NOTHING MORE OF THIS LAND: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity, by Joseph Lee
Drafted as a last-minute election volunteer in 2015, the 22-year-old Joseph Lee huddled in the library of the Aquinnah Wampanoag Community Center. His task was to recount the votes that would decide whether his tribe would attempt to build a high-stakes bingo operation on the southwestern corner of the elite playground known as Martha’s Vineyard, the East Coast island where, Lee writes in “Nothing More of This Land,” his intimate and lively new memoir, U.S. presidents vacation while in office, bringing with them “S.U.V.s full of Secret Service, throngs of photographers and even bigger crowds than the usual summer rush.”
Federally recognized in 1987, the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe, like many tribal nations, hoped to make gambling an economic anchor that would support government operations and community development. For years, the effort was stymied by lawsuits and dogged by internal disagreement. While some saw jobs and opportunity — essential for a small tribe surrounded by expensive property taxes and eye-watering land values — others predicted the spoliation of what remained of Wampanoag land, pointing to the risky financial and logistical challenges in bringing gambling to a seasonal tourist economy. Lee actively opposed the gambling initiative, but he also wanted to see the sausage get made, so he jumped in to help tally the final vote: a 110-110 tie. The tribe split down the middle.
Lee writes that this moment proved foundational to his thinking about the complexities of tribal politics. A journalist and creative writing teacher, he grew up moving between home in the Boston suburbs and summers at Aquinnah, with its beaches, cousins, family souvenir stores and a tribal culture camp he often found uninteresting.
Lee never felt quite Native enough, a seasonal Indian who sometimes wondered how different he was from the tourists visiting the Wampanoag corner of the Vineyard. His identity also rests on a complicated genealogy: His father is Chinese and his mother Wampanoag and Japanese. Still, Lee’s family was deeply rooted in the land, even as his forebears ventured off island, returning with partners from far-flung locales.
“Nothing More of This Land” begins among the Wampanoag people of Martha’s Vineyard and threads across the Native continent and the Indigenous globe. “I wanted to write about my tribe, family and experiences because I thought they deserved to be shared with the world,” he notes, “but also because I wanted to tell a different kind of Native story.”
That different story is not offered as a singular argument, but as a string of small revelations, given shape as a coming-of-age narrative. Unafraid to proclaim what he does not know, he is constantly posing questions, working his way toward answers and offering himself as a humble proxy for the reader curious about Native life. In that sense, the book (inevitably, given the ongoing state of American ignorance) is also an “Indians 101” explainer: What is tribal sovereignty, anyway? Why argue for the rights of nature? How to understand things like blood quantum and tribal citizenship?
Lee recruits experts to make sense of it all, and the book features compelling profiles of Indigenous leaders and intellectuals: the Anishinaabe legal scholar Matthew Fletcher, who complicates Lee’s idea of tribal sovereignty; the Yup’ik activist Sophie Swope, who walks him through Alaska’s complex multi-jurisdictional governance system; the Round Valley lawyer Gabe Galanda, who educates him on tribal disenrollment. Speaking to people like Galanda, Lee sees how casino revenue can distort Native identities, with some tribal governments expelling members to claim larger pieces of the pie. To some critics, Lee writes, it’s “a new form of genocide.”
Lee’s story is less concerned with colonial domination and Native survivals than it is with the ways tribal governments, communities and individuals can be misaligned, with threatening consequences for the practice of tribal sovereignty. Sovereignty is both the longstanding property of tribal communities and a legal status defined by treaties. But as Lee comes to understand, sovereignty must also be earned, used and refreshed through a governance that helps land and people thrive. “Tribal government was not this inarguably good thing,” he writes. “Sovereignty was not simply something to be proud of.” Aquinnah’s tie vote revealed the challenges to such governance, as tribal politics crashed against individuals and communities like waves on the Vineyard cliffs.
Though Lee turns to international Indigenous governance for examples — Maori in New Zealand, Sami in Norway, Kichwa in the Ecuadorean Amazon — his story remains most evocative in its domestic context. Tribal governments struggle and stumble, to be sure. But can anyone currently practicing politics in federal or state houses, or from their offices in executive mansions, claim with a straight face that their governments are more effective, honest and intelligent than that of Aquinnah — or any other tribe? Lee’s reflections demand one contemplate not only the governments in Indian Country but the troubled experiment in government that is the United States of America.
NOTHING MORE OF THIS LAND: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity | By Joseph Lee | Atria/One Signal | 235 pp. | $28.99
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