Last of Mohegans Fighting for U.S. Recognition

MONTVILLE, Conn. —  For most of this century, Gladys Tantaquidgeon’s family has tended the flickering flame of the Wolf People.

Tantaquidgeon, 93, is among the last of Connecticut’s Mohegan Indians, believed to be a branch of the Mohicans in Upstate New York whose exploits were chronicled by James Fenimore Cooper and are being revived in a movie.

The Connecticut tribe’s base of operations is a small museum in a stone building behind the Tantaquidgeon family home on Mohegan Hill in Montville. The building, built by Tantaquidgeon’s father and brother in 1931, is something of a Mohegan shrine, filled with wampum beads, ax heads, hand-woven baskets and beaded ceremonial costumes.

“Mohegan means ‘wolf’ in our language,” said Tantaquidgeon, the tribe’s honorary medicine woman. “We belong to the Algonkian language family, that great group of woodlands Indians which extended from Eastern Canada southward down the coast to where the Cherokees begin.”

Tantaquidgeon said she has no plans to see the movie, “The Last of the Mohicans,” nor did she ever read the book, which she dismisses as “historical fiction.”

But Ralph Sturges, the lifetime chief and chairman of the Mohegan tribal council, concedes that he is curious about Hollywood’s new remake of James Fenimore Cooper’s classic. He said, however, that he’s even more interested in persuading the federal government that his tribe is alive and well.

For the last 15 years, the Mohegans have been fighting a modern-day battle against the white man’s bureaucracy in Washington, trying to win federal recognition as an American Indian tribe. A victory would make the 1,000 remaining Mohegans in Connecticut and other Northeastern states eligible for a range of federal programs for Indians, including medical care, housing assistance and education.

“It’s very frustrating,” Sturges said. “The Bureau of Indian Affairs is giving us a stall job.”

The Connecticut General Assembly officially recognizes five Indian tribes: the Schaghticokes, the Eastern Pequots, the Golden Hill Paugusetts, the Mashantucket Pequots and the Mohegans.

Of these, only the Mashantucket Pequots have obtained federal recognition, which also gives them autonomy over their reservation land. But Janine Brooks of the Bureau of Indian Affairs said the agency is nearing a final decision on the Mohegan petition.

Still, the lengthy delay in federal action upsets Sturges, a 73-year-old New London marble sculptor whose Mohegan blood comes from his mother’s side of the family.

“Our tribal members have fought in all of this country’s wars, including Desert Storm. Remember, it was the Mohegans who helped the English when they first got here, while the Pequots opposed them,” he said.

The Mashantuckets were recognized in 1983 by an act of Congress and recently opened a $70-million gambling casino on their land in Ledyard, transforming the tribe overnight into an economic power in southeast Connecticut.

“They did it politically,” Sturges said. “Since then, the BIA has changed the rules. Now, it’s much harder to get recognized. There are all these criteria that must be met.”

Sturges said Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr.’s administration, which tried to stop the Mashantuckets from opening their casino, could greatly help the Indians’ cause if it would negotiate a trust agreement with the tribes, clarifying the state’s legal relationship with the Indians.

Among other things, the agreement would delve into the validity of longstanding land claims and spell out whether the state has the right to impose environmental restrictions on reservation lands, a disputed issue.

The Connecticut General Assembly passed legislation calling for such an agreement in 1989, but none has been reached.

“I think the state doesn’t want to see us get federal recognition, and I think I know why,” Sturges said. “No. 1, I think the governor’s afraid we’ll build a gambling casino like the Mashantuckets did; secondly, we’ve got a land claim on file and I think the state’s afraid it might have to make some big settlement with the tribe if we’re granted recognition.”

But he said the Weicker administration has nothing to fear from the Mohegans because they have no desire to build a casino.

As for the land claim, filed by a tribal member in 1977, Sturges said the Mohegans aren’t looking for a big settlement.

“What I’d really like,” he said, “is for the state to cede us Ft. Shantok State Park, with the understanding that we’d lease it back for some nominal sum. That way our heritage would be safe.”

Ft. Shantok, which overlooks the Thames River at Montville, midway between New London and Norwich, was the site of a log palisade built by the famed Mohegan chief Uncas in the mid-17th Century. The fort later became part of the Mohegan Reservation, which was disbanded in 1861.

Tribal historian Melissa Fawcett-Sayet, a Norwich resident, said the Mohegans agreed to break up the reservation because they were tired of being dictated to by the federal government. She said many tribal members took land parcels and settled in the area.

In order to qualify as a Mohegan, tribal members must be able to trace their lineage back to the Mohegan families that were on the reservation in 1861.

“We’re scattered all throughout the area,” Sturges said. “We’d have a better chance of getting federal recognition if we had a central base, but the old Mohegan Church on Mohegan Hill in Montville is the only thing the tribe still owns.”

Gladys Tantaquidgeon doesn’t concern herself with the tribe’s politics, but federal recognition could help finance one of her dreams--reviving the Mohegan language.

“The last speaker was my great aunt, Fidelia Hascoat Fielding, who died in 1908. That’s her over there,” she told a recent visitor to the museum.

She pointed to a photo of a proud, handsome woman with high cheekbones and straight, silvery hair, parted in the middle. “The photo was taken in 1902, during our annual wigwam festival,” Tantaquidgeon said.

Tantaquidgeon grew up on a family farm that once was part of the Mohegan reservation, an 8-square-mile tract of land that became Montville. As a child, she sat at the feet of the tribe’s “grandmothers,” including medicine woman Emma Baker. The young girl was taught tribal lore and the natural healing methods employed by the Indians.

Fawcett-Sayet, Tantaquidgeon’s grandniece, said anthropologist Frank Speck became friendly with the family shortly after the turn of the century and encouraged the Tantaquidgeons to learn more about their people and customs.

Ironically, much of what Gladys Tantaquidgeon learned about her people came from anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania, where Speck held the department chair.

She returned home to Mohegan Hill in the late 1940s and became curator of the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum, publishing “Folk Medicine of the Delaware and Related Algonkian Indians” in 1972.

“I returned home just a few years after our tribe held its last Green Corn Festival,” she said. “Over there on that table is a scale model of the green bough wigwam the men would build each fall for the festival, but it’s been 50 years since we’ve had the real thing.”

Tantaquidgeon sighed as she gazed at the model.

“There’s so little left,” she said. “In the Northeast, the Indian cultures all but disappeared once the English arrived.”

But she said she is comforted by the knowledge that her niece is interested in tending the tribe’s flickering flame when she is gone.

Fawcett-Sayet, 31, said she would be deeply honored to pick up the torch carried for so long by her elderly aunt.

In her recently finished book, “The Lasting of the Mohegans,” Fawcett-Sayet writes: “We will survive on this Native Land, for many moons to come. The torch of tomorrow soon will be passed to the ‘Wolf Children’ of today. They will enthusiastically ensure the lasting of the Mohegans.”