Mashantucket sisters among Conn. Women's Hall of Fame inductees
Mashantucket — A pair of sisters credited with preserving the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe’s legacy are among four 2019 Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame inductees.
Elizabeth George Plouffe and Martha “Aunt Matt” Langevin are being honored posthumously along with Marian Chertow, a Yale professor of industrial environmental management, and Nell Newman, founder of Newman’s Own Organics, an organic food and pet food production company.
Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz was to attend a reception for the inductees and/or their representatives Monday evening at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford. Richard “Skip” Hayward, the former Mashantucket chairman who championed the tribe’s rebirth, was to represent Plouffe and Langevin, his grandmother and aunt, respectively, according to Lori Potter, the Mashantuckets’ director of public affairs.
Plouffe and Langevin were the only Mashantuckets still living on the tribe’s impoverished reservation in the early 1970s, Potter said. Both would die during the decade — Plouffe in 1973, Langevin five years later.
In the decade that followed, the tribe would settle land claims with the state, gain federal recognition and launch a high-stakes bingo operation that would become Foxwoods Resort Casino.
“If not for their tenacity, none of what you see at Mashantucket today would exist,” Potter said of Plouffe and Langevin. “It’s all because they were so committed to holding onto the land.”
A news release from Bysiewicz’s office identified the sisters as “conservationists who used traditional gardening methods and preserved the knowledge of native uses for plants.”
Founded in 1994, the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame identifies itself as "an educational outreach organization" whose mission is “to honor the achievement of Connecticut women, preserve their stories, educate the public and inspire the continued achievements of women and girls.” Previous inductees include Florence Griswold, Katharine Hepburn, Helen Keller, Annie Leibovitz and Gladys Tantaquidgeon, the anthropologist and Mohegan medicine woman.
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