From Everglades Defender to Developer, Tribe Is Stepping Out

They once were one of this nation’s most reclusive Indian tribes, a small band of 400 who lived so deep in the Everglades--among the alligators and the saw grass--that few outsiders ever saw them.

But next week, the Miccosukee tribe will host what amounts to a coming out party in its wetland home, and everyone is invited.

To mark the opening of a $50-million, 300-room resort and convention center, the Miccosukees are presenting free concerts by Hootie & the Blowfish, Little Richard and Chuck Berry; a series of professional wrestling matches; and enough fireworks to send even the boldest gators scurrying back into the marsh.

More than just a sign of casino-fueled prosperity, the hoopla in the Everglades also is a celebration of newfound political clout that led to unprecedented federal legislation giving the tiny tribe sovereignty over 680 acres in Everglades National Park, along with permission to expand its traditional village into a small town.

Environmentalists Decry Building Boom

Dozens of modern four-bedroom houses have replaced palm-thatched huts. Under construction are a three-story high school, a tribal courthouse and a drug rehabilitation clinic. Plans are being drawn up for a new visitors’ center, and wetlands are being paved for parking lots.

Not everyone is celebrating with the Miccosukees, however, because much of the tribe’s building boom is taking place in the middle of what is the largest environmental project in history, a complex restoration effort designed to replumb the Everglades and nurse the fragile ecosystem back to health. Latest price tag: $7.8 billion.

“The Indians have an honored past as protectors of the Everglades,” said Shannon Estenoz of the World Wildlife Fund. “But now they are ultimately a developer in the Everglades.”

No one disputes the urgent need to clean up the Everglades--a vast, one-of-a-kind freshwater marsh that is the source of drinking water for more than 5 million people in south Florida. And no one disputes that the ecosystem has been severely compromised by agricultural pollution and an intricate network of canals dug to provide flood control and irrigation.

In the last decade, the Miccosukees have been the Everglades’ staunchest defenders, filing several lawsuits to force the state and federal governments to enforce ever-tougher water quality standards.

Indeed, the tribe’s past stewardship of the Everglades--and the fact that it is based there--has made some environmentalists hesitant to criticize the expansion plans. Although the hotel and casino are outside the park boundaries and the Everglades watershed, the expanding village flanks a critical freshwater flow-way.

“This is a politically sensitive issue,” said Kevin Collins of the National Parks and Conservation Assn. “It is difficult to say: ‘That’s not the place for a town.’ But that’s the honest thing to say.”

Although Clinton administration officials insist that granting the tribe permission to live in perpetuity in the Everglades does not imperil the restoration effort, Interior Department Deputy Solicitor Edward B. Cohen does concede: “If we were making that decision today, we would not create a settlement in the park.”

Tribal Chairman Billy Cypress scoffs at the notion that the Miccosukees would do less than what’s best for their homeland. “The Everglades is our mother, and she is dying. We’re not the destroyers. We’re not killing her. We’re trying to save her.”

Nonetheless, plans to turn the remote Everglades into a major tourist destination have caused dissension even within the close-knit tribe, which long has guarded its privacy and struggled to keep its young people from leaving the reservation. “I see so many Indians going too fast,” said former tribal Chairman Buffalo Tiger, 78.

Cypress sees the Miccosukees’ economic awakening as the fulfillment of tribal destiny and a fitting redress of federal abuse. Not only does the tribe want a license to expand its casino business, it also wants to take over and run the entire 1.5 million-acre Everglades National Park.

“We want everything under the sun,” Cypress, 48, declared during an interview in his office on tribal land, about 50 miles west of Miami. “Our goal is self-sufficiency.”

The issues that have the Miccosukees at odds with federal and state agencies and some environmentalists reflect conflicts taking place elsewhere in the United States as tribes large and small express their rights of sovereignty by going into business. In the 20 years since the Miccosukees’ neighbors and blood relatives, the Seminoles, pioneered gaming by opening a bingo hall, Indian gambling nationwide has burgeoned into a $6 billion-a-year industry. Proceeds from gaming operations have led to “positive social and economic impacts . . . both on and off reservations,” according to a recent study by the Economics Resource Group in Cambridge, Mass.

But the newfound economic power of Native Americans has reordered the political landscape--and some traditional alliances.

Relations between the Miccosukees and the National Park Service, which opposed the expanded village, are particularly strained. Said Cypress: “If the park had its way, we wouldn’t be here. But we were here before the park was created. This is our land.”

The Miccosukees have been in the Everglades since the 1850s, when they fled into the inhospitable wetland to escape U.S. Army troops who were rounding up the Creek Indians of Alabama and Georgia for a forced march westward on the Trail of Tears. For years, they lived in the Everglades as fugitives, eventually winning recognition as a tribe in 1962.

In the decades that followed, most of the tribe lived quietly on a narrow strip of parkland under a 50-year lease agreement due to expire in 2014. A few earned a living wrestling alligators and taking tourists on $7 airboat rides.

But with casino dollars came political muscle, exercised most assertively by the tribe’s general counsel, Dexter Lehtinen, a feisty former U.S. attorney in south Florida who is married to Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.).

Lehtinen helped write the bill, passed last year by Congress and signed by President Clinton, that doubled the tribe’s acreage inside the park and authorized tribe members to live there forever.

Collins and other critics said the precedent could open the floodgates of commercialization in other national parks.

Unlike the Timbisha Shoshones, a small tribe in California that recently struck a deal with the government to jointly manage a portion of Death Valley, the Miccosukees are thinking big. They hope to turn their village, casino and convention center into a tourist destination expected to draw tens of thousands a year.

Government scientists--backed by the National Audubon Society, among others--argued that additional tribal housing and other development along the park’s northern boundary could impede the water flow. They also contended that septic tanks could leak into marshland.

But the tribe hired its own scientific experts--including Terry Rice, a retired colonel of the Army Corps of Engineers, and Florida International University biologist Ron Jones--to argue that 65 new houses would not affect the system. “The visitors’ center in the national park every day puts out [in effluent] what the Indians would do in a year,” Jones said.

Longtime Everglades activist Joe Browder also dismissed the environmental threat, pointing instead to sugar manufacturers. “The single greatest threat is the government’s failure to insist that Big Sugar clean up the water they dirty on their own land.”

Prosperity Is Much In Evidence

Just how much money the tribe brings in from gaming, tobacco sales and other tourist operations is a tightly guarded secret. But tribal members in good standing do receive quarterly dividend checks, reported to total $32,000 per person a year.

Evidence of the gambling windfall can been seen in yards and driveways throughout the village: shiny pickups, luxury cars, airboats, satellite dishes.

The tribe also has a $400,000 sky box at Pro Player Stadium, home of the Miami Dolphins and the Florida Marlins. Performances by Bill Cosby, Wayne Newton and others are staged in the 1,800-seat arena next to the casino.

Stephen Tiger, 50, a tribe spokesman, rock musician and son of Buffalo Tiger, said: “It has helped our self-esteem. There is less of that ‘Hey, Chief’ stuff.”

In fact, confident tribal leaders say they see no conflict between increased tourism and protecting the Everglades. As for disgruntled bureaucrats and environmentalists who feel betrayed, Cypress turns to the Miccosukee language: “Pohaan checkish”--Leave us alone.

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.