Letter to 
                  President
          JOHN KENNEDY
                            OCTOBER 2, 1961

Honorable John Kennedy
President of the Untied States
The White House
Washington, D.C.

Dear President Kennedy,

    We write to you on behalf of our Miccosukee Tribe of Seminole Indians of Florida.  During the Seminole wars our people fell back into the Everglades before attacks of white soldiers.  But we were not defeated. We have treaties with the United States, which are not now honored, though they were for more than a hundred years when the United States left us alone on our land.  We have never surrendered.

Until this generation of Miccosukees our people lived unmolested in our Everglades homelands, by hunting and fishing and trading with trustworthy and friendly white people. Few grown-up Miccosukees have been to school, and few of our older people speak English.  But our people have a long history and account of our-selves, passed down in stories from far before white man came to America.

In the older days of our fathers, we did not send letters to Presidents of the United States to try to tell you how it was, and how we find ourselves today.  This is what our old people have told their children for a long time.

     When the first white man came to this country hungry and thirsty and wanting help, Indians helped them, our own people helped them in Florida.  Our for fathers have told us that the first white people who came to Florida were so few that the Indians could have killed them all before they reached shore in row boats.  But the chief of our people said, “Don’t hurt them.  Let them come ashore and we’ll find out what they want.”
                          

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They came ashore without even a needle scratch; though the braves could have killed them all.  The white people said they wanted a place to sleep, and we gave them that, and we fed them.

Little by little they wanted more, until, here today we are pushed back and back into the Everglades, a big Florida swamp.

Our people provided safety, food and land to the first white men who came to Florida.  Now we need help from the white people as they needed it from us when they came to this country. Protection for our people and land.

     Most of the people of our tribe live by hunting and fishing in the Everglades.  We still live in thatched huts.  Our women wear costumes and skirts of old time.  It may be hard for you to believe, but that is the way most of our people have always lived, for a long, long, time, and that is the only way they now know how to live.  For over a 100 years your people left us alone, and our people were not discontent with this relationship.

     The Indian Bureau wants to put us in your world.  Some people are pushing some other Indians to try to sell our home land and they are trying to do it now by claims 73 and 73A, which we never authorized.

But only for the last five or ten years have our children been going to white schools.  Our people cannot adapt, accommodate, compete or make out in the world of white people today, with our present education and history.

At the same time our people love freedom more than life.  Our history tells us that, and I am sure that you will remember that your history tell you that.  It is true of us today.

     Our people are not ready to move into your world.  Our parents never had any schooling and cannot speak English.  But we will not live as wards of your government, to be treated as backward children by white agents who will not tell us what they have in mind, and seem to have order or a plan that is not of our making.  White agents who  go among our people trying to cause trouble and saying things to the newspapers about our people that are untrue.
     What we have asked for, therefore, for the past eight years, is for the United States to leave us alone on our homeland in the Everglades so that Miccosukee and other Indians that want can live on it as long as they want to.  We wanted this land held in trust and protected for as long as there are Miccosukees living on it, as the United States is obligated to do under all its treaties.

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     During these years, we got close to setting up this land for our people to live on and we thought we had agreements and then all the negotiations fell down, over and over again.  Somebody in Washington, it seems to us, thinks not.

     The land we want confirmed as our homeland is a part of that Florida land on which we have valid, authentic and legal rights under treaties.  Under these existing treaties four nations—Spain, france and England, as well as the United States – – are bound to defend our land rights.  In addition, the settlements and commitments that U.S. representatives made but did not carry out are sensible and realistic.  The land is now claimed by the State of Florida, and will be flooded under plans of the Central and South Florida Flood Control District.  Our people know how to live on islands in such flooded land, as they have lived for more than a hundred years.

     Now they are trying to push us off our land and cut off our livelihood.

     Therefore, we ask your help.  We have written to Secretary of Interior Udall in January, 1961, and he never replied.  We have not been able to get help from anybody under you.

                          Very sincerely yours
                         THE EXECUTIVE COUNCIL
                              Homer M. Osceola
                              Howard M. Osceola
                              Bill McKinley Osceola
                              Douglas M. Osceola

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