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| PHOTO: Author Joseph Lee. (Photo/Aslan Chalom) |
By Shaun Griswold | 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?
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