Martha's Vineyard, just seven miles off the coast of Massachusetts, is an island known for its windswept beaches, clay cliffs, and cedar-shingled cottages. It's a place synonymous with presidential vacations, affluent visitors, and shops selling pearls and polo shirts.
But beneath that postcard-perfect image lies a much older story, one that debut author Joseph Lee uncovers in his new book, Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity. As a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag, Lee takes readers beyond the celebrity summer scene and into the heart of Noepe, the name his people have called the island for centuries.
Lee begins the book with the legend of Moshup, a giant whose toe is said to have carved the island from the sea and whose whale hunts left the cliff in Aquinnah stained deep red. Beyond the myth, Lee takes readers on a deeply personal exploration of indigenous life around the world and what it means to belong to a land that is both a sacred home and a luxury playground, a place where tourism sustains families, even as it threatens to displace them.
"At one time, there was nobody else on the island; it was just Wampanoag folks …" Lee says. "Unfortunately, now we have a much smaller community. ... We have over 1,000 members in the [Aquinnah Wampanoag] tribe, but only a few hundred of those live on Martha's Vineyard and then an even smaller percentage of those actually live in Aquinnah, in our hometown."
Lee grew up in a suburb of Boston and spent his summers on the family's land, working at his parents' store on Martha's Vineyard.
Interview highlights
On the way some tourists react to meeting a Native person on Martha's Vineyard
I think anybody who has ever worked in retail or any similar setting will know that people just come in and it's totally unfiltered and they'll say anything and they will ask you anything. For some reason, being behind a counter just exposes you to anything anybody wants to say. ... People would ask all kinds of questions: "I didn't think there were Indians anymore. What are you doing here? What do you wear? What kind of houses do you live in?" Somebody once asked me if we use iPhones …
So there's a lot of weirdness, and you kind of have to fight through it. And it's something I wanted to talk about in the book, because it's an important part of my experience ... but I also didn't want it to become this like punching down thing where I was sort of focusing on these bizarre and sometimes offensive comments I was getting, but sort of what's behind them.
On questioning his own indigenous identity
I think in the absence of maybe more nuanced positive models of what it means to be indigenous, I felt like the only thing I had to fall back on was kind of these stereotypes or simplifications or assumptions. And so I always felt a little bit like, well, am I maybe less Native because I don't look the way people expect me to look or because I have these other parts of my background? [Lee is also of Chinese and Japanese descent.] …
I saw other young Native people who I felt were maybe embracing their culture a little more. They were speaking the language or they were competing at powwows. …
I would go [to Martha's Vineyard] in the summer and I looked forward to the beaches and getting ice cream and going to the agricultural fair at the end of the summer and going on rides and playing games. And all of that was fun and I loved it, but it to me didn't feel like this sort of ideal of being Wampanoag or being indigenous that I had built up in my head. And so I kind of wondered like, well, am I just another summer visitor? What actually distinguishes me from these people?
On why he wanted to talk to people from other tribes
I wanted to feel that sense of kinship, because I always felt a little bit insecure in my indigenous identity. … I didn't live on the land, I didn't speak the language, all these things. But also just because of the nature of our tribe, that our tribe felt so small and being on Martha's Vineyard felt so removed from [the] stereotypes about what a tribe is, like these big kind of Western expanses, these huge communities, which, that's one aspect of Native life, but that's not the only one. I think I felt in some ways that those larger tribes were maybe a little bit more legitimate than I was.
On his relationship to the Wampanoag language
I grew up learning the Wampanoag language in our tribal summer camp. ... Our language was lost and we had no fluent speakers for a long time. ... People were working really hard to bring it back. And so in camp, we would practice words and phrases and learn how to introduce ourselves. ... There are a lot of people at home who are dedicating themselves to becoming fluent in the language and more importantly becoming teachers in the language and learning how to pass it along to others.
On the Aquinnah Wampanoag receiving federal recognition
When I grew up in the tribe in the '90s, it was just a few years after my tribe, the Aquinnah Wampanoag, had received federal recognition, which in the U.S is kind of like the U.S. recognizing your sovereignty as a sovereign nation. And so I grew up in this space where the tribe was really proud of this achievement and excited by it and excited for all the opportunities and for what we could do with it. And also just, I think, happy that we were finally being acknowledged as a people, as a nation, which had been denied for so long.
I think because of that, I felt like maybe the work was done. I knew that my parents and my grandparents' generation had achieved federal recognition. In some ways, like that was the finish line — like, we did it and now we have it. But what surprised me and what I've learned is that it's not something you can just sit on. ... There are all these other ways that you need to practice it and employ it and defend it and build it and that was one of the really exciting things for me in the reporting I did, is traveling around the country and seeing tribes really using and flexing their sovereignty and using it to push back against some of these U.S. structures.
On his tribe's application for recognition initially being denied
I read back through those documents, and it's kind of strange. In the initial rejection, there's a little bit of what I would read as kind of criticism of our community: … The community is very dispersed, not everybody lives in Martha's Vineyard. And they're kind of saying like, well, that's a bad mark in our little score book here, and that might mean they're not really legitimate. And it's strange because they do acknowledge the historical reasons why that's happened, and they acknowledge historical reasons why, for example, we were not speaking our language at that time. And so it was this really strange thing where they're like, these people are victims of colonialism because they were Native, but because all that stuff happened, maybe they're really not Native.
On the high property taxes his family in Aquinnah pays
A lot of the land in my family in particular is privately owned. We're paying the regular property taxes in the town. I think that's a stereotype about Native people that we get all these free benefits — we don't pay taxes, we get free checks from the government — and that could not be further from the truth. We're now paying these really, really high taxes on land that's been in the family and been in the community for generations and generations. And so it's not enough to just have the land. You need to also be making enough money in your life to be able to keep the land and pay property taxes. And so that's also something that I think a lot about. You can't just be passive with the land and like, well, we have it. This is great. And we're going to hold onto it forever. You really have to work to hold on to it.
On land acknowledgements
I think one way of looking at it is that land acknowledgments are correcting the record and acknowledging something that has been unacknowledged by a lot of people for so long. You see this especially in university and other institutional spaces where they're saying, we're recognizing whose land this is, we recognizing the history here. I think the problem with land acknowledgments is, well, what are you doing about it? What happens after the land acknowledgement? … You can acknowledge it, but at some point if you're acknowledging that there was a harm, I think you have to take a little more action. Sometimes land acknowledgments can be one of those things that makes the people doing them feel better, but ultimately isn't really making any change.
On what he thinks the future looks like
I think land will always be important to indigenous people and indigenous community is based around land and solidarity. But what that looks like will continue to change just as it's changed in my parents' and grandparents' lives and it's changed in my own life. So I think we need to hold sort of these core values but be really, really flexible and adaptive to changing situations.
Roberta Shorrock, Susan Nyakundi and Sam Briger produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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