Resistance to oppression is a globally recognized cultural phenomenon that displays a remarkable amount of variation in its manifestations over both time and space. This cultural phenomenon is particularly evident among the Native American cultural groups of the Southeastern United States. Throughout the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries the European and American states employed tactics and implemented laws aimed at expanding the geographic boundaries of their respective states into the Tribal Zone of the Southeast. None of these groups, however, sat passively during this process; they employed resistive tactics and strategies aimed at maintaining their freedoms, their lives, and their traditional sociocultural structures. However, the resistive tactics and strategies, primarily manifested in the medium of warfare, have gone relatively unnoticed by scholars of the disciplines of history and anthropology, typically regarded simply as guerrilla in nature. This research presents a new analytical model that is useful in qualitatively and quantitatively analyzing the behaviors employed in combat scenarios. Using the combat behaviors of Muskhogean speaking cultural groups as a case study, such as the Creeks and Seminoles and their Protohistoric predecessors, this model has shown that indigenous warfare in this region was complex, dynamic, and adaptive. This research has further implications in that it has documented the evolution of Seminole combat behaviors into the complex and dynamic behaviors that were displayed during the infamous Second iv Seminole War. Furthermore, the model used in this research provides a fluid and adaptive base for the analysis of the combat behaviors of other cultural groups worldwide.

This study examines in depth the most common interpretation of the opening of the Third Seminole War (1855-1858). The interpretation in question was authored almost thirty years after the beginning of the war, and it alleges that the destruction of a Seminole banana plant garden by United States soldiers was the direct cause of the conflict. This study analyzes the available primary records as well as traces the entire historiography of the Third Seminole War in order to ascertain how and why the banana garden account has had such an impactful and long-lasting effect. Based on available evidence, it is clear that the lack of fully contextualized primary records, combined with the failure of historians to deviate from or challenge previous scholarship, has led to a persistent reliance on the banana garden interpretation that continues to the present. Despite the highly questionable and problematic nature of this account, it has dominated the historiography on the topic and is found is almost every written source that addresses the beginning of the Third Seminole War. This thesis refutes the validity of the banana garden interpretation, and in addition, provides alternative explanations for the Florida Seminoles' decision to wage war against the United States during the 1850s.