Women of Wayland

Born in Gay Head, Massachusetts as a member of the Wampanoag Tribe, Gladys Widdiss grew up on Martha’s Vineyard during the 1920s, where she learned pottery arts and played by the cranberry bogs. She grew up to serve as president of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head from 1978 to 1987. When she was president, the tribe acquired the Gay Head Cliffs, the cranberry bogs, and Herring Creek from the town. She also attained federal recognition from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Gladys continued to serve as vice-chairperson of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribal council. She traveled the country attending Native American gatherings as a representative of the Wampanoags. In the 1960s Gladys was active in the Coalition of Eastern Native Americans. The Gay Head Council on Aging nominated her as the Senior Citizen of the Year (1993), declaring that she exemplified “the spirit of positive aging.”

Gladys showed her strengths early in life. She was the class valedictorian in 1932 at the Tisbury High School. Gladys attended Salem State College to become a teacher but the Great Depression stopped her from finishing. She moved to Boston and found work making hospital gowns. She wed and while her Marine husband was away during WWII, Gladys worked as a painter of aircraft dials. After the war, the couple moved to Wayland.

While raising her children in Wayland, she was a great supporter of the Boy Scouts and at the same time a member of the Boston Children’s Museum for many years. She would split her time working at Jordan Marsh Department Store and the elementary school cafeteria in Wayland but she wanted her three sons and a daughter to love Gay Head so they spent their summers there. She also worked at Filene’s for 17 years.

In an interview with Martha’s Vineyard Magazine some years ago she recalled how at the age of eight she began making and selling ashtrays, paperweights, candleholders, and miniature lighthouses filled with colored clay. She returned to the pottery arts. Several of her pieces are in the Boston Children’s Museum, and for a time, one of her large bowls was on display in a bank in Kyoto, Japan. All her work is sun-baked since the colors of Gay Head clay will fade in the heat of a kiln. A cranberry is the signature on all her work; Wild Cranberry is her native name. Before her death, Gladys joined with two of her sons to operate a trading post that she named in honor of her great grandmother, Howwasswee Trading Post, on the same spot she and her mother had sold clay souvenirs.

“We had 3,400 acres for a playground when I was growing up in the 1920s,” she recalled in an interview. “In winter, we had a game we loved to play by the edge of the cranberry bogs. After the bogs freeze, they’re frozen just on top, but not underneath, and we’d see who could get closest without getting wet feet.” Gladys loved her swimming days at Lobsterville on the island and watching her grandfather back his ox cart into the water there. “And we’d scoop up hake and scup in a pail and afterward we’d salt the hake for winter.” As a child she would pick up fossilized quahaugs and shark’s teeth on the Cliffs and play with them. “We never took any of them home, though, because the next day, if you wanted them, you could go back,” she told historian Linsey Lee for her book More Vineyard Voices.

Martha’s Vineyard Museum Oral History Center interview with Gladys revealed “One of the first things I remember, and I guess I was four or five, was when grandfather would get up around five o’clock in the morning and make a fire. While he was making the fire, he was singing and dancing. I would wake up in the morning to grandpa singing. That was something that came down from way back. Native Americans sing, get up and sing, from sunrise. Some of the tribes still do it out west. Get up and sing songs, and that’s what grandpa used to do.”

Contributed by Kay Gardner-Westcott