Ea number. Hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand dollars? People ask for a number when they notice that Cheyenne Kippenberger is a Seminole. “Of course I won’t tell you,” says Kippenberger. Nobody reveals the number. And so there is only an estimate of “Forbes” magazine from 2016 to guess the wealth of the Indian tribe. A member of the Seminoles receives around $ 130,000 a year. The median income in Florida is $ 46,000. When she came of age, Cheyenne Kippenberger was a millionaire.
About 4250 Seminoles live in Florida. They have their own police and fire brigade. In the six reservations, the children go to tribal schools. The Seminoles have pop singers, and one of them is the reigning “Miss Indian World”, the winner of the model contest for indigenous women in America.
140 meters high, 36 floors, 638 rooms
On a warm December afternoon in Hollywood, twenty miles north of Miami, she sits in the shade of a chiki, a hut made of bald cypress canes and palm leaves. Cheyenne Kippenberger is 24, she wears gel nails and a skirt in tribal colors, black, red, yellow and white. In 2019 she won the election for “Miss Indian World” as the first Seminoline. Since then she has been traveling around the country, opening football games and speaking on panels about the high rate of mentally ill and alcohol addicts in the indigenous population. “We could have an infinite amount of money – the problems of many tribes are problems with us too,” she says.
–
One of the many guitars in the “Hard Rock” empire: 36 floors, 638 rooms has its newest hotel and casino near Miami.
:
Image: AFP
–
In the parking lot next to the Chiki, SUVs and sports cars shine in the sun. A security woman guards the entrance to the Seminole community center. In a generation, the tribe has grown from one of the poorest people in Florida to one of the richest. “I remember how my siblings and I lived in the trailer with our parents,” says Kippenberger. Now the rise and prosperity of the Seminoles can be seen miles from their center in Hollywood.
As the oversized body of a reflective guitar, the tribe’s newest prestige object rises 140 meters in height. 36 floors, 638 rooms. A crazy superlative of hotel. At night, ultra-bright spotlights simulate the guitar strings, they shine upwards from the roof of the building and illuminate the sky as light strips.
At the entrance to the hotel, guests are greeted by a world-famous logo: “Hard Rock” is written in the café chain’s font. Above it, and that is different from the normal yellow-brown logo: “Seminole”. The addition reveals what hardly anyone knows. The guitar hotel in Florida, yes, all 190 cafes, 30 hotels and eleven casinos in the “Hard Rock” group belong to the Seminoles. In 2007 the tribe bought Hard Rock for $ 965 million. Today the company is worth five times as much. Whenever someone bites into a burger in the “Hard Rock Café” in Amsterdam or someone in Calcutta buys a “Hard Rock” T-shirt, a few cents flow to an Indian tribe in Florida.
“The Seminoles are the richest tribe in America,” says Robert Jarvis, a lawyer who studies gambling laws at Nova Southeastern University in Florida. “The basis of wealth are their casinos. They contribute 95 percent of the revenue. ”The largest casino in Tampa alone makes a billion dollars in profit a year. When Florida recognized the Seminoles as an ethnic group in 1957 and granted them self-determination over their territories, the newly elected tribal government was faced with a problem: Where should it get the money from to finance its government tasks? Tribal courts had to be set up, health care. In the mid-1970s, the tribe opened tobacco stores on their reservations and sold tax-free cigarettes. From 1968 to 1977 the tribal income rose from $ 600,000 to $ 4.5 million. When the local sheriff’s lawsuit to tax the tribe’s tobacco shops failed, the then leader of the Seminoles, Jim Billie, decided to exhaust self-determination.
– .
1 thought on “Before the Super Bowl in Florida”
Leave a Comment
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
To put a tribal members estimated gross income out to the entire world is very harmful. Native American woman are already targeted enough, Murdered Missing Indigenous Women (MMIW) proves that Indigenous women are kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and abused at higher rates than any other race. Don’t you think putting their income targets Indigenous women even further?? & to sit there and openly say Miss Indian World because a millionaire when she came of age, is a blatant lie. The author of this article has no respect. This article also has nothing to do with the state of Florida before the Super bowl. In this article you also misspelled the Seminole’s name. The richest tribe in the USA is not the Seminole Tribe of Florida, it is the Shakopee Mdewakanton. Horrible journalism, no fact checking or respect for the indigenous community.