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ERNIE STEVENS: On this edition of Native Report,
we take a tour of a very special sculpture
garden of the Mohegan Nation in Uncasville, Connecticut.
RITA ASPINWALL: While in Connecticut,
we visit the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum,
the oldest Native American owned and operated museum
in the United States.
ERNIE STEVENS: We visit the Peabody Museum
at Harvard University and learn about the archeology
and history of the Indian College at colonial Harvard.
RITA ASPINWALL: We also learn what
we can do to lead healthier lives and hear from our elders
on this Native Report.
NARRATOR: Production of Native Report
is made possible by grants from the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux
Community, the Blandin Foundation, and the Duluth
Superior Area Community Foundation.
[music playing]
Welcome to Native Report.
I'm Ernie Stevens.
And I'm Rita Aspinwall.
Visitors to the Mohegan Nation Government and Community Center
are greeted by life-size statues that honor prominent sachems
and chiefs.
Join us as we learn about their place in Mohegan history.
TADD JOHNSON: A gentle wind blows
across the statue garden on Crow Hill of the Mohegan Indian
Reservation.
These statues in front of the Mohegan Government
and Community Center are memorials
honoring the influential Mohegan chiefs and sachems
of the 20th century.
MELISSA TANTAQUIDGEON ZOBEL: Behind me, we
have two very important chiefs.
The man with the hat was Henry Wegun Mathews.
And Wegun means good in our language.
And that was something that his people called him because he
was so pure of heart.
And we see him actually grinding corn.
Corn we believe feeds the body and the spirit.
We call it [non-english].
But when it's ground, we call it [non-english],
which means "traveling food."
Traveling food has many purposes, mainly for hunters
on long journeys.
But also, it's very important to nourish us spiritually.
And so this is something he did.
He kept us going during very difficult times
and provided for his people, both physically
and spiritually.
Behind him, we have Chief Matahga.
And Chief Matahga's English name is Burrill Fielding.
And Burrill Fielding was a great preserver of our ceremonies
and kept our wigwam festival going.
Our wigwam festival is actually like a powwow,
where we invite the whole world to come visit us
every year in August, on the third weekend in August.
And Chief Matahga would cook in the cook shack,
and make the clam chowder and the oyster stew,
and wake everyone up early in the morning
to make sure that things got going as they needed to.
And he also held the tribe together
during the difficult period of the 1930s and '40s
and into the 1950s.
TADD JOHNSON: Melissa is the Mohegan Nation's
tribal historian and medicine woman.
One of her responsibilities is to tell
the stories of the tribal chiefs honored in this special place.
I'm standing in front of a good friend of mine,
Courtland Fowler.
He was our chief and chairman during the 1970s, 1980s,
into the 1990s.
And he was a very traditional man,
but he also was very political and very resolute.
He was the person who was in charge of our people
at the time of our first filing a federal recognition.
And he went through the period in which we were initially
denied that claim and had to keep
things going through that time when, of course,
there was a lot of discontent and unhappiness
on the part of the tribe.
He's pictured in his statue here with a headdress that
was the type that was worn a lot by eastern Indian men
in his period, because it was very flamboyant.
It garnered a lot of attention.
But he also wore traditional roach in many of his pictures.
You'll see him wearing a split deer tail and porcupine
headdress.
His regalia is typical of the other men you see here
with eastern woodlands designs.
And he's carrying a hatchet, because his Indian name
was Little Hatchet.
And the reason for that is that as a young boy,
he always wanted to chop wood.
So his father had to get him a very small hatchet
when he was just a little boy.
And his hatchets grew with him.
He was someone who worked very, very hard with these people
on his own time.
Of course, there were no salary.
This was just something that he did and devoted himself to.
He was also a great proponent of protecting our burial grounds.
He made sure that those things were taken care of.
And in fact, several of the burial grounds
which we have been able to reclaim
were due to his hard work, places
where local authorities had paved over burial
grounds and that sort of thing.
Thanks to Courtland Fowler, we were
able to reclaim those places.
My favorite thing about Courtland Fowler
was his stubbornness.
He was stubborn in a time where that's all we had was
to hang on and hold on and say no
to people who were trying to harm our burial grounds
and do things to our people that were unfair.
Sometimes people might have seen him as gruff.
And I saw him as resolute and I was
proud to call him my friend.
TADD JOHNSON: It was in 1994 under the leadership
of Chief Ralph Sturges when the Mohegan Nation received
federal recognition.
The man standing behind me is Chief G'tinemong,
which means he who helps you, Ralph Sturges.
And certainly he did do that.
When he became chairman of our tribe,
we were not a federally recognized Indian nation.
And when he finished his tenure, we
had been a federally recognized Indian nation for many years.
And pretty much all of his dreams and our dreams
were starting to come true in terms
of bringing our people home.
This community center that we're standing near was his idea.
He said this is the first thing we have to do for our people.
We have to have a place we can gather again.
Ralph Sturges dedicated himself 100% to federal recognition.
It was something that he, I think more than anyone else,
understood in terms of how much it would benefit our people.
Some of the things in the east that sometimes people
don't realize are that Indians can go very unnoticed here
in New England.
We were fortunate.
We had a museum, and we still have a museum.
So we had some sort of a public face.
But many tribes don't have that.
And our reservations are very hidden.
They're in the woods.
And a lot of people don't even know they're there.
In Connecticut, there are five Indian reservations.
And very few people could tell you where those are.
So Ralph Sturges worked on federal recognition.
And we succeeded in that goal in 1994.
He's pictured here holding the paper
in which our land is returned to us by the federal government.
And that was a very important part of federal recognition.
And he wore a baseball cap that said "Chief" on it.
That was one of his favorite things that he had.
He sometimes wore a headdress, but the baseball cap
was something you saw him in most of the time.
He sometimes called himself a three-piece suit Indian
because he had to travel to Washington, DC, a lot.
And he had a very affable personality.
And I think that's one of the reasons
that he was so successful.
These are the people who brought us where we are today.
I'm Dr. Arne Vainio, and today, we'll
be talking about heart disease and cardiovascular disease.
Heart disease affects a big portion of the population
and is responsible for about 610,000 deaths in the United
States each year.
Heart disease includes coronary artery disease,
hypertension or high blood pressure, heart attacks,
congestive heart failure, heart rhythm problems,
and congenital heart disease.
Cardiovascular disease can also involve the heart
and is caused by narrowed, blocked,
or stiffened blood vessels that prevent
blood and oxygen getting to your heart, brain, or other organs.
When it comes to heart disease symptoms,
men are more likely to have chest pain, while women
can sometimes have just extreme fatigue, nausea,
and shortness of breath.
And this can sometimes be missed.
Other symptoms can include pain in the jaw, throat,
upper abdomen, or back.
You may not be diagnosed with cardiovascular disease
until after you have a heart attack, heart failure, stroke,
or develop angina.
Angina is chest pain that goes away with rest.
And the pain is usually squeezing, pressure, tightness,
or heaviness.
Pain that does not go away with rest or nitroglycerin
could be a heart attack and needs
to be evaluated in an emergency room.
A heart attack is a blockage in a blood vessel to the heart
muscle itself, and that part of the heart dies.
The heart muscle can heal as a scar in about eight weeks.
Then that part of the heart doesn't contract and cannot
pump anymore.
Treatment for heart attacks is often
cardiac rehab and lifestyle changes
and can include angioplasty, which is a thin balloon
to push the artery open again.
Stents can be used to keep the blood vessel open.
Sometimes people need to have coronary artery bypass graft
surgery to jump around the blocked areas.
There are three main blood vessels that supply blood
to the heart muscle itself, and each supplies
a specific part of the heart.
Preventing heart disease is much better
than trying to fix it after heart damage happens.
The best way to prevent heart disease
is regular exercise, a low-fat diet
with lots of fruits and vegetables,
losing weight, and avoiding alcohol
and non-ceremonial tobacco use.
Controlling blood pressure allows your heart
to work less hard.
And keeping diabetes under control
helps prevent damage to blood vessels.
There are many different types of heart problems,
and we'll discuss those individually
in future segments.
As always, please email me questions you would
like to have answered here.
My email address is at the bottom of the screen.
Remember, call an elder.
They've been waiting for your call.
I'm Dr. Arne Vainio, and this "Health Matters."
The Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum is
the oldest Native American owned museum in the United States.
Operated by the Mohegan Tribe of Connecticut,
the museum houses a collection of artifacts and objects
from across the continent.
WANDA SAYERS: This stone lodge on the Mohegan Indian
Reservation is the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum,
which houses a collection of Mohegan
and other Native American artifacts.
It is dedicated to the ideal of education.
Welcome to the Tantaquidgeon Museum.
It was built in 1931 by John and Harold Tantaquidgeon.
They had housed a lot of these articles that are
in this museum in their home.
And so they decided they wanted to build a museum
and present their viewpoint to the public
so they would get to know them better.
And it was a good thing they did,
because two years after they moved all the articles up here,
their house burnt down.
This particular room houses Mohegan items
for the most part.
We also have some Mohegan and northern coastal Indian items
in that one.
And the other room we call the Southwest Room.
And it houses items from the west, southwest,
and some South American items.
This is what we call our leaders' board, sort of.
And there's a lot of chiefs up here
and important people to our tribes, including women.
They were all artisans.
Some of the carvings, this one particularly,
when I was mentioning the fire, my grandfather
had saved one of the beams from that
and carved this and donated this to the museum.
He also did some beadwork.
This was from Chief Matahga.
He did a lot of utensils.
And these were typical wedding presents
that they would present to the brides.
Looking at these items, it reminds me
of the way things used to be.
We've changed so rapidly with the onset of gaming,
that things have just progressed.
This reminds me of the old times when you would sit around
and you would actually have conversations with people
and do crafts together.
Obviously, my grandfather's items are very important to me,
too, because he's-- actually, these earrings came from
my father, who got his education about beading from
my grandfather.
So it's all connected somehow.
WANDA SAYERS: The Mohegan hold their chiefs and sachems
in high regard.
A statue garden honors their memory.
The medicine women also hold a special place
in Mohegan culture.
In one corner of the lodge stands a wood
carving in the likeness of Gladys Tantaquidgeon,
co-founder of the museum.
MELISSA TANTAQUIDGEON ZOBEL: I'm standing
in front of my great aunt, Gladys Tantaquidgeon, who
lived from 1899 to 2005.
She was 106 when she passed on.
And she led her people through most of the 20th century,
as a medicine woman and also as a member of the tribal council
in many different capacities.
She learned from our traditional elders.
When she was a small child, she was selected.
They actually called her everyone's grandmother,
[non-english], because she was the type of child who really
captured the imagination of the older people.
They felt that she would do great things.
The carving of Gladys is really an interesting piece.
It's made of a single piece of basswood,
which is a sacred tree to us.
It's called [non-english] in our language
because it's a cure-all.
It heals, which is in many ways what Gladys herself was like.
She was a healing kind of a personality,
a good-spirited person.
Gladys' belt is a very interesting piece.
It comes from a time before the American Revolution.
And what's interesting about it is
it was only worn by three women, they had such longevity.
Martha Uncas passed it on to Fidelia Fielding--
these are Mohegan women.
Fidelia Fielding's Indian name was Flying Bird.
And Flying Bird passed it on to Gladys.
And so Gladys died in 2005.
And this belt, which was only owned by three women,
came into existence in 1769.
So with it went many of our stories with the belt.
And that's why it's such an important piece of our culture.
Gladys is holding a small basket,
which also has significance because it relates
to offerings that we give to some of the spirits who
are important to us.
And her clothing, again, is Eastern Woodland design.
She was a tiny, tiny lady.
WANDA SAYERS: In the yard adjacent to the museum
is a replicated Mohegan village that features a traditionally
framed wigwam and longhouse.
ANITA FOWLER: There's longhouse and a wigwam.
Longhouse tended to have two or three families.
In this area, they could be up to 60 feet long
and house up to 12 families.
Every family had their own fire pot and their own beds.
They're made out of poplar, which is the outside bark.
And the inside structure is swamp cedar.
And they take the saplings, and they have to dig down.
Then you bend those saplings, cross them over,
tie them together.
So then you have that structure that you attach the bark to.
And then the outer rings hold the park in place.
They're very well made.
In the summer time, they're very cool.
If you put the mats on the inside,
it's like air conditioning with the air circulating.
And in the winter, it's just like you're
having heating in your house, and it keeps the wigwams warm.
I think this village adds a lot, because now we have
an outside attraction as well.
And a lot of people don't even come into the museum.
They will just come and look around the village
and sit up here.
We're on Mohegan Hill.
A lot of the Mohegans lived in this area.
It was not just on this area, but in this general area.
This is where we all lived.
I lived across the street.
And like I said, my grandfather lived on the other side
of the museum.
So every day, I would walk through this path
to go to my grandfather's and my grandmother's house.
And Harold or Gladys or Ruth would grab me every single day
and show me something that was related to something in here.
So this is what we have.
You can't just replace any of these items,
so it's our heritage and our culture.
What these people have just done
is re-enacted this march back in November 7th
through the 13th, 1862, when 1,700 of our people, primarily
women and children, were force marched 150 miles
from southwestern Minnesota around the Morton, Redwood
Falls area, 150 miles to the concentration camp.
And again, soldiers enforced this.
We just got done there with that little ceremony
where a lot of us were carrying a branch with ribbons on it.
And on the ribbons was names of known people
who were on that march.
And the young people who are running it,
they were very thoughtful.
And they knew that one of my relatives was [non-english].
And that means, in English, Blueberry Woman.
And they gave me that branch with a name--
with a ribbon on it to carry.
And then in the circle, we were to put it down.
And anyway, when I put it down, we said [non-english].
Tears came to my eyes.
I said, [non-english], Blueberry Woman,
thank you so much for what you have done.
RITA ASPINWALL: In 2007 and 2009,
Harvard students, professors, and leaders
of local native communities shared the excitement
of discovery and interpretation as they
excavated Old Harvard Yard, site of the Indian College.
The small fragments they found revealed so much from a time
long ago.
CHRISTINA WOODS: One of the world's oldest archaeological
and ethnographic museums is the Peabody Museum on the Harvard
University campus.
Today, we will learn about the Digging Veritas exhibit that
reveals how students lived at colonial
Harvard and the role of the Indian College
in the school's early years.
DIANA LOREN: Harvard is founded in 1636
with the goal of educating English students to become
Puritan ministers.
So it's a Puritan institution as it's initially founded.
Unlike the Harvard you know today,
which is kind of a grander institution,
Harvard in the 17h century is a poor, financially struggling
institution.
And it actually starts to go bankrupt.
So they seek funding from the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England
to help them keep the university going.
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England
is looking, as part of their colonization efforts,
to convert Native Americans in southern New England
to become Puritans.
One way they seek to do that at Harvard
is establish the Indian College.
So what that means in 1650 is that Harvard reestablishes
itself to the education-- and I'm quoting directly
from the 1650 Harvard Charter, "the education of English
and Indian youth of this country in knowledge and godliness."
And one way to proselytize and convert population
was through language and language acquisition,
both Native American knowledge of English language and vice
versa, English knowledge of Native American languages.
So 1655, the Indian College building is constructed.
And there are only actually a few Native American students
that come to Harvard between 1655 and about 1690.
CHRISTINA WOODS: Harvard Yard had been
excavated during the 1980s.
However, the 2005 excavation coincided
with the 350th anniversary of the Indian College.
DIANA LOREN: In 2005, the Harvard University Native
American Program organized the commemoration
of the 350th anniversary of the Indian College.
It was a fantastic event with scholars and celebration
across campus.
Here at the Peabody Museum, we have an exhibit,
a student curated exhibit called Digging Veritas, which
tells the story of the Indian College.
So we have the archival information
of what the plans were, that it was
to be built of brick, that it was supposed
to have certain dimensions, and is
supposed to have two chimneys and several chambers.
So we have that information.
There are no maps from the 17th century of Harvard.
There's no architectural plans.
There's no really complete description.
It's just these notes in the records that we find.
We have located a foundation trench for the Indian College
building.
So going from where we really didn't
know where the Indian College building was
to actually finding part of its foundation trench in the soil
has been great.
But then to locate printing type, that type that
was used in the printing press, that
was used for the printing of those books in Algonquin,
we found the printing type inside the foundation trench
where the Indian College was.
That just brought it all around.
We have a sense of things from the archival records.
But the archaeology really gives us a different sense,
what their day to day was like.
What we find is trash, the stuff that's left behind.
And that trash tells us how they ate, what they ate,
how they studied, what they smoked, what they drank.
And that's a fascinating story, because it tells us
the community that they created as students, both the English
and Indian students together, here at Harvard.
CHRISTINA WOODS: And that story of the Indian College
is what faculty and staff strongly
believes needs to be told to a larger audience.
SHELLY LOWE: Peabody Museum has focused specifically
on the history of Harvard, on the Indian College,
has looked at the Charter.
And with the help of quite a few faculty and alumni,
they've been able to shine a very, very big spotlight
on the Indian College and the history of the Indian College
at Harvard.
This is a very, very unique history.
Harvard is the first institution of higher education
in the United States, and the first to then also be
there to educate Native youth, or have part of its purpose
to educate Native youth.
It's one of those things where not too many people know that,
specially students who come here.
They really have no idea that this
is what the history of their institution is.
The dig in Harvard Yard was kind of the most in-your-face
pointing back to this history, because nobody puts
a big hole in Harvard Yard.
That doesn't happen.
All of a sudden, students, tourists, faculty, staff
are walking through Harvard Yard, and there's a big hole.
And there's a big sign that says we're
looking for the Indian College.
DENNIS NORMAN: So many people I had
to explain the history to this over and over again.
And I think the dig in Harvard Yard
did more to create an awareness of the history of Harvard
than anything I've seen around here, because we've been saying
this for years and years.
But the dig really brought it home.
And people had to go by it.
It was there during commencement.
A lot of visiting dignitaries had
to see it and ask questions about it
and learn about the history.
I also think it has brought it home to the administration,
to tell you the truth, of the importance of the history.
And I think that's a big factor that we constantly
have to work on is keeping this in the awareness
of the institution and the importance
of the collaboration.
DIANA LOREN: So many students come to Harvard
not knowing about Harvard's past.
So there are students that don't know about Indian education
here at Harvard or the founding of the college,
the university as a multicultural place
in the 17th century and how important it
was to the creation of Harvard and what we know today.
In the 18th and 19th century, that history becomes lost.
And that's a key history that tells us about Harvard.
And as a Harvard student or someone
affiliated with Harvard, it's a story we should know.
ERNIE STEVENS: For more information
about Native Report or the stories
we've covered, look for us on the web at nativereport.org,
on Facebook, and on Twitter.
Thank you for spending this time
with your friends and neighbors in Indian country.
I'm Rita Aspinwall.
And I'm Ernie Stevens.
Join us next week for another Native Report.
NARRATOR: Rita Aspinwall is an enrolled member of the Fond du
Lac Band of Lake Superior, Chippewa,
and is an ICWA social worker with Fond du Lac Social
Services.
Ernie Stevens is a member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin
and is a film and television producer.
Production of Native Report is made possible by grants
from the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, the Blandin
Foundation, and the Duluth Superior Area Community
Foundation.