[The following is a transcript of a lecture which accompanies a
recording of Seminole Indian chants, medicine songs, etc. The original
recording, on a 78 rpm record, was recorded in the field in 1939 by an
anthropologist identified as Robert F. Greenlee. Although professionally
trained, Mr. Greenlee probably never worked as an anthropologist.
The recordings were obtained by Marjorie Stoneman Douglas and given
by her to John Goggin, former physical anthropologist and archaeologist
at the University of Florida.]
The Florida Seminoles are descendants of the Indians who remained in
the Everglades after the close of the Seminole War in 1840. One hundred
years later we find the people radically transformed both in material
aspects of life and in their ideas and religious customs. This morning
we are concerned with ceremonial and medicinal practices--vestiges of a
much richer life which has vanished due to the coming of whites in ever-
increasing numbers to what was formerly a cloistered Indian world. To
discover and record these remnants of the Seminoles' former life before
it disappeared forever from the minds of the older generation was one of
the chief objects of the 1939 study.
A medicine man of the Big Cypress swamp settlements was my chief
informant. He consented to interpret many phases of ceremonial life,
especially those connected with the annual Green Corn Dance and his own
specialty, medicine. A number of chants from the old medicinal formulas
--many of them rendered in the special medicine man's language with its
archaic words and phrases--were recorded on phonograph records. A simi-
lar study was made by Miss Frances Densmore, which was published in 1932.
She used the same informant I did, and was able to record seventy-five
songs of the corn and hunting dances as well as the alligator, catfish,
quail, screech owl and other dances. The songs sung for me include
several from the Green Corn Dance, the Horned Owl chant from the Hunting
Dance, several of the Seminole mourning chants, as well as a number of
medicinal formulas. I will play some of these records shortly, but
before doing so will give a few of the general features of the Seminoles'
social organization, ceremonial and medicinal practice in order that the
chants and songs will be more intelligible.
In the Seminole social organization descent is counted only on the
mother's side, and with clans as a basis. A child belongs solely to the
clan of his mother. Nine clans are found among the Big Cypress people,
all but one of them being named after some animal; Panther, Wildcat,
Tiger, Bird, Otter, Wind, Wolf, Snake, and City or Town clan are the
chief active clans. A Deer clan also exists, but it is dying out due to