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Approximate territory of the Mayaimi tribe

The Mayaimis were a tribe of Native Americans who lived around Lake Okeechobee (the Belle Glade culture area) in Florida from the beginning of the Common Era until the 17th or 18th Century. The group took their name from the lake, which was then called Mayaimi. Mayaimi meant "big water" in the language of the Mayaimis, Calusas, and Tequestas. The current name of Okeechobee for the lake is derived from the Hitchiti word meaning "big water".^[1] There was no linguistic or cultural relationship with the Miamis of Ohio.

The Mayaimis left ceremonial and village mounds around Lake Okeechobee like those used by the Mound Builders. They also dug many canals to use as pathways for their canoes. The dugout canoes were a platform-type with shovel-shaped ends resembling those used in Central America and the West Indies, rather than the pointed-end canoes used by other peoples in the southeastern United States.

Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, who lived with the tribes of southern Florida for seventeen years in the 16th Century, said that the Mayaimis lived in many towns of thirty or forty inhabitants each, and that there many more places where only a few people lived. Lake Okeechobee provided most of the Mayaimis' food. They used fishing weirs and ate bass, eels, alligator tails, opossum, terrapins and snakes, and processed coontie for flour. In high water season they lived on their mounds and ate only fish.

At the beginning of the 18th century raiders from the Province of Carolina burned villages, and killed or captured members of all Florida tribes down to the southern end of the Florida peninsula. In 1743, Spanish missionaries sent to Biscayne Bay reported that a remnant of the Mayaimis, perhaps fewer than 100 people, still lived in the area of Lake Okeechobee. Any survivors are presumed to have been evacuated to Cuba when Spain turned Florida over to the British Empire in 1763.

1. ^ Simpson, J. Clarence (1956). in Mark F. Boyd: Florida Place-Names of Indian Derivation. Tallahassee, Florida: Florida Geological Survey. 

• Austin, Daniel W. 1997. The Glades Indians and the Plants they Used. Ethnobotany of an Extinct Culture. The Palmetto, 17(2):7 -11. [1] - accessed December 7, 2005.
• Douglas, Marjory Stoneman. 1947. The Everglades: River of Grass. Hurricane House Publishers, Inc.
• Sturtevant, William C. (1978) The Last of the South Florida Aborigines, in Jeral Milanich and Samuel Proctor, Eds. Tachagale: Essays on the Indians of Florida and Southeastern Georgia during the Historic Period, The University Presses of Florida. Gainesville, Florida ISBN 0-8130-0535-3

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