These are stories that mainstream news organizations used to routinely miss, if not ignore. But The Post’s reports on the April 21 meeting in Lake Worth of the American Indian Movement — to “awaken a sleeping history,” as the group’s leaders said — were welcome and informative. Readers received an opportunity to learn not only of AIM’s former militant history but its current efforts to promote cultural awareness, protect civil rights and eliminate stereotypes and acts of racism.
Moreover, staff writer Scott McCabe placed the meeting in the context of Florida’s obviously rich Indian history at a time of increasing awareness and sensitivity — evidenced by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’s recent urging of non-Indian schools to drop the use of such tribal images and team mascot names as Braves, Chiefs and Redskins. Mr. McCabe noted, for example, AIM’s conscious choice to have its first South Florida meeting “in the city named for an Indian killer,” Gen. William Jenkins Worth, “who mopped up the end of the Second Seminole War.” For even more perspective, Mr. McCabe included references to Mayan accomplishments that predated the Spaniards’ invasion of Guatemala in 1524 and cited the efforts of the Guatemalan-Maya Center of Lake Worth on behalf of Palm Beach County’s 30,000 Mayans regarding health, education and civil rights issues. In another deft touch, he included a quote from Romero Ramirez of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, active in the fight to increase wages for tomato workers, that the “True Americans are the indigenous people.”
This reference to another of the staff’s fine stories about Florida’s ever-changing demographics is prompted, however, by a reader who challenged the statement: “Anthropologists estimate that a half-million (Indians) inhabited Florida when the Europeans first arrived in the early 1500s.” Julian Light of Jupiter called to say there were “only 500,000 in all of North America at the time of Columbus. And by not quoting the source but saying ‘some’ anthropologists, the article was misleading. The population just wasn’t there.”
Mr. McCabe acknowledges that he should have said “as many as” a half-million, as the paper had reported previously citing a source whom many consider to be the state’s leading anthropologist, Jerald Milanich of the University of Florida. Dr. Milanich puts the number of Indians in the state at 350,000 at the time of contact with Europeans around 1513.
Another scholar agreeing that 500,000 “was kind of high” is the author of Prehistoric Peoples of South Florida and my retired editorial board colleague, William E. McGoun. “The reader is probably closer to the consensus,” he said, adding that 500,000 for the U.S. at the time of contact is a more accepted figure.
The varying estimates, however, are just that, Mr. McGoun reminded. “European diseases often reached the Indians before the Europeans did,” he said, “and by the time the Europeans reached an Indian group the group had already been decimated. All this stuff is guesswork for that reason.”
Meanwhile, Mr. McCabe said, “It’s good to see that somebody’s reading these stories.” Good, too, that we get the chance to read them.
It was curious to find on Monday that 11 readers had left messages Saturday saying that the photograph that ran on the front page “teasing” to the obituary article that day was not Arlene Francis — actress and fixture on the What’s My Line? TV show for 25 years, who died last Thursday at age 93. Leading the speculation, the first caller, Evelyn Citrin of Century Village, said the photo actually was that of Stagecoach and Key Largo movie star Claire Trevor, who died last year at age 90.
Editors ran a correction — with a correct photograph of Miss Francis — the next day, noting that The Associated Press had transmitted the incorrect one. Even more curious, however, is that as of this writing, the AP still is less certain than Ms. Citrin of the identity of the person in the other one — which I hope to report later.
