Native American History and Culture on Cape Cod: Wampanoag Organizations and People

The Red Nation Podcast interview with Jessie Little Doe Baird, April 4, 2020

From Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University

Mindy Todd of CAI's "The Point" interview with Ramona Peters and Leslie Jonas of the Native Land Conservancy

From Harvard Museums of Arts and Culture.

"The Chappaquiddick Wampanoag Tribe is a historical Massachusetts tribe. Its ancestral homelands are Chappaquiddick Island, Cape Poge, and Muskeget. The Chappaquiddick Wampanoag were a tribe at the time of first contact, when the United States became a country in 1776, and when Massachusetts became part of the Federal Union in 1789. The tribe had two reservation areas on Chappaquiddick until the late 1800s. Today, Chappaquiddicks live in Martha’s Vineyard, the larger island next to Chappaquiddick, on the mainland in Massachusetts and Rhode Island (ancestral homelands of the Wampanoag Nation), and throughout the United States. "

"WE are THE Wampanoag Tribe of Plymouth Indians known Present-day as the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe, also identified in historical documents as Patuxet, Comassakumkanit, The Herring Pond Indians, The Pondville Indians and Manomet. "

"Contact between Native and non-Native people is often seen as a singular event at a particular point in time. Contact is in fact and ever occurring experience between those surviving indigenous peoples in a place and those who continue to arrive and settle within and around indigenous communities. The following is a snapshot timeline of the contact experience of the Mashpee Wampanoag."

"Several institutions that have significant New England Indian collections have organized into a cooperative endeavor called The Yale Indian Papers Project to address these problems by publishing an electronic database known as The Native Northeast Portal. The Portal represents a scholarly critical edition of New England Native American primary source materials gathered presently from the partner institutions into one robust virtual collection, where the items are digitized, transcribed, annotated, and edited to the highest academic standards and then made freely available over the Internet, using open-source software."

"For over ten thousand years the Wampanoag have inhabited the island of Noepe. When the first Europeans dropped anchor off our shores in the 1500s - just before the Pilgrims - we numbered three thousand or more. To this day we still occupy our aboriginal land of Aquinnah and count 901 members, about 300 of whom live on the Island."

"The Aquinnah Cultural Center Inc. is an independent non-profit organization whose purpose is to preserve the culture and history of our people, the Aquinnah Wampanoag, by providing opportunities to engage our tribal community and to educate the public. In addition to curating the contents of our museum and other cultural events, the ACC is also proud to maintain strong community partnerships that help us create safe environments for tribal families to learn and practice their cultural ways. We encourage you to explore our website and contact us with any questions."

"Through the door of our Museum the history and culture of the Wampanoag from the Stone Age to the present is carefully detailed through a range of exhibits. First established under the guidance of the Mashpee Historical Commission, the Museum is the only one in existence devoted exclusively to Wampanoag history."

"Reviving a long-silent language and restoring to her Native American community a vital sense of its cultural heritage and to the nation a link to our complex past."

"Native Land Conservancy was founded in 2012 in Mashpee, Massachusetts, and is the first Native-run land conservation group east of the Mississippi."

"The Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project began in 1993 under the direction of jessie 'little doe' baird who earned a Master’s Degree in Algonquian Linguistics from MIT in 2000. Through the joint collaborative efforts of members of The Assonet Band of Wampanoag, The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah and the Herring Pond Band of Wampanoag, our mission is to return language fluency to the Wampanoag Nation as a principal means of expression."

"In partnership with SmokeSygnals, a leading Native American creative agency, the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum established a new, permanent exhibit, Our Story: The Complicated Relationship of the Indigenous Wampanoag and the Mayflower Pilgrims."

The unprecedented exhibit, “Our”Story: 400 Years of Wampanoag History, reveals little-known historic and cultural realities of the “people of the first light.”