Coming to an understanding of Indigenous identity, rooted on Martha’s Vineyard

A member of the island’s Indigenous Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe, Lee tells the story of the giant Moshup, whose toe carved earthen borders from the sea. The colorful cliffs at Aquinnah, at the western edge of the island, are said to be stained red, Lee writes, with the blood of the whales that Moshup slaughtered to feed his people.

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.

“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.”

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.”

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. In one instance, Lee details his family’s yearslong effort to hold onto a small section of coastline — “one of the last Indian-owned beach plots” — when Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis buys the property surrounding it. 

Although the two sides eventually come to an agreement, Lee worries openly about the ability of indigenous families, including his own, to pay the “rapidly increasing” property taxes on their increasingly in-demand parcels of land. 

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.

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.

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.