and anti-authoritarian neurodivergence, fostered by the agrarian traditions of the land we now call home. A series of farms, communes, co-ops and homesteads living off the land with our own network of schools, militias, small businesses and mutual aid societies to sustain us while still living in harmony with whatever other voluntary cultures surround us.
We can't replace the native people who once occupied these hollers, and we wouldn't dare to try. The Shawnee who once called my little corner of Pennsyltucky home suffered a similar fate as many of the Seminoles, being ethnically cleansed by that 19th century Donald Trump, Andrew Jackson, with his genocidal 1830 Indian Removal Act.
But we can honor the last nations to live off this land sustainably and more importantly we can learn from them. We can do what the Seminole dared to do and forge a new stateless existence in the age of Orange Ozymandias by making America truly tribal again.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* Even the Losers by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
* Tribe by Gruntruck
* The Flag by Royal Trux
* The Wrong Year by the Decemberists
* Heroes by David Bowie
* The King of Spain by the Tallest Man on Earth
* The Druid by Sleep
* Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes
* Anaconda by the Melvins
* Territorial Pissings by Nirvana
