An Indigenous Islander’s Search for Identity

In his beautifully woven narrative, Nothing More of this Land: Community, Power and the Search for Indigenous Identity, Joseph Vanderhoop Lee, an Aquinnah Wampanoag writer, takes us on his personal journey to learn the truth of his family history, Martha’s Vineyard, the Aquinnah Wampanoag, and Indigenous peoples elsewhere. Joseph has an MFA from Columbia University and teaches creative writing. He has been published in The Guardian, BuzzFeed News, Vox, Electric Literature, and High Country News, and is a mentor to budding writers from Indigenous communities around the country. His richly detailed book, written with pride and honesty, captures both the Island that residents know and the Island unseen. His intimate search for identity will be familiar and moving to anyone who has wondered who they are and where they came from.  

I sat down with Joseph in my home just after the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival and then spoke with him again after I read his book. In reflecting back on our meeting that day on my deck, I reminded myself that the property on which my house sits and the fields I enjoy looking at every day were once the lands of his people. Check local bookstores or find the book on Amazon and on Thriftbooks.

Victoria Riskin: I loved your book. Was there a moment when you said to yourself: I'm going to write this book?

Joseph Lee: It was a growing feeling where I knew these stories were important and I wanted to do something with them. I wanted to learn more about the tribe and my family and the Indigenous experience. I didn’t know what form it would take, or that I could even write a book. And then eventually it was “Well, here I am and this is what I'm doing.”

VR: You unravel for yourself and the reader the misconceptions that you had as a child about your family and your Indigenous heritage. Can you give an example of one of the misconceptions you unraveled?

JL: One was my family name, my middle name, Vanderhoop. It's well known on the Island and in the tribe. We’re a large family. I always assumed some Vanderhoop came on the Mayflower, some white colonist, but it was actually long after the Mayflower … [the first] Vanderhoop was half Dutch, half Surinamese and came from what was a Dutch colony [in South America]. From the photos, he was a relatively dark skinned person. He ended up in New Bedford, where he met my great-great-great-grandmother toward the end of the 1800s … and they eventually came to Martha's Vineyard. 

VR: Your grandfather went to Japan after the War (WWII) and hadn’t planned to come back, but then did and brought his Japanese wife here. Tell me a little bit about her. 

JL: Charlie Vanderhoop Jr. was born at the Gay Head lighthouse. His father was the lighthouse keeper. He eventually became a great sailor and amazing boat captain. He sailed around the world and was in the merchant marines. He met my grandmother, Hatsuko, in Japan, and they lived there for about five years. He decided he needed to come home after my mom was born. It was a really hard move for my grandmother, coming from this giant city in Japan to really, really small-town Martha's Vineyard, which back then was even smaller. 

My favorite feedback on the book was when my mom said I really captured her mom, my grandmother, who passed away when I was young. The more I learned about her, the more I admired who she was — her spirit and energy and resilience to be able to stay on a tiny island so far from her family. She was early in renting out the family home to summer residents, and she made extra income selling beach plum jam to buy things for the kids. 

VR: It’s natural for us to search for our identity and when we find we have different family threads, and we aren’t always sure which to embrace. 

JL: Yes. I wanted to write this book out of my own personal reckoning and what it means to be me, with my different family backgrounds and heritages and cultures and traditions. It’s easy to make stereotypical assumptions and think “I have to be this one thing,” say, Wampanoag. Those are the questions that drove me to want to learn more about the tribe and family history, but also about other Indigenous people across the country and around the world. We're all trying to figure these things out. To ask about identity and community and belonging is universal — at least I hope so.

VR: Where did you go around the country and the world and what did you find in other Indigenous communities? 

JL: A few of the places I went are Oklahoma and Alaska, Southern Oregon, and Northern California. I talked to Indigenous people from other countries — Australia, Ecuador. We're all trying to figure out our relationship with the land. How do we protect it? How do we protect our community and our traditions while also evolving for the future? A lot of the same conversations are happening in different places, but in totally different contexts — from the freezing icy landscape in Alaska to the smoky forests in Northern California, where fire is a big conversation. 

VR: At some point in your journey you fully embraced your Indigenous identity. Is “Indigenous” the right word? 

JL: I think people are sometimes confused about terminology, but I think the best thing is to be specific and talk about the Aquinnah Wampanoag people, not Native Americans. I think the term “Indigenous” came into being to find a way of talking for all these people with an identity built around collective effort, collective struggle, but also collective hope and shared energy and work. And so I think it's a definition that rests in action, rather than in any kind of passive definition. And to me, that was a really important lesson. 

VR: You write about the complexities of the different tribal communities, rules, constitutions, and deciding what constitutes membership in a tribe — how different that can be from one tribal community or nation to another, like the Freedmen for the Cherokee. 

JL: Freedmen are descendants of people who were enslaved by five tribes which are now in Oklahoma: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw Muscogee Creek, and Seminole Nations. Before the Civil War they all owned slaves, and after the Civil War there were treaties signed between the tribes and the U.S. government that said that the freed slaves would become citizens of these tribal nations. And now in the 20th and 21st century, the descendants of these groups, of these freed people, have faced varying degrees of exclusion from the tribes. Some of them, like the Cherokee Freedmen in recent years, have been accepted legally within the tribe as full citizens, but Seminole Freedmen in the past have faced exclusion from access to tribal services, like housing funds and health care. 

VR: What are your thoughts about the name change from Gay Head to Aquinnah?

JL: The name changed in the ‘90s, and I was pretty young. I remember conversations about it, and Aquinnah, of course, was our original name; the English name was Gay Head. The first vote to change the name failed, because some tribal elders, like my grandfather, wanted it to remain Gay Head. They grew up proud to be from Gay Head proud to be a Gay Header. Aquinnah means something like “the land at the end of the island.”

VR: What does “Wampanoag” mean?

JL: “People of the first light.” The East Coast is where the sun comes up. I met somebody from an Indigenous community in New Zealand, and they had similar language in their name about the first light — kind of an amazing discovery. 

VR: You also write that when people think about Indigenous people, the stereotype is that you're always living in the past, or you can't be a real Native person unless you're living in some ancient traditional way. 

JL: I think tradition and culture is an important part of who we are and important to preserve, but we also should acknowledge that those traditions have been evolving and shifting over the years, that we've always been adapting. I talked to people from different Native communities, and they're always talking about the future, about the next seven generations, about their kids and their grandkids and making the world a better place for them, pursuing these big long-term goals and projects that they know they will not be alive to see; but they want to do it anyway and contribute towards the collective progress.

VR:  Much of my life I’ve had a sense of personal guilt about what’s happened to the tribal Nations in America. I’m not sure what to do with that feeling.

JL: The first step is learning and acknowledging that history. We can't talk about it until we know what happened. This is a journey I had to go on, having learned sanitized versions in school of the first Thanksgiving and so on. You have to fight through to learn the real histories, which are not always so pretty and straightforward. And colonization is not something that ended. It’s something that has changed and evolved, but the system continues to impact people today. At the very least, make people aware you know what's happening and how you can trace that lineage back from the Mayflower to today in so many Indigenous lands around the country.

That's the work, and it will probably be uncomfortable for anyone who’s benefitted, myself included.

VR: And maybe one other thing. What are the teachings from the Wampanoag or any tribal community about nature itself?

JL: It’s part of a bigger conversation about conservation and environmental stewardship, to actually listen to and understand Indigenous ways and perspectives.  Increasingly, Indigenous people and tribes are being invited to participate in those conversations [about land management], and tribes in a lot of cases have legally mandated rights and input. But a lot of times that just gets ignored. The tribe on the Island has been seen as an enemy of conservation or environmental things, but when you look at it, the tribe is working really hard to be stewards of the environment and use our traditions and new technology to manage, maintain, preserve, and protect the environment. It comes down to having these conversations and being open to new ideas or new ways of seeing that are maybe a little bit outside the Western scientific norm.

VR: Can you give an example of that? 

JL: In the Wampanoag way of thinking, land and animals and water are viewed as relatives. That simple understanding can take you a long way. And when you think about it that way, it’s not something to extract from, or control, or even something just to protect, it's something that you have a relationship with. Building a relationship with the environment, animal and fish life, and community, have to be seen as one and the same thing, rather than like these separate tracks. I think if we can do that, we're on the right path. 

Excerpt from Nothing More of this Land: Community, Power and the Search for Indigenous Identity

According to Wampanoag legend, Martha’s Vineyard wasn’t always an island. In search of a new homeland for his people, the giant Moshup wandered the Massachusetts coastline. As he began to tire, Moshup’s big toe dragged through the sand, leaving a deep trench. Cold seawater rushed in and eventually grew to become the Vineyard Sound. And so Moshup’s weary foot inadvertently carved off a new home for the Wampanoag people: the island we call Noepe. A still place among the currents. 

Over the long years of his rule, Moshup shaped other features of Noepe.  

To feed his people, the giant waded out into the cold ocean water to snatch whales from the depths. Back onshore, Moshup killed the whales by slamming them against the clay cliffs at the western tip of the island. Their blood stained the clay its distinctive red color. The Wampanoag people called this place Aquinnah — the land under the hill or land at the end. 

Although their new life on Noepe was good, Moshup decided to build a bridge back to the mainland, so his people could trade with the mainlanders. While he tossed huge boulders into the sea, a giant crab snuck up and pinched his foot. Roaring in pain, the giant hurled the crab far out to sea, forming the small island we call Nomans. The bridge remained unfinished. To this day, the rocky area known as Devil’s Bridge is treacherous for boats. 

After a long, peaceful life, Moshup foresaw the arrival of a new people who would change Wampanoag life forever. He offered to turn the Wampanoag into whales and many accepted, preferring to live at sea rather than face the mysterious newcomers. Bidding farewell to those who remained, Moshup and his wife, Squant, walked into the southern dunes, never to be  seen again. On foggy nights, Wampanoags say that Moshup is smoking his great pipe, still watching over us. 

Every summer, my tribe reenacts these stories, “The Legends of Moshup,” for a paying audience of summer tourists. Those are some of my  earliest memories of the tribe — my moccasined feet squelching through the mud, the embarrassment of wearing a breechcloth, the familiar smell of citronella candles, and the echo of my cousin Adriana’s narration in the summer night. As the performance moved toward its inevitable conclusion and the machine-made fog rolled in, I never wanted it to end, despite my mosquito bites and self-consciousness. 

Acting out the familiar scenes, I always imagined a different ending, a Noepe without the invaders Moshup foresaw. In those moments, after a summer spent immersed in tribal community and exploring the same lands the giant shaped, it felt possible. I thought of him like a hero from my favorite cartoons, and I imagined new adventures he might have had. To me, Moshup wasn’t an artifact from the past, but dynamic and  alive. The real connection I felt to him, the land, and our ancestors made  me believe that one day he might return. And when he did, the island would revert to the way it used to be. But once the performance was over, Moshup was gone again, the illusion was shattered, and we were all left to wonder if those he had turned into whales were better off. As I  grew older, I spent less time imagining our tribal legends coming to life and more time dwelling on the sad finality of the story. I know now that Moshup is not coming back. 

Today, we, the Aquinnah Wampanoag people, own only a small piece of  the smallest town on the island home Moshup created for us, what is now  Martha’s Vineyard — one of the most expensive and exclusive vacation destinations in the country. But even as the island became best known for celebrity sightings and presidential vacations, we survived and we resisted.  

Copyright © 2025 by Joseph Lee. From the book NOTHING MORE OF THIS LAND by Joseph Lee, published by One Signal Publishers, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.