Content area
Full Text
The most powerful American Indian leader of the past century is a manual laborer building palmetto-thatchled chickees in the unforgiving beat and thunderstorms of South Florida.
You might spot Chief Jim Billie anywhere from Naples to Dania today - a short, stocky man of 60, sweating through a colorful patchwork shirt and barking commands to a ragtag group of workmen. He's strong as an ox, bowlegged, and the ring, finger from his right hand - lost in a long-ago battle with an alligator - floats in a little jar he keeps in a pocket. Perched hight ato a peeled-cypress shut frame, he furiously nails fronds tossed up to him, deftly interweaving the leaves to prevent leaking and wind damage, just as he was taught by his uncles and elders in the Seminole trible.
"A lot of people try, but only a Seminole Indian can build chickees correctly," he yells down, in a voice deep and husky. Cocksure, he rears back, schwarzeneggers his chest and gorilla-pounds his pecs with both fists. "And the Chief's chickees are best of them all!"
For 22 years, Jim Billie served as chairman of the Seminole Tribe of Floirida's governing council, the longest tenure of any elected leader in the Western Hemisphere, execpt for Castro. Though he's no longer leader of the 2,600-member tribe, every one still calls him Chief. He lives in Moore Haven, near Lake Okeechobee, with his longtime girlfriend. Maria, and their two young children. Six other children, an destranged wife and an ex-wife live on Indian lands within an hour's drive. The house he built with his own hands at his Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation camp sits vacant, vandalized and condemned.
Once an avid pilot who used planes the way the rest of us use automobiles, Billie has not flown a helicopter or airplane since he was booted off the council and banned from the Big Cypress hangar more than three years ago. Still popular among his people - more than 400 signed a petition for his return after his ouster - he sees very few other Indians, except at funerals where his heartfelt eulogies are almost tradition. Secret sources within the tribe risk their personal standing by informing him of tribal news. The police...