Still Here: Native American Resilience in New England

2026 marks a milestone in America’s history – 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Our founding document put forward aspirations that have shaped America and inspired the world. But the Declaration may surprise you. It calls the Native peoples of America “merciless Indian Savages.”

For generations, stories of Native America have been kept separate and apart from the American story.

Take a fresh look at the history of our region — and hear today’s Indigenous voices. It’s part of Still Here: Native American Resilience in New England — a special series from Connecticut Public, featuring radio storytelling, in-depth videos, digital stories, pictures and a community conversation.

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VIDEO:  https://www.ctpublic.org/still-here-native-american-resilience-in-new-england 

Chapter 1: An enduring spiritual connection to the land

Mark Mirko / Connecticut Public

In the several hundred years since the arrival of Europeans to New England, known as "Dawnland" to its original inhabitants, Native peoples have been forced to live on a small fraction of their ancestral homelands.

For more than 10,000 years before Europeans arrived, the Northeast was home to many tribes with organized leadership and governance; it was among the most prosperous parts of North America. A connection with the land endures – and you care for it like it’s a member of the family.

Watch, listen and read the story

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Chapter 2: The hidden history of Indigenous slavery

Sir John Henry Lefroy / Cornell University Library

This image — a portrait of Jacob Minors of St. David's Island — helped reconnect Indigenous peoples in Bermuda and New England. Its caption contained a clue: "Reputed to be of Indian descent, and probably descended from one of the Pequod captives."

It's a surprising and overlooked story, a blind spot in the narrative of early America: the hidden history of Indigenous slavery. As colonial powers took over Native land, white settlers were enslaving Native people. Some worked in New England. Others were kidnapped and shipped to an isolated tropical island. For generations, a lost tribe in Bermuda wondered about its past. Centuries later, they’ve reconnected with family – in New England.

Watch, listen and read the story

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Chapter 3: ‘An unsung hero:’ A runner puts his tribe on the map

Courtesy of the Boston Public Library / Leslie Jones Collection

Ellison "Tarzan" Brown's victory at the 1939 Boston Marathon is seen as a turning point in the visibility and recognition of New England's Native people.

In the 1930s, runner Tarzan Brown twice won the Boston Marathon – and carried the Narragansett tribe’s name out of obscurity and onto a global stage. “He was like an unsung hero for a long time,” his granddaughter says. “It’s just good to see him get the recognition he deserves.”

Watch, listen and read the story

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Chapter 4: A reverence for water, celebrated with music

Katie Lenhart / Dartmouth University

Jeremy Dutcher and Yo-Yo Ma greet the dawn with a song and music from We Are Water at the bank of Kwenitekw (the Connecticut River).

A Connecticut singer is taking Native art and culture to new places. He invited Indigenous musicians – as well as one of the world’s most famous cello players – to perform at sunrise on the banks of the Connecticut River. The performance highlights Native peoples’ deep connection to nature and water.

Watch, listen and read the story

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Chapter 5: The cultural power of a powwow

Mark Mirko/Connecticut Public

Visitors to the 2025 Schemitzun, one of the largest powwows in the Northeast and hosted by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation

As Native communities face continued challenges to their overall well-being, many find strength in cultural heritage and tradition. Powwow gatherings are a chance to reconnect with family, culture and values.

Watch, listen and read the story

 

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Finding Your Ancestors in the Archives

PHOTO: Author Joseph Lee. (Photo/Aslan Chalom)

By Shaun Griswold | July 19, 2025  Yahoo News

Summer memories of running with cousins in Zuni mud — all the weekends I spent at my Auntie Paula’s home on the Zuni Pueblo — return as I read Joseph Lee’s book Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity. 

A mixture of memoir, reportage and commentary, it documents Lee’s family history, describing how land and ancestry forged strong links to his Aquinnah Wampanoag home on Martha’s Vineyard. Lee’s stories echoed my own rez dirt memories, layers of loving Indigenous relationships with foundations deeper than any historical record.

[Editor's Note: This column originally appeared in "High Country News. Used with permission. All rights reserved.]

Lee spoke with High Country News before his book’s July 15 release. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

High Country News: Your book demonstrates how you and your family live as Indigenous people on colonized land. Can you introduce those experiences?

Joseph Lee: I’m a Wampanoag, and my family and my tribe is from Martha’s Vineyard. It’s a small island in the Northeast, known for being this fancy vacation place where presidents and movie stars go. I grew up spending summers at my grandparents’ house, and that was the original framing for the book: How I thought about being Indigenous and being Wampanoag was filtered through the experience of how people see Martha’s Vineyard, along with how people see Wampanoag people and Native folks in the Northeast: We were there when the pilgrims came, Mayflower, the first Thanksgiving, all of that. 

That confused me, because what I was being told about being Indigenous didn’t really match up with the way I was experiencing it personally. I went to tribal summer camp, I went to our cranberry festival harvest. I did all these things, and none of it aligned with this version of stereotypical Nativeness, the disappeared Native gone in the past.

I was trying to make sense of the way that we’ve lived and the choices that we’ve made, and what is this going to look like in the future?

keep reading👇 

What Tourists in Martha’s Vineyard Showed Me About Being Indigenous

 LIVING and WORKING in NEW ENGLAND, you will see this ignorance is everywhere... Trace

Joseph Lee NEW YORK TIMES | 7/4/2025

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Every summer from when I was old enough to make change until after I graduated from college, I worked in my family’s gift store on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.

I grew up in the rhythm of the store. The season began in the spring and steadily ramped up throughout the summer, reaching a crescendo with the August crowds. I learned how to fold a T-shirt and talk to strangers.

But one thing I never fully got used to was customers’ surprise when they found out that my family was Aquinnah Wampanoag and the few shops in our town were all owned by tribal members. Or, to be more precise, I never got used to the things they said when they found out.

But even as I resisted their ignorance, I was forced to reckon with how little I knew about my own identity and community.

People would tell me they wished they were Native or that they must have been in a past life because of their spiritual connection to nature. Sometimes they asked me my tribal name or wanted to take a picture with me. I still wonder what they do with those pictures.

I’ve been asked if Wampanoags use iPhones and live in houses. Although few of them said it, I knew what they were looking for: a kind of combination of Crazy Horse legends and the infamous crying Indian from the 1971 “Keep America Beautiful” ad. When I — who spent fall, winter and spring in Newton, Mass., and would later move to New York City — didn’t meet those expectations, they often seemed disappointed.

My grandparents opened the store about 50 years ago, and my parents took it over when I was in elementary school.  We sell a range of souvenir items like hats and keychains, along with handmade jewelry and other local goods.

Most people don’t expect to meet Indigenous people in a place like Martha’s Vineyard, which is primarily known for being a fancy vacation destination. They’re also usually surprised because I don’t look like what most people assume Natives look like. (My dad is Chinese American, and my mom is half Japanese.) Sometimes people would push back, saying that I might be technically Wampanoag but because I didn’t live the way my ancestors did, I wasn’t really.

That’s what American education and popular media has taught: Indigenous people have largely disappeared, their way of life incompatible with the modern world. That seems especially true on the East Coast, where America’s colonial story began.

Like everyone, I learned about the Mayflower and the first Thanksgiving in school. The Wampanoag people were key features of those early American tales but never seemed to pop up again once our lessons moved beyond early American history.

Even though I grew up going to tribal summer camp and events like our annual cranberry harvest, I had many of the same blind spots most Americans do.  Beyond cursory entries in history textbooks, I knew that my tribe had survived, but I never really knew what happened in between those moments and my childhood.  It would take me looking well beyond Martha’s Vineyard to truly understand my tribe and our history.

Though I knew Indigenous identity was more than stereotypes, I struggled to see what else it could be. And I struggled to see if that identity fit me.  Maybe, I thought, I really was less Wampanoag because I didn’t speak our language or know how to hunt.  Even though I resisted customers’ oversimplified and commodified version of Native identity, the store was the part of my life where I thought and talked about what it means to be Native the most.  And because I was constantly pushing back against what other people thought Native identity was, I had no time or space to figure out for myself what it actually was.