Gladys Tantaquidgeon (June 15, 1899 – November 1, 2005)[1] was a Mohegan anthropologist, author, council member, and elder.[2] In 1994 she was inducted into the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame.
Gladys was the third of seven children born to Mohegan parents in Uncasville, Connecticut. In childhood, she learned traditional practices, beliefs, and lore from nanus or respected elder women. One of her mentors was the Mohegan traditionalist Fidelia Fielding, who lived from 1827 to 1908.[3] Another was her maternal aunt, Emma Fielding Baker, who was posthumously elected in 1992 as the Tribal Medicine Woman.[2]
Tantaquidgeon had only infrequent Western education in youth, but at 18 she attended the University of Pennsylvania to study anthropology. There she studied and worked with Frank Speck. She later did field work concerning the Lenape and other eastern tribes.
She worked with the Bureau of Indian Affairs from 1934-1947, first on the Yankton Sioux Indian Reservation in Dakota. Working with the BIA Federal Indian Arts and Crafts Board in the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming, Tantaquidgeon helped artisans preserve traditional skills and arts. She also helped them form cooperatives and other institutions for sale and management of their arts.[2] She developed ways for tribes to revive their cultural practices.
In 1931 she worked with her brother Harry, a former chief, to set up the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum, one of the oldest owned and operated by Native Americans. After returning to Uncasville for good, she was working full-time at the museum until 1998.[4][2]
She also worked to preserve and revive tribal customs and language. She became a council member and medicine woman, publishing several books about traditional herbal medicine. "Her best-known work, A Study of Delaware Indian Medicine Practices and Folk Beliefs, was published in 1942 and reprinted in 1972 and 1995 as Folk Medicine of the Delaware and Related Algonkian Indians."[4] In 1992 she was elected as the Tribal Medicine Woman.
As a librarian in the Niantic Women’s Prison in the 1940s, she helped minority women. She also kept birth, graduation, marriage and death records of the Mohegan people that proved vital to proving the tribe's case for federal recognition in 1994.[5]