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Warriors Without War

Warriors Without War

Seminole Leadership in the Late Twentieth Century

by Patricia Riles Wickman

424 Pages, 6.12 x 9.25 x 1.40 in, 9

Hardcover
9780817317317
Published: August 2012

$49.95

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eBook
9780817385392
Published: April 2011

$49.95

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Description
Contents
Authors

Warriors Without War takes readers beneath the placid waters of the Seminole’s public image and into the fascinating depths of Seminole society and politics.

For the entire last quarter of the twentieth century, the Seminole Tribe of Florida, a federally recognized American Indian Tribe, struggled as it transitioned from a tiny group of warriors into one of the best-known tribes on the world’s economic stage through their gaming enterprises.

Caught between a desperate desire for continued cultural survival and the mounting pressures of the non-Indian world—especially, the increasing requirements of the United States government— the Seminoles took a warriorlike approach to financial risk management. Their leader was the sometimes charming, sometimes crass and explosive, always warriorlike James Billie, who twice led the tribe in fights with the State of Florida that led all the way to the US Supreme Court.

Patricia Riles Wickman, who lived and worked for fifteen years with the Seminole people, chronicles the near-meteoric rise of the tribe and its leader to the pinnacle of international fame, and Billie’s ultimate fall after twenty-four years in power. Based partly on her own personal experiences working with the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Wickman has produced an in-depth study of the rise of one of the largest Indian gaming operations in the United States that reads almost like a Capote nonfiction novel.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

A Note on Language

1. An Alternate Universe

2. Coming of Age in the '70s

3. James "E." Billie: The Man Who Would Be King

4. Hitting the Big Time

5. Dollars and Drugs

6. Home, Home on the Res

7. One Too Many Alligators

8. Money Matters (More and More)

9. The Beginning of the End

10. Gaming: The Next Chapter

11. The Fourth Seminole War

12. La Ley del Deseo

13. A Change, of Course?

14. Coda

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Patricia Riles Wickman is the director of Wickman Historical Services, Hollywood, Florida, and former director of the Department of Anthropology & Genealogy for the Seminole Tribe of Florida, as well as author of Osceola’s Legacy and The Tree that Bends: Discourse, Power, and the Survival of the Maskoki People.

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Warriors Without War

Seminole Leadership in the Late Twentieth Century

Warriors Without War

Seminole Leadership in the Late Twentieth Century

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