[Thanksgiving is a hugely fraught holiday for us AmericanStudiers, but I also have a ton I’m thankful for. So this year I wanted to combine those two perspectives by highlighting indigenous voices, past and present, for whose contributions to our collective conversations I’m profoundly appreciative!]
On a moving memoir that’s also much more.
I’ve had a lucky lifelong connection to Martha’s Vineyard, thanks to my grandfather Art Railton’s enduring love for the island and the multigenerational family story that he inaugurated there: first as a 1930s teenager working with his fisherman uncle, then as a 1950s husband and father bringing his own young family on vacation, and finally as a 1970s retiree who became the island’s leading historian. The family has finally had to sell my grandparents’ house, but we were determined to keep the Vineyard connection going in some form this year, and were able to do so in late June thanks to my older son running (and running damn well) in the Chappy Point to Point road race. While we were there, we happened into a gift shop near the Aquinnah Cliffs, and there I learned of a wonderful forthcoming (and now published) book written by the shop owners’ son: Joseph Lee’s Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity.
Lee’s book is first and foremost a memoir, the story of growing up part of the island’s longstanding, challenged, and still evolving Aquinnah Wampanoag community (along with other layers to Lee’s multiracial heritage, family, and identity that he includes in the book as well). We can see the power of that personal perspective in this early passage: “In tribal summer camp, I learned our versions of first contact between Wampanoags and the English and the First Thanksgiving. These stories, stripped of the usual patriotic flourishes, made me grow to resent the standard narrative of America’s founding. I proudly announced to my first-grade class that I did not want to be friends with any ‘Europeans’ since they were the ones responsible for the killing of my ancestors. But the contrast between my tribal experience and what my history textbooks said confused me.” Lee’s voice is an intimate and vital one that we should all read, this week and all year long.
But like many of the other indigenous-authored memoirs I’ve discussed in this space, including those by the subjects of the next two posts in this week’s series (William Apess and Sarah Winnemucca), Lee’s book would best be characterized as an autoethnography, as interested in communal stories and identities as in personal ones. Not long after that opening anecdote about Lee’s educational experiences in and out of school, he turns his attention to one of his first such autoethnographic topics: the amazing historical document known as Mittark’s Will. As the last will and testament of a 17th-century Wampanoag leader, this document is certainly part of Lee’s legacy as a 21st-century descendant. But it also opens up the historical, contemporary, and profoundly significant lenses on land, community, and power that Lee’s title and subtitle suggest, and that he likewise introduces early on: “Over time, I’ve learned that land is not something that is simply lost forever, but something that Indigenous people across the country have been fighting over—losing, regaining, losing again, and rebuilding—for as long as any of us can remember.”
Next thanks tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Indigenous voices or texts you’d highlight, or other thanks you’d share?
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