A Tiger by
any other name
Betty Mae Tiger Jumper is
indeed a legend in her own time. The Jumper was added at age 24 when
she married Moses Jumper, a childhood friend. The venerable lady, in
her eighties, is still active in the work she loves best: helping
her Seminole people to a good life, and by her own example, showing
them what is possible.
Her story reads like a
contrived script for the silver screen, but this is a case where
fiction pales beside real life. No writer, regardless of talent,
could have come up with this saga of survival against all odds: from
tribal outcast to healer, leader and national icon.
Betty Mae Tiger was born in the
Everglades, when Okeechobee was still the Big Lake and Indiantown
was a tiny settlement in the wilderness --- home to a few Indian,
white and Spanish families and a stopover for trappers and traders.
The Seminoles were an insular people then. Still recovering from
years of war and hardship, they shunned the white perpetrators and
held the European culture and lifestyle in contempt. Their adamant
resistance, after three costly battles over a forty-year period,
forced the U.S. Army to withdraw in frustration. Very few Seminoles
were coerced into the long march to Oklahoma in what was termed the
Great Removal, Andrew Jackson’s solution to the Indian problem.
The small band of surviving
Florida Seminoles, less than a thousand, guarded their freedom
tenaciously, ever suspicious of outsiders, especially white people.
Miscegenation was a crime punishable by death. On April 27, 1923,
Ada Tiger, of the Snake clan, living in the Seminole camp in
Indiantown, gave birth to a baby girl whose father was a French
trapper. The child was named Elizabeth after the white woman, Sis
(Elizabeth) Savage, who helped deliver her. Betty’s father was
driven off and the Seminole medicine men and elders plotted to put
the half-breed child to death. Half-white children were drowned or
suffocated by filling their mouths with sand. Sometimes a child was
left out in a field where no one could hear its cries. Fortunately
for baby Betty, her grandfather had converted to Christianity and he
tried to protect the child and her mother. Still the baby was in
danger of being seized and killed.
Betty’s uncle took her to live
with Fannie Savage, the sister of the midwife. Fannie was expecting
a child and wet-nursed Betty until she could be with her own mother
in a safe place. “I don’t know what my family would have done
without the Savage family in those days,” Betty writes in the
memoir. “Before me, all half-breed kids were killed as soon as they
were born. None were as lucky as I, being born into a family that
had received Christ.”
Two and a half years later,
Betty’s brother, Howard, also half-white, was born. After a
confrontation that resulted in gunfire and the arrest of Betty’s
grandfather, the family decided they would move to the new federal
reservation at Dania, now called Hollywood. Betty writes about the
move. A big truck took her grandfather and their belongings and
pets. The women and children followed on the train. When they
reached the station in Dania, they set off on foot in the heat and
dust, loaded down with bundles.
In their new home, the children
were no longer in danger of being killed, but as half-breeds in a
Christian family; they were still the targets of prejudice and scorn
in the community.
Very few people lived at Dania
in the beginning. Traditional Seminoles viewed any accommodating
gesture by the government as a trap and many refused to move their
families to the federal reservation. It was mainly poverty, brought
about by the Great Depression and Second World War, that made more
families choose to relocate and reluctantly take work as field hands
and laborers. A craft industry sprang up when the women learned that
tourists would buy souvenirs.
The tension between the
traditional Seminoles who clung to their old ways and the new
Christian converts continued. Betty Mae Jumper had by then become a
committed Christian, finding peace and safety in her faith. Years
ahead of her time in her thinking, she saw value in both Seminole
tradition and in the Christian way of life. She would strive to meld
the two paths as she set out on a life plan that included getting an
education, becoming a nurse to deliver health care to the remote
areas, and finally getting elected to political office.
Betty Mae would have to
overcome many barriers. Her own grandmother was against her going
off to the Indian boarding school to get an education. Reading and
writing was the white man’s way, they said, as was speaking English
and worshiping as a Christian. In the community, the Indian kids
ostracized her and her brother. The white kids who came in contact
with the reservation kids called them “dirty Indians” and threw
rocks at them. They were not allowed to attend the schools in the
white community, and often were forced to use the back doors,
reserved for blacks, of restaurants and stores. Still Betty Mae
would not be discouraged.
She finished high school, got
her nurse’s training and went to work with the Seminoles, visiting
the remote communities. Her stories about riding around south
Florida in an ancient Model T, to help the sick, injured and to
deliver babies are funny and sad. Betty drove to the far-flung
Seminole communities with Miss Esther Drury, the public health
nurse, who “was scared to death of Indians.” They had to change
tires, coax a dead engine to life and often ended up sleeping in a
disabled vehicle in the middle of nowhere. They would joke about
their choice of work when they could be in a cozy job in a hospital
in town. Often they were chased away from the villages and camps by
gun-brandishing Seminoles who insisted they had their own medicine
men. They battled superstition, witchcraft and mistrust, still they
persevered. Betty Mae Jumper would one day become known by the
Seminoles as Doctor Lady.
In 1946, Betty Mae married
Moses Jumper. They would have three children. In the 1940s and
1950s, Florida Indians were involved heavily in tourism, living in
theme parks, where the public would pay to see them going about
their everyday activities. Alligator wrestling was added to the
attractions. Moses Jumper was a star alligator wrestler, often
earning more than $100 a day in tips.
Betty Mae’s other
accomplishments included creating the first tribal newspaper, the
forerunner to the Seminole Tribune, getting elected as the
first female Chief of the Seminole Tribe, heading the Seminole
Communications department, and receiving an honorary doctorate from
Florida State University. President Richard Nixon appointed her to
a two-year term on the National Indian Opportunity Council. As well,
Betty Mae has authored three books, made recordings of Seminole
legends and history and continues to work toward the betterment of
her people. She is a strong disciple of Christ. It was Betty Mae who
insisted the tribal flag include: In God we trust.
This book is recommended
reading. A single review cannot do it justice. It is a true story
filled with hair-raising escapes, colorful adventures, in a sweeping
landscape of a people and a place that transcends time, history and
imagination.
http://www.fcsw.net/halloffame/WHOFbios/betty_mae_jumper.htm
