Joseph Lee (R), author of “Nothing More of This Land,” speaking with Taylor Smalley (L) at the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival (photo: Bruce Henderson)
Alumni of the Newton Public School system may have hazy memories of Newton’s education regarding Native American history — a unit here, a presentation there. Quickly forgotten in the whirlwind of school. Newton native and author Joseph Lee has stepped forward to fill some gaps in common understanding of Massachusetts’ Native past and present, having just published his debut work, Nothing More of This Land. It’s a sprawling historical account of his family, his Wampanoag heritage, and the meaning of indigeneity and connection to tribal land across the globe.
Lee now lives in New York, but he split his childhood between summers in Aquinnah (Gay Head) in Martha’s Vineyard and school years in Newton. Receiving a Newton Public Schools education, Lee felt a strong lack in the instruction about Native history and culture presented to him. “We learned about the Mayflower and a little bit about the first Thanksgiving. In elementary school, there was a unit, maybe one or two weeks. …Seventh grade and 11th grade [were] US History years. In those, there’s always a unit …Brief mentions and very cursory and one-sided history.” Though Lee says that the educational gap is not limited to Newton, he found it “A strange experience …it made me doubt a little bit about myself and my own community, because what I was seeing as Native history in those textbooks or in those small snippets really didn’t match up with my own personal experience.”
This dissonance spurred Lee to write. “I didn’t feel like I was getting a lot of answers, so I decided at a certain point that I was going to need to make it a personal mission to …do some of that research, and to ask people within the tribe.”
But his focus soon expanded beyond Aquinnah. At home during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lee used his spare…