NOTHING MORE OF THIS LAND

A Wampanoag journalist looks at what it means to be Native American.

Over the course of U.S.–Native American relations, too few people have remembered that the East Coast once abounded with Indigenous settlements. In the case of the Wampanoag, famed for their generous role in the first Thanksgiving, writes Lee, “we, the Aquinnah Wampanoag people, only own a small piece of the smallest town on…what is now Martha’s Vineyard—one of the most expensive and exclusive vacation destinations in the country.” Owning land, Lee observes, is one of the principal ways that one can claim sovereignty over a place, and it is just for that reason that, centuries ago as now, white newcomers to Martha’s Vineyard have labored to displace Native people, whether by violence or by property taxes too high for them to afford, “victims of a rigged capitalist system no one bothered to explain.” As Lee, of mixed Asian, European, and Wampanoag descent, explores the issue of sovereignty, he necessarily opens the door to the question of who qualifies to be Native American: Some nations have a “blood quantum,” by which Black people whose ancestors were formerly enslaved by the Cherokee were long denied membership in that tribe, and which, Lee writes provocatively, can be a species of “creepy race science.” More inclusive tribal identity, he suggests, “is best rooted in community and events like the Native market, not tribal government and council policies.” Given that tribal membership is often a criterion for the distribution of federal grants, revenues from casinos and natural resources, and the like, the question is fraught. Lee travels widely across the U.S. and visits with Indigenous peoples from Oceania and South America to look at how such matters are addressed, concluding that “there are different ways of being Wampanoag and what works or is meaningful for someone might be different from the way I approach things.”

A searching and timely exploration of indigeneity and its many interpretations.