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Florida’s Miccosukee Tribe is seeking to purchase important Tribal lands to create a corridor for wildlife conservation as part of a partnership agreement with the Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation.
The corridor will connect 18 million acres of contiguous privately owned and state wilderness that are the habitat of endangered species like Florida panthers and Key deer, reported The Guardian.
“The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida have stewarded the lands and waters of Florida since time immemorial. The entirety of this land, and her flora and fauna, have been shaped by successive generations of our people. Our collective Indigenous Knowledge offers a unique perspective informed by this deep and historic relationship to the lands and waters of the National Wildlife Refuge System that lie within our traditional lands,” said Talbert Cypress, chair of the Miccosukee Tribe, in a press release from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).
During the Seminole Wars two centuries ago, Tribal members sought to protect the Everglades and avoid banishment by government forces to Indian territories in what is now Oklahoma.
In January, the Miccosukee Tribe entered into an agreement with FWS for co-stewardship of national wildlife refuges in South Florida. The agreement means Miccosukee citizens can once again hunt, fish, gather culturally significant and medicinal plants and conduct ceremonies in the refuges adjacent to traditional Miccosukee lands and within the Greater Everglades.
In the wake of the Trump administration’s slashing of federal funds for conservation projects, the Miccosukee Tribe has stepped in to fulfill what it feels is a “moral obligation” to protect their sacred lands and the plants and animals found there.
“We have a constitutional duty to conserve our traditional homelands, the lands and waters which protected and fed our tribe since time immemorial,” Cypress said, as The Guardian reported. “[But] we’ve seen some sort of hesitancy a lot of times to commit to projects because of the erratic nature of how the government is deciding to spend their money or allocate money.”
The agreement was announced during a corridor stakeholders’ summit last week in Orlando. It came as a Native American Fish and Wildlife Society (NAFWS) study found that 60 percent of Tribes recognized by the federal government have lost over $56 million in federal funding since President Donald Trump took office for his second term.
Though Tribes have their own independent governments, the U.S. has legal trust responsibilities to protect rights set out in Tribal treaties regarding lands, assets and resources, a press release from The Wildlife Society (TWS) said.
“These services are part of what we receive in lieu of all of the years of what we gave up — our land, our resources and sometimes, unfortunately, our culture and language,” said Executive Director of NWFWS Julie Thorstenson in the TWS press release. “These are not things that are, in our mind, something that is really negotiable.”
A Florida panther in a tree in Naples, Collier County. Tim Donovan / Florida Fish and Wildlife
As government funding has disappeared and federal land stewardship agreements face an uncertain future due to the Trump administration’s attacks on the National Park Service, Cypress said Tribal leaders had reassessed their work with other partners.
“For good reason, my predecessors had more of a standoffish approach. They went through a lot of the areas where they did deal with conservation groups, federal agencies, state agencies, pretty much not including them in conversations, or going back on their word. They just had a very different approach to this sort of thing,” Cyprus explained, as reported by The Guardian. “My administration has taken more of a collaborative approach. We’re engaging with different organizations not just to build relationships, but fix relationships that may have gone sour in the past, or were just non-existent.”
Lawmakers established the Florida Wildlife Corridor in 2021 and have preserved approximately 10 million acres thus far, with an additional eight million considered “opportunity areas” that need protection. Environmental groups have warned that there is still the potential for large areas to be lost to development.
The Florida legislature has been considering corridor funding cuts to balance state spending, and has encouraged commercial partnerships and investment.
The Tribe has already established a direct or collaborative stewardship with nearly three million acres in Biscayne and Everglades National Parks, as well as Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. Cypress said the Tribe was working on identifying and prioritizing lands inside the corridor that had historical significance.
“Financially, the tribe will invest some money, but we’ll also be instrumental in finding investors, partners interested in the same thing, which is to conserve as much of our natural habitat as possible while making room for growth and development,” Cypress said. “We’ve shown we can do it in a sustainable way, and our voice can help in shaping the future of Florida as far as development goes because once a lot of the land gets developed we’re not going to get it back. We need to do it in a way where we benefit not just ourselves in the present, but for generations in the future as well.”
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