A three-alarm fire tore through parts of the Miccosukee Reservation in the Florida Everglades on Sunday night, destroying family homes, a community center where residents learned sewing and weaving, and a traditional Chickee structure, as well as troves of art and artifacts.
The blaze broke out around 8:40pm on July 27 at the Miccosukee Tiger Camp along the Tamiami Trail. The fire is believed to have been accidental, the Miccosukee Police Department said, but an investigation is still ongoing. No casualties were reported.
Khadijah Cypress, a patchwork artist who led the now-destroyed Creativity Center, lives next door to the camp and said she first saw the flames engulfing resident Mary Jane Cantu’s home on the property.
“I was banging on Mary Jane’s door, yelling out, ‘There’s a fire!’” Cypress told Hyperallergic. As they waited for fire trucks to arrive, her father and other community members rushed to the scene, attempting to put out the blaze. But then Cypress heard the explosions of the propane tanks.
“In my heart, I knew everything was gone at the first pop of that propane tank,” she recounted.
Cypress said she felt fortunate that the fire did not reach her home and emphasized the urgency of supporting displaced families by donating to the Tiger Camp Relief Fund. In the coming days, Cypress hopes to meet with Tribal members and start a donation pool for the Creativity Center, which was entirely consumed by the blaze, turning everything from beloved designs to decades-old fabrics into ashes.
“I gave seven years of my life to that center. It felt like it was my calling,” Cypress said. “My late grandfather had always told me, ‘Us, as Miccosukees, we have to learn as much as we can about ourselves. Because if you don’t pick up on anything, we’ll lose everything.’”
The project began with her sisters learning how to sew out of a small shed behind their mother’s property. Three sewing machines grew to eight and then 12 as more and more girls came to bead, stitch dolls, weave baskets, and create taweekaache patchwork in the Miccosukee and Seminole traditions. Eventually, Cypress’s grandfather, then the Tribe’s assistant councilman, helped them establish a permanent home in an unused section of the Tiger Camp building. Community members donated any supplies they could get their hands on to help maintain the sewing stations.
“Most people don’t have a lot, but they said, ‘Don’t worry, I got you,’” Cypress recalled. “Now the last piece of showing how much they care is gone. That’s what hurts me the most.”
The fire has left Tribal members heartbroken as they mourn the loss of a multigenerational cultural anchor. Tiger Camp dates back to the times of Buffalo Tiger, the Tribe’s first elected chairman who played a key role in its fight for federal recognition in the 1950s, and the site has a long history as a gathering hub for organizing, according to Betty Osceola, a Tribal member, activist, and educator.
The Miccosukee Tribe recently made headlines for its opposition to the nearby immigrant detention center notoriously dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and other Republican lawmakers. Advocates say the prison, which lies just hundreds of feet away from Tribal villages, will be detrimental to the Big Cypress ecosystem and to Miccosukee rituals and ways of life. The Tiger Camp fire comes at an already tenuous moment for the Tribe, which is once again faced with threats to its ecosystem decades after helping lead protests against the construction of an airstrip on what is now the Alligator Alcatraz site in the 1970s.
“The emotional and economic impact will be felt for some time, but the cultural significance that the Tiger Camp has on the history of our Community cannot be understated,” Chairman Talbert Cypress said in a statement shared with Hyperallergic.
“We as a Community have celebrated so many milestones and holidays at the Tiger Camp and have all grown up with fond memories of the original Miccosukee Indian Village,” Chairman Cypress continued, adding that the extent of the damage is still being assessed and requesting privacy for the Tiger family.
