Trickster hermeneutics of 19th c. African and Indigenous Seminole naming

Introduction

Names were central to the cultural practices and experiences of the 19th c. African and Indigenous Seminoles of Florida, and products of struggles with settler-colonialism, bondage, and war. Indigeneity theory provides concepts such as trickster hermeneutics, which can generate new ways to examine Seminole names and documents listing them. Settler colonial naming created inventories of Seminole travelers on the “Trail of Tears,” while transforming people into racial subordinates, laborers, and fugitives. On the other hand, Indigenous and African Seminole naming also helped affirm kinship, situate people within histories of self and community, and activate the powers of words. A trans-Atlantic perspective on African diasporan, Muskogean, Mikasuki, settler-colonial, and slaveholder onomastics (dynamics of naming) brings to light the multiple, metamorphic, contested, and ambivalent nature of Seminole naming practices. By framing these issues within trickster hermeneutics of naming, it is possible to challenge dichotomous handlings of African and Indigenous Seminoles, track trickster practices in settler colonial Florida, and consider the self-determinist and self-expressive capacities of Black and Indigenous people who have accommodated or rejected names and enumeration.

My exploration of Florida Seminole naming largely pursues one objective of this special issue of Critical Sociology on “Indigeneity, History, and Historical Analysis”: how to reframe historical research with Indigenous priorities and practices in mind (compare Tuhiwai Smith, 1999: 28–33, 63, 81, 149). I address this by building on the emerging critical discourse on tricksters, which has interrogated the social sciences, history, and anthropology, while seeking to decolonize them and recognize trickster contributions to indigenous knowledge (Orr and Orr, 2022; Vizenor, 1990, 2019). I also seek to extend conversations about indigeneity and history by accounting for the complexities and contradictions shaping African and Black dialogues, interactions, community-building, and conflicts with indigenous people. Another goal of this special issue that I support is the use of Indigenous approaches to recover silenced histories of Indigenous and African Diasporan people, which I consider in tandem with the costs and benefits of visibility (e.g., colonial or federal modes of recognition) and concealment or evasion of surveillance.

The name “Seminole” is the product of Maskoki, colonist and U.S. citizens’ ethnonymies—labelling that collapsed various indigenous groups, collectively-constructed behaviors, interests, and places into single socio-cultural entities. None-the-less, the people who became Seminoles also shared aspects of knowledge, practices (e.g., ball games), and languages (Muskogean and Mikasuki; Hardy, 2005: 70). Descendents carry forth these historical legacies, as members of the Seminole and Miccosukee Tribes of Florida and the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma (Weisman, 1989: 170), and related communities. Scholars, documents, and descendants have used various terms to describe people of African descent living in 19th c. Seminole territories, such as estelusti, Black Seminole, Afro-Seminole, Freedmen, Seminole Maroons, and self-emancipated Africans (Mulroy, 1993; Ogunleye, 1996; Opala, 1980; Weisman, 2019). I use the term African Seminole in this discussion because it recognizes both African and regionally Indigenous heritage, while avoiding reproducing documentary descriptions that uncritically assign racial identities to people (e.g., Seminole Negroes). No one term of self-identification has found acceptance among scholars, descendants, or laypersons (Weik, 2007: 316).

Trickster stories are one type of practice linking African and Indigenous Seminoles. Seminole tricksters take various forms, such as the rabbits, which are also found in other Indigenous communities’ stories on “Turtle Island” (a.k.a. North America), and in African and diasporan stories (Bascom, 1981; Bear and Baehr, 2014; Dembicki, 2014; Johnson, 2021; Jumper, 1994; Vest, 2000). Some of these Rabbit tricksters are said to have the ability to fool their target or enemy, and in cases, even themselves. Present day Florida Seminole rabbit trickster stories help teach the youth about heritage and values such as people’s powers to “make a difference in the world” (Bidney, 2022). My goal in this paper is not to analyze specific Seminole Trickster stories, but to think about the kinds of knowledge and interpretive tools that discourses that about them provide for an the examination of historical Seminole naming practices.

The Seminole onomastic (names study) project elaborated on below is facilitated by analysis of documents transcribed and published as part of the U.S. House (25th) Congressional record, as well as military correspondence, slaveholder writings, missionary papers, travelers accounts, and related documents (United States Congress, 1839). The archives created from these sources are largely the product of the Second Seminole War (1835‒1842), and settler-colonial programs such as the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Special attention is given to people who surrendered or were captured by the U.S. military during these conflicts. Their names appear on Seminole prisoner of war (POW) lists (a.k.a. “emigration” records; United States Congress, 1839).

These POW lists created during the “Second Seminole War,” were made possible by trickster tactics such as the U.S. military’s “violations of a [white] truce flag,” where U.S. General Jesup and others used cease-fires as traps to disarm and capture Black and Seminole warriors and their families (Porter and Amos, 1996: 87). However, the Seminoles had tricks of their own, which led to events such as the 1837 escape from a U.S. military jail in St. Agustine, led by the Indigenous Seminole leader named Wild Cat (Coacoochee), and the African Seminole known as John Horse (Porter and Amos, 1996: 36, 84–86). As I shall show, there have been various types of Euro-American and Seminole-related tricks, trickster hermeneutics, and tricksteronymy (episodes naming tricksters), which have continued into more recent times, alongside the telling of trickster stories.

Theoretical framing of African and Indigenous Seminole naming

Discourses on Indigenous and African diasporan naming in anthropology or other disciplines have covered a range of topics on individuals, groups, places, and things, including power, ontology, cosmology, acculturation, time, artifact classification, and rituals (Bramwell, 2016; Cowell, 2018; Derrida, 1995; Finch 2008; Handler and Jacoby 1996; Lavender, 1989; Mooney, 1889; Price and Price, 1972; Puckett, 1937; Rogers and Rogers 1978; Swanton, 1910; Zeuske, 2002; compare Brink-Danan, 2010; Schmidt, 2010; Vom Bruck and Bodenhorn, 2006). The same can be said for theories informing Indigeneity and Black or African Diaspora Studies (Dillard, 1976). For example, Gates (1988) situates “rhetorical naming” within a discussion of intertextuality, Black vernacular English, and diasporic trickster traditions involving an African (Yoruba) divinity called Esu. Vizenor (2009: 24), a central voice in American indigeneity discourses on literature and oral traditions, suggests that “The native author must bear the eternal nature of the unnamable, the chance of names, the ironies of simulations and contested cultural histories, and create a sense of presence in stories, a sense of survivance over dominance and victimry” [italicized emphases mine]. Similarly, Spillers (1987) pursued a Black Feminist rehabilitation and recognition of subversive diasporic gendered subjectivity, in response to cultural assaults, the “dehumanizing business of naming,” and the “effacement and remission of African family and proper names.” Similarly, in Trickster Academy, Chickasaw Linguistic Anthropologist Davis (2022) presents a poem which mocks imagined administrative angst and questionable motives of a bureaucrat more concerned with mis-pronouncing Indigenous names than with delivering a sincere land acknowledgement or a decolonizing university program and relationship with Native people.

Despite the historical dispossessions, obstacles, and injuries that accompany naming, and the challenges of irrecoverable names, there are also opportunities in archives, oral traditions, and local knowledge to support the recovery of Indigenous and African/Black presences (compare Leissner, 1997). Similarly, (re)naming has been part of the transformation of international science that has accompanied the restoration of traditional ecological knowledge (Gillman and Wright, 2020). In these reclamational ventures, names are not trivial labels, nor superficial representational claims, nor mere products of academic politics of determination (compare Vizenor, 1990), but instead acknowledgements of unconceived or ignored layers of being (individual and social). In historicizing names, we have the chance to envision BIPOC humanity and life otherwise, instead of succumbing to the reproduction (even in critique) of ontological and epistemelogical violence (Ferreira Da Silva, 2013; King, 2019: 30; McKittrick, 2014; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999: 157).

My approach to names articulates Trickster analytics drawn largely from Vizenor (1990, 2009: 39), who situates hermeneutics within the legacy of his native Anishinaabe culture, which he has brought into engagement with an evolving set of social theories (e.g., post-structural, post-modern, and sovereignty; Squint, 2012; Vizenor and Doerfler, 2012; Vizenor, 2019). His novels and survivance stories feature an Anishinaabe trickster called Naanabozho, who outwits, mocks, and teases White priests and federal agents. Core aspects of Vizenor’s trickster hermeneutics include the following: deconstruction of normative and overgeneralizing narratives; attention to interrelated occurrences of chance, chaos, free expression, and comic signification; criticism of social science’s “limited language games” (e.g., tropes like “vanishing tribes”) and universalist casuality; exploration of irony and contradictions. Vizenor’s concepts overlap with and diverge from trickster story-telling practices, characteristics, cosmic roles, and behavioral tendencies around the world, including the following: source of ambiguity or polyvalent force; deceiver and game-player; shape shifter; transformer (of people, places conditions); messenger; divinity; and transgressor of morality or social values (Doty and Hynes, 1997; Podruchny, 2016). Some of these conceptual concerns are directly relevant to Seminole onomastics. For instance, Jumper (1985) shared an example of mischievous rabbits, a prominent theme in Seminole and Maskoki storytelling, some of which use deception, impersonation, and violence to acquire information or oppose dangerous figures of their environment such as alligators (compare Dembicki, 2014).

Trickster discourses can take shape as communalistic encounters which pull into engagement narrators, characters, and audiences (Vizenor, 1990). Trickster discourses can also give participatory and articulating powers to animals, spirits, earth, and material objects. Similarly, rabbits, spiders, turtles, and other figures have sat at the nexus of colonized and enslaved African and Indigenous trickster oralities in the Americas (Carew, 1977: 19). Like more recent iterations of “radical orality,” such as Hip Hop, historical Indigenous and Black storytelling has generated embodied, therapeutic, and subversive possibilities which have taken form as comic relief, outrage, social criticism, and heritage preservation (Navarro, 2016: 568, 579; compare King, 2019: 43 and Tuhiwai Smith, 1999: 14).

Trickster hermeneutics are useful for the analysis of settler-colonial rhetoric concerning African and Indigenous Seminole naming. For instance, during the Seminole Wars a “List of Indians and Indian Negroes enrolled for emigration to the West” was created, which contains terms such as “emigration,” one of the euphemisms that vastly understates—and make more ethically conscionable to the settler(?)—the destructiveness of these traumatic relocation campaigns (compare King [2019: xii, 45] on evasive emphemisms, conquest [re]naming and settler-colonial archives). The uprootings of Indian Removal and indigenous circumscription on and off reservations proceeded alongside White settlement, imperial imaginaries (e.g., Eurocentric cartographies), and national-mythmaking (e.g., U.S. popular narratives devoid of colonial violence and settler dispossession; Goeman, 2013: 36; compare Simpson, 2014: 21). However, Black and Indigeneous stories, alternative geographies, and modes of survivance have long subverted settler, colonial, and imperial powers (Goeman, 2013: 21; Vizenor, 2009: 24).

Trickster hermeneutics are well-suited for the analysis of census records, such as the above-mentioned prisoner of war (POW) lists containing African and Indigenous Seminole names. For centuries, census records and maps have informed imagined communities, however, enumerations and censuses have served both subaltern and state or colonial projects (Anderson, 1983; Appadurai, 2012). Works in historical sociology have examined imperial race-making and ways that everyday cultural categorization survived imperialist censuses (Emigh et al., 2021). These moves may help build on studies that “name . . . the violent arithmetics of the archive” while “uncomfortably enumerating the unanticipated contours” of both black and indigenous life (compare McKittrick, 2014: 19, 25). Similarly, I seek to build on ways that censuses and archival identification allow for a wider range of possibilities than just social control and management. These possibilities appear at moments when Black and Indigenous people are assigning, evading, and appropriating names in early 19th century Florida and the Bahamas (Howard, 2002: 47).

Seminole War POW census records are sources that are apt for trickster hermeneutics of Black and Indigenous names and their entanglement with racialized language. For example, these U.S. military “emigration” records are shaped by racial ideologies, apparent in headings that demarcate “negro” from “Indian.” This divisive listing practice aided in the furtherance of racial enslavement, as chroniclers’ lists were in part prepared for the benefit of slaveholders, whose agents monitored military outposts, bearing names of “fugitives” from bondage (United States Congress, 1839: 11, 19). These dualistic renderings of human difference were informed by notions of Black hypodescent, tactics designed to divide and conquer BIPOC, and by what King (2019) describes as “logics of conquest” that perpetuated “ongoing Native annihilation” and the “calculus of Black Surplus accumulations of property.” Similarly, Vizenor (2009: 18) challenges the idea of the “Indian” by analyzing his Anishinaabe ancestors’ enumeration on 20th censuses, deconstructing chronicled “Indians” as “transethnic. . .simulation[s] . . . the absence of the native” in “the archive of the institutive other.” Racial-ethnic misnomers have long informed and clashed with Florida Seminole and Muskogean ways of rendering human difference, which also accounted for attributions such as religion, residence, language, kinship, and moral or (un)ethical practices (e.g., encroachment on indigenous lands; Saunt, 1998, 2006). In addition to its role in constituting social identities, racial language also operated on the personal level of identification, informing early 19th c. Florida Seminole names such as “Mulatto King” and place names such as “Mulatto Girls Town.”

Beyond racializing features, my analysis also builds on the works of scholars critically interrogating archives and challenging the dehumanizing, racist, anti-Black limitations of sources, perspectives, and political structures maintaining archives. Further there is a need to creatively reading between and beyond the lines, and acknowledging the unavoidable failures of evidence and interpretations (Fuentes, 2016; Hartman, 2008; Rindfleisch, 2021: 3; Stoler, 2008). In addition, I seek to build on ways historicity theorists are challenging strict divides between history, memory, story-telling and orality as knowledge (compare Saunt, 2006: 674; Scott, 1990; Wickman, 1999: 4–6).

A trickster hermeneutic gains added nuance when paired with simultaneity and bivalency insights derived from Woolard’s (1998) linguistic-anthropological, post-structural, Bakhtinian ideas about the importance of coincident, multiple actors’ inputs in communication events and utterances. This discourse embraces the ambivalence of language elements (e.g., morphemes) and practices (e.g., speaking styles) arising in intercultural encounters and bilingual situations (Woolard and Genovese, 2007). Attention to indigenous trickster qualities, such as chaotic, comical, or creative capacities for action, can help to infuse historical narratives and research interpretations with diverse, innovative, and analytical tropes and perspectives (Vizenor, 1990: 282). Similarly, King’s (2019: 45, 84, 222) Black Shoals suggests Black-Indigenous studies encourage consideration of issues linking communities, such as a “polyvocality [that] enables a simultaneous utterance and consideration of slavery and genocide” (italicized emphasis mine).

A historical context for Seminole naming

Indigenous members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida have positioned their earliest ancestors within a timeframe encompassing 14,000 years of life in the region, and embraced certain archaeologists’ chronotopes, such as ancestral, ancient “Mississipian” archaeological sites and material culture. Historians and anthropologists narratives have situated the Seminoles within three centuries of encounters between Africans, Europeans and Native Americans, with emphasis on conquests, enslavement, devastating diseases, Anglo- and Spanish colonial rivalries, missionary projects, intermarriage, trans-Atlantic and deer-skin trades, nation building, frontier diplomacy, and territorial wars (Klos, 1989; Monaco, 2017, 2018; Mulroy, 2007; Porter, 1971; Porter and Amos, 1996; Riordan 1996; Weisman, 1989; Wickman, 1999, 2006). Chroniclers have recognized ethnic distinctions within indigenous Seminoles, such as the Topekayligays, and distinct languages such as Mikasuki (a.k.a. Hitchiti) and Maskoki (of the Creek or Muskogean ethnicities; Weisman, 1989; Wickman, 1999). Archaeological site reports, chroniclers’ accounts, the Florida Master Site File (a state cultural resource management system that lists historical places and cemeteries), and oral histories have identified hundreds of communities that were home to thousands of Seminoles who lived in Florida from by the 18th–19th centuries (Sturtevant, 1971; Weisman, 1989, 2019).

The Seminole Wars, which included three periods of conflict (1816–1818, 1835–1842, 1855–1858), were collectively one of the most costly set of campaigns the U.S. military had fought (Mahon, 1985; Monaco, 2017; Rosen, 2015). Seminole warriors exercised their massive, unsettling powers, in defense of their communities and in defiance of the White and American invaders. This extended suite of conflicts, invites consideration of Vizenor’s trickster analytic of irony, which implicates the (in)famous Indigenous Seminole leader Asi Yahola (Osceola). The fact that one northeastern Florida slaveholder named his son Osceola, for an Indigenous leader who was one the fiercest opponents of Indian Removal, was ironic, as Seminole Forces destroyed many plantations during the Second Seminole War (Weik, 2012a; Weisman, 1989; Wickman, 2006). In the wake of these wars, racial identifiers for Indigenous people (e.g., “Indian old fields”) and personal names such as Osceola became part of maps, toponymies, consumer products, and municipalities (Baram, 2012: 117; Weik, 2012a).

Decades ago, Hancock (1980) identified the uniqueness of “Afro-Seminole” language, the product of African, indigenous and European languages and the speech of “Atlantic Creoles.” The speakers of these languages operated within contexts of enslavement, self-liberation, African diasporan community building, trans-Atlantic colonial relocation, and ethnic soldiering (Landers, 2011). Language was an important form of cultural leverage that played a vital role in trade, war, and diplomacy. African Seminoles were key interpreters, holding power to translate, withhold, and modify words exchanged between indigenous Seminoles and European (American) soldiers, merchants, and officials. By the 17th c., Spanish colonists encouraged Africans to flee from regional Anglo plantations and colonial settlements, convert to Catholicism, and defend places such as St. Augustine from Anglo forces. From the 18–19th c., Africans found refuge in Florida within Spanish and British subisized forts, indigenous Seminole villages, and African Seminole communities (Deagan and Landers, 1999; Landers, 1990, 1999; Rivers, 2000, 2012). African and Black recruitment into Anglo colonies was part of wider relocation efforts (e.g., runaways shipped to Bahamas, Bermuda, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone), and shifting Anglo-Atlantic policies regarding slavery, colonialism, abolition, and trade. Archaeological, ethnographic and archival glimpses of African Seminole names can also be found for refugees of southwestern Florida communities such as Angola, who fled to the Bahamas, evading indigenous Creek enslavers who aided U.S. troops during the 19th c. (Baram, 2011, 2012, 2015; Brown, 2005; Howard, 2002, 2006). African Seminoles went on to inhabit places that settler power made into Oklahoma, Mexico, and Texas.

Archaeological research on Florida African Seminole communities includes a location called Pilaklikaha (c. 1813–1836) or Abraham’s Old Town (Weik, 2009). At African Seminole towns such as Pilaklikaha, people raised cattle, grew crops such as rice, offered corn to indigenous neighbors as a form of tribute, and engaged in various relations with Native Seminoles ranging from intermarriage, to slavery, and military alliance. An alternative name for this site is “Abraham’s Old Town,” named for one of the best known African Seminoles, who signed an 1837 letter with his indigenous War-title “Souanaffe Tustenukke” (Suwanee Warrior; Porter, 1971). According to Anglo chroniclers, Abraham was a “chief interpreter” and “sense bearer of King Mickenopah.”

The historical relationship between Africans and Indigenous Seminoles was highly varied, involving cases of enslavement, military alliance, intermarriage, and interactions in various contexts, including Busk (or “Green Corn”) ceremonies (Weik, 2002). In a number of towns, African and Indigenous Seminoles lived together, while in many others people of these groups lived apart (Weik, 2012b). As Miller (2005: 26) suggests, “Maroon communities appear to have paid a portion of their crops to certain Seminole leaders, but the nature of that relationship is unclear: were the payments more like rent, taxes, or protection money, for example?” Different disciplines approach Black and Seminole histories with emphasis on differing levels of Indigenous and African interconnection, inequality, entanglement, cooperation, or autonomy (Dixon, 2020; Mulroy, 1993; Porter, 1971; Weik, 2012b; Weisman, 2019).

Historical Seminole naming

Archived and oral traditions from Africa and Florida, ranging from the 16th–19th c., provide glimpses of rites of passage such as “naming ceremonies,” which established the value and social recognition of youth and parenthood. Naming ceremonies, which continue today, have been chronicled for west and central African groups going as far back as 1602. The fact that Akan (an ethnic group of modern Ghana) “day names” such “Cuffy” (compare with Kofi in the Twi language) and “Affy” were given to young African Seminole children who appear on military officers’ Seminle War POW lists and post-removal descendants in 20–21st century Oklahoma is a testament to the durability of intergenerational diasporic transmission (Bateman, 2002; Clark, 1839: 122; Freeman, 1839a: 89; Mulroy, 1993). Oral histories from Texas suggest that African Seminole mothers often named members of their communities, in part because men were often away at war, hunting, or ranching (Mock, 2012).

Mikasuki and Maskoki language speakers who became Seminoles acquired a range of names throughout their lives, as opposed to just a personal and sur-name (Wickman, 2006: 76). In Muskogean contexts, elders and healers or spiritual leaders often assigned names (Moore, 1995). Simmons (1973) made brief mention of an indigenous Florida Seminole naming ceremony in 1822. Some received titles (e.g., micco [leader or king]), which accounts for individuals such as “Micco Potokee,” who is found on the “List of Seminole Indians and Negroes sent from Fort Jupiter to Tampa Bay for emigration to the West” (Freeman, 1839b: 74). Beyond titles, Indigenous Seminole names on the removal censuses were also Euroamerican (e.g., Tommy) or Indigenous names translated into English (e.g., a male named Jumper). A few, such as Nelly Factor, had Euro-American first and last names. Ethnographic writings and archival sources claim that many Muskogee females only acquired one name, often referring to actions, events, animals, cosmological entities, or the natural world (Moore, 1995: 191). Males often acquired more names, from events such as Busk rites or battles (Wickman, 2006: 74).

Government bureaucrats who created archival records concerning names varied in their attention to details. Some carried ethnocentric biases, which operated against non-European names or bearers of multiple names (with a few exceptions, noted below), and which may have led to Anglicized versions of Muskogean, Mikasuki, Black or African names. This compares well with 20th c. Seminole oral histories, which describe how European and White people’s unwillingness or inability to enunciate Indigenous names, and Indigenous Seminoles’ desires to communicate with merchants, led to the self-adoption or outsider-imposed use of European names among both Mikasuki and Maskoki speakers in Florida Seminole communities (Pleasants and Kersey, 2010: 179). However, Indigenized naming persisted alongside these ambiguous situations, presenting opportunities for appropriation and creativity which confound older binary narratives pitting tradition against modernity (compare Frank, 2017: 76, 78).

Black Seminole naming was shaped by central and west African influences, patro- or matronymy, double naming, and namesaking (Bateman, 2002). Mock’s (2012) work illustrates complexities such as repetition over generations, and names’ roles in border crossing, Freedmen agency, and interregional linkages. For self-liberated people such as Black Seminole Maroons, who had to fight for control over their lives, ancestral African and creolized American names offered opportunities for self-definition, creative expression, and heritage recognition. These alternatives helped people deal with anti-Black verbal assaults (including insult names), the fungibility shaping Black lives, and indoctrination or mental colonization (Ewara, 2022: 367; Zeuske, 2002).

The border crossing persona of Tricksters widens analysis of alternative meanings, provenances, and genealogies of names that crossed the Atlantic and Florida’s regional boundaries. Take for instance an African Seminole “emigrant” named Dinah. From a Eurocentric perspective, this appears to be a nickname for Diane, the result of either a creole Black or slaveholder naming act, similar to another African Seminole woman on the POW lists, named “Diana.” Alternatively, it is worth considering whether chroniclers generated homophones, words or sounds that were as close as possible to familiar European morphemes (word elements), with which they attempted to document certain African names. Settlers and officials used homophones in their documentation of 19–20th c. indigenous Maskoki names (Moore, 1995). The African names on The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (2025) present other hermeneutic directions for Dinah, some of which could be fuller names from which a nickname could have been derived: a registree called Dinah was shipped from a central African port in the Kongo area; A man named Ahbadinah told an African interpreter that he embarked from Ouidah (Dahomean town) on the slave ship Josephina in 1841; a girl named Mandinah, was enslaved in the Sherbro area of Sierra Leone, and emancipated in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Widening the scope of explorations of ancestral meanings across the Atlantic to southeastern African languages such as Ma-shona, the word Dina could be translated as “person seeking comfortable place to sit” (Mapara, 2013).

Obviously, this discussion of alternative meanings does not prove Dinah’s name originated in these areas, for it was possible these women were abducted many miles inland from these coastal ports of embarkation and return. In addition, Burnard (2001) is correct to point out that bearing African names does not guarantee that the bearer was born in Africa. However, for some, having African names added authenticity or authority to the name bearers, or reflected pride in African heritage, as Inscoe (1983) suggests was the case for enslaved and freed people in the Carolinas (18–19th c.).

Turner’s (2002) mid 20th c. fieldwork (Africa and U.S. lowcountry), consultations with Africanist linguists, and analysis of regional dictionaries suggests that early Gullah names provide another range of West African contenders for Dinah’s etymology and field of meanings. Turner lists the Gullah name “dina” as correlating with a Yoruba phrase (di na, “to obstruct a passage”), or a Fula (Arabic) word for faith. Turner’s attention to the tones of vowels provides clues to the phonology and pronunciation of particular words, and indicates the caveats that must be addressed in thinking about how chronicled African Seminole names were spoken, and how their origins or travels must be assessed. However, most chroniclers neglect to indicate tones or accent marks (e.g., Jesup, 1839: 66–69).

There is a theoretical significance in the power to impose names, which can be seen in the enslaved African people who were marked with European names before being sent into American captivity (Burnard, 2001; Williamson, 2017). In his discussion of 19th c. African American abolitionists who returned to Africa bearing European names, Stuckey (1987) argued that these names were a “metaphor for cultural pain inflicted upon them.” Analysis cannot simply stop here, though, as the Florida POW removal rolls suggest European names were not the only labels that Seminoles carried. For example, an African Seminole man named Charles is described on a “emigration” list along with his other name, Tenebo (Freeman, 1839b: 77; Weik, 2012b: 145). The contrast here between an indigenous (presumably African) and European name begs the question of whether the archival record speaks to the accumulation of names over time, or alternately, the recognition of contrasting, simultaneous, community-bestowed (Black/African/Indigenous) and slaveholder/colonist-imposed naming (compare Spillers, 1987: 69). Some self-liberated and enslaved people used names provided within their communities that differed from the names they were given by outsiders (Mock, 2012; compare Price and Price, 1972). Many African Seminoles carried European names, which was likely the result of the ways slaveholder-imposed names were privileged by chroniclers, whose intentions were to help slaveholders find escapees (Figure 1). However, at least one chronicler was aware that African Seminole POW’s sometimes employed tactical pseudonymy (giving false names) to avoid detection by former enslavers, (Humphreys, 1839a: 93–94). Similarly, people may have also sought to avoid entrapment by fictitious claims (by slaveholders or would-be enslavers) about their alleged slavery status.

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Figure 1.

List of African and Indigenous Seminoles compiled by U.S. officials. (Freeman, 1839a: 83).

Simultaneity is possible in some nicknames, which may have cloaked ancestral usages or multiple meanings, which decenter the simple default position of a European imposed identity. Take the four African Seminoles on POW lists who were named Sam. Was this a nickname for the more formal European names Samuel or Samson (compare Mock, 2012)? Could they have originated from “Sambo”? Some Africans (and descendants), had meanings for Sambo(a), such as “elephant” in the Malinke language. Sam Bowlegs was an important interpreter whom Freeman (1839b, 79) claimed was enslaved by the Indigenous “owner” Harriet Bowlegs. These diverse interpretive possibilities could also be relevant to 19th c. Indigenous Seminoles such as the revered Seminole Wars (Second and Third) leader called Sam Jones, also known as Abiaka ( “Yellow Rat Snake”), Aripuki (in setters chronicles), or tastanakata:fi (“wise warrior” in modern Seminole Tribal heritage narratives; West, 2015: 2–3). One reason oral histories were once difficult to find for Mikasuki’s such as Jones (Abiaka) was that people avoided speaking the names of deceased community members such as great warriors, healers, or leaders, because descendents feared the uncertainty of spirits, who could “. . . come back in a mean manner or a good manner.” (Billie, 2016). However, rich, and at times disparaging, archival records reported Abiaka’s varied talents and skills, as a soldier, fisherman, shipwreck salvager, prophet, wetland navigator, and community leader (West, 2015; Wickman, 1999: 79).

A trickster hermeneutical perspective presents the option of maintaining all of these above-mentioned interpretations of Sam in tension, thereby conceptualizing the potential collectivist and contested grounds of naming that lay within and between the various Black, Indigenous, and Settler-Colonist speech communities engaged in the Seminole Wars. Vizenor’s (1990) vision of trickster discourse shows how historical narratives involve critical conversations among various community members, comparable to indigenous “multivocality” practices among other North American groups (Atalay, 2008: 35). Hence, the different Sams on the POW lists likely were named in response to different needs, demands, or desires.

Trickster traces in Seminole places

Some Seminole historical figures, especially leaders or slaveholders, offer possibilities to consider trickster toponymies. A case in point involves a person named Buckra Woman. Buckra Woman’s Town appears on a list of communities provided by Neamathla and other indigenous Seminole Leaders to U.S. soldiers around 1820 (Klos, 1989: 56). The term Buckra has long been recognized in Black/African/Diaspora film, music, language studies, and speech communities, where it is often understood to connote disdain for white people in the Americas that derives from their role in enslavement or later racial power. “Buckra” originated among the Ibo of West African, who helped carry it to the Caribbean and North America. Captive and formerly enslaved people used the term refer to “master” or to poor white people (Mulroy, 1993: 25; 2007: 34). Thus, the label likely originated in African Seminole and Black regional populations, from which it became part of Indigenous toponymic knowledge and settler colonial documents associated with Florida.

Buckra Woman’s Town is a possible case of trickster toponymy given the unlikelihood of regional leaders (Indigenous or White) reproducing this potentially derogatory name. It was more likely the invention of African Seminoles. If this was the case, then it begs the question of whether African Seminoles used it in a mocking way, like enslaved and postemancipation people of African descent who sang coded songs poking fun at overseers, slaveholders, or bosses (Piersen, 1976; compare Byrd, 2011: 119–121). Did settler colonists and indigenous people not understand the name’s insulting implications? If they did, is it possible they could not overcome African Seminole toponymic hegemony. If so, this would be striking, as colonial and slavery regimes’ regularly dehumanized and silenced African descendants, which aided their enslavement and fungibility. However, As Ortner’s (1995: 188) discussion of Ethnographic Refusal suggests, colonial (and academic) texts are never able to completely distort or exclude voices and perspectives of those being written about. Mock’s (2012) Texas oral histories provide an alternative meaning for Buckra, which is less politically charged or disparaging: some female consultants claimed Buckra was a generic Freedman term for people who were not-(Black) Seminole. But more information is needed to understand whether this meaning held for ancestors in Florida, versus being solely a later historical development in Texas, Oklahoma, or Mexico.

But what about Buckra Woman’s perspective here? Little is known about the Indigenous person referred to as Buckra Woman, and her own term of self-identification is lacking in the documents. She is known largely through trade records, such as the sale of a herd of cattle for $1700, in 1804 (Mulroy, 2007: 13). Like women in neighboring Indigenous (e.g., Cherokee or Creek) communities elsewhere, Seminole women’s political powers, leadership, and institutional roles have been neglected by many chroniclers (Perdue, 2007: 279; Rindfleisch, 2021: 2). Settler-colonists paid much more attention to male military, political, or economic actions. Buckra Woman’s intentions and feelings about her name are likewise unknown. She may not have known about African Seminole or Black populations’ onomastic intentions or projected ire. If Buckra Woman did know about African or Black derogatory name calling, she may not have cared or been present to witness side comments or body language giving her clues about the name’s meanings. Or Buckra Woman may have embraced only those meanings that referenced her power as a slaveholder or a tribute taker (compare Mulroy, 2007: 13).

Tricksteronymy

An example of tricksteronymy is an African Seminole named John Horse, an important leader, warrior, and interpreter who had both African and Indigenous Seminole parents (Mulroy, 1993). U.S. Soldiers ascribed the name Gopher John to the young John Horse, who fooled white warriors into repurchasing a tortoise that he stole from them multiple times (Cohen, 1964 [1836]). It is difficult to know whether “Gopher John” was motivated only by self-interest, or whether this deceit also benefitted other community members. Further, what were the social or cultural implications of his trickery? Would his elders or parents or community have approved of his deceptive trading activities? Many African Seminoles—some of whom had escaped from slavery—engaged in Seminole War raids on military supply trains or plantations, taking (or liberating) enslaved people and goods. Critics have pointed out that various Indigenous Seminoles engaged in enslavement of Africans and raids on plantations, trading posts, and settler or colonial establishments in order to gain economic advantages, leverage in political relations, and advancement within regional Maskoki modes of empowerment (Mair, 2020: 113–118). However, any interpretation of these acts as alleged theft have to be weighed against the dispossessive programs, broken treaties, and Settler-colonial or U.S. theft of land, freedom, and life (Weik, 2012b). John’s tricky activity needs to be framed within a continental historical context where Black and Indigenous people had to “make shrewd and difficult decisions that at times fall outside their own, as well as larger and shared, ethical frames” (King, 2019: xi).

Another way that John Horse took part in a trickster mode of engagement was his participation in the guerilla fighting style (e.g., use of ambush) employed by African and Indigenous warriors of the three 19th c. Seminole Wars, which were deadly and costly for the U.S. army. As Lawres (2014: 559) suggests, Seminole warriors used the environment “. . . as a means of concealment, defense, strategic entrapment, and escape.” These and other combat strategies affected the placement and configuration of Seminole communities for decades after these wars (Lawres, 2014: 560–561).

John later became a mediator between communities, as a translator and a traveler, accumulating valuable news and military intel. John’s entrepreneurial and negotiating skills allowed him to accumulate funds and networks which helped him evade enslavement, free relatives, lobby the U.S. government in Washington, DC on behalf of African Seminoles, and make claims for war losses. His relationships with Indigenous Seminoles such as Coacoochee were crucial for his freedom. Coacoochee helped John create relationships with western Indigenous communities and the Mexican government. John’s mobility, enabled by his ability to convince the U.S. military to grant him a pass to travel west of the Mississippi, allowed him to establish opportunities for African Seminole freedom south of Texas (Mulroy, 2007: 73–83). These skills also helped him avoid assassination by Indigenous slaveholders and people who resented his willingness to negotiate with U.S. forces while in Florida and in post-removal settings. Ironically, John Horse helped pay for some accommodations for Black Seminoles during their removal from Florida. John Horse acquired an expanding list of aliases (e.g., Captain Juan de Dios Vidaurri) after Seminole removal (Mock, 2012: 16). However, his Florida names remained resonant. For example, in 1861, a traveler named Samuel Spindle encountered “Gopher John” in Mexico, at a festival where John was telling Florida Seminole War stories, entertaining guests, and exhibiting “Indian voice” and “Indian dress” (Mock, 2012: 82–83).

Trickster autonomy

Another case of trickster dynamics in early 19th c. Florida Seminole Territory involves an indigenous man named “Friday,” who is found in the margins of Seminole War POW lists, as well as in slaveholder and Indian agent records. Friday was observed by a “Captain Bell,” who in turn shared his observations with a missionary named Morse (1822), who recorded Bell’s observations in 1822:

. . . an Indian called Friday, who is an industrious man, cultivates and fences his lands, splits rails, &c. but is laughed at and discarded by his neighbors, because he “works like a Negro.” When they see this man at his work, they exclaim, “Are we reduced to this degraded state?”

Perhaps Captain Bell heard this story from Horatio Dexter, a U.S. Indian agent who aspired to be a plantation owner. Dexter related a similar story (like that of Bell) to a traveler by the name of Simmons in 1822. Dexter indicated that he named this Indigenous Seminole man “Friday” because he reminded him of “the hero of Defoe’s tale,” a reference to the author of Robinson Crusoe. By 1824, Dexter (Boyd, 1958) claimed that he named the man “Friday” because of his “savage isolation” (living among settlers such as Dexter), and his faithful attachment to Dexter. Vizenor’s (1990) trickster hermeneutics challenge this and other forms of “hypotragic isolation,” and encourage more broad thinking about life and relationalities beyond the limitations of the settler colonial gaze. Further, Dexter’s naming act may have disrupted and concealed previous identities, and disregarded existing social and genealogical networks (compare Williamson, 2017: 3).

If Friday was not found on the margins of the “emigration” censuses (POW lists), it might be easy to categorize his story as a missionary fiction, which served settler colonial “civilizing” agendas and paralleled the Christian racialist colonial overtones of the famous classic, Robinson Crusoe (compare Blackburn, 1985). However, Friday is more than just an imaginary character, for references (on the margins two POW lists) refer to “an Indian called Friday.” For instance, a list of enslaved laborers claimed by Colonel G. Humphreys (in 1838) describes an African Seminole woman named Pamilla, who was “Enticed away by [the] Indian Friday who has her as his wife” (Clark, 1839: 123; Humphreys, 1839b: 96). Friday’s subversive influence on his wife, Pamilla, who escaped confinement (and enslavement) as a POW, calls into question his absolute loyalty to settler interests. It is also worth considering whether the patriarchal, racial perspective of this document that reduced Pamilla to property may have missed her capacity to flee bondage based on her own intentions for freedom or relationships.

Perhaps the indigenous Seminole Friday’s (if this is a name he acknowledged for himself) willingness to disregard social labor conventions, was part of an independent mode of thought that also made him willing to cross ethnic or racial lines to marry. However, the cross-cultural (or interracial) character of their union can be called into question. For instance, from an African perspective, the name Friday could be the result of a phenomena called “linguistic interference” where a word from another language is transformed via Anglicized translation (see Moore, 1995 for Maskoki examples). If this type of linguistic transformation was at work in this Seminole context, then it could suggest that Friday was the Anglicized translation of the Twi (language of modern Ghana) name Kofi. For centuries, Twi speakers have been naming people for the day of the week on which they were born. If this were the case, then one would have to explain how an indigenous person could have been ascribed such an unorthodox name, for Seminole and Maskoki languages have not historically employed day names. Unfortunately, we do not have information about “Friday’s” personal view of things. If his name was African influenced (like the Gullah and Black Seminole name Monday), it may have hinted at Friday having a bicultural identity or African and Indigenous parentage, or the rare incorporation of an African naming convention into an indigenous Seminole naming act.

Wider aspects of Trickster discourse help bring attention to other implications of this case, in particular what to make of the laughter directed toward Friday’s behavior. While laughter can be joyous and healthy, it can also be harmful, destructive, or manipulative. This latter type gestures toward discussions of “trickster sovereignty,” which ponders the relationship between laughter, racial stereotypes, gender, political power, and authoritarianism (Rafael, 2019). The conversation raises the question of whether Friday’s “neighbors” (which appear to be Indigenous from the above quote) were laughing at him solely as a form of ridicule, in response to the labor Friday was performing (which was associated with slavery). Or was their laughter motivated by the transgression of gendered-labor expectations, as Indigenous women were the primary farmers in their communities? Alternatively, it is worth considering whether Friday’s peers’ laughter was a nervous response to expanding settler-colonial projects in the region. Some Creek and Muskogean people expressed fears over being consumed by colonial land grabbing, debts, labor demands, and expanding enslavement systems (which drove land grabbing; Saunt, 1998).

It is also worth considering whether the laughter was a coping mechanism, as we find in Black and Indigenous everyday, performative, or social cultural practices (e.g., drama or music), which mobilize humor as an antedote to sadness, trauma, or depression (e.g., laugh to keep from crying; Levine, 2007: 300–330). Thinking cumulatively, it is possible that various of these types of motivations drove the laughter. Finally, in the spirit of trickster-hermeneutical reversal, we might think against the current of formal, intentional, social-constuctionist, or power-laden analytical preoccupations, and instead consider whether fun or play was the point of the laughter. Similarly, literary and folkloric discourses point to ways Seminole and Black trickster stories had both entertainment and pragmatic value (e.g., lessons for daily life; Bucuvalas et al., 1994; Harris, 2010).

Friday appears to have exercised a kind of freedom, taking a chance on living between Seminole (African and/or Indigenous) and Euro-American societies, grappling with uncertainty, changing circumstances, varying hegemonies, and partial or intermittant communal membership. Or maybe Friday was engaging in a form of refusal beyond the dualisms of traditionalist/assimilationist binaries, or to the evasion of sovereignties, both Settler/U.S. and indigenous recognition and membership.

Trickster demographics and Seminole refusals

Another way to explore the elusive, ironic, and deceptive potentials of trickster actions and perspectives on Seminole history is by examining onomastic refusal, which sheds light on what happens when subalterns attempt to avoid naming or being named. In 1880, less than 20 years after the “Third Seminole War,” Reverend Clay McCauley oversaw a census of Seminoles, which became one of the earliest anthropological observations of Florida. McCauley’s work on the Seminoles aided J. W. Powell, of the Bureau of American Ethnology, in enumerating Indigenous people in the Continental U.S. for the Census Bureau. This action was initiated by the 1879 Congressional act which called for a census of “Indians not taxed” (McCauley, 2000: ix). Sturtevant (in McCauley, 2000: ix) suggests that Powell lobbied congress for the act to fund his early ethnological projects.

Powell would much later become part of academic debates about trickster stories, and the target of criticism by the folkloric writer named Joel Harris. Harris argued that Uncle Remus stories involving tricksters such as “Brer Rabbit” were the vernacular derivatives of African origins or Black ethnoracial uniqueness, as opposed to borrowings from indigenous storytelling traditions, as Powell suggested (Johnson, 2021). Johnson (2021: 99) provides an implicit warning against the pursuit of this type of polarized debate, suggesting that the “the tricky part of understanding oral traditions” is the challenge of establishing precise origins, while acknowledging that stories (motifs) were often shared across many Black, Indigenous, or Black-Indigenous communities. Similarly, Howard’s (2002) historical-ethnography of Black Seminoles in the Bahamas shows how similar ancestral practices may have paved the way for some Black and Indigenous cooperation if not collective community building (compare Kokomoor, 2009). Ultimately, as the 19th c. ran its course, the Seminole Wars tested these bonds of kinship, cultural affinity, and shared experiences.

However, it appears that prior to these wars, African/Black and Indigenous connections or mutual concerns sometimes led different types of Seminoles to work together to evade Settler-colonial attempts at surveillance and census-making. For example, in 1823, a Seminole leader named Neamathla provided a U.S. delegation led by Colonel James Gadsden with a list of towns and an estimate of over 4800 Seminole inhabitants of Florida (Duval et al., 2007: 439–440). However, Neamathla refused to provide Gadsden with “the number of negroes in the nation.” Indigenous leaders may have feared that divulging African or Black numbers would invite slaveholders and U.S. officials with a justification to hire bounty hunters or soldiers to intervene in Seminole politics, and take their land, laborers or kin. Similarly, Indigenous Seminoles rejected U.S. official John Logan’s request for information for an 1830 federal census (Weik, 2002). The Indigenous Seminoles were likely leery of having their numbers documented, as it exposed their military strength. Seminole War chronicles, like settler and colonial accounts elsewhere, included census records that demarcated Native Americans by the number of warriors, women, and children (Freeman, 1839a: 89; compare Rindfleisch, 2021: 22).

These denied requests for demographic information are among the types of issues addressed by various Indigenous people in North America who have negotiated and opposed settler-colonial states (compare Bell, 1952: 75, and Goeman, 2013: 21). Anthropologists suggest that refusal goes beyond saying no and beyond resistance to affiliations, conditions, or agreements, to also encompass limits and possibilities of individuals, states, and institutions (Simpson, 2014). Similarly, Schneider and Hayes’ (2020: 133) decolonizing archaeological vision of indigenous epistemology suggests that “. . . refusals to share knowledge may be assertions of sovereignty, and are . . . a rejection of the colonial ideology of the “universal good” of knowledge.” Thus, (Black) Seminole’s rejections of U.S. census-takers must be situated within the politics of knowledge and within longterm strategies of concealment. Some Seminoles would continue to remain hidden from the view of government census-takers, observers and mappers into the 1930s, in part out of mistrust of the U.S. that was carried forward in oral histories (Mahoney, 2017: 179, 184; compare post-removal example in Mulroy, 2007).

Seminoles also rejected outsiders’ attempts to impose social group labels on them, a type of identity construction also known as ethnonymy (Sturtevant, 1971; compare Frank, 2014). A trickster hermeneutic of Hothli Emathla, or Jumper, serves as a good example. For instance, in 1836, a U.S. soldier named Cohen (1964 [1836]: 239) observed that “Jumper, or Ote-mathla” who “. . . is a Seminole, although he denies it, and objects to being so-called, boasting his descent from a distinguished race, of which he is the sole survivor.” This passage exemplifies the onto-epistemelogical violence of tropes of disappearing environmental features and Indigenous people (and cultural practices) in colonial and western intellectual narratives (Vizenor, 1990: 282–287; compare the idea of “lasting” in OBrien, 2010). Cohen (1964 [1836]) claimed Hothli Emathla had Yamasee cultural roots. The Yamasee were a powerful regional group, centered in the Carolina-Georgia borderlands, who engaged in colonial trade and enslavement of regional people. By the 18th c. the chaos cause by a Yamasee uprising nearly destroyed Anglo colonial power in the area. It also led to opportunities, caused by war-time destruction of plantations, for African fugitivism within the emerging Seminole nation.

But instead of pursuing Hothli Emathla’s name’s provenance, in monogenetic fashion, one could inquire into the potential motivations behind his refusal to be named ethnonymically, taking inspiration from documented Seminole experiences and viewpoints. For instance, was “Ote-mathla” resisting Cohen’s label because of some derogatory meaning of Seminole? This hypothesis derives partly from some 19th c. south Florida Seminoles interviewed by the Reverend Clay McCauley, who preferred other terms of self-identification that derived from a Muskogean word for “peninsula people” (McCauley, 2000: 509). Similarly some Florida Seminoles interviewed by Sturtevant (1971: 111) in the mid 20th century rejected the Muskogean label simanoli (which English setter’s came to pronounce “Seminole”), because it signified “wild” and referred to undomesticated plants or animals. Some Bahamian people applied a similar label, “wild Indians,” to self-emancipated people of African descent who fled from southwest Florida to the Bahamas in the early 19th century, in response to U.S. funded enslavement raids by Indigenous Creeks (Howard, 2006). There were also 20th c. descendants who appropriated siminoli as an expression of their autonomy from or rejection of other macro-identities or geographic regional affiliations (e.g., “Creek” or “Redstick”; Wickman, 1999: 217). It is possible that Hothli Emathla’s (and other Seminoles’) ambivalence regarding being labelled as Seminole was related to centuries-old Muskogean micro-level assertions of sovereignty, reflecting kin, clan, village, or other interests (compare Saunt, 1998: 141).

Finally, Hothli Emathla’s objection to Cohen’s imposed cultural naming may have been based on identificatory simultaneity, a desire for recognition that encompassed multiple identities simultaneously or allowed for partial or intermittent membership, responsibilities, and forms of participation. The limits or challenges of inclusivity and membership are one of many types of historical factors complicating understandings of processes of Nation-state recognition and Indigenous aspirations that created reservations, communties, and relationships across Florida, Oklahoma, the Caribbean, and Mexico. Diasporic Seminoles’ crossed borders and subverted settler colonial boundaries creating struggles and complexities rooted in gender, land access, racial ideologies (e.g., Blood Quantum), and other issues (Gil, 2014; Mulroy, 1993; compare Simpson, 2014: 175).

Trickster hermeneutics play with ironies and contradictions (Vizenor, 2019: 151–158), which become apparent in an examination of Hothli Emathla s (Jumper) role in linking Indigenous and African Seminole ranching and plantation slavery. A letter written by a north Florida overseer Charles (1825), shows how Jumper helped negotiate the paid recovery of cattle that escaped from a north Florida plantation, with the help of the above-mentioned African Seminole named Abraham (Weik, 2012b). This is ironic because it involves an overseer working with formerly enslaved African Seminoles, some of which the overseer would have considered as property or a threatening example of Black self-liberation (inspirational for enslaved people). Elsewhere, cattle and horses were carried off by Black, Indigenous, and sometimes White, people (working apart and together), who raided plantations and settlements (Carrier, 2005: 177). But not all raids were successful, due to settler communication networks.

The utility of tricksterism in historical Seminole strategic thinking might also be seen through further consideration of cattle ranching. Ranching has continued to be an important part of Seminole economic projects, land relationships, and communal practices (Frank, 2017). However, while there have been various instances of profitable ranching, including the above-mentioned Buckra Woman, it is important to not assume that livestock capitalism was universally beneficial for Black and Indigenous people. In times before casino wealth offset certain costs, cattle raising aided settler-colonial agricultural assimilationist programs, benefitted a narrow group of (herd-owning) community members, limited landuse to pasture, and led to debt (Cattelino, 2008: 33–5). Similarly, in 1878, White ranchers’ cattle encroached on the Indigenous Seminole camp called “Fish Eating Creek,” forcing its relocation (Mahoney, 2017: 184). By 1936, a U.S. program distributed free cattle as a means of improving Florida Seminole livelihoods (Cattelino, 2008). But Indigenous Seminole rancher Stanlo John’s memories of this cattle program were ambivalent; he suggested that the program was initially met with suspicion by community members, as they feared it was a government “trick” to pull the rural Seminoles from their protective refuge in the Everglades. Vizenor’s (2019) stories’ of tricksters who subverted government agents’ plans is useful here as it encourages analysis of indigenous Seminole responses to problems caused by federal intervention. In the case of this 20th c. Federal cattle distribution program, the patriarchically-gendered nature of the program led to unevenly distributed costs and benefits that disadvantaged Seminole women, who were not granted the direct ownership rights, technological assistance or other benefits that aided men in this livestock allocation (Cattelino, 2008: 37). Over the 20th century, some Seminole women fought to create space for indigenous female participation in cattle ranching and tribal business networks (Pleasants and Kersey, 2010: 24–25).

Conclusion

Trickster hermeneutics of Seminole naming practices present the opportunity to conceptualize micro-level power dynamics, exceptions to macro-narratives, the social significance of word play, and the tensions or disruptions of settler-colonialism. Within the Seminole War context, analyses of trickster moves shows how names are meaningful human identifiers that are more than just labels: they are also windows into historical struggles, accumulations of personal experiences, products of relationalities, opportunities to (dis)engage, contested cultural grounds, cross-cultural travelers, and recognitions or distortions of humanity. Ongoing trickster hermeneutics and refusals offer important challenges to the negative legacies of naming, while providing inspiration, knowledge, and heritage from ancestral practices.

Trickster hermeneutics can encourage considerations of the historicity of cultural productions such as names and their capacity to inform the history of critical oralities. Names on documents such as censuses serve as tools of recognition and dispossession, often simultaneously.

Acts of (re)naming have continued to play roles in more recent management of Seminole Indigeneities, struggles against economic exploitation and racist mistreatment, and politics of sovereign interdependency, in ways that gesture back to 19th c. Florida (compare Cattelino, 2008: 163, 171). For example, in naming Freedmen access to Seminole Nation membership and benefits “entitlements,” and in questioning what she labels “Black Indian discourse,” Miller (2005: 24) expresses a form of Oklahoma Seminole National sovereignty. On the other hand, in the context of Mascogo (African Seminole) struggles on the Texas-Mexico border, Gil (2014: 24, 34) argues that the apparent “epistemic problem of naming” is more an issue that necessitates linking “CLASSification” and racial relations within a complicated array of issues, including (denied) U.S. or tribal citizenship, community membership, social services, housing, land rights, economic assistance, and healthcare. Similar struggles face African Seminoles elsewhere in their post-Florida diasporas. These distinct perspectives suggest that there is a lot to explore beyond the scope of this paper, where trickster analytics could be applied to the names on other influential censuses such as those generated through the Dawes Act. Whether one’s ancestors’s names are present or absent on census records created for the Dawes act is a vital part of the information collected on present day Seminole Nation (Oklahoma) applications for citizenship. Thus, names continue to shape more recent Seminole identities and movements toward citizenship and self-determination.