“Through Death’s Wilderness”: Malaria, Seminole Environmental Knowledge, and the Florida Wars of Removal

Abstract

For more than fifty years the United States waged wars of removal in Florida against the Seminole Indians. This article unpacks how the Seminoles deployed their knowledge about Florida’s environment and, crucially, an understanding of American fears about Florida’s environment to resist removal and the loss of territory. Taking Seminole movement, home construction, and language and placing it in dialogue with sources from soldiers and settlers involved in the wars, this article reveals a new facet of Indigenous resistance to colonial violence, rooted in relationships with the natural world. Finally, this essay recasts disease in the history of Native North America as potentially liberatory, as different lifeways exposed different populations to mosquitoes and their diseases.