Seminole - History

History

In the second half of the 18th century, the Lower Creeks, a tribe of Muscogee people, began to migrate into Florida to evade the dominance of the Upper Creeks, effectively displacing the Calusa and Mayaimi tribes with the aid of the Spanish who moved many of them to Cuba, where the tribes' populations were soon decimated by disease. The Seminole intermingled with the Choctaw and other few remaining indigenous people there, some recently arrived as refugees after the Yamasee War, such as the Yuchi, Yamasee and others. In a process of ethnogenesis, they formed a new culture which they called "Seminole", a derivative of the Mvskoke' (a Creek language) word simano-li, an adaptation of the Spanish cimarrón which means "wild" (in their case, "wild men"), or "runaway" . The Seminole were a heterogeneous tribe made up of mostly Lower Creeks from Georgia, Mikasuki-speaking Muscogees, escaped African-American slaves, and to a lesser extent, Native Americans from other tribes and even white Americans. The unified Seminole spoke two languages: Creek and Mikasuki (a modern dialect similar to Hitchiti), two different members of the Muscogean Native American languages family, a language group that includes Choctaw and Chickasaw.

During the colonial years, the Seminole were on good terms with both the Spanish and the British. In 1784, the treaty ending the American Revolutionary War transferred British rule of Florida to Spain. The Spanish Empire's decline enabled the Seminole to settle more deeply into Florida. They were led by a dynasty of chiefs founded in the 18th century by Cowkeeper. This dynasty lasted until 1842, when the US forced the majority of Seminole to move from Florida to the Indian Territory (modern Oklahoma) after the Second Seminole War.

There is also a village of Black Seminoles who have lived at Red Bays on Andros Island in the Bahamas since the 1820s.