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Michael McLeod
UNCONQUERED SEMINOLE’ WAGES UNENDING BATTLE
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By Michael Mcleod | Orlando Sentinel
PUBLISHED: May 27, 2001 at 12:00 AM EDT | UPDATED: October 26, 2018 at 10:52 AM EDT
Most people think of downtown St. Augustine as a historic place: the old fort, the cobblestone streets, the Spanish-colonial architecture.
It’s just one more Florida strip mall to Bobby C. Billie.
He strides past the storefronts of St. George Street in a burly glide, a full-blooded Seminole with caramel-colored skin and a graying ponytail. Tourists clopping by in horse-drawn trams squint at him in the midday sun and then fumble for their cameras. They think he’s a player in some historical pageant the guide forgot to mention.
They’re not too far off. Billie has a part in an epic that goes back further than St. Augustine. He’s in a battle over bones — ancient bones.
At 56, Billie is a sixth-generation medicine man on a crusade to protect Native American gravesites in Florida. Many of those graves — including the resting place of one of his own ancestors — have been disturbed by developers, archaeologists or poachers. Billie has put nearly two dozen of the old ones back into the earth, overseeing their re-interment along seashores and riversides, on hammocks in the Everglades, under oak and pine and palm.
AT ODDS WITH ARCHAEOLOGY
Now he finds himself picking his way past a Port-o-Let and a squat green trash bin as the cobblestone charm of the tourist district gives way to a small construction site. The boarded-up shop was once one of those novelty photo studios where tourists pose as gunslingers or dance-hall girls. All that remains are pitted red brick walls, a gaunt ceiling strung with a strand of bare light bulbs, a dirt floor — and, possibly, a grave.
A subcontractor working on the shop renovation has secretly contacted Billie, insisting that his crew discovered human bones while digging a new foundation. He thinks they may be Native American remains. The developer, John Valdes, says the subcontractor’s story is a vengeful fiction, concocted because of a business dispute. Carl Halburton, St. Augustine’s city archaeologist, has come to the same conclusion.
Halburton has spent the morning digging exploratory holes and finding nothing but roots, an old smoking pipe and a few pig bones. As Billie rounds the corner, Halburton is kicking at the dirt, Valdes is pacing with a frozen smile on his face and three workmen are lounging around getting paid for doing nothing. A fine green mist of evaporating money hovers over the scene.
It’s up to Halburton to explain it all to Billie so everybody can go back to work.
Billie stands with arms akimbo as Halburton launches into an Archaeology 101-type lecture. The earth beneath the city has built up in predictable layers. The farther down you dig, the further back in time you go. Just a few inches down and you’re back in the time of the conquistadors. Because the workers never dug down beyond that point, even if there are human remains, there’s really no way they could be Native American because. . . .
Suddenly Billie cuts one arm through the air as if to brush aside the archaeologist’s careful reasoning. “We know our people, indigenous people, were all around here,” he says. “You can cover them up, but they are still there. What I’m trying to say is: Where does the earth for indigenous people begin?”
Halburton stammers out a reply, but it’s like watching a very bad round of charades. His logic means nothing to Billie because Billie doesn’t accept the premise. He thinks it is ridiculous to talk of land as if it can be quantified, packaged or even owned. So do the rest of his people.
TRIBE SPURNS GOVERNMENT
Billie grew up as a member of the Independent Traditional Seminoles, a group of about 200 Native Americans who live at the northern edge of the Everglades on 400 acres bought for them by a private foundation. They do not acknowledge the concept of land ownership. To their way of thinking, land can be occupied, but it can’t be bought, any more than sky and stars and air. They refuse to live on any of the state’s five Seminole reservations because that would mean making a pact with the U.S. government, whose authority they refuse to recognize.
Members of the group — once known as “Trail Indians” because they lived along the Tamiami Trail — now live in a small village, dotted with oblong billets that resemble the thatch-roofed chickees that were once the traditional dwellings of the Seminoles. Ordinarily, the people in the village keep to themselves. Bobby Billie is the exception.
SPIRIT MOVED HIM
About 15 years ago, Billie says, a spirit came to him in a vision and told him to begin warning the mainstream culture to start taking better care of the Earth. So he worked to improve his English and overcome his shyness and began speaking to schools, civic organizations and environmental groups.
Eventually, he became involved in the issue of Native American graves. When remains were dug up or uncovered by erosion, he often was called to oversee their reburial. When he heard that graves might be disturbed, he took it upon himself to prevent it.
Once, near DeLeon Springs, he jumped into the middle of a group of archaeologists who were excavating a Native American grave, demanding: “You WILL stop!” They did.
At a golf course near Bonita Springs, he made other scientists cover up a 10,000-year-old mammoth that surfaced when a pond was drained. The animal, like the Native American remains nearby, belonged to the past, not the present, Billie said.
“The archaeologists say, ‘But all we want to do is study your people.’ I tell them, ‘Then come and talk to us.’ But they never do.”
Billie’s uncompromising positions have frustrated state archaeologist Jim Miller so much that the only comment Miller is willing to make is: “Nothing good can come of anything I might say about that man.”
Billie has stormed uninvited into federal conferences about Native American affairs, then lectured startled bureaucrats about how to do their jobs. Anthony Paredes, chief of Ethnology and Indian Affairs for the Southeast Region of the National Park Service, calls Billie “the last unconquered Seminole.”
GOVERNMENT IGNORES HIM
But Paredes also knows that there is a Catch-22 to Billie’s crusade, and a price to pay for being unconquered: As far as the federal government is concerned, Bobby Billie is not a Native American.
To put it another way: Because he doesn’t recognize the federal government, the federal government doesn’t recognize him.
The most significant federal guideline for dealing with Native American reburials is the Native American Grave Protection And Repatriation Act, signed into law by Congress in 1990.
The law is meant to correct a long-term grievance among Native Americans, who have complained for decades about the indiscriminate collecting of human remains and artifacts by soldiers, scientists and poachers. Many of those remains wound up in museums, stored in neatly labeled plastic bags.
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, which has a collection of 19,000 Native American skeletons, has been referred to by one Native American activist as “the biggest Indian cemetery on the planet.”
As Billie puts it: “Do we dig up your grandmother’s bones? Do we have picnics in your cemeteries? Does it matter that we don’t put stones over their heads?”
The 1990 law protects graves and calls for all federally funded museums to catalog the remains and relics they have collected — and to return them, upon request, to recognized tribes that can prove a connection to the remains or artifacts.
The government recognizes more than 800 such tribes. The Seminole Tribe of Florida is on the list. The Independent Traditional Seminoles are not.
That means that Bobby Billie has no authority under federal law to have anything to do with Native American remains. He is an invisible man.
“There is a great irony here,” says Patricia Wickman, historical preservation officer for the Seminole Tribe of Florida. “The U.S. government, which spent 200 years trying to destroy Indians, has now set itself up as the unilateral arbiter of Indian-ness. It is a cosmic joke from which most of us will never recover.”
KENNEWICK MAN IN DISPUTE
Three thousand miles from Florida, scientists in Kennewick, Wash., are still waiting for the punch line.
In 1996, college students at a riverbank stumbled onto the remains of a man who died 9,000 years ago. Anthropologists want to study the bones, but first a federal magistrate must consider the arguments of groups trying to establish a “cultural affiliation” to Kennewick Man, and the right to say what happens to him. That includes, so far, five Native American tribes — and a pagan, California-based religious group, the Asatru Folk Assembly, which worships Norse gods.
Maybe it is better, as Bobby Billie maintains, to leave the old ones where they lie.
“The bones do not belong in a science book. The bones belong in the earth,” he says.
Billie stays involved in repatriation partly out of determination and partly through loopholes. He has tended to reburials on behalf of the Seminole Tribe of Oklahoma, descendents of Florida Seminoles forcibly removed from the state 170 years ago. He has done much the same for The Miccosukees of Florida, whose beliefs prevent them from doing reburials.
Billie himself is careful never to touch bones of the dead. To do so, according to the traditions of many tribes, can cause grave spiritual damage.
He can trace his ancestry to Sam Jones, the most famous medicine man in the history of the tribe. Jones, whose given name was Arpeika, was in his 70s during the 1830s, when soldiers tried to drive the Seminoles out of Florida. Arpeika led a stubborn guerrilla resistance, burning white hostages alive, shooting his own people if they spoke of surrender. He was never captured, and is thought to have lived into his 90s and died a free man, hiding with a small band of followers in the Everglades.
People of his day thought of him as the last unconquered Seminole, too.
BELIEFS REMAIN A MYSTERY
Billie is secretive about many of his beliefs. If you ask him what he carries in the ever-present leather pouch at his waist, he will likely fix you with a level, not unpleasant gaze and say: “You don’t need to know.” Nor will he confirm the commonly held belief that he conducts the Green Corn Festival, a secret, yearly convocation in which disputes are settled and young people are initiated into the tribe.
But he does acknowledge that he is a living repository of the tribe’s oral history, as Clay Henderson knows well.
Henderson, an Orlando attorney who helped orchestrate the purchase of the land where the Independent Traditional Seminoles now live, remembers taking Billie for a walk in woods near Spruce Creek. Henderson wanted to show him some Native American mounds.
“He’d never been there before,” says Henderson. “But at one point he stopped and said, “Does this trail go to a bluff that overlooks a small river? And are the mounds off to the west from there?’ Then he took a stick and drew the layout of the village in the dirt for me. It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.”
REPOSITORY OF HISTORY
Billie says he recognized the area, and knew the layout of the village, from oral histories passed down to him. “It’s like pictures in my head,” he says.
The pictures make more sense to him than the world that he sees when he travels around the state, relying on a small group of environmentalists and friends who support his efforts.
Billie grew up in the Everglades and did not see a white person until he was 8 years old. Simple things that most people take for granted bemuse him. Concrete, for example. Parking garages and sidewalks remind him of the cast he wore when he broke a finger as a child. Remembering how the finger looked after the cast was removed, he thinks of concrete as a cast placed over the Earth, which has become pale and shriveled beneath it.
Although he cannot read or write, he has his own perspective on education. He calls it “the teaching of the square.”
“They give the people square hats when they graduate,” he says. “Then they go out and make all their buildings the same shape — square, like the hats.”
He has an abiding affection for animals, carving little wooden figurines of panthers, alligators and birds. He refers to trees as “elders,” because, in Native American tradition, they were here before anything else.
“Bobby Billie has a light in his eyes,” says Mark Glisson, environmental administrator for the Florida Bureau Of Natural and Cultural Resources. “Of course, there was one time I can remember when he looked at me like he wanted to cut my head off.”
TILTING AT WINDMILLS?
Glisson tried, unsuccessfully, to accommodate Billie and his fellow villagers when they asked permission to harvest cypress from a state forest. Glisson asked Billie what they wanted to do with the wood. “He wouldn’t tell me. He said, ‘What my tribal people do in the forest and take from the forest is not for you to know.'”
“I love him,” says Glisson. “But he’s Don Quixote.”
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