UMB’s Institute for New England Native American Studies recently hosted a panel of local Indigenous leaders titled “Contemporary Native Massachusetts”. The present director of the institute, Cedric Woods, a citizen of the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina and expert on tribal governments moderated the panel. Speakers included Joanne Dunn, a Micmac and executive Director of the North American Indian Center of Boston, Cheryll Holley of the Nipmuc Nation and Paula Peters, a Mashpee Wampanoag and the marketing director of Plymouth Plantation.
Before the first Thanksgiving, the Wampanoag Indians of Massachusetts knew quite well of the risks of colonial contact. Only a few years before, European traders announced their arrival with an epidemic of Yellow Fever that wiped out two thirds of their population. With such a severely reduced population, the Wampanoag waited three months before greeting the settlers out of fear for contracting disease. There are multiple histories as to the circumstances of the first Thanksgiving, but key to them all is the central tenet that without the assistance of the native peoples, these pilgrims would have perished.
The Wampanoag Indians who helped the pilgrims at Plymouth during the first “Thanksgiving” have not gone away. The land sale documents that were forged by colonists resulted in over 300 years of steady removal from their tribal lands. Paula Peters used her time on the podium to detail the present day struggles of the tribe to gain deeded ownership of traditional grounds and assert its recent federal recognition on a local level. Peters then described how the Mashpee lived communally for hundreds of years unnoticed. “The colony grew and grew until they realized that the Mashpee had a huge tract of land everyone wanted- trees. We had learned to use dead fall wood to heat our homes and not abuse trees.”
The state decided in 1870 without tribal input to declare it a town, give everyone 60 acres, and start charging taxes on the land that lead to most of it being taken away by the IRS for nonpayment. Slowly outsiders came in and usurped many native town officials until eventually the Mashpee tribe no longer had tribal dominance. Led by Paula’s father Russell Peters, the tribal council filed a court suite in 1976 demanding the return of all the town according to a deed that said the land belonged to them forever and no land could be sold without Mashpee Wampanoag permission.
According to Paula, who was a teenager at the time, “All hell broke loose and our house became the center of all this tension and drama with newspapers and selectman saying mean and nasty things about my father.” At one point, Dennis Banks, leader and cofounder of the American Indian Movement called asking for her father and she remarked how this was her grand reality check and when she started to really get involved.
Thirty-one years later, in 2007, the Mashpee received its federal recognition, which gave it sovereign rights including the right to open a casino. Much of state support for casinos was bolstered in an attempt to prevent the Mashpee from developing its own. The town selectmen quickly dangled a carrot in front of the freshly recognized tribe to waive their sovereignty in exchange for the 73 acres they wanted in exchange for never opening a casino, and never again try to legally assert their ownership of the land the town or private individuals own. If the tribe refused, the town would actively stand in the way of the Mashpee Indians getting the desired land and attempt to regain the land, which the tribe already owns.