"Our Land: Indigenous Northeast Florida" Beaches Museum Exhibit

19 Locations | Curated by Indigenous Florida

Welcome to the digitized "Our Land: Indigenous Northeast Florida," a permanent exhibit featured at the Beaches Museum in Jacksonville, Florida. This tour takes you through the works featured at the exhibit, produced and curated by University of North Florida students in 2020. Learn about the longer Indigenous history of the northeast Florida area along with considering the work of history and archaeology students to reconstruct our understanding of the past.

More and more people, governments, institutions, and businesses are showing respect and awareness of Indigenous peoples today and their histories by creating land acknowledgments. These can be very detailed or quite short. Because this tour offers so much information about the Mocamas, we are…
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Jacksonville’s past includes a deep Indigenous history. Beginning more than 10,000 years ago, small family bands occasionally moved through the area. By 5000 years ago, Native populations started living permanently near the Atlantic coast. Contrary to the myth of an unchanging Native American past,…
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NORTHEAST FLORIDA 1000 YEARS AGO One thousand years ago, life in Northeast Florida was vastly different from today. Communities of fisher-hunter-gatherers made their homes along the banks of the St. Johns River and islands to the north. They built villages and buried their dead in cemeteries…
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WHO ARE THE MOCAMA? More changes were underway by the mid-fifteenth century, giving rise to the Indigenous societies encountered by European invaders. Though we may never know what the Natives of Northeast Florida called themselves, we do know that the seventeenth-century Spanish referred to them…
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TECHNOLOGY The Mocama used a variety of tools throughout their daily lives. Using handcrafted nets, seines, baskets, traps, and weirs, they captured large numbers of fish. Heavy whelk shells were used for cutting and pounding, and modified animal bones helped work hides and plant-based textiles.…
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The Mocama practiced matrilineal decent and traced kinship ties through their mother’s line. Husbands and wives were always members of different clans, meaning children belonged to the mother’s clan from the time of birth to death and beyond. Male and female holatas (or chiefs) were often members…
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A NEW WORLD? Beyond the horizon, the Mocama observed large ships closing in on their shores. Beginning in the early 1500s foreigners such as Juan Ponce de León and Hernando de Soto scoured Florida searching for Indigenous slaves and gold. Political struggles and organized violence in the form of…
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Two years passed before Saturiwa faced the French again. Disputes between different Timucua polities had worsened. Hoping that he could use the French to his advantage, Saturiwa encouraged the French to reaffirm their alliance with him at Ribault’s column, the site of their previous visit. Enticing…
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The Mocamas referred to their territory as heca utimile meaning “our land.” For twenty years the Mocamas waged an episodic war against the Spanish soldiers who sought to take over La Caroline (renamed San Mateo). Then, in 1587, the holata of Alimacani (Fort George Island) invited a Franciscan friar…
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Christened San Juan del Puerto by the Spanish in 1587, the Mocama town of Alimacani included the longest occupied Franciscan mission in Florida outside of St. Augustine (1587-1702). One of Alimacani’s most notable foreign residents was Fray Francisco Pareja. Between 1603 and 1627, this…
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Native people combined overland trails and navigable waterways to form a complex Indigenous transportation system. Dugout canoes of differing shapes and sizes served as the primary method of travel in Northeast Florida. They were made mostly of felled pine trees, hollowed by burning and chipping…
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Around 1600, the Spanish introduced a new labor system (repartimiento) among the Mocama. The colonial government now required holatas to provide laborers for farming, ferrying, public works construction, and military support. While the elites of Alimacani and other Timucuan towns held on to their…
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Holata Merenciana was not alone in trying to navigate and knit together this diverse world. Collectively, Mocama, Yamasee, and Guale women responded to the pressures of Spanish missionary activities and English-sponsored slave raiding by forming a new network together. Among other things, they…
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Beginning in the 1660s, the Mocamas faced an additional challenge. English-sponsored slave raiders from the north descended on the Spanish missions, capturing Mocamas and selling them to Virginia traders. The main slave raiders were Indigenous groups including Westos. The raids increased after the…
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In 1703, some Mocamas relocated from St. Augustine to present-day Queen’s Harbor Yacht and Country Club. Years earlier a small number of Mocamas had established a satellite settlement there called Pilijiriba—or “standing field” in Mocama. Now, Mocama and also Guale refugees erected two town sites…
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Although scholars are still working to understand what happened to all of the Mocamas, Guales, and Yamasees who lived in Northeast Florida, it is likely that at least some moved west and south to join people who would self-identify as Seminoles and Miccosukees in the twentieth-century. Called the…
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Students from the University of North Florida helped to design this exhibit for a course co-taught by Dr. Keith H. Ashley and Dr. Denise I. Bossy in the fall of 2019 called “Public Archaeology and History of Florida Indians”: Sarah Ali, Timothy Brown, Jessica Chew, Megan Colee, Courtney Dulaney,…
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