Tequesta - Customs

Customs

By one account, when the Tequestas buried their chiefs, they buried the small bones with the body, and put the large bones in a box for the village people to adore and hold as their gods. Another account says that the Tequestas stripped the flesh from the bones, burning the flesh, and then distributed the cleaned bones to the dead chief's relatives, with the larger bones going to the closest relations.

The Tequesta men consumed cassina, the black drink, in ceremonies similar to those common throughout the southeastern United States.

The Spanish missionaries also reported that the Tequesta worshipped a stuffed deer as the representative of the sun, and as late as 1743 worshipped a picture of a badly deformed barracuda crossed by a harpoon, and surrounded by small tongue-like figures painted on a small board. There was also a god of the graveyard, a bird's head carved in pine. The painted board and bird's head were stored in a temple in the cemetery, along with carved masks used in festivals. By this time the tribe's shaman was calling himself a bishop.

The Tequestas may have practiced human sacrifice. While en route from Havana to Biscayne Bay in 1743, Spanish missionaries heard that the Indians of the Keys (apparently including the Tequestas) had gone to Santaluz (the village of Santa Lucea was at the St. Lucie Inlet) for a celebration of a recent peace treaty, and that the chief of Santaluz was going to sacrifice a young girl as part of the celebration. The missionaries sent a message to the chief begging him not to sacrifice the girl, and the chief relented.