My name is Michael Frank. That's my English name. And I myself, I was born three miles
south of here, one of the islands. It's called Janchehid, means high island. And like I said,
along the canal, when the water, all the hammocks under water, that's only dry ground. That's
how we started those two camps. Otherwise, we'll be, we'll be living in water. That's why the
aggregates is dying.
Here, I got to the top of my house and look north. On this side, water comes in the tree. It was
like a lake. There's mercy, mercy, have mercy. What are you doing to my home, to my land?
I've heard stories about how the skies used to team with millions of birds. And we've had so many
pressures against that. First, it was bird hunting for their plumes. And then it became more about
the way that we manipulated the environment. We diked and dredged and channelized the
Everglades in order to allow people to live here. But what that did was it was slowly killing the
Everglades.
The destruction of the Everglades not affected not just the Mikosuki tribe, but pretty much
anybody who relied on the Everglades for their livelihood. It starts out in 1928 when a hurricane
ripped through the Everglades and killed 2,000 people. It was the second worst in terms of human
life, natural disaster in our nation's history. And so the Corps of Engineers got busy taming
the Everglades saying, we never want this to happen again. We don't want it to kill people.
And they set about putting the Everglades into a straight jacket, converting the river of grass
into a series of lakes and dams so that it didn't function at all like it used to.
And that ecological collapse affected not just the Mikosukis, but fishermen from traditional
gladesmen. Anybody who lived in the Everglades, relied on the Everglades for their livelihood,
was totally unprepared for the changes that happened in a very short order. In about 15 years,
this was changed pretty dramatically. Back when I was little, when I was born in 1957,
I drunk the water, ate the birds. Me and my brothers, we used to go hunting, get our spear,
bow and arrow, we would go hunting. And I think there's a little pond over here. When the rest of
the water, there's no more water. It's dry. The Everglades, it's dead. What you see here is a skeleton.
You don't see no birds. You don't see no birds flying, migrating into the Everglades.
Because I don't know. The water's full of mercury. I can't drink the water.
That what the government wanted to do then, wanted to destroy my home, wanted to get me
out of here, couldn't survive. They're doing it now. They have done destroyed my home.
The Everglades is astonishingly sensitive to what we would consider, what you might consider,
trace amounts of nutrients and pollution. Here have astonishing and seriously detrimental effects.
The Mikosuke tribe has been at the forefront of making sure that all water put in the Everglades
is clean. When people ask what they can do, I think there's a number of things. There is power
in numbers. There is power in our democratic process. You do have a voice. You do have a
choice every single day with how you live your life. You can make a choice to become closer
with the land around you, the world around you, the air you breathe, or not. It's up to you.
You can also make a choice to relate to other people around you and find people of like mind
and get together as one and make your voice heard. That is how things change. In fact,
it's the only way things can change.
