The View from Crow Hill: An Interview with Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel

If you attended the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (naisa) symposium in 2012, you know Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel (formerly Melissa Jayne Fawcett) as the author of The Lasting of the Mohegans: The Story of the Wolf People (1995). naisa was held that year at the Mohegan Sun Resort and Casino on the Mohegan Tribe’s reservation in Uncasville, Connecticut, and all attendees received a copy of Zobel’s book in their conference folder. Her first book, The Lasting of the Mohegans demonstrates the multifaceted interests and talents—as historian, anthropologist, educator, medicine person, and storyteller—that Zobel has continued cultivating in the decades since the book (or, more accurately, a longer manuscript version of it) won the inaugural Wordcraft Writers’ Circle First Book Award for Non-Fiction in 1992. Some of the same research that went into The Lasting of the Mohegans and Zobel’s other historical monograph, Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon (2000), was also crucial to the tribe’s long and ultimately successful struggle for federal recognition. (They achieved federal recognition in 1994.) At the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum and at schools across the region, Zobel has taught thousands of people Mohegan history, culture, and stories. Today, she serves as tribal historian, medicine woman, and executive director of cultural and community programs for the Mohegan Nation.

While conducting original scholarly research and serving her community in a variety of significant leadership roles, Zobel has also managed to find the time to embark on a serious career as a fiction author, writing between the hours of one and five a.m. She has published two novels and has a new trilogy in the works. Her first novel, Oracles (2004), is set in the future on the Yantuck Indian Reservation, a lightly fictionalized version of the Mohegan reservation. Its protagonist is a young medicine-woman-in-training who joins her elders in resisting “the New Light Corporation,” a New Age–like movement that dominates the media and the economy as well as the spirituality of the novel’s sort-of-post-apocalyptic, sort-of-sci-fi world. While Oracles takes us into the future, Zobel’s second novel, Fire Hollow (2010), takes us back in time to the nineteenth century. Inspired by a real-life murder mystery, the book is focalized through a young “Yantuck” (again, read Mohegan) man who looks to Bram Stoker’s Dracula as well as Yantuck stories and artifacts as he attempts to process the murder and its repercussions. Having completed an mfa at Fairfield University in 2012, Zobel is now at work on a young adult trilogy. The first novel in the series, Wabanaki Blues, is being published by Poisoned Pencil Press in June 2015. A contemporary coming of age story/romance/murder mystery/thriller, Wabanaki Blues reflects Zobel’s first attempt to write fiction set in the present and off the reservation. The novel’s protagonist is a teenage Mohegan/Abenaki musician whose professor parents force her to spend a summer away from her Hartford home in the remote Vermont woods with her quirky grandfather.

On a warm day in June 2013, I sat down with Zobel to talk about her writing. We met in the beautiful new Mohegan Tribal Government Building that sits atop Crow Hill, just across a small gorge from Mohegan Sun in southeastern Connecticut. The bright and airy building, carefully designed to resemble a series of long houses and to offer sweeping views of the Thames River, is “an enormous transformation,” Zobel says, from the Mohegans’ first tribal office, a small room in a “very rundown” apartment. Before turning on the microphone, Zobel and I talked about the fall 2012 sail special issue on Indigenous New England and our shared excitement about it and other recent work on the region, especially scholarship by folks like Lisa Brooks and Christine DeLucia that dynamically maps Native presence, movement, and networks in the Northeast.

While Zobel’s novels do not fall neatly into generic categories, they all focus significantly on the region of New England. Throughout our...