Traditional Seminoles formally petitioned the US in 1954 to be left alone

Evidence

It began, however, almost 30 years earlier when, on March 1, 1954, George Osceola, Jimmie Billie, and Buffalo Tiger, representing the Seminole General Council, climbed the steps of the Capitol, carrying a large buckskin scroll. The Buckskin Declaration was a formal petition to the president of the United States from the General Council of the traditional Seminoles. It said, in part: We have, and have had for centuries, our own culture, our own customs, our own government, our own language, and our own way of life, which is different from the government, the culture, the customs, the language, and the way of life of the White Man… We are not White Men, but Indians who do not wish to become White Men but wish to remain Indians and have an outlook on all of these things different from the outlook of the White Man. We do not wish to own lands because our land is for all of us. We have failed to have your Indian Agent or your Secretary of Interior or your other government officials understand our outlook. — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations, 206

Categorization

• XREF: The collective-land rejection is a direct counterpoint to the private-property assumptions underlying Johnson v. M’Intosh and all US land law — an on-the-record alternative epistemology. — connects to: County housing-code enforcement criminalized a Seminole’s ancestral fire — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 220
• SEED: The Buckskin Declaration as a primary text for an eco-justice/legal-systems essay on Indigenous refusals of both land ownership and recognition.