A personal investigation of Indigenous history on Martha's Vineyard

Washington Post

3 days ago

As a child in the 1990s, journalist Joseph Lee spent his summers on Martha's Vineyard — not in the wealthy celebrity enclave that most associate with the island, but on tribal land in its remote southwestern corner. Lee, whose maternal grandfather is Aquinnah Wampanoag, took for granted that the tribal summer camp he attended, where he learned how to speak his tribe's language, was generations old. After all, his people had been stewarding their land for more than 10,000 years, since the legendary giant Moshup walked the Massachusetts coastline and dragged his big toe, creating a trench that carved off the island of Noepe, now known as Martha's Vineyard.
'I assumed the tribal government had just naturally extended from Moshup's time to the present, when my cousins and I made moccasins and played tag outside the tribal administration building,' Lee writes in his first book, 'Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity.' 'The first time I noticed the plaque commemorating the building's 1993 construction, I was shocked that I was older than the tribal building. I quickly realized that while I knew we had survived, I had no idea what that survival meant or looked like.' Lee not only traces how the Aquinnah Wampanoag survived in the past but paints a nuanced and compelling portrait of the ongoing fights by Indigenous peoples for land, sovereignty and community.
Lee spends the first half of the book grappling with revelations from tribal and family history: 'Each new piece of information I learned complicated the simple story I had been told about colonization.' The Wampanoag are unusual in that they escaped the fraudulent treaties, settler violence and forced removals that gobbled up many Indigenous homelands in the colonial period and early years of the United States. But, Lee writes, the tribe couldn't avoid 'the next phase of settler colonialism,' in the late 1800s, when the United States used allotment laws to turn Native lands into privately owned plots that could be easily expropriated. When Massachusetts incorporated Aquinnah in 1870, the Wampanoag gained U.S. citizenship but lost all their collectively owned land, which became property of the state. Wampanoag maintained ownership of the land they lived on, but they had to pay property taxes — difficult to afford with their subsistence lifestyles. In this tension between sovereignty and economic survival, many sold their plots.
It would be more than a hundred years before the Aquinnah Wampanoag regained their sovereignty and some of their land, a process rife with tensions and tribulations. The tribe was granted federal recognition in 1987, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs had initially rejected its claim due to the tribe's dispersed community and lack of sufficient self-governance. In other words, as Lee points out, the government was blaming the tribe for suffering the consequences of colonization.
Around the same time, the tribe struck a settlement agreement with the town of Aquinnah that granted them nearly 500 acres of land. This was much less land than the tribe had lost in the 1870s, and to get it, the Wampanoags had to sacrifice some self-governance rights, agreeing that they would follow all town and state laws and cede all future land claims. Still, this agreement ensured that the tribe would always have a home in Aquinnah — an important safeguard, as multimillion-dollar property valuations and high property taxes have made it increasingly difficult for Wampanoags to hold onto privately owned plots.
In recounting his personally driven inquiry into the tribe's troubles, Lee's approach can be repetitive. He begins each chapter with what he didn't know about his tribe as a younger person, and that naive attitude becomes tiresome, as does Lee's occasionally imprecise language. For instance: 'There was stuff I had as a kid, but then as I grew older, I realized it was up to me to figure out what I wanted and where I could get it from.'
That said, once Lee zooms out from his personal experiences, he finds surer footing. He realizes that while the Wampanoag's recent fight for recognition and land back enabled his childhood connections to Native culture, their struggle to 'make the most of the land we have before it's too late' remains. Tensions within tribal government encourage him to look outward in the back half of the book, setting off to report on how other tribes grapple with questions of sovereignty and maintaining community.
In his discussions with other Native people and study of the challenges they face — both external and internal — Lee gains new perspective. While visiting with the Shasta of Northern California, who were violently displaced during the Gold Rush and lack federal recognition or reservation lands, Lee 'felt humbled by the sheer willpower it must have taken to keep a community together without some kind of homeland that people could visit,' giving him a greater appreciation for the slice of Aquinnah his people won back. And through the struggle of the Cherokee and Muscogee Freedmen — descendants of Black people these tribes had once enslaved — to gain tribal citizenship and rights, Lee reflects on the fallibility of tribal governments and how internally policing Native identity weakens communities, putting the individual over the collective good.
In its focus on recent Native history, 'Nothing More of This Land' offers a fresh perspective on what Indigeneity looks like now, and how it might evolve in the future. As Lee writes, 'After disease, stolen land, persecution, violence, racism, and near extermination, Indigenous peoples across the country are still here. And we aren't going anywhere.'
Kristen Martin is a cultural critic based in Philadelphia and the author of 'The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood.'
Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity
By Joseph Lee
One Signal. 235 pp. $28.99