When an American alligator bites down, its jaws can exert up to three thousand pounds of force. In 2011, on a sunny day in the swamplands of South Florida, one bit Clinton Holt on the head.
Holt is a Seminole alligator wrestler a few years retired. During a live wrestling show at a Native village, he held a gator’s mouth open with his hands and slowly inched his head inside, a crowd-pleaser stunt. On this occasion, he made a mistake, tilting his head and brushing his ear against the roof of the gator’s mouth. The jaws closed shut. A number of handlers rushed immediately to his side, to free him but first to make sure that the alligator didn’t roll over and potentially snap Holt’s neck, a move known in wrestling parlance as the “death roll.” In “Halpate,” a documentary short viewable above, Holt describes being in the gator’s grasp, feeling the full weight of a Harley-Davidson pressing onto his head, “listening to my skull crack.” When he was released from the hospital, he went straight to the village to wrestle the same gator again, in another live show. He says he wanted to see whether the experience had made him fearful, hesitant. “And I wasn’t.”
The Florida Seminoles are widely known as “the unconquered.” They are the only Native American tribe never to have signed a peace treaty with the United States government, with which they fought three separate wars in the nineteenth century. Throughout that period, they were pushed deeper and deeper into the Everglades. In new, inhospitable territory, they started hunting alligators for sustenance. Because alligator meat spoils quickly, especially in South Florida’s climate, hunters would have to capture the animals and transport them live to their villages before slaughter. The story goes that, as highways and other infrastructure began to encroach on the swamplands, white residents and visitors began spotting Seminoles hunting gators from the road. Some started throwing tips out of their cars, believing that the sight was for their benefit. The spectacle of Native hunters “wrestling” alligators was born.
“Halpate,” co-directed by the Native American filmmakers Adam Khalil and Adam Piron, describes how white Floridians were the first to capitalize on it. Some constructed Native “villages” and camps and hired Seminoles—for “pennies,” as Holt says—to populate them and produce traditional crafts for white tourists. They also performed live gator-wrestling shows, which grew in popularity throughout the nineteen-thirties and forties. By the early sixties, Native-owned villages were established, and Seminole wrestlers started to reap the profits of their labor. In many ways, the gator villages were a precursor to the modern-day Indian gaming-and-entertainment industry, Piron, who is of Kiowa and Mohawk ancestry, told me. Ever since, the Seminoles’ business focus has grown and grown. In 2007, the Seminole Tribe of Florida purchased Hard Rock International—every Hard Rock Casino and Cafe in the world, in addition to other entities—for nearly a billion dollars.
But alligators aren’t just money-makers. (The tribe, which has a population of about three thousand, has a net worth of approximately twelve billion dollars, according to a 2016 investigation by Forbes.) What started as a means of sustenance has become a cultural touchstone—what was once a form of exploitation transformed into tradition. Shows continue today in part because “alligator wrestling kind of keeps us relevant,” Everett Osceola, a forty-one-year-old wrestler and tribe historian featured in “Halpate,” told me. (Osceola is also a producer of the film, the title of which means “alligator” in the Miccosukee language.) “A lot of people don’t realize that we have a major part of Florida in our history,” and that alligator wrestling can be a gateway to that education, he said.
At the core of the sport is also an ongoing relationship with the animal. Wrestlers describe a synergy with alligators while they’re wrestling—reading their body language, anticipating their moves, keeping in step. There’s also a relationship born outside of the ring. Osceola recalled meeting a gator named Longjaws at Okalee Indian Village, the first Native-owned alligator camp, for the first time. Osceola was four years old; the gator was thirty years older. Longjaws died in 2017, at the age of sixty-eight, and Osceola felt like a relative had passed. Holt, too, had had a long relationship with the alligator that bit his head. He had worked with it for years, and wasn’t mad at it for what it did. Returning after his injury, he didn’t seek to dominate it, just as he never had.
Over the years, animal-rights groups have criticized alligator wrestling, but Osceola says that the practice is more about educating people—not just about Seminole history but about what it means to live with and around alligators, as has become more common for South Floridians as residential and commercial development has crept further into the swamplands. In the late sixties, the American alligator was listed as critically endangered. “It took a full turn,” Osceola told me. “They helped us survive, and then, at a certain point, we helped them survive.” The alligators that are selected for wrestling are kept and fed at villages but never trained. If any of them begin to lose their nature and show signs of overaggressiveness, hostility, or unpredictability, then “they’ve lost their way,” Osceola said, and are released back into the wild. “It’s like their way of saying that they’re missing home.”