Wigwam Festival owes debt to tribe's Sewing Society

August 20, 2010 12:00 am • Last Updated: August 20, 2010 3:34 am

By By BRIAN HALLENBECK Day Staff Writer

Emma Baker, a major force in celebrating and preserving Mohegan tribal culture in the late 1800s, is credited with revitalizing the green corn festival.

Mohegan - They darned and baked and no doubt kibitzed.

They also revived the Mohegan Tribe's green corn festival, decided who could become chief and kept the tribe's reservation and culture intact when things got tough in the late 1800s.

They were some bunch.

No wonder this weekend's annual Mohegan Wigwam Festival is dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the Mohegan Sewing Society.

"At first glance, it was this sort of innocuous group of little old ladies who made quilts," Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, a Mohegan tribal historian and medicine woman, said Thursday. "But if you look at some of their diaries, you see they also picked the tribe's chiefs and decided policies on important matters like burials and land claims and ceremonies."

It wasn't so much that they officially endorsed a chief. It's just that no one was getting elected without their say-so.

"They were like a society of grandmothers - with tremendous influence," Zobel said.

Emma Baker, the group's firebrand, chaired the tribal council and represented the Mohegans before the Connecticut legislature - decades before women had the right to vote.

"One of her big issues was literacy," Zobel said. "She made sure the children learned to read, which provided a tremendous bridge between cultures, between the Mohegans and the outside world."

Festival dream

In 1860, with the reservation starting to break up under mounting pressure on the tribe to Christianize and assimilate, Baker took it upon herself and the sewing society to revitalize the tribe's green corn festival, or wigwam, an annual rite dating back hundreds if not thousands of years.

"Here's where it gets mystical," Zobel said.

Baker told family and friends that her late mother, Rachel Fielding, had come to her in a dream and urged her to revitalize the festival, that the very fate of the tribe could depend on it. Baker took the vision to heart.

"So the restoration of the festival was inspired by a dream," Zobel said.

Baker's festival was originally held on the lawn in front of the Mohegan Church, which the event supported. Tribal archives contain an item from The Day describing the 1909 wigwam, which Baker was unable to attend because of illness.

"… But she has made many articles for the festival at her home, and her assistants have been zealous and efficient, so that the wigwam promises to be as full and successful as ever.

" On the lawn in front of the church is erected the usual white birch wigwam providing the place where the tables are spread. Under this leafy roof the women of the society put in some busy times with the serving of meals at all times of the day and the disposal of the various articles, many of them of Indian design and workmanship, which they have for sale."

In addition to the usual wigwam fare - Native American crafts and cuisine, music, tribal dance competitions - and the celebration of the sewing society, this weekend's festival will serve as a coming out of sorts for Lynn Malerba, who was installed as chief Sunday during the Mohegans' annual members-only homecoming. Malerba, until Sunday the chairwoman of the tribal council, was elected chief for life earlier this year by the tribe's elders council.

"It's an opportunity for us to debut our new chief," Zobel said of the festival. "It's fitting that it will be our first woman chief (in nearly 300 years) on the anniversary of the sewing society. There's a bit of karma there."

Malerba is expected to greet Mohegan tribal members, members of other tribes and the public between 10 a.m. and noon Saturday. She'll be wearing her new chief's regalia, a gift from the tribe and her family, featuring her symbol, a heart.

"It's a very vibrant, colorful regalia, which we hope symbolizes the fact that we're looking to the future and not just the past," Zobel said.

Chief Occum (Lemuel Fielding) stands with granddaughter Lucille Fielding Eichelberg and an unidentified child by the welcome sign to the Mohegan Wigwam Festival in this undated photo.