Martha's Vineyard Isn't Just an Elite Summer Destination
Drafted as a last-minute election volunteer in 2015, the 22-year-old Joseph Lee huddled in the library of the Aquinnah Wampanoag Community Center. His task was to recount the votes that would decide whether his tribe would attempt to build a high-stakes bingo operation on the southwestern corner of the elite playground known as Martha's Vineyard, the East Coast island where, Lee writes in 'Nothing More of This Land,' his intimate and lively new memoir, U.S. presidents vacation while in office, bringing with them 'S.U.V.s full of Secret Service, throngs of photographers and even bigger crowds than the usual summer rush.'
Federally recognized in 1987, the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe, like many tribal nations, hoped to make gambling an economic anchor that would support government operations and community development. For years, the effort was stymied by lawsuits and dogged by internal disagreement. While some saw jobs and opportunity — essential for a small tribe surrounded by expensive property taxes and eye-watering land values — others predicted the spoliation of what remained of Wampanoag land, pointing to the risky financial and logistical challenges in bringing gambling to a seasonal tourist economy. Lee actively opposed the gambling initiative, but he also wanted to see the sausage get made, so he jumped in to help tally the final vote: a 110-110 tie. The tribe split down the middle.
Lee writes that this moment proved foundational to his thinking about the complexities of tribal politics. A journalist and creative writing teacher, he grew up moving between home in the Boston suburbs and summers at Aquinnah, with its beaches, cousins, family souvenir stores and a tribal culture camp he often found uninteresting.
Lee never felt quite Native enough, a seasonal Indian who sometimes wondered how different he was from the tourists visiting the Wampanoag corner of the Vineyard. His identity also rests on a complicated genealogy: His father is Chinese and his mother Wampanoag and Japanese. Still, Lee's family was deeply rooted in the land, even as his forebears ventured off island, returning with partners from far-flung locales.
'Nothing More of This Land' begins among the Wampanoag people of Martha's Vineyard and threads across the Native continent and the Indigenous globe. 'I wanted to write about my tribe, family and experiences because I thought they deserved to be shared with the world,' he notes, 'but also because I wanted to tell a different kind of Native story.'
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