Seminoles resume gator wrestling

Seminole Hardrock contest first major gator wrestling in decadesFirst prize in the Seminole Okalee Indian Village Alligator Wrestling Competition, which runs through Sunday at the Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood, is $3,000. Ten men are wrestling. All are or once were professional gator wrestlers at Florida gator farms or Indian villages, which still allows for impressive professional variety: one is a retired clown, one a notary and one, a plumber who used to sleep with his girlfriend's pet caiman.

The contest is part of the first annual Seminole Okalee Indian Festival, an art, music and culture fair showcasing the replica of an authentic Seminole village tucked snugly behind an outdoor mall and the casino parking lot.Some history:For reasons having to do with the politics of alligator wrestling and the sue-happiness of the American public, this is the first major gator-wrestling competition held in 22 years. It is also the first ever open to non-Indians, which should not give you any funny ideas about Seminole customs or rituals, because gator wrestling is a traditional Seminole activity only insofar as there is an old Seminole tradition of making money off white tourists.

It dates back to the early 1900s, historian Patsy West writes in The Enduring Seminoles (University Press of Florida: 2008), her study of Seminole economic activity in the 20th century.

By the 1930s, she writes, half of all Miccosukee-speaking Seminoles lived at least part of the year in white-owned "villages" built in Ocala and Miami (most were on the Miami River, near what is now the intersection of NW 20th St. and NW 27th Ave.).

Seminole weddings, real and reenacted, drew thousands of paying spectators. Pan-Am paid Seminoles to paddle dugout canoes out to meet the new American Clipper seaplane off Dinner Key. White promoters shepherded them to ribbon cuttings and parades down Flagler Street; in West Palm Beach they marched, along with the Ku Klux Klan, in the Seminole Sun Dance Festival.

Almost all these villages featured alligator wrestling, and here the finer aspects of cultural tourism took a back seat to pure spectacle. It mattered little that gator-man battles were almost nonexistent in the wild, or that the stylized gator wrestling that developed in the villages had very little to do with actual gator hunting: it was enough to see two great "emblems" of the Everglades go at it in a pit for five minutes.Comment:  For more on the subject, see Seminole Success Story and Gator Wrestling Disappearing.