Mundo Wigo: Words to Guide a Life Over a Century

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the NYTimes, November 6, 2005

Words to Guide a Life Over a Century

By PETER APPLEBOME
UNCASVILLE, Conn.

MUNDO wigo, the Creator is good, the elders taught her from the time she
drew her first breath on Mohegan Hill on June 15, 1899. It was around the
last solstice of a dying century in a culture that had been pronounced all
but dead as well, but they said it over and over, evoking thankfulness,
evoking faith. I have nothing to eat today, Mundo wigo, but the Creator is
good and the sun is shining. The weather has been terrible, and I can't
get out of the house, Mundo wigo, but I have my legs, and I can walk. Our
people are scattered and our resources scarce, Mundo wigo, but we will
survive.

By all accounts, Gladys Tantaquidgeon never doubted it. She grew up in a
world at once seemingly passing away and as permanent as the rocky soil
and harsh landscape of oak, maple, pine and cedar. Until Gladys's first
birthday, according to a biography by her grandniece Melissa Tantaquidgeon
Zobel, her mother bit the baby's fingernails, instead of cutting them, to
prevent her from ever becoming a thief. Her hair was trimmed when the moon
was waning, to keep it thick, and her shoes were turned over at night to
prevent bad dreams. She was put to bed every night before the whippoorwill
called, so she wouldn't be captured by the Makiawisug, the mischievous
little people of the forest. As the years went by, she learned a little of
everything - how to sew rickrack borders onto calico dresses and to bead
dark velvet "puzzle pouches"; how to cook yellow-eye baked beans roasted
overnight with honey, ketchup, mustard, brown sugar, onion and salt pork;
or make "soup on the hill" with rutabaga, carrots, potatoes, celery and
onion with a chunk of meat.

She learned the tribal history and legends, how the Mohegans split off
from the Lenni Lenape, and left New York State for what is now eastern
Connecticut, of Moshup, the giant whose footprint marks Mohegan Hill and
his wife, Granny Squannit, the leader of the Makiawisug. From her great
aunt Fidelia Fielding, the last fluent speaker of the Mohegan-Pequot
dialect, she learned the secrets of Mohegan magic and medicine and became
only the third medicine woman since colonial times.  She began her
training when she was 5, learning, from her great-aunt and two other
women, to gather and use dandelion, poke, milkweed, bloodroot, boneset,
motherwort, ginseng, and how to surround herself with things that brought
good spirits, things like cedar, quartz, sweet grass and corn.

Over the course of a lifetime that included studies on Mohegan Hill, at
the University of Pennsylvania and with Indian tribes across the West, she
became a student of history, ethnography and Indian crafts. She became
especially expert at deciphering the evocative designs of Mohegan arts -
the x's that symbolized the four directions or four winds, the diamonds
denoting medicine, the circles representing the continuity and cyclical
nature of things and the undulating lines reflecting how every summit
leads to a valley, how every valley leads to a higher plane. In 1931, she
and her brother Harold and their father, old, crippled, half blind,
founded a remarkable Indian museum that still stands today. JAMES FENIMORE
COOPER'S fiction envisioned the tribe's end. But, Mundo wigo, somehow the
Mohegans never died. Would they have survived without the exhaustive
history and documentation she kept that finally helped the tribe, which
now has 1,700 members, receive federal recognition in 1994?  Who knows?

But who could have imagined the arc of her tale, far stranger than Moshup
and Granny Squannit and the Makiawisug, leading not to oblivion but to
rebirth, all playing out in the tribe's 13th generation, as its legends
foretold? Who could have imagined all those decorative x's and diamonds
and circles and wavy lines at the museum, which are recreated in dazzling,
impeccably faithful oversized splendor at the tribe's Mohegan Sun casino
with its seven-story waterfall, 34-story hotel and planetarium dome, its
evocation of Thunder Moons and Wombi Rock of Moshup, Granny Squannit and
the Makiawisug? Even she, a skeptical visitor in a hard hat at 97, was
impressed. When Gladys Tantaquidgeon died on Tuesday at the age of 106,
she left behind centuries of lessons. Some are spiritual - live with those
you love, respect your past, honor the earth, give thanks and have faith.
Some are practical - if you want to live to be 106 one way might be to eat
eight or nine very small meals a day, don't smoke or drink, avoid
processed meats, drink lots of tea, eat lots of vegetables. (Oh, and
Velveeta-with-marmalade sandwiches won't kill you.)

Today, tribe members; Indians from across the country; and members of the
clergy from churches, monasteries and synagogues will march from the
museum on Mohegan Hill, past the Mohegan Church down to the ancient tribal
burial site to bury her ashes near the Thames River. There will be music
and prayers, and after, tea and chowder. Mourners will celebrate her life
and reflect on the long sweep of history, the power of faith, the ties
that bind. And in their own ways and words, they'll no doubt repeat what
the elders said so long ago.

Mundo wigo.

E-mail: peappl at nytimes.com
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/nyregion/06towns.html


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