“I am welcoming you from my home on Quinnipiac land,” said Elizabeth Nearing on behalf of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas.
The greeting, which has become standard in meetings all over town, took on added meaning with the festival’s presentation, “Indigenous Writers of Connecticut,” part of the National Endowment of the Arts’s Big Read, and held in partnership with the New Haven Museum.
In the virtual event, five Indigenous writers presented a convincing case for us to acknowledge not merely that we live on Indigenous land, but with Indigenous people, whose cultures thrive among us today — and have much to teach about the history and possible future of the state — if we are willing to pay attention.
On the event’s panel were poet Natasha Gambrell, author and anthropologist Rachel Sayet, author Shoran Waupatuquay Piper, cultural anthropologist Candyce Testa, and author Ruth Garby Torres. The panel was moderated by Siobhan Senier, a professor of English and chair of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire. Senier was there partially in her capacity as editor of Dawnland Voices, an anthology of Indigenous writing from New England and the Northeast that began as a bound volume and continues online.
The original anthology of Dawnland came about, Senier explained by way of introduction, because ‘I really wanted to teach the Indigenous literature of this place, and I was told there isn’t any, and I knew that was a lie.” The prevailing consensus she faced was that Indigenous writers “just disappeared, and if you live in New England, you know how much we cherish this myth — that the Native writers disappeared.” As she began to ask around, she discovered numerous writers from the past to the present; one of her first guides through the world of Indigenous literature was, in fact, Sayet’s mother. She learned that Wampanoag and Miqmak authors started writing in English early in American history “to say, ‘get off our land,’” Senier said. Today, she said, “Indigenous people are writing faster than I can keep up,” referring to younger writers who are coming to the fore, from novelists and playwrights to screenwriters, hip hop artists, and poets — including Gambrell.
Lighting A Fire
Natasha Gambrell is Eastern Pequot and tribal councilor in that nation, which is centered around present-day Mystic and Stonington. The Eastern Pequots began working toward federal recognition for their nation in 1978. In 2002 the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs officially granted the nation that recognition. Worried about the possibility of the Pequots opening a third casino in Connecticut, the state, through the office of then-Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, filed an appeal, and in 2005, the BIA revoked its recognition. The Pequots pushed to reinstate it, only to be met with a new ruling from the BIA in 2015 that nations could not reapply for recognition once denied.
Gambrell began with her poetry; one piece in particular recalled the day in 2015 when she reeled from the news from the BIA. “I knew that we were there and had been here from the beginning of time,” she said, and the news made her “angry and hateful.”
“It was like a blizzard had swept my entire body,” she read. “They were celebrating while the elders were sick and hopeless.” But from that hopelessness sprang energy and resolve. “That drum pounded like a bold fist,” she read. “I could see the fire lit” for “a new dawn for my people.”
“One day we will celebrate,” the piece ended, “a wounded, rich, and proud people.”
In The Footsteps Of Giants
Rachel Sayet, or Akitusut (She Who Reads), used her master’s thesis to talk about how she learned Mohegan practices from her family, from traditional stories to skills in gathering flowers and herbs in the woods.
“The most prevalent traditions that were passed down to me by my mother and my great-aunts were stories about Little People and giants, specifically those of the leader of the Little People, Granny Squannit, and her husband, Moshup the giant,” Sayet read. “My siblings and I were told that every time there was a thunderstorm, it was Moshup and Granny fighting, and we learned not to talk about Little People and also freeze us. In order to keep them
happy, we left offering baskets of tobacco and corn in the woods. We were also told stories of Granny Squannit taking children away from home.”
She came from a line of cultural historians. “My great-aunt Gladys, her brother Harold Tantaquidgeon (a former chief of the Mohegan tribe), and their father John Tantaquidgeon, founded our tribal museum, Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum in 1931. This tribally owned and operated museum is now the oldest Native-run museum in the country. Gladys’s house was located right next to the tribal museum, so I would often go up to the museum with Gladys while she gave tours. I later became a tour guide for a time while in high school. Gladys spent her life recording the traditional medicinal beliefs of the Mohegan and Delaware tribes,” she read.
In following in the footsteps of Gladys and her mother, Medicine Woman Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, collecting and analyzing the stories of her people, she stumbled across a theme that emerged in other panelists’ talks: that at least some of the places the European colonists named after the devil were in fact important sites to the Indigenous peoples who lived there. “When I was a child, my grandfather would oftentimes take me into the woods near Mohegan Church to show me the ‘Devil’s Footprint,’ a rock with an indentation about six inches deep and eight inches wide. As my grandfather is non-Native and Christian, he never mentioned that this ‘footprint’ was also affiliated with Moshup. He and I always just referred to it as ‘Devil’s Footprint.’ It was only when I began doing research on Moshup stories a few years ago that I learned it was a site that we Mohegan people credit as being a place that Moshup walked and left his imprint.” Later, while doing similar research on Martha’s Vineyard, “standing on the
Aquinnah Wampanoag reservation, looking out on the magnificent Aquinnah cliffs,” her guide “told me the story of the rock formation off the shoreline, which is known as Moshup’s Bridge, or Devil’s Bridge.”
Sayet explained that the Moshup in the stories is “a benevolent being who is believed to have performed miraculous feats,” though he is also associated with the tumultuous land and sky of New England. “He now walks the border between the natural and the spiritual world.” She went on to say that “the fear of Moshup’s size” caused missionaries to associate him with the Devil. “It’s understandable that the missionaries would want to rid the world of traces of a figure” able to challenge the Christian God. The same whitewashing of Indigenous places happened in Devil’s Hopyard in Connecticut, a site “nearby where many ceremonies were happening,” as well as the area around Moodus and its seismic activity; “there was always a sense of spiritual energy in that area,” she said. But “we don’t believe in good and evil — it’s about balance, opposing forces working together.”
Distant Paradise
Clan Mother Shoran Waupatuquay Piper is the tribal leader of the Golden Hill Paugussett Nation and has written a book, The Red Road, She began by speaking about her family, which has been at the center of keeping her nation’s identity and traditions alive. “For 10,000 years the Native Americans have inhabited this region,” she said, after migrating from the north and west. “They came to the east, to the land of the rising sun.” and found first pine, hemlock, and spruce trees that in time gave way to oak, birch, and ash.
They farmed and grew vegetables we eat now, such as potatoes, corn, and chili peppers.“They used every part of the plant from root to leaf,” developing medicines from them, she said. “They drank only water until the Europeans came,” she said. They tended crops in summer settlements, then moved inland to hunt in the winter, and moved to fishing camps in the spring. There are no written records of their civilization, but physical artifacts show “respect for the dead, and thus, respect for life,” she said. Many artifacts have been destroyed by acidic CT soil and clumsy archeology over the years, but “many famers have found important artifacts,” she said. “Some farmers have more artifacts than I do.”
Before Europeans came, she said to sum it up, the Connecticut River valley “must have been a paradise. My ancestors walked in beauty,” she said. It wasn’t too late to reclaim what those ancestors knew. “Believe you are a child of the Creator,” Piper said. “If you have strayed from the teachings of the elders, you are not lost. Ask the elders for counseling to guide your life back to the wisdom fo the old ways. With Creator’s help, you can regain control. We are relatives of all living things and Mother Earth,” and “we must offer our children a life of hope.”
She placed Indigenous ways of life in contrast to European-style settlements, which Americans wholly adopted. “I find it hard to understand the non-Indigenous man” who cuts down all the trees to build houses, then complains that the soil isn’t fertile, she said — the same man who kills dandelions instead of eating them. “The land is necessary to survive. You can survive on the land if you treat it right.” She mentioned how she conceives of the environment around her as more of a living entity.
“I wonder if the ground is listening to what is said,” she said. “The earth has much to say, but no one is listening.”
Being Native
Candyce Testa, who is Pequot, focuses her anthropological work on language, identity and connection to place. She’s a cultural instructor for the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, working to reclaim the language and organize community events. A sense of place runs deeply through her work, she said. “There is nothing more powerful than to hike upon the land of my ancestors,” she said. “Every trail has a story.” Hiking in the forest makes Testa ask questions of the environment around her when she leads hikes on the Pequot reservation, “I am full of when, if, and how my ancestors performed ceremonies in a particular glen,” she said. “I take this curiosity with me” wherever she goes.
She considers the possibility of reclaiming some Indigenous place names from the names European settlers gave out; picking up the theme from Sayet, she said, place names mentioning the devil, Satan, or hell are “offensive,” as they are too often used to describe places important to Indigenous culture. The Satanic place names are are “direct result of Puritans’ views of Natives,” she said. “We were known as Satan’s children.” She mentioned Devil’s Hopyard in particular, which she visited as a child. “Why had such an enchanting place been given such a name?” she asked.
Testa also took time to explain her support for powwows, as events for Indigenous people to gather and pass on traditions and for non-Indigenous people to get a glimpse of the Indigenous culture around them; the Pequot Schemitzun runs Aug. 28 to 29 this year. “Powwow connects us to our ancestors,” she said. If it showcased the similarities among nations across the country, it also was a place for a specific nation to show was was unique to it. For Indigenous people, it was an event were “it is OK to be Native and express what being Native means to you.”
She explained how cultural values came out in Pequot circle dances. The circle itself was considered a special shape because ”everything in nature tries to be round,” she said. The people in the concentric circles moved clockwise, considered to be a more natural direction, except for veterans, who danced counterclockwise because “they have had to do things that no one else has had to do” to protect their people.
Regarding the perceptions of non-Indigenous people of a powwow, Testa said, “we do not have to meet your criteria for what being Native is; that is for us to decide.” That was part of what sustaining identity in the face of genocide and moving into the 21st century was all about.
Six Things You Don’t Know
Author Ruth Garby Torres, who is Schaghticoke, is a writer of articles and op-eds, and co-edited the Schaghticoke section of Dawnland Voices with Schaghticoke elder and educator Trudie Lamb Richmond (whose name emerged again and again in the course of the entire panel). Torres read a 2014 op-ed she wrote for CT Mirror entitled “Six Things You Did Know About the Federal Acknowledgment of Indian Tribes,” which explored the ongoing issue of federal acknowledgment, beginning from the fact that many people are still unaware that nations exist east of the Mississippi river and proceeding from there to describe the state of Connecticut’s fractious history in pushing back against federal acknowledgment. Her article picked on themes begun by Gambrell, about the anger and resentment of not being recognized, the sense of being invisible, the very real consequences of lack of recognition in terms of Indigenous people having access to public services.
“Rebuilding a tribal nation’s infrastructure after nearly four hundred years of purposeful demolition is difficult, and over the last decade, has been further complicated by U.S. Supreme Court rulings,” she wrote. “And, by the way, this is a national issue — affecting the future of Indian peoples across the country — and none of the local media outlets are reporting on that.”
Torres’s piece also took the long view of history in explaining why federal recognition was a way for government regulations to match reality. “Five of the six reservations in Connecticut were established long before the State of Connecticut was established,” she wrote. “The Connecticut colonial government set aside land for the exclusive use of the tribes and these long standing reservations are substantially important evidence of continuous tribal existence. The proposed regulations acknowledge this while the State is trying to deny it. So, when the next news story you read is that Connecticut is trying to abolish the remaining state reservations so that the state can evade the impact of potential changes to the federal acknowledgment regulations, would you kindly think of these six things you did not know about the federal acknowledgment of Indian tribes?”
Culture Bearers
“I write when I think there’s something mportant to say,” Torres said, in response to a question fron Senier. “We speak of people and times that should not be forgotten.”
Senier then remarked that, in may cases, women were the spokespeople for Indigenous nations in New England, an observation that the panelist fleshed out. Gambrell explained that, as a child, “when I looked up, I always saw a woman leader. Woman have always been in that power, leading.” Sayet explained that New England nations are matriarchal; the current chief of the Mohegan is female, and she isn’t the first. “As we’re presenting from our ancestries,” she said. “the women are the culture bearers.” They are “the backbone, the healers,” Piper said.
Senier then asked the writers why they wrote in the specific forms they did.
“With poetry I could convey the pain that I felt,” Gambrell said. Reaching back to the poem she wrote about the denial of federal recognition, she said that poetry let her communicate her specific memories of the news arriving just after “Columbus Day, and it was raining and elders were in tears.”
“If I didn’t write about that, I don’t know where I would be,” she added. “For a long time, the state of Connecticut has made our tribes voiceless. I thank you for giving us a voice. We get forgotten in all this,” and “it’s lovely when we get a chance to tell our story.”
The International Festival of Arts and Ideas runs now through June 27. Visit the festival’s website for a full schedule of events.
This is wonderful that the International Festival of Arts and Ideas is honoring Indigenous Writers. Also kudos to Elizabeth Nearing! Going a step further and in a true act of solidarity it would behoove the Festival to initiate and support a campaign to free Leonard Peltier, Native American activist who has been imprisoned over 40 years.
https://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/