What is the difference between the Seminoles and the Creeks?
The answer to this question is complex and contained in the last 400 years of their history. As you read other questions and answers in this section, the answer will become clearer to you. Suffice it to say here, however, that the “Seminoles,” “Creeks,” and “Mikisúki” (the modern Tribe spells the word “Miccosukee”) are all descendants of the Maskókî-speaking peoples (possibly 400,000 of them) who lived in towns and villages across what are now the states of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and parts of South Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi, when the first Europeans arrived in 1510. The Choctaws and Chickasaws are descendants of these peoples also. The Spaniards, trying to get the Indians to live in mission towns and convert to Roman Catholicism, began as early as the 1630s to call many of them cimarrones or runaways, because they fled the missions rather than give up their own beliefs. These Florida Indians heard this word as “shiminolie” and called themselves yat’siminoli, which they t
