When Spanish conquistadors arrived in the land they would name La Florida, they found a nation of people already there, a nation of people whose lives and customs they did not understand. The armed European businessmen called the natives "Timucua" and soon commenced reeducating them about the nature of ownership, conquest, and history. The centuries churned, and new laws of the land replaced the Timucua way-a way nearly forgotten forever. But all is not lost. Three hundred years after the death of the last known Timucua, the people rise again, not to defend themselves but to defend the land they walk upon, the land they desire to save for the future. The Macbeths, the new novel by Bruce M. Deterding, brings us into the conflict between big-money, big-power Florida developers and the small but thriving Timucua nation and their claim to save the world. Spearheading the claim are Ty and Tina Macbeth, strong, willful, intelligent siblings who trace their roots back twelve thousand years and draw their power from the land they love. Beyond the courtrooms, legislative chambers, and front-page spreads, however, the Macbeths must face the inexorable dreadnaught of greed, fear, and modern history. Sometimes violent, sometimes funny, and sometimes sad, The Macbeths is a vivid, fascinating, and ultimately hopeful tale of a people, though once thought lost, who have become a part of us all.
The Macbeths
By MacbethiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Macbeth
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4620-0867-4 Chapter One
The Timucua Resistance is futile. We will assimilate you. The Borg, Star Trek: The Next Generation
They were the native tribe of prehistoric North Central Florida. When Europeans arrived in Florida, sweeping out prehistory and towing history in their wake, the natives had been here for at least twelve thousand years. To the armed European businessmen, the natives' prior claims seemed ill-established. Consequently, when the Spanish failed to secure written documentation of ownership from the illiterate residents, European custom allowed them to begin an inventory of everything within sight.
As one consequence of that inventorying, the native tribe became the Timucua, for cataloguing purposes. No one knows what the people called themselves. The name "Timucua" is rumored to have been derived from the advice of an Atlantic coast Timucuan who, feeling some animosity toward his inland kin, pointed an armed Spanish delegation westward, indicating the land of "timucua." Apart from this piece of folklore and an oblique historical reference, we do know that the sound made in pronouncing "timucua" closely resembles the native word for "enemy." It's not what they would have called themselves, obviously, but they are apparently extinct and unable to correct the misnomer.
The Spanish wielded metal weapons, disease, and Catholicism—not necessarily in that order—to extinguish the natives. Modern sensibilities see no logic in extinguishing such a naturally noble people; the new world offered bountiful resources for all, and the natives historically took from those resources only sparingly and with respect. The Spanish saw the Timucuan as primitive and not quite human. Certainly, by modern standards, social interaction between native tribes, largely trade by war, seems primitive, but it's important to remember that this was also the standard European method for international trade.
Other than that, the two cultures, European and Native American, had little in common. The goals of war for the Spanish, French, and English were very different from the Native American goals in the same endeavor. The Europeans tended to view war's purpose as land conquest and domination. Whereas, for the natives, war was just an available means of acquiring domestic accoutrements like pots, nice clothes, livestock, and mates—the earth itself was not something that could be owned by men.
The fact that the two cultures were so tremendously different was the cause of much irritation and confusion from the outset, mostly for the Europeans. For instance, while the Timucuan people had a clear division of labor along gender lines (there was women's work, and there was men's work—a concept that any Spaniard could appreciate), a Timucuan could essentially opt for a different gender role. A female who chose the path of a warrior was no longer treated as a female but as a male. She would sit at council meetings, smoke the local tobacco, and go to war and the hunt. It was not unusual for a female to be cacique or chieftain, if her family was connected. On the other hand, a male who chose the path of caring for children, doing fieldwork, and making pots and baskets would not participate in the council or be called on to go to war. When a Timucuan opted out of a gender role, he didn't necessarily become homosexual (although homosexuality was not unheard of). The choice of sexuality was a separate and unrelated choice to which no social stigma seems to have been attached. Employments as cacique, shaman, midwife, or herbalist were career options that knew no gender or sexual parameters and were highly respected offices on par with any tribal leader.
Additionally, the Timucua family line descended matrilineally. If a man married the cacique's daughter, he married into the cacique's family but not his wife's clan, from which power descended. Consequently, the cacique typically spent a lot more time with his eldest nephew than with any of his sons.
It is not surprising that the Spanish had a particularly difficult time with this concept, and early attempts at securing European-style political marriages were doomed to failure. Timucuan nobles mostly came from the Deer clan and yet routinely married outside that clan. This meant any progeny of such a union would not be of the royal bloodline.
The basic difference in perspective was displayed from first contact. In those first formal meetings, the Spanish were insulted that the natives sent so many women to meet with them, and they had difficulty discerning which of the men were in charge. The Timucua were perplexed and a little suspicious when they saw only men in the Spanish delegation; to them, it looked more like a war party than a peaceful delegation.
The Spanish solution to these cultural differences was to send in the Franciscans to smooth things over. Those ambitious monks strove to correct all the native practices and traditions, believing that, when there were no more heathens, there would be no more heathen problems. Again, modern sensibilities might reason that extinguishing a people's language, traditions, and practices would ultimately extinguish them as a people. This would have been a rather simplistic observation to the Franciscans, perhaps even a goal—certainly not a limiting consideration.
Another factor of the disparity between the cultures was in height and appearance. The average Spanish soldier or priest was between five feet two and five feet four, stumpy, and hairy. The average Timucuan is believed to have been around six feet tall, muscular, and well-formed. The French artist Jacques le Moyne described them as an exceptionally handsome people, an observation he would not have made about the Spanish. The Timucuan people dressed scantily, displaying hairless bodies decorated in colorful tattoos. Some friction between the groups would seem obvious and inevitable.
In all, it took about two hundred years—from the mid-fourteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century—for the Spanish to complete the extermination of the Timucuan people. When the Spanish left Florida, harried by the advance of the British and French forces into northern Florida, they took the few remaining Timucuan with them to Cuba as slaves. It was in Havana that the last known Timucuan, the half-Spanish Juan Alonso Cabale, died in 1767.
Chapter Two
Muqbey
Muqbey ran his thumb through a familiar valley on the blade's flat surface, feeling the momentary comfort of its smoothness. The blade was old; the father of his mother had made it and given it first use. The blade had been larger then and chipped as an axe for battle. For Muqbey, it had served as a skinning knife until that day.
His attention crept back to the strangers. They do not fight like men, he thought. They apply themselves to war in the same way other men toil in the fields: patiently, with resolve, and without passion, exhibiting cold-blooded precision rather than abandonment. They wield metal weapons and cut down the Timucua as they cut down the ancient ones in great numbers, leaving the earth unprotected. They violate all laws of nature and persist in robbery, deception, and affronts to the ancient ones. Nothing affects their direction or attitude.
Muqbey looked at the broken chert blade he clutched in his hand before angrily pitching it into the dark...
