The first known people to inhabit the rough terrain of The Florida Everglades were what we now call American Indians, or previously known as just Indians by the white settlers who first encountered them. Really, anyone who lives in the Everglades is one of the Glades People, but the only groups of humans ever to have been able to adapt the harsh conditions were various tribes of Native Americans, who came here thousands of years ago across the Bering Sea

and down through North American, over to the Florida Peninsula. Anthropologists have found pottery from kitchen middens as old as 900 A.D. Middens from around 1200 A.D. begin to reveal knives made from shark teeth. This was an improvement over the conch shell tools they’d formerly used. With the advent of shark-tooth knives, the Glades People were able to craft many new items for daily living. With their new knives, they could:

• carve animal bones into hairpins, to make their distinctive pony tail hairdos for men
• carve bones into pendants, which are unique to the Everglades people.

How to Live in the Everglades

Over the hundreds of years that have been documented in the social history of The Everglades, no group of white settlers has been able to adapt and survive in this region without drastically altering the terrain, to the detriment of the land. Tribes of American Indians such as Calusa, Mikasuki, Tekestas, and the Mayaimis, were able to adapt and survive where no other people could even visit, much less inhabit.

One major factor of life in the Everglades was (and still is) mosquitos. Everglades have large masses of water that don’t move, which as we all know is perfect breeding environment for mosqitos. Early on, Glades people learned that building smudge fires kept the mosqitos at bay, as well as other insects of the Everglades: sand flies.

The made tools with what they found in the area, mostly at first conch shells, as mentioned above. As you can imagine, digging or cutting anything with a conch shell, no matter how matter how hard you worked to sharpen the edge, was inferior to the later development of using shark teeth as blades. New tools opened a whole new world of possibilities for the Native American people of the Glades, and the shark tooth became an important cultural tool as well as a symbol of their ingenuity.

The Glades people developed their culture and invented their tools and adornments, their solutions to daily life in the Everglades, and slowly became different from the American Indians who settled more north, along the rivers of Florida, the rivers which fed into Okeechobee and which flowed out from it. Lake Kissimmee would be one area where River people developed differently from Glades people. The different types of tribes did trade with each other, however, as they developed canoe routes amongst the saw grasss. The Glades people used their shark tooth knives to dig great canoes from the big cypress trees that grew in the swamps above the everglades area.

As the different tribes in southern Florida dug in and developed their cultures through the decades, and as they established trading routes, they learned from each other, carrying cultural information along trade routes. One thing the Glades people learned from the river people was new ways of dealing with the dead.