Medicine Woman

"… there were, it is said, certain of the old women who were more adept in the art of preparing and administering the medicines….The cures were regarded to be, to a certain extent, secret property. The women went out at odd times to places where desired roots and plants grew, when others would not know of their whereabouts….The teachings of those women have been handed down to posterity through individuals considered by them worthy of the right to minister to their kindred… there are certain rules which must be observed in order to preserve the potent properties of the plants and to cause the remedy to effect a cure. The plants must not be gathered during “dog days,” but just prior to that period. It is believed that the sun is a great healer and strengthener, therefore plants and herbs to be used for medicine should be dried in the sun. Sometimes [the women] gathered as many as ten different plants to effect a single cure.

They taught me…never to pick more than you need….In the spring, early plants were referred to as weeds, and they were gathered and cooked as weeds—a spring tonic: dandelion, poke, milkweed, plantain, and dock, to name a few. Other plants were more important as sources of healing ingredients, such as bloodroot, boneset, motherwort, ginseng….Some plants are actually poisonous when green. They are dried, ground with a stone or wooden mortar, and gathered...”

“Even at a very early age, Gladys showed promise as a future herbalist and culture bearer, often accompanying three Mohegan women elders into the fields to gather plants and learning how to prepare them for healing and spiritual purposes. One of these women—whom Gladys called her nanus or grandmothers—was in fact her maternal grandmother Lydia Fielding. Together with Gladys’s great aunt Fidelia Fielding, the last living speaker of the Mohegan-Pequot language, they imbued Gladys with a strong sense of the importance of carrying forward traditional Mohegan practices in herbal medicine, handicrafts, story-telling, and spiritual observance. They effectively chose Gladys to continue a long line of Mohegan women faithkeepers who for centuries had worked to maintain the Mohegans’ identity in the face of encroachment by often hostile, land-hungry colonists. (The nanus did not teach Gladys much of her native language, however, as they feared she would be punished for speaking it, as they had been when young.)

Among the Indians from other tribes with whom Gladys was Witaponoxwe, a medicine man from the Lenni-Lenape tribe, which was anciently related to the Mohegans. Comparing notes with him, she discovered many similarities in the stories, beliefs, and customs of the two tribes, including herbal healing practices…Gladys received many gifts from the various tribes she visited, such as snowshoes and painted animal skin (parfleche) clothing given to her by the Montagnai Naskapi people, and a Penobscot birch bark canoe… The US government wanted to move the “uncivilized” and “unchristianized” Mohegans from their lands, as it did the Cherokees and other southern tribes, who were forced to march on the Trail of Tears to settle in Oklahoma. To guard against this, Mohegans—especially women—fought to build a church. Melissa Jayne Fawcett, tribal historian and Gladys’s great-niece, explains in her book Medicine Trail, “Its purpose was to prevent Mohegans from being relocated, for by the 1830s, federal law required any unschooled or non-churchgoing Indians to go West.” Elsewhere she notes, “Mohegans resisted Federal relocation by claiming to be already ‘civilized’ and ‘Christianized.’ To support that claim, she founded a Christian church and school on their reservation in 1831.”

The Mohegan Congregational Church became a focal point for the tribe, a place where people could meet socially, work on handicrafts, and discuss tribal politics and other matters. Now the museum afforded another such setting. It also had an educational purpose. In the following decades, Indian and non-Indian visitors to the museum—the oldest Native American-run museum, still operating today—would learn much about Indian and Mohegan history and lore as Gladys enthusiastically explained the provenance and meaning of each object. As stated in her biography on the Mohegan tribe’s website, “She shared her brother's philosophy that education was the best cure for prejudice. ‘You can't hate someone that you know a lot about.’”

In 1934, the Indian Reorganization Act, a reform effort intended to improve federal policies toward Indians, was set up under the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). On Speck’s recommendation, Gladys headed west, taking a position with the BIA as a community worker at the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. There she saw at first hand the hunger, sickness, and death that resulted from a lack of food, clothing, shelter, and medicine, as well as poor education. Two years later she found a way to help the tribe economically: as part of a job with the Federal Indian Arts and Crafts Board, she worked with the Sioux to revitalize their art and sell it. She also taught Indian art and handicrafts on other Indian reservations. Native artistic and sacred ceremonial traditions are often closely intertwined; Gladys played a part in bringing back sacred rituals like the Sun Dance, which the government had forbidden to be performed on reservations. Referring to the Sioux, she later recalled, “In the past, things Indian were rather frowned upon, and every effort was made to try to have these people forget as much of their culture as possible: their language, ceremonies, tribal customs. Part of our work…was to undo that.”

Gladys retired from her travels and returned to Mohegan Hill in 1947. She herself was now a nanu, caring for and playing with nieces and nephews, attending to the sick, advising tribal members about performing ceremonies, and particularly in her role as teacher, meeting with visitors to the museum and educating them about Mohegan history and culture. During the 1950s she worked at a state prison for women in Niantic, observing wryly that having been on an Indian reservation gave her an understanding of the problems women face in difficult circumstances. All the while her reputation as an “archetype of Mohegan culture” was growing.

In 1992 she officially became the Mohegan tribe’s Medicine Woman. In 1978 the Mohegans began to seek federal recognition for their tribe—a daunting challenge, as the government required proof that the tribe had existed continuously since historic times. At first they were turned down for lack of sufficient proof, but they finally succeeded in 1994, a victory due in large part to the fact that over the years Gladys had carefully kept many tribal documents—tribal rolls, records of births, graduations, marriages, and deaths, and extensive correspondence with tribal members—and stored them in Tupperware containers under her bed. With the help of her sister Ruth, she organized the documents to make the tribe’s case. The Mohegans’ sovereign status qualified them for federal funds and enabled them to build their highly successful Mohegan Sun casino and luxurious hotel.

Gladys never married; “There were certain boys in the community. But I always had too many other things going on.” However, when the Mohegans held a big celebration for her 100th birthday on June 15, 1999, her eight-year-old grand-nephew David Uncas Sayet spoke eloquently: “You were chosen by the Creator, which was a very good choice of a medicine woman… I hope you live forever so you can keep continuing your journey, and we will keep giving you our respect. I hope you have a great one hundredth birthday. Thank you for giving us care.” There were many other outpourings of appreciation and gratitude that day for all Gladys had done for the tribe, and the governor of Connecticut declared the day “Gladys Tantaquidgeon Day.” Melissa Fawcett observed,

“Gladys, probably more than anyone else that I can think of, is the epitome of having spent a lifetime working for social justice. Throughout the century that has been her focus, whether it was for her own people or other Indians out west or even with the general public. She has made people aware of forgotten groups of people.”
~ Dorian Brooks