This is the first page of an article from Natural History Magazine‘s April 1942 edition, which I found on archive.org. Today, the Seminole Tribe owns the Hard Rock Cafe brand, has a licensing agreement with Florida State University to use their name and likeness (with some creative control over those), and oodles of money from kinda sorta inventing “Indian casinos” as a thing.
In 1942, though, while Dine Navajo were busy codetalking in the Pacific Theater, the intrepid anthropologists of the American Natural History Museum were venturing out from urban Fort Lauderdale to explore the people next door:
I found a unique situation, a group of practically unknown people living in an unexplored wilderness, in the very midst of our own civilization. These people were the Big Cypress or southern group of the Seminoles. They are among the most unapproachable and least known Indians in the United States.
So wrote Ethel Cutler Freeman. One wonders, if she’s still with us, what she thinks of the multi-story neon-lit electric guitar rising up west of 95 between Stirling and Sheridan in that neighborhood where suddenly cigarettes and gas are noticeably cheaper because somehow you’ve rolled into a reservation where local and state taxes don’t apply.