Buffalo Tiger takes a stand

Buffalo Tiger went to enormous lengths to regain his people's land in the Everglades. Picture / James Frankham

He waits on the dock, wearing jeans with an enormous buckle, an embroidered waistcoat and a necktie. Buffalo Tiger, one of the last chiefs on the East Coast of the United States, greets me with a nod.

His face is speckled by years of exposure to the sun but his skin is smooth, defying his 82 years of age. And despite his modest stature he summons an enormous presence, with a voice that whispers like wind through river reeds. His thinning silver hair flutters in the breeze.

Buffalo Tiger has led his people for half a century, defied the United States government and colluded with communists to win back a small section of swampland in the heart of Florida's mighty Everglades National Park. I feel I should stoop in recognition of his status or offer that Disney gesture "How" with my right hand.

Buffalo Tiger, standing on the edge of a flimsy timber dock, looks over a seemingly endless expanse of golden sawgrass and sinuous channels of dark water and says: "I was born right over there." He points vaguely in the distance, waving his arm gently to include the entire 800,000ha of national park.

What appears to be a vast inland delta is actually a slow moving river up to 100km across that runs from Lake Okeechobee in the east, devours the southern tip of Florida and diffuses into the Gulf of Mexico.

Conservationists worldwide have recognised South Florida, and specifically Everglades National Park, for its outstanding biological wealth. The park is one of only three sites in the world to be designated a World Heritage Site, an International Biosphere Reserve, and a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance.

Tiger escorts me to a waiting airboat, stock-in-trade for navigating the waterways of the grassy interior. It resembles an aluminium baking tray beneath a giant hairdryer. A gaggle of youngsters from the Miccosukee Reservation are already well established in the bow, grinning as if they slept with coat hangers in their mouths.

Buffalo Tiger sits carefully on a plastic seat and nods to his young apprentice, Johnny, who clambers up the scaffolding of the elevated pilot seat, starts the 400-horsepower Cadillac engine mounted behind his head and stuffs cotton wool into his ears. We all follow suit, ramming wads of noise reduction material into our aural cavities as the prop winds up to a scream that the kids echo.

Johnny squeezes the throttle open, deftly manoeuvres the roaring contraption into the waterway, then gives her the gun. The white-knuckled tykes in front of me fizz with delight and issue wide-eyed squeals as we accelerate. Clouds of spray swirl behind the giant propeller and sawgrass clatters against the flat hull. My ears ring and pieces of severed foliage litter my wobbling cheeks.

Buffalo Tiger's people once lived in north Florida but their land was occupied as white farmers settled the southern states. Some Miccosukee were captured and deported, the rest were rapidly outnumbered and retreated into the Everglades swamp where they lived in exile since the 1820s. They were not followed, never defeated and lived in isolation, without contact with white people or knowledge of the outside world.

In the early 1950s the US Army Engineers began flood-control works, which altered the course of the huge river and drained vast tracts of swampland. Indian villages were bulldozed. The Miccosukee emerged from more than a century of hiding under the leadership of Buffalo Tiger, claiming that they had never been defeated, that the land was theirs and the Government should give it back.

The claim stems from a series of 18th-century treaties with France, Spain and England that the United States inherited when it took over Florida. Land claims with the US government could be settled only with money because it is against the law to return it. But like Maori, the Miccosukee tradition holds that land cannot be bought or sold - it is for the use of all, and to be kept for future generations. "The land I stand on is my own body," a Miccosukee leader once told a federal official.

In 1958 Buffalo Tiger became frustrated with Washington's unwillingness to recognise his people, and sought acknowledgment elsewhere. He wrote to Premier Franco in Spain, sent an envoy to France and marched into the British Embassy in Washington with a buckskin scroll on to which were etched the demands of his people: specifically, the return of the entire state of Florida to the Miccosukee Indians.

It was a bold claim.

He was ignored by the Spanish, sidelined by the French and of his experience in the Queen's company admitted, "We didn't achieve much in there". The media laughed off the debacle, though the Government was mildly embarrassed. Buffalo Tiger upped the ante.

He jumped in a plane and flew to Cuba where Fidel Castro's new communist government was more than happy to capitalise on an opportunity to irritate its democratic neighbour. Buffalo recalls, "I went over there and smoked some cigars with him and Che Guevara and I asked them, 'Do you recognise the Miccosukee Tribe?' Castro said he did." The old chief smiles, reliving the brazen accomplishment again. "When we got back there were all kinds of phone calls from Washington. The Government started dealing with us seriously then."

In 1983 the state of Florida granted Buffalo Tiger's tribe lease on 76,485ha of conservation land and nearly a million dollars, ostensibly it seems, to shut up. He put up a hotdog stand, a gas station, and a white man's school, then went out and bought a house in Miami and a brand new gold Cadillac.

The aluminium hull rumbles as Johnny flies us deeper into the flooded heart of the Everglades. I feel more than a little conspicuous; one skinny white guy with a boatload of Indians who have spent the great portion of their lives campaigning for the return of land from the hands of people my colour. And a self-conscious part of me quietly wonders whether Buffalo Tiger judges me as part of the conspiracy. Should I apologise? Johnny's gold-rimmed eyes squint a little. He sits up tall and kills the engine, the 3m-long sawgrass squeaking against the alloy as we coast to a stop. "It's a female," he whispers, indicating a low, dark form in the water.

The mirror-surface is punctuated by a pair of flared nostrils, followed by two enormous gold-rimmed eyes and a series of bumps extending 3m to the tip of the tail like a half-submerged steak-knife. Air wheezes into the lungs and her body rises to the surface, revealing a powerful tail nearly 30cm in diameter.

Want to silence your children? Give them an alligator for Christmas. It seems to turn a yodelling kid into an open-mouthed, wide-eyed bundle of curiosity in just less than a second.

Speechless, they lean over the gunwale, eyeballing the reptile and gasping at the mere suggestion of movement. And move she does, scrambling to dry ground. I kneel on the bow, eye to the viewfinder of my dilapidated Pentax, barely a metre from the snout of the massive reptile. I can feel its breath on my face and my heartbeat in my ears.

The alligator glares back at me with the eyes of a cold-blooded killer. I'm taut with adrenaline "Biiig one," Johnny calls from the stern pointing at the ripples approaching from the left.

On four stout legs a massive male lumbers on to the marsh, it's serrated tail dragging behind. There is a moment of inaction, a stand-off of giants. We hold our breath. Even the children are silent. The smaller female turns her head and slinks back into the mire.

There are 1.2 million alligators in the swamps and waterways of Florida's Everglades, making it somewhat less popular for swimming than Miami's famous beaches only an hour to the east. But changes to the watercourse, high phosphorous levels from agricultural run-off and pollution from urban development are reducing the alligator population.

Flood control and water supply structures have drastically reduced the water volume and disrupted natural flooding and drying cycles. And the Everglades have nearly halved in extent.

"There have been many changes in my lifetime," explains Buffalo Tiger, with the great aura of chief. "Once there were no white people here, no road, no pollution."

Miccosukee Indians and alligators share the fate of the Everglades. And it has been discovered that white people also depend directly upon the health of the ecosystem. This vast inland marsh is the water source for Miami's six million residents and South Florida's valuable farming sector. Scientists predict that water shortages could result in commercial losses of more than US$250 ($349) million a year.

This news has brought about remarkable changes at the metropolitan water board. In what may be the world's most ambitious effort to restore an ecosystem, Government agencies, business interests, and environmentalists are combining forces - and some US$7.8 billion ($11 billion) - to reverse a century of draining and diking.

Ironically, leading the charge is the US Army Corps of Engineers - the very same crew that built the dams and diverted flow paths in the first place. Over the next decade they will dismantle 800km of canals and levees assembled by their corps just 40 years ago.

It is anticipated that after the restoration of historical water patterns, species at every level of the food chain will recover their original population and distribution. But just how fast is still in question. Bringing back two million wading birds and the 68 endangered species is problematic at best. And curbing human population growth, expected to double in less than 50 years, could be more difficult still.

"Man cannot make this again," Buffalo Tiger says. "When you destroy the water you destroy your food and your life." He's seen the situation come full circle. White people took it. Spent millions wrecking it. Now billions trying to restore it.

It seems that the Miccosukee have lost their homeland forever - lost to the flood of development and the gradual ebb of water.

But Buffalo Tiger is resolute. He stands on the dock, draws a long breath, and gazes across the sawgrass to his birthplace.