Mashpee Wampanoag tribe is fighting to reclaim their homeland

Posted January 2021

By Elizabeth Philbrick

Staff Editor

Almost 400 years later, the descendants of the tribe at the heart of the Thanksgiving holiday are still fighting to reclaim their land.

The indigenous tribe, the Mashpee Wampanoag, did eat with the Pilgrims in 1621, and they did sign a treaty with the colonists that were settled on their shores. But it was an act of survival rather than one of friendship and goodwill. The tribe's population would decimate and the land would whittle away after the relationship eventually broke down.

"We're kind of stereotyped as the tribes that met the Pilgrims and that's our whole history, like we ceased to exist in 1621," stated Robert Maxim, a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe. "That couldn't be further from the truth."

Maxim was born in Mashpee, Massachusetts, and raised in a nearby town. He has seen so many areas that once belonged to the Mashpee Wampanoag which were now overtaken by citizens who don't understand its history.

Although the Mashpee Wampanoag have lived in what's now Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island for more than 12,000 years, the federal government didn’t recognize them until 2007. Court rulings challenging whether the tribe's reservation was eligible to be put in trust have posed an existential threat in recent years.

In 2015, the federal government declared it would place about 300 acres of land in Massachusetts into trust for the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, turning it into a reservation. The land couldn't be taken away from the Mashpee Wampanoag without the federal government’s approval. This gave the tribe sovereignty, allowing it to build housing, a school, and a police department on the land.

In 2018 though, the Department of the Interior reversed that decision after area residents brought a lawsuit, saying the land was ineligible for trust status because the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe wasn't under federal jurisdiction in 1934. In March of last year, the tribe learned that the US would be taking their land out of trust.

"It's worth underscoring how absurd it is that the descendants of the tribe that met Pilgrims, who every American learns about around this time of year, couldn't meet the definition of a 'tribe,'" Maxim stated. "It's just a perfect illustration of how messed up, and really, anti-Native, federal Indian policy has been throughout our history."

The Mashpee Wampanoag’s fight is one in indigenous people’s broader movement across North America to reclaim their lands. A tribe on California’s northern coast seems to be an outlier.

For thousands of years, the Wiyot people were the caretakers and occupants of Duluwat Island, situated in the estuaries and marshes of what's now Humboldt Bay. But in 1860, a White settler group interrupted the tribe's annual world renewal ceremony and Wiyot women, children, and elders were massacred. They had transformed the island into a shipyard and by 1990, it lay unoccupied, scattered with scrap metal, and contaminated with toxic chemicals.

In 2000, the tribe raised $106,000 to buy back 1.5 acres, and a few years later, the Eureka city agreed to give them back about 40 more acres. And in 2015, the Eureka City Council voted to return the remaining 200 acres the city-owned on the island. The Wiyot had reclaimed almost all of Duluwat Island in 2019. Since first purchasing those 1.5 acres, the Wiyot tribe has been working to restore the island to its original state.

"The island is just one part of our journey," stated Cheryl Seidner, a tribal elder and former Wiyot chairwoman. "The other part of the journey is walking on the earth and knowing that it is all sacred and that we need to take care of it and watch over it."

In 2014, the tribe danced on the island again, completing the ceremony that had been cut short more than 150 years before.