Айс: История и культура коренного народа Флориды

The Ais or Ays were a Native American people of eastern Florida. Their territory included coastal areas and islands from approximately Cape Canaveral to the Indian River. The Ais chiefdom consisted of a number of towns, each led by a chief who was subordinate to the paramount chief of Ais; the Indian River was known as the "River of Ais" to the Spanish. The Ais language has been linked to the Chitimacha language by linguist Julian Granberry, who points out that "Ais" means "the people" in the Chitimacha language. The Ais were hunter gatherers and food was plentiful. They ate fish, turtle, shellfish, cocoplums, sabal palm berries and other gathered fruits. Prior to contact with European colonizers, the Ais population had grown to several hundred thousand and may have flourished for over 10,000 years. A burial mound, used by the Ais tribe for 500 to 1,000 years rises about twenty feet in Old Fort Park on Indian River Drive in Fort Pierce. This location later became an Army fort used during the Second Seminole War (1838–1842) and it may be the location of a Spanish settlement, mission and military outpost dating back to 1567. The burial mound is several hundred feet around. The Indian River (called the "Rio de Ais" by the Spanish colonizers) flows by within sight. was paramount to all of the coastal towns from the Jaega town of Jobe (at Jupiter Inlet) in the south to approximately Cape Canaveral in the north (that is, the length of the River of Ais). The Ais had already had considerable contact with Europeans by this time. The Spanish became acquainted with the Ais in middle of the 16th century. In 1566 Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, founder of St. Augustine, Florida, established a fort and mission at an Ais town, which the Spanish called Santa Lucía. After the Ais attacked the fort, killing 23 of the soldiers, the Spanish abandoned the fort and mission. Oathaqua was a major chief of the Ais. Governor Mendez de Canco reported in 1597 that this chief led more people than any other tribe.</blockquote>

The Ais men wore a "loincloth" of woven palm leaves. Dickinson describes this as:
being a piece of platwork of straws wrought of divers colors and of a triangular figure, with a belt of four fingers broad of the same wrought together, which goeth about the waist and the angle of the other having a thing to it, coming between the legs, and strings to the end of the belt; all three meeting together are fastened behind by a horsetail, or a bunch of silkgrass exactly resembling it, of a flaxen color, this being all of the apparel or covering that the men wear. He has little to say on how the women dressed, recording only that his wife and female slaves were given "raw deer skins" with which to cover themselves after their European clothing had been taken away. Women of the Tequesta tribe, to the south of the Ais, were reported to wear "shawls" made of woven palm leaves, and "skirts” made from draped fibers from the Spanish dagger (yucca), similar to the "grass" skirts of Hawai'i.

Dickinson states that the town of Jece "stood about half a mile from the seashore within the land on the sound, being surrounded with a swamp, in which grew white mangrove trees, which hid the town from the sea." Dickinson describes the cacique's house in Santa Lucea as "about forty foot long and twenty five foot wide, covered with palmetto leaves both top and sides. There was a range of cabins, or a barbecue on one side and two ends. At the entering on one side of the house a passage was made of benches on each side leading to the cabins."