brooksie female alligator wrestler alabama

(According to the tribe, that’s not unusual. She was raised in Little Havana in Miami, and her family comes from Nicaragua. But Billy talked her through the demonstration from the other side of the fence, and she survived.Ĭottone isn’t a member of the Miccosukee tribe. She had never before handled an alligator. Cottone rushed to the Village and arrived five minutes before showtime. Cottone’s mentor at the Indian Village, Steven “Gator Steve” Billy, asked her if she could fill in.

One day last year, the Miccosukees’ alligator handler position opened up.

After the 1928 construction of Tamiami Trail, which connected Naples and Miami, many Miccosukees moved near the new road, where they drew in tourists with their crafts and performances, like the alligator demonstration. They migrated to Florida and then escaped to the Everglades to elude the federal government’s violent effort to move them to the West. Members of the tribe originally belonged to the Creek Nation in what is now Georgia and Alabama. She got a job flipping burgers at the Miccosukee Indian Village, a tourist outpost that showcases the history and culture of the Miccosukee people. “They told me women are not capable of wrestling alligators,” Cottone says, “so I quit.” But she hit a glass ceiling while working for one Orlando park.

Hired at a handful of different attractions, she learned how to interact with birds, primates, reptiles and more. Jessie Cottone, the tribe’s first female alligator wrangler, does the same trick, but she refers to it with a gender-neutral name: “Face Off.”Īs a kid, Cottone loved the outdoors, eating mud and playing with insects, but as she grew older, she says, her mother pushed her to become more “girly.” When she finished high school, she considered going to cosmetology school, but instead decided to work with animals. For decades, alligator wrestlers working at the Miccosukee tribe’s Indian Village cultural center have performed a trick they call “Close Shave.” Seated on an alligator’s back, they hold the big reptile’s mouth open by clamping down on its top jaw with only their chin, then pass their hands through the gaping maw of the deadly beast.

Brooksie female alligator wrestler alabama