Latest / In Focus with Carolyn Hutcheson / Jake Tiger - TPR's In Focus - August 19, 2026

Transcript

Jake Tiger - TPR's In Focus - August 19, 2026 · In Focus with Carolyn Hutcheson

• 0:00
  Support comes from the Rosa Parks Museum on Troy
• 0:03
  University's Montgomery campus, located on the spot
• 0:07
  of Mrs. Parks' historic 1955 arrest and featuring
• 0:11
  exhibits that chronicle the history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
• 0:15
  More information at troy.edu/rosaparks.
• 0:22
  From Troy Public Radio,
• 0:25
  this is In Focus, and I'm Carolyn Hutcheson.
• 0:30
  As America's 250th celebration continues,
• 0:34
  Jake Tiger shares the American Indian perspective
• 0:39
  as a member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. He is
• 0:42
  often in our tri-state coverage area starring in
• 0:46
  documentary films and working with schools
• 0:49
  and museums. Coming up Saturday,
• 0:53
  Jake will speak at the Creek War Symposium at Pebble
• 0:57
  Hill at Auburn University, and the public is invited.
• 1:07
  Jake Tiger, welcome to Troy Public Radio. Thank you
• 1:11
  for having me on. Jake, although you're in Oklahoma right now,
• 1:14
  your home state, you frequently come to Alabama,
• 1:18
  Florida, and Georgia. Can you share some of the reasons
• 1:22
  you're here? I come to the Southeast pretty often, and mostly
• 1:26
  because I do a lot of historical research and historical
• 1:31
  interpretations at historic sites. Work with a lot of archaeological
• 1:35
  sites as well, museums and universities. Very often
• 1:39
  people will see me roaming around places like
• 1:42
  Tuscaloosa or Donaldsonville in Georgia or Tallahassee,
• 1:46
  Florida, or Wetumpka, Alabama. So I'm all over the place in
• 1:50
  the Southeast. And in Donaldsonville, Georgia recently,
• 1:54
  what did you do there? My good friend Superintendent Mark Earnest
• 1:58
  invited me out, and so I stayed in Donaldsonville for a week
• 2:01
  and McFadden Nature Center. I was there back in November,
• 2:05
  and I had dressed out in my early 19th century
• 2:09
  Seminole clothing, and Superintendent Ernest asked me to make a Seminole outfit
• 2:14
  for them in the school. So I have one of my works over in the
• 2:17
  school right now, and I'm actually working on another piece, making a woman's
• 2:21
  outfit for the school. I love every aspect of history,
• 2:24
  if it's in film, if it's in print, or if it's
• 2:27
  in lectures or living history, showing people stuff that
• 2:31
  I've researched through museum collections and portraits.
• 2:35
  I recreate a lot of these pieces that haven't been made
• 2:38
  in 200, 300 years, and I'm actually going back further now
• 2:42
  into the pre-contact era just to show people that
• 2:46
  our material culture was constantly changing,
• 2:50
  but it's all deeply rooted in our own imagery because
• 2:54
  we put our own designs into it that goes back to traditional
• 2:58
  tattooing and shell carving and how that became beadwork.
• 3:01
  I make tools and weaponry, and there's such a
• 3:05
  broad spectrum of things that we can show the
• 3:09
  public. We had clay pottery, we had bison hides.
• 3:12
  On the website, the National Park Service Horseshoe Bend
• 3:15
  website, you are pictured and you have on a turban,
• 3:19
  not a war bonnet. I'm wearing a 19th century
• 3:23
  turban. Which is essentially just 2 handkerchiefs. I'm either
• 3:27
  wearing eagle feathers and ostrich plumes, I believe. That was
• 3:31
  very typical wear of Southeastern American Indian men.
• 3:35
  There was a point in time that the Southeastern people did have war
• 3:39
  bonnets. Now, they were a lot different than what you would see from the
• 3:43
  Buffalo Bills Wild West shows, but there is from another
• 3:47
  tribe in the Southeast. The Choctaws actually had one kind of similar to the Plains,
• 3:51
  a lot smaller, But we do know that because there's an image of Choctaws
• 3:55
  wearing those in the early 1700s. And there's one
• 3:59
  similar to that in the Bronle Museum in Paris. But the one
• 4:03
  I have on, these are trade items of the 19th century.
• 4:07
  Coming up on Saturday, the Creek War Symposium in
• 4:11
  Auburn at Pebble Hill. What will you be doing?
• 4:14
  At the university, I will be presenting the American
• 4:19
  Indian perspective on this whole conflict and trying to
• 4:23
  get people to understand our side of the story because most of the time
• 4:26
  we just hear about Jackson's victory and then him with his Tennessee militia,
• 4:30
  and then he had so many Cherokees and friendly Muscogees that were
• 4:34
  a part of this conflict. What I'm trying to do is try to get people
• 4:38
  to not only understand our portion of it, but there was much more
• 4:41
  that happened after this. So we think, you know, the Red Stick Wars ended
• 4:46
  with the Battle of Horseshoe Bend and the Treaty of Fort Jackson,
• 4:49
  but my understanding is The Red Stick
• 4:52
  War was essentially the predecessor to the Seminole Wars that
• 4:57
  had started in 1817 and going all the way up to 1858.
• 5:00
  We weren't fighting for our own status. We were fighting to protect
• 5:05
  our lands and families. And so trying to get people to understand that,
• 5:09
  because that's not going to be in your high school curriculum
• 5:13
  and the textbooks. From the way I see it, that's an injustice on history because
• 5:18
  If you want history to be told correctly, you have to tell every single side
• 5:22
  of the story, not just one that makes people feel comfortable. Speaking of
• 5:26
  the side of the story you're referring to, you are in a
• 5:30
  documentary film that Ohio has just released called Stomping
• 5:34
  Freedom. Is that what this is about, the Native American side
• 5:39
  of the story? So Stomping Freedom is actually a
• 5:42
  film that goes back to The Shawnees
• 5:46
  and Delawares, they are on the northern fringes of the Muskogean
• 5:50
  Confederacy. Funny enough, this story actually kind of ties
• 5:54
  into Muscogee history because one of our actors,
• 5:57
  his name is Tondy, but he plays Tecumseh.
• 6:00
  And we all know that Tecumseh actually came to Tugabutchee in
• 6:05
  Alabama, asked the Muscogees to join his fight.
• 6:08
  The film Stomping Freedom goes back to around the time of American
• 6:12
  independence and the war for revolution. And so that
• 6:16
  was set in 1780. That story actually transcends into
• 6:20
  what we're talking about here with the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. It's kind
• 6:24
  of cool to see this whole network and how it's all connected. I noticed
• 6:27
  that the Seminoles of Florida describe themselves as unconquered
• 6:32
  people, yet you are from Oklahoma. Can you
• 6:36
  tell us more about both? So the Oklahoma Seminoles, we have
• 6:40
  the majority of the population of Seminole people.
• 6:44
  Most of us were the ones that were removed as prisoners of war,
• 6:47
  not just the men, but the women and children and elders were put in chains
• 6:51
  and shackles and sent from the western coast
• 6:55
  of Florida and sent out to the Gulf of Mexico and then going into
• 6:59
  Louisiana and New Orleans and going out to Fort Smith and
• 7:03
  Little Rock and then arriving to Fort Gibson in Indian Territory.
• 7:07
  That was a 20-year process of removal.
• 7:10
  So, there was a much smaller population of Seminole Indians
• 7:14
  that were left in South Florida, and so they were able to
• 7:18
  evade that conflict and go into the Everglades where
• 7:21
  the U.S. Army couldn't traverse through there and capture
• 7:25
  these people. So, there was a small population that stayed there.
• 7:28
  Now you have 2 federally recognized tribes of Seminole
• 7:32
  peoples from 2 different land bases: the Seminole Tribe of
• 7:36
  Florida and the majority, which is the Seminole Nation
• 7:40
  of Oklahoma. You told me that you have been working
• 7:44
  in a documentary film about Jim
• 7:48
  Boy. Jim Boy was actually a Muscogee,
• 7:51
  but he was in the Seminole Wars. Unfortunately, he was on the wrong side
• 7:56
  of the Seminole Wars. But we were working on this film in Alabama
• 8:00
  2 weekends ago. We were going around and finding
• 8:04
  the townsite of Atasi and Thapthako and Thalafi.
• 8:08
  There was another film that Thapthako Travel Town had put
• 8:13
  together called Searching for Thapthako. And actually, it was the guy who
• 8:16
  put this together was actually my first director when I worked for Seminole
• 8:20
  Nation in the Historic Preservation Office. His name is David
• 8:23
  Frank. We did the first film, Searching for Thapthako.
• 8:27
  What they were trying to essentially do was show people this is
• 8:31
  where our Muscogee people were from. These were Muscogee
• 8:36
  town sites. So we did a part 2, which is a film about
• 8:40
  Jim Boyd, Tusenage Amothla. They were hoping to have
• 8:44
  a screening of this film in Tallahassee, Alabama in October.
• 8:47
  We will look forward to that. Can we visit again? This has
• 8:51
  been a fascinating look into a different
• 8:55
  side of America's 250th and the whole story
• 8:58
  of what was North America originally. Yeah,
• 9:01
  absolutely. I would love to further that conversation.
• 9:04
  Great. That was Jake Tiger of the Seminole Nation of
• 9:08
  Oklahoma and an authority on 18th
• 9:12
  and 19th century Seminole textiles. He will speak
• 9:16
  Saturday morning at the Creek Wars Symposium at Auburn
• 9:20
  University's Pebble Hill, along with other presenters about
• 9:24
  the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Jake's picture in traditional
• 9:29
  Seminole clothing is at the nps.gov/hobe
• 9:35
  website, which has information about the seminar.
• 9:39
  Thanks for joining us for In Focus, which is a podcast
• 9:43
  wherever you get your podcasts. Feel free to get in
• 9:46
  touch at infocus@troy.edu.
• 9:50
  I'm Carolyn Hutcheson, and this is listener-supported
• 9:54
  Troy Public Radio.