Alumni of the Newton Public School system may have hazy memories of Newton’s education regarding Native American history — a unit here, a presentation there. Quickly forgotten in the whirlwind of school. Newton native and author Joseph Lee has stepped forward to fill some gaps in common understanding of Massachusetts’ Native past and present, having just published his debut work, Nothing More of This Land. It’s a sprawling historical account of his family, his Wampanoag heritage, and the meaning of indigeneity and connection to tribal land across the globe.
Lee now lives in New York, but he split his childhood between summers in Aquinnah (Gay Head) in Martha’s Vineyard and school years in Newton. Receiving a Newton Public Schools education, Lee felt a strong lack in the instruction about Native history and culture presented to him. “We learned about the Mayflower and a little bit about the first Thanksgiving. In elementary school, there was a unit, maybe one or two weeks. …Seventh grade and 11th grade [were] US History years. In those, there’s always a unit …Brief mentions and very cursory and one-sided history.” Though Lee says that the educational gap is not limited to Newton, he found it “A strange experience …it made me doubt a little bit about myself and my own community, because what I was seeing as Native history in those textbooks or in those small snippets really didn’t match up with my own personal experience.”
This dissonance spurred Lee to write. “I didn’t feel like I was getting a lot of answers, so I decided at a certain point that I was going to need to make it a personal mission to …do some of that research, and to ask people within the tribe.”
But his focus soon expanded beyond Aquinnah. At home during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lee used his spare time to interview members from other tribes. “Somewhere in that process, I realized, ‘Oh, I really like doing this, and also what I’m doing is journalism, and this is research, and this is reporting’ …Everything I was doing in that year brought me to that place.”
As he reported, he also reflected back on his wide-ranging roots. His Wampanoag grandfather moved to Japan and married his grandmother, while his father traces his heritage back to China.
Ultimately, this research and series of interviews culminated in Lee’s first book, Nothing More of This Land. Drawing from personal history as well as his conversations with other Natives, Lee paints a vast and storied picture of Native history, spanning from Martha’s Vineyard to Ecuador to Okinawa. Throughout the course of the book, Lee turns inward, slowly unspooling his family’s past and its roots in Aquinnah, Japan, and China. “It’s helped me have a more open point of view and open mindset about what it means to be indigenous. …I grew up with just such a narrow, limited version of what that was. And my own personal journey has been helped a lot with a lot of the people I’ve talked to from my own tribe and from other indigenous nations.”
With this realization came a comfort about his own life trajectory. Living off-island, Lee “had always assumed being Native meant one very specific thing, and usually that meant actually not leaving and always just staying on the [Aquinnah] land.” But researching his history brought him peace with living away from Aquinnah. “The more I learned about my family history, the more I see that …my grandfather, my great-grandfather, my mother… all these ancestors were always traveling and seeing new places and coming back. And so I always felt this insecurity that …living off-island was a deviation from family history …[but] more and more I see it as like the continuation of that family legacy.”
Climate change looms large in his book and in the Native future. “Whether it’s the wildfire crisis …in drought, water, loss of access to traditional foods like fish, plants. Threats to indigenous land … Those are big differences, and along the way, of course, all that comes with loss of culture, loss of language, trying to protect those things.” Intertwining this narrative with his family story, Lee found a unique challenge in his writing. “I think it would already be a lot to just be telling my family story, but then trying to include as much of the Wampanoag and the Aquinnah story as possible, but then broadening that out to this global perspective of indigeneity.”
In early August, two and a half weeks after the book’s launch, Lee was a featured speaker at the annual Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival, which National Geographic has named one of the top seven book festivals in the world. He participated in a panel discussion, Out of Place in America: Marginalized Identities, and was interviewed by Taylor Smalley, a member of the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe.
Through the festival and his current book tour, Lee has been exploring and sharing his own lingering questions, mostly “about the future. I don’t think I’ll ever have a perfect understanding of the past…What do we do now? How do we respond to climate change? How do we protect our land? How do we work together to accomplish these things?” And finally, “How do we protect our land and all of these things that are so important?”
Noa Kelmer-Racin is a Fig City student reporter and a rising junior at Princeton University.
