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Seminole Lives Enriched But Divided By Casino

Kim Garcia makes fried bread, taught to her by Maggie Garcia, during the Discover Native America Powwow & Music Festival presented by the Seminole Tribe of Florida.

Tribune photo by MICHAEL SPOONEYBARGER

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By KAREN BRANCH-BRIOSO, The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 27, 2007

TAMPA - Maggie Osceola Garcia lived in a chickee until age 14.

Her family traded its traditional Seminole home of cypress logs and palm-thatch leaves for a rundown mobile home in a Bradenton migrant labor camp.

Today, home is a lakefront piece of the Brandon suburbs.

"They gave me a nice house," Osceola Garcia, 62, says of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, which five years ago bought the 1,607-square-foot home for $125,000.

"I never thought I'd live in a house like that."

Today, the 3,300-member Florida tribe is one of the most prosperous American Indian tribes in the United States, thanks to gaming revenue from seven casinos and last year's $965 million purchase of the Hard Rock International restaurant and hotel chain. About 75 members of the tribe in the Tampa area - most descendants of Maggie's mother, the late Ruby Tiger Osceola - have also shared in the wealth.

Each member, even children, earns about $7,500 a month in gambling dividends after taxes. Some drive late-model, luxury cars. Although several members in the Tampa area live in middle-class homes owned by the tribe, others have been able to buy their own homes.

The five council members who oversee the statewide gaming operations and other enterprises for the tribe as a whole have far more money at their disposal, according to a South Florida Sun-Sentinel report this week. It said the council members - none of whom live in Tampa - have millions more from discretionary accounts that they have lavished on themselves, friends and family members and, particularly around election time, on other tribe members.

The report said the National Indian Gaming Commission has scheduled a visit to the tribe next month to review spending.

Tribe spokesman Gary Bitner said that since a commission 2004 audit that found improper spending of gaming revenue, the council members have complied with the rules. Any discretionary spending, he says, comes from the tribe's income from its other enterprises: tribal attractions, cattle, citrus, real estate and smoke-shop sales.

"There's no regulation on tribal spending of nongaming revenues," Bitner said. "They can spend those dollars any way they please."

Locally, it's difficult to find anyone who will discuss the issue. The tribal liaison in Tampa, Richard Henry, wouldn't answer any questions about the local tribe, directing all questions to tribal headquarters in Broward County. Most members didn't return phone calls. The few who would talk to a Tampa Tribune reporter said they couldn't discuss the gambling enterprise.

Reservation Isn't Home Anymore

Tampa and Coconut Creek are the only two of seven tribal casino properties where the members live off-reservation. The reservation here is now exclusively the home of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino and a drive-through smoke shop where the tribe sells tax-free cigarettes.

The last of the Tampa tribe members moved off the reservation six years ago to make room for the ever-expanding casino.

Some work there at Orient Road and Interstate 4. Some work in the tribal office in a nondescript warehouse district on Harney Road, about a mile from the casino. The tribe bought the office buildings and a nearby warehouse for $4.2 million last year.

Many local members, thanks to dividend income, don't have to work.

"I do work when I want to - beads and sewing and stuff," said Osceola Garcia, who was selling her hand-sewn colorful patchwork shirts and glass bead jewelry at the Discover Native America PowWow at the Florida State Fairgrounds two weekends ago. "I do, like, three shows a year."

Like Osceola Garcia, many live in small- to midsize suburban homes bought by the tribe in Brandon, Seffner and Valrico. One of her three grown children, Danny Santiago, says he pays a nominal rent for a small Brandon home owned by the tribe.

The communal tribe life they once shared on the reservation is now reserved for holiday gatherings. Like the Thanksgiving feast the tribe celebrated Tuesday night at Ybor City's Columbia Restaurant.

Scores arrived, young and old. The men wore colorful patchwork shirts. Women and girls arrived in flowing floor-length skirts with patchwork and even more hand-sewn details. In a lavishly decorated room, they shared arroz con pollo, a roasted pig, turkeys and hams. Some spoke in their native languages.

Such scenes used to be daily life at the Tampa reservation where most of them lived from the early 1980s until the casino's expansion prompted their relocation.

"We're scattered," Osceola Garcia says. "But sometimes we get together, like at Thanksgiving and community meetings and Easter, Halloween."

The intermittent gatherings are not what the tribal matriarch wanted most for her clan.

"She liked everybody - the family - together," said Osceola Garcia, who cared for her mother in her final months in a Brandon home bought by the tribe in 2002. The lack of tribal gatherings didn't affect her as much by then, just before her death.

"My mom was forgetting things, so it wasn't so bad."

Plans Made To Reunite

The Florida tribe is trying to remedy the dispersion of its local members. It recently bought several hundred acres in Polk County where it hopes to one day build homes for tribe members. Those who were displaced by the casino expansion would get first dibs.

Maggie's husband Arnie Garcia, a Mescalero Apache Indian who lived on the Seminole's Tampa reservation for years, suspects many tribe members would welcome a return to a more communal way of life on the Lakeland property: "A lot of people miss being around the grandparents."

For now, the members live often-separate suburban lives.

"It's hard, because we're not close-knit like we used to be when we lived on the rez," said Santiago, 35, who once lived in a town house on the reservation with his mother and step-father.

His mother's first job on the reservation: cleaning the bingo hall.

Santiago's job, at first: alligator wrestler at the Indian Village that existed on the reservation in the early days. Then, at 18, he went to work cleaning the kitchen at the bingo hall, known as the Seminole Gaming Palace. He worked his way up to clerk.

Revenue Has Grown Substantially

In those days, the jobs were a necessity.

Gaming "dividends back then were only like $300 every three months," Santiago says. "But once Palace Gaming came in, I'd say early to mid-1990s, we'd get $1,000 a month. We started getting more comfortable. That's when I got my first family car in '93. The tribe was moving up. That's when we started growing more, business-sense wise. Because now, we live real comfortably. We make $7,000 to $8,000 a month now."

The gross dividend is $120,000 a year. After a 25 percent cut for federal taxes, that amounts to a net income of $90,000 a year for each tribe member, who qualify by being at least one-fourth Seminole.

Those dividends will likely continue to grow if the federal government approves a deal struck between the Seminole Tribe of Florida and Gov. Charlie Crist to allow Vegas-style machines and blackjack and baccarat at its casinos. The agreement would bring $1 billion into state coffers over its first five years and a half-billion dollars a year after that. First, it must clear a challenge in the state Supreme Court filed by House Speaker Marco Rubio, R-West Miami.

Even without that potential increase for the tribe, many members, like Santiago, don't have to work.

An older brother, Randy Santiago, works at the casino. Danny Santiago says he was in the casino management training course open to tribe members, but dropped out for a few months. It's something many members can afford to do.

"I live comfortably, just from the tribe," Santiago said.

Money Has Hurt Education

He says that for some of the younger tribe members, the money has become a disincentive to study at a time when the tribe is devoting large amounts of money to education. The Florida tribe spends large portions of its growing budget on reservation schools and private schooling. Today, any Seminole who wants to attend college gets a full scholarship, courtesy of the tribe.

Santiago says some Seminole youngsters - who receive part of their $7,500 monthly dividend, with a portion going into a trust until age 18 - have lost interest in education.

"They get all this money now, and they say they don't want to get an education," said Santiago, who received his high school diploma through the GED program as a teenager in the tribe's needier years.

The tribe has considered withholding dividends for youngsters who drop out of school, Santiago said.

For Osceola Garcia and her six siblings, formal education was not allowed as they grew up in the Everglades. Their father, Frank Osceola, wanted them to keep their Seminole traditions and language.

He died when Maggie was 14. Ruby Osceola took her seven children with her to Bradenton, where they worked for the Manatee Fruit Co. as farm laborers. They lived in a migrant labor camp.

Her offspring began to pick up English. Among themselves, then as now, they spoke in their native language.

"We never learned to read or write," Osceola Garcia said of herself and her siblings.

Ruby Osceola's grandchildren did, however. Unlike their parents, they attended school. They speak English better than the tribal language. Most of Ruby Osceola's great-grandchildren don't speak the native language.

"They might learn it" if the family moved back to a reservation, Osceola Garcia said.

The family's time on the Tampa reservation lasted just two decades. Ruby Osceola moved them there in 1980, the year that Seminole remains were discovered on the construction site for a Tampa parking garage.

The city asked the tribe to rebury them so the construction could go on. The Seminole Tribe of Florida bought the 8 1/2 -acre site at Orient Road and I-4. They asked Ruby Osceola to move her family from the Bradenton farm. She agreed.

Ruby Osceola and her offspring moved in to a dozen small town houses built by the tribe. Some more distant family moved in to chickees, the cypress-and-palm-thatch homes developed by the tribe in the early 1800s during the Seminole Wars.

The tribe needed homes that could be quickly assembled in those years, when they repeatedly had to abandon land as the battles to drive them from their land forced them southward, into the swamps. Those who survived stayed in the Everglades. That's where Ruby Tiger Osceola was born in 1896.

She died in June 2002, at the age of 106. As a resident of a lakefront Brandon home.

Reporter Karen Branch-Brioso can be reached at (813) 259-7815 or kbranch-brioso@tampatrib .com.

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