The story of the Seminoles told in this and every other source is utterly rediculous and divorced from reality. Yet the author hides the facts, the truth in reality in plain sight before the idiot modern reader.
On the cover is a bearded Seminole warrior who looks like the brother of the shaven US Soldier.
Within, it is incompletely reported that Seminole derives from the Creek word “simanooli,” which means runaway, without noting that this Creek word derived from the Spanish word Cimmeron, which meant runaway and that the runaways were people of European descent who mixed with Amerindians.
Is this incredibly sloppy work, or protective omission to maintain a place on American book shelves and online sales platforms?
Page 5, an 1896 illustration, shows Seminoles fighting who look to be of mixed, European, Amerindian and African ancestry. Throughout the book, Seminoles are shown in hybrid native and European attire. It is mentioned that they were one of “The Five Civilized tribes” without even the briefest explanation that this was due to their highly European genetics and culture, including a very Gaelic clan system as opposed to the more typical tribal systems.
“The land is ours, we do not need an agent.” declared Osceola most storied chief of this second of three Seminole wars. Osceola did not appear to require a translator.
[Editor, please find the 1841A Narrative of the Early Days and Remembrances of Oceola Nikkanochee by Andrew Welch.]
Do note that mixed race and full Caucasian Indians had rejected European culture and values [namely capitalism and federalism] and tended to downplay their genetic origin in favor of their adopted identity as a tribal person. So this deception has gone on since the first chief of the Seminoles, illustrated in about 1710, appeared like the very image of the Scottish actor Liam Neison.
[There were Welsh Speaking Indians in Carolina in the 1620s, descendants of the failed Roanoke Colony.]
Page 11: An 1848 illustration of “a nephew of Seminole Chief Micanopy Coacoochee” captured with Osceola [betrayed under a flag of truce] appears to be mixed race, with features half way between European and Amerindian, looking like Joseph Brant, the half-English chief of the Mohawks from 50 years earlier.
Throughout the book, the marginal participation of runaway African slaves and their inclusion in the Seminole tribes, [mostly as slaves, this part being overlooked] is mentioned in an apparent attempt to muddle the runaway origin of the tribes.
[See Washington Irving’s Journal concerning the Seminole origins legend, circa 1800.]
Page 15: Seminole Chief Ea-mat-la’, or King Phillip, painted by George Gatlin in 1838 was described as very old and seemed to be of mixed race, with more Amerindian genetics than European, which was the trend across the tribes, for chiefs of the late1700s to be more Amerindian and those of the early 1800s to be more European in appearance according to period illustrations.
The historian here does a nice job of tracing Seminole tribal organization to the Creeks, who were a clan-based people, with Gaelic chiefs such as McAntosh. The threads are all present, nothing intentionally obscured, but undetectable to the general reader due as much to the long-standing overall conditioning of the American mind to look at a European with a gun and a feather in his hair, and declare him to be entirely of another race, due only to artifice.
On page 7, Osceola and his men are shown as just as light of skin as the Americans, and to possess a distinctive European range of facial features, to include mustaches.
Page 19, a period illustration of Abraham “The Prophet” a Seminole guide who was a runaway slave and clearly African, is given more space than most chiefs, when it could have been a thumbnail. Everything in this book in graphics and words overplays the African angle and underplays the European-American tribal angle.
Page 20 is a full-page portrait of chief Chittee-Yoholo or Snake That Makes Noise,” who described his mission as “kill white men.” This man is dressed in entirely European manner, including wearing five gorgets and one medallion stamped with the likeness of a European aristocrat. He looks exactly like the popular 1990s actor Armand Asante, appearing very much to be of Iberian, French or Italian ancestry.
Page 23 has two very interesting illustrations by the Assistant Surgeon Ellis Hughes at Fort Lauderdale. These are reproduced in tiny thumbnail and show two Seminole warriors: a clearly Anglo-European face with ski-slop nose, mustache and beard, looking very much like pirate out of myth, and a clearly Amerindian-European mixed warrior, that seems as if Dolph Lundgren was bread with the Land o’ Lakes butter babe.
Page 24 shows a detailed color portrait of Chief Julcee Mathla who is dressed in the distinctive turban and coat of the Seminole upper class, a very practical version of high European dress, wearing a Medallion of a European aristocrat. His face is rendered in highly realistic asymmetry and he looks very much like many middle-aged men of Greek, Italian and Jewish ethnicity who I have known in Baltimore City. His nose might remind one of a Mayan prince, but the eyes are way too close together for a pure-blood descendant of North Asiatic Siberian folk.
Page 25 Chief John Hicks, also known Tuko-See-Mathla would be killed by Osceola for collaborating with the Americans. He appears in gaudy highland clan finery adapted to the sub-tropics and appears racially to be Portuguese, or some mix of Iberian and Italian, seeming to this observer to be a mixed race person of the era.
On page 31 a hand-colored engraving from 1836, shows the slaughter of Americans by racially European, racially Amerindian and racially mixed tribal people in traditional Seminole-Creek dress. Assisting them are, clothed in the attire of the European-American laboring classes, Negroes. The stark and obvious contrast between the African allies of the Seminoles [runaways] being dressed as runaways while the actual Runaway tribe is depicted in traditional tribal guarb, albeit of hybrid Amerindian-Gaelic type, is striking.
On page 37 George Gatlin’s beautiful painting of Osceola depicts a man who could be Daniel Boone’s brother, with feathery hair and a long ski-slop nose ending in a slight over-cleft distinctive of the Scottish nostril. Of course, he wears his nostalgic and out-dated symbols of British military rank, the silver gorgets.
On page 38, a portrait of Micanopy by Charles King Bird in 1826, shows a tanned man, with feathery dark hair [not wool or straight] with facial features that are a mix between Scottish and Irish.
On pages 65-69, the recently drawn osprey art depicts Seminoles that look racially like they belong to the various tribes of the far west with a sprinkling of European and African actors. This seems very contrived.
Then, after the modern fiction, an ancient correction, on page 72, published in 1847, in John W. Barber’s Incidents in American History, Ron Field captions that this engraving is accurate concerning the Seminoles and fanciful concerning the Americans in their dress blues. And what does the Seminole Tribe look like?
The three men in the foreground, appear to be full European, including a leader who has light hair. The eight men in the background have a mix of European and Amerindian features.
Now, to page 73 and a rare and interesting illustration rendered in 1839 by the Assistant Surgeon Ellis, and despite its detail, given here only in a thumbnail, we find the “only known image of Abiaka” [also known as Sam Jones.] This fellow was said to be a master of backwoods warfare never conquered and who would rather “see you dead” then surrender to General William J. Worth.
This fellow, looks precisely, like the American actor Walter Mathow [can’t spell that name to save my life] in the movie Grumpy Old Men, if he had neglected to have his fair cut.
Finally, on page 75, we have the only character in this drama likely to be sympathetic to the deluded postmodern American idiot mind. This is a photo of a wizened old negro, with white beard who in a suit who had, in the 1820s, escaped from Spanish slavery numerous times and been captured and resold. He eventually worked as an interpreter for the American Army and was suspected of leading 101 soldiers to their death at Dade’s Massacre, a charge he denied and for which he was never lynched. He was probably spared because he was a non-combatant.
As a final note, the uniforms of the American infantry are positively transhuman, with numbered hats, pointing the way to the wars of industrial annihilation when American men would simply be named GI, or Government Issue.
It is my opinion that the choice of illustrative stress in this volume, was most likely editorial and that the author, while pretending to the common lie by omission that is the keystone of American History, did a fine job presenting a reality easily discovered by the reader willing to peel back the curtain of his own media-installed delusion.
Thank you to InTheseGoingsDown for the loan of this book.
