As the Museum Coordinator for the Wampanoag History Museum at the Aquinnah Cultural Center, I have the responsibility of making sure that the belongings in our collection are properly cared for. This work can be unglamorous, but it is a privilege. To ensure that the belongings in our collection are well taken care of for present and future generations of Aquinnah Wampanoag people is a great responsibility, intimately tied to issues of sovereignty.
For Wampanoag people have had so many of our ancestors and belongings stolen from us. I sit and wonder where our historical wampum belts went; where, on Wampanoag land, there is a copy of Mamusse Wuneetupanatamwe Up – Biblum God in an institution stewarded by Wampanoag and/or other Northeastern Woodlands Indigenous peoples; where, besides behind plexiglass cases in settler institutions, we might be able to sit with the fine grass baskets that our ancestors made 150 years ago. At this moment, we do not have access to many of these belongings of cultural patrimony in our own homes and institutions. But I, and so many other tribal members from across Mashpee and Aquinnah and Herring Pond and Assonet Wampanoag land, dream of a day when it will be so. Because there is no-one who can better caretake Wampanoag belongings than Wampanoag people ourselves.
This summer at the museum, I came across a curious, meaningful thing. Aquinnah Wampanoag knowledge carrier and former museum director, Linda Coombs, had told me about the presence of early 20th-century schoolbooks from the Vanderhoop family in our collections room. Once I opened the covers of these books that seem to have nothing to do with tribal life at first glance, I came to understand why they were so precious. You see Aquinnah Wampanoag ancestors’ careful, graceful script. You learn a little bit about the schools they attended; the places they went; and the things that they learned. And sometimes, you see their thoughts, feelings, and strivings scribbled in number 2 pencil on the inside of the covers.
My favorite scribble comes from the math book of Edwin Pope Vanderhoop (1889-1909), the son of Edwin DeVries Vanderhoop and Mary Cleggett Vanderhoop. Looping script inside the front cover reads: “I am a dreamer/Am I not/I don’t dare to tell…” I don’t know if this is Edwin’s hand, and the script seems to change halfway through — smaller and tighter. But these simple lines, – perhaps a diaristic entry, perhaps the makings of a poem, perhaps transcription of another piece of writing — captures the ethos of a period in Aquinnah Wampanoag history and Wampanoag history more generally.
Photograph of Edwin P. Vanderhoop’s Math Textbook Interior Cover, c. 1900-1909. Aquinnah Cultural Center. Taken by the author.
Born twenty years after the forced incorporation of the Indian Districts of Mashpee and Gay Head (as Aquinnah was then called) into Commonwealth of Massachusetts towns, and the carving up of our commonly held lands into allotments, Edwin and his generation had to contend with the latest schemes by the settler-state to dispossess us of our land and neutralize our sovereignty. Incorporation and allotment opened Wampanoag families to taxation on lands previously held in common, which in turn accelerated the alienation of Wampanoag land from Wampanoag hands. To survive as taxable citizens in a free-market capitalist world, many Wampanoag men had to leave their homes on years-long whaling expeditions across the 19th century; others worked locally as fishermen and in other manual labor trades. Concurrently, many Wampanoag women made traditional crafts to sell to tourists, cut scallops, and performed domestic labor in wealthy white families’ homes in order to keep their own families financially afloat. And during this period, select Wampanoag families such as the Vanderhoops, in pursuit of a better life for their children, sent them to elite East Coast boarding schools for a classical education, while other children were sent to industrial boarding schools such as Carlisle.
But our people are resilient. They toiled to ensure that their descendants could remain on our ancestral homelands and in our ancestral homewaters. Post-incorporation, they assumed control of local government to continue exercising sovereignty in our territories, even if it wasn’t recognized by the state as such. In the 1920s, Wampanoag people from Gay Head, Herring Pond, and Mashpee would come together under the banner of “The Wampanoag Nation,” gesturing towards a return to united, confederation-style thinking as the way forward for a people who had been hunted, enslaved, dispossessed, and violently detribalized across three hundred years of colonial occupation. And in the 1970s, Mashpee and Gay Head would file separate land claim suits and petitions for federal acknowledgement, fighting, in the case of Aquinnah, for 15 years, and in the case of Mashpee, for 30.
To be Wampanoag is to be a dreamer — to imagine a world that looks so different from the one in which we currently live. Our survival as a sovereign people has been predicated on the fact that we are dreamers. We fight for political, cultural, and social self-determination. We refuse settler terms of order that seek to disconnect us from our homelands and homewaters. We generate solidarities and make kin with the empire’s other victims. Here, I think of Edwin’s grandparents, Beulah Occouch Salisbury Vanderhoop and William Adrian Vanderhoop, an Aquinnah Wampanoag woman and Afro-Dutch Surinamese man. As Majel Peters (Mashpee Wampanoag) writes in her digital humanities project, More than Surviving, Beulah and William were “‘maritime conductors’ on the Underground Railroad in the 1850s,” known to have worked with other tribal members to have “assisted as many as eight refugees from slavery escape to freedom.” This rich inheritance of bold visioning and action by our ancestors should order our steps today; we should hold it in our hearts and our minds even as things around us may look quite apocalyptic.
So yes, Edwin. We are dreamers, operating in the legacy of our ancestors, who were dreamers, too. Even when we dare not to tell. And that is integral to who we are as sovereign, but still-colonized, people. And that is something that can never be taken away.
Mary Amanda McNeil is a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe with deep kinship ties to the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head Aquinnah. She is a Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University and part-time Museum Coordinator at the Aquinnah Cultural Center.