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Vogue
3 days ago
- General
- Vogue
Joseph Lee on the Sprawlng Portrait of Aquinnah Wampanoag Identity at the Center of His New Book, Nothing More of This Land
While Martha's Vineyard is perhaps best known as a vacation spot that draws the well-to-do likes of Seth Meyers and the Obamas to its shores every summer, the island also has a rich and complex Indigenous history. Aquinnah Wampanoag writer Joseph Lee gives voice to that past in his new book, Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity. The book chronicles Lee's own upbringing in Martha's Vineyard, as well considering what it means to be in community with other Indigenous individuals around the world. Here, he discusses the book, community sovereignty, taking inspiration from fellow Aquinnah Wampanoag author and historian Linda Coombs, learning the Wampanoag language as a child, and his favorite thing to do when he's back on Martha's Vineyard. This conversation has been edited and condensed. Vogue: How does it feel to see the book out in the world? Joseph Lee: I mean, the book being out is just really exciting. It's a little bit strange because, you know, you work on something for a long time and mostly by yourself, and then suddenly it's out in the world and people are reading it, and it's exciting and a little scary. Transitioning from just writing, where it's you and your laptop, to being out there talking about it and promoting it is great, but it's definitely a shift. You dig so much into present history, including the origins of your own name. What did your research process look like? It was pretty mixed, because I was using so many different types of sources. A lot of it was just talking to my parents or talking to cousins or going back through tribal meeting records, but [there was also some] looking through the local papers, or we have a tribal newsletter that goes out, and I've looked at a lot of those. I was also doing research online and interviewing people from other places. It was a really diverse research scope. It was just trying to gather as much as possible and [use] as many different sources as possible. Are there books that you kind of feel helped your book exist? I would say almost every book written by an Indigenous person before me. Actually, there's one from my own tribe, by Linda Coombs, and it's called Colonization and the Wampanoag Story. I'm not sure what the technical categorization is, but it's a book that has a lot of history as well as a creative retelling, imagining what life was like before colonization in our tribe. Those kinds of books helped me factually—the information in those books was useful to me—but it also helped me personally think about being a Wampanoag author, being a Native author, and putting something like this out into the world.
Washington Post
6 days ago
- General
- Washington Post
A personal investigation of Indigenous history on Martha's Vineyard
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
New York Times
12-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Martha's Vineyard Isn't Just an Elite Summer Destination
NOTHING MORE OF THIS LAND: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity, by Joseph Lee 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.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Boston Globe
09-07-2025
- Boston Globe
Coming to an understanding of Indigenous identity, rooted on Martha's Vineyard
A member of the island's Indigenous Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Arguably the most picturesque landscape on Martha's Vineyard, this is the land that the author's family still calls home. But aside from the opening pages, Lee's writing resists the tendency toward mythmaking that's common to destinations laden with outsize reputations. Related : Advertisement 'Most people, I think, expect to encounter Natives on rural land out west, not in Massachusetts, and certainly not in one of the most exclusive beach communities in the country,' he writes. 'And to be honest, that threw me off a little too. My tribe's land and community did not look like what I imagined other Native lands did and so those assumptions clashed with the Martha's Vineyard that I knew.' Advertisement These are the sorts of complexities that course through Lee's engaging text, which is as much a personal memoir as it is the story of his family and his tribe's history. Despite the author's deep breadth of knowledge — in addition to his lived experience as an Aquinnah Wampanoag, he's also a journalist who covers Indigenous affairs — he is refreshingly frank about his own misconceptions while coming of age and how he learned to correct them while researching and writing this book. Tourism, in particular, emerges as an essential, if thorny topic that Lee explores with great nuance. While clamming off the coast in one scene, he notes of the Atlantic, 'Every summer, those waters drew the tourists that supported my family and continued to threaten the tribe.' Related : His grandmother was one of the first in their remote town to rent out their family home to summer vacationers starting in the 1960s, a practice that has become a critical source of income for many island families, Indigenous or not. And for generations, his family has operated a profitable gift shop near the Gay Head lighthouse. 'Tourism,' he writes, 'had suddenly given some Gay Headers a realistic path to making a living and building a life there. … And yet the same thing that offered these opportunities — the allure of the island's pristine beaches and raw landscape — also made it increasingly difficult for tribal families to stay on the island.' Anyone who's witnessed the wild, natural beauty of Martha's Vineyard, especially in Aquinnah, can understand why property values and, in turn, property taxes have skyrocketed on the island, and it's a concern that Lee worries about openly in the text. Advertisement By offering these glimpses into his mind and his own internal conflicts, Lee proves to be an adroit, honest narrator, resisting any desire to wax poetic by instead reminding readers that real people live here. In one lightly humorous aside, he relays the origins of his family's gift shop, called Hatmarcha. It's a portmanteau of the names of his grandmother, mother, grandfather, and uncle: Hatsuko, Martha, and Charles (both men shared the name). Yet, 'decades later, people still ask if the name has some sort of mystical Native meaning,' he notes with a wink. Related : Since Lee spent the school year in Newton, with his parents switching off to commute back and forth to Martha's Vineyard, he describes coming to terms with his Indigenous heritage in real time while working summers at Hatmarcha Gifts: 'I was behind the showcase in the store, trying to figure out what it means to rely on an economy that is slowly but surely destroying our homeland, who tourism actually benefits, and what it all says about how we think about Native identity.' There are no easy answers, he learns, as he expands the scope of the book beyond the personal in its latter half to explore concepts like 'land back,' blood quantum, and federal recognition of tribes through his work as a journalist covering other Indigenous communities around the world. Through a diverse array of sources, Lee offers readers a valuable understanding of the many forms that 21st-century Indigenous life can take and how they might evolve in the future. It's clear how much Lee cherishes his connection to Martha's Vineyard, a place that's easy to love. And in these pages, he's crafted a must-read for anyone who seeks to know the island with depth that extends well beyond its superficial myths. Advertisement NOTHING MORE OF THIS LAND: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity By Joseph Lee Atria/One Signal Publishers, 256 pages, $28.99 Hannah Bae is a Korean American writer, journalist, and illustrator and winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.
