Timucua Families

WHO DID THE TEACHING?  Mothers taught their daughters skills like weaving baskets, making pottery, planting corn, gathering wild fruits, and taking care of children.  Fathers did not teach their sons.  If you were a boy, you learned skills like hunting, tool-making, canoeing, and hut-building from your uncle.   Your father was more like your friend or an older brother.  It was your uncle who was in charge of training you and deciding punishments. 

WHAT KINDS OF CHORES DID KIDS HAVE?  Timucua children did not get to sit in air-conditioned classrooms like kids today.  They had lots of chores, like grinding corn into grits, scraping and stretching animal hides, picking beans, weaving rope into fishing nets, taking out the trash, and helping with the fishing.  Kids did the jobs that did not require much strength or skill. 

WHAT CHORES DID THE ADULTS DO?  Boys and girls were considered adults by the time they were fifteen or sixteen.  This meant they took on adult responsibilities like getting married, providing their own food, and taking care of their own hut.  Men fished and hunted for large and small animals.  They also protected the village from dangerous animals and other Timucua people.  Men built huts and canoes and also helped plant the gardens.  Women fished, collected eggs, and hunted small animals.  They gathered wild plants for food, planted and harvested the gardens, made clothes, made baskets and pottery, cooked and preserved all the food, and took care of the children.  Older grown-ups (like grandparents) who could no longer hunt or harvest plant foods became storytellers, guards at the fields, and teachers for young children.  Everyone worked together to help the village survive.

WHAT WAS A TIMUCUA CLAN?  A person’s clan included the people related to their mother by blood.   If you were Timucua, these people would be in your clan:  your mother, your brothers and sisters, your mom’s brothers and sisters (your maternal aunts & uncles), their kids (your maternal cousins), and your mother’s mother (your maternal grandmother).  Your father and his relatives would NOT be in your clan.  Timucua people were always in the same clan as their mother.  There were many different Timucua clans, including fish, deer, panther, bear, earth, buzzard, and quail.  Only people in the deer clan could become a chief.  You could not marry anyone in your clan because it would be like marrying your cousin.

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