Gladys Tantaquidgeon: Champion of Native American Culture

When Gladys was born in 1899, Native Americans were scorned and denigrated. They were segregated on reservations on land too poor for white settlers to want. Children were sent to white schools which tried to erase their native culture. When she died at the age of 106 in 2006, she was a celebrated anthropologist who had helped abolish the white culture schools, helped tribes regain their native lands, worked for conservation of natural resources, stood as a “faith keeper” of her Mohegan native culture, championed the US’s recognition of her Mohegan tribe in 1994, and supported her tribe’s purchase of its original settlement in Connecticut.

Not only did Gladys Tantaquidgeon work for her own tribe, but she also worked for other tribes’ cultures and livelihoods. She worked with the Sioux in South Dakota, hiding their sacred pipe until it was needed at the Standing Rock protest in 2016. She studied the Eastern tribes of the Abenaki and Penobscot, the Cayuga, and the Naskapi of northern Canada.

Gladys worked for John Collier, commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs under F.D.R. in 1934 when Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act, reorganizing tribes, recognizing them as nations, and granting self-government.

Gladys remembered the admonition of a Yankton Sioux: “Remember to take the best of what the white man has to offer . . . and use it to still be Indian.”

Note: My articles about Women’s History this month come from the book, She Did It! 21 Women Who Changed the Way We Think, by Emily Arnold McCully.

Submitted by Teresa Wilmot