Ais people

For other uses of the word, or the acronym, see AIS.

At the time of First Contact.

Approximate territory of the Ais tribe in the late 17th Century

The Ais, or Ays were a tribe of Native Americans who inhabited the Atlantic Coast of Florida. They ranged from present day Cape Canaveral to the St. Lucie Inlet^[1], in the present day counties of Brevard^[1], Indian River, St. Lucie and northernmost Martin. They lived in villages and towns along the shores of the great lagoon called Rio de Ais by the Spanish, and now called the Indian River. The name Ais is derived from a great Indian Cacique (Chief).^[2]

Little is known of the origins of the Ais, or of the affinities of their language. The Ais language has been tentatively assigned by some authors to the Muskogean language family , and by others to the Arawakan language family.

Observations on the appearance, diet and customs of the Ais at the end of the 17th Century are found in Jonathan Dickinson's Journal. Dickinson and his party were shipwrecked, and spent several weeks among the Ais in 1696. By Dickinson's account, the chief of the town of Jece, near present day Vero Beach, was paramount to all of the coastal towns from the Jaega town of Jobe (at Jupiter Inlet) in the south to approximately Cape Canaveral in the north (that is, the length of the River of Ais).^[3]

The Ais had considerable contact with Europeans by this time. The Spanish became acquainted with the Ais in middle of the 16th century. In 1566 Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, founder of St. Augustine, Florida, established a fort and mission at an Ais town, which the Spanish called Santa Lucía.^[4] After the Ais attacked the fort, killing 23 of the Spanish soldiers, the fort and mission were abandoned.^[5] Spain had eventually established some control over the coast, with the Ais regarding the Spanish as friends (comerradoes) and non-Spanish Europeans as enemies. A number of Ais men knew a little Spanish, and a patrol of Spanish soldiers from St. Augustine arrived in Jece while the Dickinson party was there. There was one man in Jece who had been taken away on an English ship to work as a diver on a wreck east of Cuba. He got away when the ship put in for water in Cuba, and had made his way back to his home via Havana and St. Augustine.

Pedro's Bluff

In December of 1571, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés was sailing from Florida to Havana with two frigates when, as he tells it, "I was wrecked at Cape Canaveral because of a storm which came upon me, and the other boat was lost fifteen leagues further on in the Bahama Channel, in a river they call the Ais, because the cacique is so called. I, by a miracle reached the fort of St. Augustine with seventeen persons I was taking with me. Three times the Indians gave the order to attack me, and the way I escaped them was by ingenuity and arousing fear in them, telling them that behind me many Spaniards were coming who would slay them if they found them." ^[6]

Province of Ais

In the year of 1601 the Spanish King commissioned a map of Florida indicating his desires for a fort to be built in Miami. On the map he indicated the land we know as Brevard county as the Province of Ais, as it was typical in those days to designate a region of specific tribal domination and generally took its name from the ruling cacique. ^[6]

Period of Friendship

In 1605, the Governor, Pedro de Ibarra sent a soldier by the name of Alvaro_Mexia on a diplomatic mission to the Ais Indian Nation. The mission was a success, not only did they firm up an agreement for receiving shipwrecked sailors for a ransom to the Ais but a map of the Indian River area was made.^[7] The Ais had many European artifacts from ship wrecks. As there was a group from another English shipwreck in Jece when the Dickinson party reached the town, it may be presumed that European and African survivors of shipwrecks were fairly common along the coast. There was also some trade with St. Augustine. Dickinson reports that one man of Jece had approximately five pounds of ambergris, and that he "boasted that when he went for Augustine with that, he would purchase of the Spaniards a looking-glass, an axe, a knife or two, and three or four mannocoes (which is about five or six pounds) of tobacco."^[8]

The Ais did not survive long after Dickinson's sojourn with them. Shortly after 1700 settlers in the Province of Carolina and their Indian allies started raiding the Ais, killing them and carrying captives to Charles Town to be sold as slaves. In 1743 the Spanish established a short-lived mission on Biscayne Bay (in the area of present-day Miami). The priests assigned to that mission reported the presence of people they called "Santa Luces", perhaps a name for the Ais derived from "Santa Lucia", somewhere to the north of Biscayne Bay.^[9] The Ais were gone from the area by 1760.

Diet

Dickinson stated that the Ais "neither sow nor plant any manner of thing whatsoever",^[10] but fished and gathered palmetto, cocoplum and seagrape berries. Dickinson described the fishing technique of the neighboring Jaega people of Jobe thus:

[T]he Casseekey [of Jobe] ... sent his son with his striking staff to the inlet to strike fish for us; which was performed with great dexterity; for some of us walked down with him, and though we looked very earnestly when he threw his staff from him could not see a fish at which time he saw it, and brought it onshore on the end of his staff. Sometimes he would run swiftly pursuing a fish, and seldom missed when he darted at him. In two hours time he got as many fish as would serve twenty men[.]^[11]

The Ais boiled their fish, and ate them from 'platters' of palmetto leaf:

About noon was some fish brought us on small palmetto leaves, being boiled with scales, head and gills, and nothing taken from then but the gut[.]^[12]

Dickinson also recorded a gift of clams to his wife:

This day the Cassekey [of Jece] ... made presents to some of us, especially to my wife; he gave her a parcel of shellfish, which are known by the name of clams; one or two he roasted and gave her, showing that she must serve the rest so, and eat them.^[13]

The Ais dried some of the berries they gathered for future use:

This week we observed that great baskets of dried berries were brought in from divers towns and delivered to the king or Young Caseekey [of Jece.]^[14]

Dickinson does not say anything about the Ais hunting, but they did use deer skins, and the neighboring Jaega people of Jobe gave the Dickinson party a hog they had killed.^[15]

Clothing

The Ais men wore a "loincloth" of woven palm leaves. Dickinson describes this as:

being a piece of platwork of straws wrought of divers colors and of a triangular figure, with a belt of four fingers broad of the same wrought together, which goeth about the waist and the angle of the other having a thing to it, coming between the legs, and strings to the end of the belt; all three meeting together are fastened behind by a horsetail, or a bunch of silkgrass exactly resembling it, of a flaxen color, this being all of the apparel or covering that the men wear.^[16]

He has little to say on how the women dressed, recording only that his wife and female slaves were given "raw deer skins" with which to cover themselves after their European clothing had been taken away.^[17] Women of the Tequesta tribe, to the south of the Ais, were reported to wear "shawls" made of woven palm leaves, and "skirts” made from draped fibers from the Spanish dagger (Yucca), similar to the "grass" skirts of Hawai'i.

Housing

Dickinson states that the town of Jece "stood about half a mile from the seashore within the land on the sound, being surrounded with a swamp, in which grew white mangrove trees, which hid the town from the sea."^[18]

Dickinson describes the Cacique's house in Santa Lucea as "about forty foot long and twenty-five foot wide, covered with palmetto leaves both top and sides. There was a range of cabins, or a barbecue on one side and two ends. At the entering on one side of the house a passage was made of benches on each side leading to the cabins."^[19]

Subject and related tribes

The Mayaca, who lived along the upper St. Johns River south of Lake George, appear to have spoken a language related to that of the Ais. The Surruque to the north and the Jaega to the south were politically subordinate to the Ais.

Ais Island naming

At the time of this writing there is a proposal put forward to the USGS to name the barrier island of Brevard , Ais Island in honor of the Ais Indians that lived there. Many consider this a more historically accurate name than the alternative, Ponce de Leon Island. The Ais Island naming proposal has much public support including organizations such as the AIA.

Notes

References

• Let us alone. (1983). William R. Ervin. ISBN 0-915447-00-2
• Melbourne and Eau Gallie. (2002). Karen Raley and Ann Raley Flotte. Arcadia Publishing.
• Andrews, Charles Mclean and Andrews, Evangeline Walker (1945). Jonathan Dickinson's Journal or, God's Protecting Providence. Being the Narrative of a Journey from Port Royal in Jamaica to Philadelphia between August 23, 1696 to April 1, 1697. Yale University Press. Reprinted (1981) Florida Classics Library.
• Austin, Daniel W. (1997). "The Glades Indians and the Plants They Used: Ethnobotany of an Extinct Culture." The Palmetto, 17(2):7 -11. (14 September, 2002). Accessed 27 November 2005
• Bullen, Adelaide K. (1965). Chapter XXIV Florida Indians of Past and Present, in Tebeau, Carson. Florida from Indian Trail to Space Age. (pp. 317-350). Southern Publishing Company.
• Gannon, Michael V. (1965). The Cross in the Sand. University Presses of Florida. ISBN 0-8130-0776-3
• Milanich, Jerald T. (1995) Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe. University Press of Florida. ISBN 0-8130-1360-7
• Sturtevant, William C. (1978). "The Last of the South Florida Aborigines". In Jeral Milanich & Samuel Proctor (Eds.). Tacachale: Essays on the Indians of Florida and Southeastern Georgia during the Historic Period. Gainesville, Florida: The University Presses of Florida. ISBN 0-8130-0535-3

External links

• Article on Ais Indians