Along Marine Street in front of the St. Augustine Art Association, you’ll find Richard Weaver’s sculpture of a Native American boy. The bronze statue is placed on a pedestal within a sunken garden. The realistic-looking child stretches out both arms, creating the shape of a cross or cruciform.

He holds a palm frond in his left hand, signaling toward the sea. His shoulder-length hair is adorned with feathers and he wears a shell necklace. Animal pelts are wrapped around the boy’s shoulders and waist, revealing his slender body. A hunting knife is attached at the hip. The figure stands on a small shell mound surrounded by two fish swimming in suspended animation.

HISTORY

More than 14,000 years ago, the first descendants of the people who crossed the land bridge from Siberia to Alaska arrived in Florida. When Europeans first landed on the peninsula, some 200,000 natives were living in groups and villages around Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia. They spoke the same language and were collectively known as Timucuans (Tim-oo´-kwahns).

Early illustrations show the natives as tall, muscular warriors battling giants, fierce alligators, and other exotic creatures. But historians and archaeologists have pieced together a more believable picture. The Timucuans lived in round palm-thatched huts.  They were hunter-gatherers who fished with nets and spears and grew corn. They dressed in deerskins and decorated their bodies with tattoos and ornaments. They believed in omens and practiced rituals for harvest and healing.

Starting in the late 1500s, Spanish missionaries in Florida were charged with building churches, converting the Indians to Catholicism, and harnessing their labor to sustain the new colony. Native Americans both accepted and resisted this missionary zeal. Some Timucuan chiefs struck deals with Spanish officials to bring tribal members into the faith. The Franciscans taught the new converts to speak, read, and write in Spanish, and to participate in Mass. Over time and often through harsh punishment, the Friars erased many of the ancient beliefs and practices of the native people, but not their popular ball game!

At the end of the 17th century, British militia from South Carolina and their Indian allies raided the Spanish missions in Georgia and North Florida, setting off a string of attacks that destroyed the mission villages. Catholic Indians were tortured and burned at the stake. Thousands were captured and sold into slavery. Scores perished from disease. The native population that once measured in the hundreds of thousands throughout “La Florida” was reduced to a mere 89 when Spain ceded its territory to England in 1763. Those last remaining Indians joined the Spanish exodus to Cuba, leaving behind only ghostly traces and fragments of their pre-historic culture.

Beneath Weaver’s statue, a diverse assemblage of Native American artifacts from across the Southeast was unearthed in 2014. Inspired by that discovery, the Timucuan sculpture was conceived as a fleeting memory of our native ancestors and installed in 2016 as a memorial to their sacrifices and labors. Whether welcoming a ship on the horizon or a canoe by the shore, the child evokes the innocence of youth and the inherent goodness of humanity.