As a high school student, when Melissa Fawcett Sayet first heard about the theory of Manifest Destiny, she put her head down on her desk and cried.
The notion that the European conquest of the Americas was divinely inspired meant that her ancestors, the Native Americans who lived here, were fated to be wiped out.
It was bad enough, Sayet says, that a classic American novel-James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Last of the Mohicans,” which was made into a movie released last year-essentially declares the extinction of her tribe by dramatizing the death of the “last” Mohican, Chief Uncas.
Sayet, the author of a soon-to-be-published book called “The Lasting of the Mohegans,” has spent her career as a writer documenting the existence of the Mohegans to show that they have lasted. As a 12th-generation descendant of Chief Uncas, she’s living proof of that. (Cooper apparently invented the name Mohican, a corruption of the related tribes, the Mohegans and the Mahicans.)
“It’s almost like an obstinance: We refuse to be exterminated,” Sayet said in a recent interview in the small Mohegan Tribal Office, on the site where Chief Uncas lived, off a sleepy country highway in this village named for him.
Sayet said her late uncle, Harold Tantaquidgeon, a Mohegan chief, always taught her: “Survival is No. 1. Nothing else really matters. It’s not just a thing, it’s everything.”
For many years, the question of survival has weighed heavily on her.
“Our culture is such a fragile thing,” said Sayet, 33, the official tribal historian for the Mohegans. “No one wants to be a member of the generation that finally let it all slip away.”
At the same time, Sayet has been waging a struggle from within herself. Though she has been steeped in Native American culture since a child, she’s also had to face the fact that when she looks in the mirror, she sees a blue-eyed, fair-skinned woman who looks white in spite of her porcupine quill or beaded earrings and Mohegan medallion.
“I sort of wear the face of the conquerer,” she said. “It’s very depressing because my sister looks like Cher,” in other words, Indian, Sayet said. Sayet inherited her “white” traits from her father, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. She traces her Native American heritage from her mother.
After Sayet was born, her mother, Jayne, an English teacher and poet, wrote a poem about how traumatic it was to have a child with blue eyes.
The Mohegans, who number about 950 members, once lived in wigwams made of bark and animal skins and harvested corn and hunted deer in the lush Connecticut forests. Now many members of the tribe have moved away, and those who remain are hard to distinguish from their white neighbors. Among them are engineers, teachers, nurses, and government workers who live in middle-class colonial or ranch-style homes in and around the quiet town of Montville (pop. 17,300), of which Uncasville is a part.
Since there is no Mohegan reservation (it was dissolved in the 1860s), a visitor must pay close attention to know this is Indian country. A small sign in front of the Mohegan tribal office designates the area as “Mohegan Hill,” where Uncas lived with a dozen wives and fathered many children. Down the road is the turn-off for Fort Shantuk, a 400-year-old Mohegan burial ground. The high school sports teams are “The Indians.”
Ironically, it was last year’s 500th anniversary of the arrival of Columbus in the New World that has helped Sayet feel more confident of the Mohegan tribe’s future and comfortable with herself as a Native American.
One might think the Columbus quincentennial would hardly be an uplifting event for Native Americans. But Sayet said that many Native Americans celebrated the fact that many tribes still exist five centuries later.
“The 500th anniversary of Columbus was a very powerful image,” she said.
The pivotal events of the quincentennial for Sayet began with a conference in the fall of 1991 sponsored by the Connecticut Humanities Council to kick off the Columbus 500 celebration. Sayet and other Native Americans as well as scholars of Native American history were invited to speak about the state’s Indian heritage before an audience of scholars from Yale and other colleges as well public and private school teachers.
“For no apparent reason, we just decided to tell everyone what we really thought for a change,” Sayet said, smiling at the memory.
“So I got up to speak and I said: `Let’s play a game called Shoes and Moccasins,’ ” Sayet recalled. ” `Pretend you all have on moccasins, and let’s look up the definitions of Mohican and Puritan in the Oxford English Dictionary.
” `If you look up Mohican, it says “A warlike tribe formerly inhabiting Connecticut and Massachusetts,” ‘ ” she told the audience. ” `And if you look up Puritan, it says: “A group strict in its adherence to religious observances.” ‘ “
“So I said: `Why don’t we change the definitions. Why not say: The Mohicans are the group that’s strict in its religious observance, because we are strict. And the Puritans were the former warlike tribe that used to inhabit Connecticut and Massachusetts.’ “
The scholars in the audience thought her “game” was clever and “almost funny,” she said, but they didn’t laugh at the next part of her speech.
“I said that Manifest Destiny should not be taught in schools at all. I said that it’s a volatile, racist philosophy and that it’s harmful,” she recalled. “Well, half the scholars in the audience probably wrote some piece of their master’s or Ph.D. dissertations on Manifest Destiny. They didn’t think that (my argument) was necessarily the most brilliant thing they’d ever heard.”
She said from that point on, “you could feel the audience polarizing and pulling away.” The scholars, she recalled, became an “erudite mob.” One man stood up and declared that the theory of manifest destiny “was here to stay.” The audience applauded.
“I had never felt so alone in my life,” Sayet said. “I had never felt so Indian and so unlike everyone else.”
The man in the audience told her that there was no way schools and colleges were going to stop teaching about Manifest Destiny. He said the best thing for her to do was “to just go home and give your kids some weapons to fight it.”
So that’s what she did.
Sayet, the mother of three young children, sat down at her typewriter and started writing furiously about the Mohegan tribe’s history and their struggle “to ward off Manifest Destiny.”
She said she was trying to create a book that would “talk back” for all Mohegan children, something that would say, “This is what I feel and believe, and this is what my people have to say about this.”
A few months after she started writing the book, she read about a contest for the first North American Native Writers’ Awards.
“So I sat there with my Dunkin Donuts and huge mugs of black coffee, getting fatter and fatter working round the clock trying to pump this thing out” before the deadline, Sayet said, laughing. She completed her 150-page manuscript two months later, just in time to submit it to the contest.
In the spring of 1992, Sayet learned that her manuscript, “The Lasting of the Mohegans,” had won the non-fiction award. Hundreds of Native American writers from across the country had submitted entries in six categories.
Sayet is negotiating with two publishers and expects the book to be released in 1994. Unlike “The Last of the Mohicans,” a fictional account of Cooper’s hero “Hawkeye” and his Indian companions, Uncas and Chingachgook, that relies, according to Sayet, mostly on non-Indian sources, “The Lasting of the Mohegans” uses mostly spoken stories that have been passed down from one generation of Mohegans to the next in the oral tradition.
As an award winner, Sayet was invited to attend the first North American Native Writers’ Conference at the University of Oklahoma in July 1992, with such well-known Native American writers as Leslie Marmon Silko and Scott Momaday.
Even though she was an honored guest, Sayet was apprehensive about attending an event with hundreds of other Native Americans, especially those from Western tribes that have had a lot less intermarriage than East Coast tribes. She brought with her two local children of Native American descent, one who’s also African-American and looks it and one who is part white and has blond hair.
“So here we were, this little trio from the East,” Sayet said. “I thought they were going to hate us.”
But that didn’t happen. “Everyone was great,” Sayet said. “People had a real understanding of the fact that we are all native peoples . . . that the issue was really not color or race, but our culture and what we believed in.”
Actually, an immediate camaraderie developed among the participants, Sayet said. They shared jokes about prying anthropologists and common concerns about making the transition from oral traditions to personal computers. And the writers all related wisdom from their elders.
“Every single person, and I mean every single person, got up and said: `My grandmother taught me this, or my grandfather taught me that,”‘ Sayet recalled. She explained that to Native Americans, a “grandparent” is not necessarily your parent’s parent, but a “spiritual grandparent,” or any tribal elder.
She said the stories reflected the common respect for elders in Native American culture. “It was just so amazing to hear how it was such an important part of other people’s lives, too,” she said.
Sayet has always felt close to older people, even dead ones. When she was 4 years old, Samsom Occum, an 18th Century leader of the Mohegans, was her imaginary friend. “He would talk to me and take walks with me,” she said.
Later as a youngster, she would come home from school and head straight for the Mohegan Tribal Museum, which was run by her great-aunt, Gladys Tantaquidgeon, who at 94 is still the tribe’s medicine woman, and Gladys’ brother, Harold, who was tribal chief at the time.
From those afternoons giving tours at the museum, which houses an abundant collection of Native American artifacts, Sayet began to develop an expansive knowledge of Mohegan and Native American history. She later earned a bachelor’s degree from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and a master’s degree in history from the University of Connecticut.
She’s now using her education and background to help the Mohegan tribe complete a 15-year bid for federal recognition, which would allow the Mohegans to benefit from a wide range of federal education, housing and health care programs. It would also enable them to build a casino under the 1988 federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.
Though some tribe members don’t like the idea of making money from gambling, Sayet supports the plan to build a casino because she sees socioeconomic success as essential to the tribe’s survival.
She said the events during the Columbus quincentennial brought her closer to her own tribe’s history and made her feel more a part of the rich heritage of all Native Americans. Those experiences, coupled with the promise of financial success from a casino, have made her more optimistic about the tribe’s future.
Sayet, who is married to a non-Indian, attorney Bart Sayet, says she is comforted to know that when her three children, ages 7, 3 and 2, are old enough to read about the theory of manifest destiny, they’ll be able to find another version of U.S. history, from a Mohegan perspective, among the texts on the shelf.
