Florida Seminole Housing and the Social Meanings of Sovereignty

Abstract

Driving past the strip malls of Hollywood, Florida, visitors know they have entered the Seminole Reservation when they approach blocks of modest houses punctuated by the thatched roofs of backyard chickees (from chiki, or home, in Mikasuki). On Seminoles' rural Big Cypress Reservation, chickees dot the landscape as storage sheds, front yard spots to sit and socialize, and shelters for taking lunch breaks away from the punishing Florida sunshine. Chickees also convey Seminoleness in some tribal casinos' interior design, as vendors' booths at Seminole festivals (figure 1), and even on the Seminole tribal flag, with its chickee logo (figure 2). More than any other element of the built environment, chickees mark space as distinctly Seminole. If today chickees have come to signify Seminole nation and culture to Seminoles and outsiders alike, however, the history of Seminole housing reveals a complicated and fraught relationship among chickees, governance, and the politics of culture. In this paper, which is part of a larger study of Seminole tribal sovereignty and economy in the casino era (Cattelino n.d. [forthcoming]), I examine housing as a case study of mid- to late twentieth-century relations between Seminoles and the federal government. I show how the 1990s transition from federal to tribal control over housing and other social programs,