Darkness for the People of the First Light

I’d like to tell you about when I first heard of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe.

I’d been on Cape Cod for about two months or so in the early 1980s, living aboard a schooner with a dysfunctional man, a German shepherd, and two cats. This will be relevant later.

Somehow, Malcolm had gotten to know a member of the finance board of Mashpee, and so we went to meet her and her husband for drinks one afternoon.

She kept referring to the “Monigs,” and I had no idea what she was talking about. I finally asked. She laughed; “Oh, that’s what we called the Wampanoags – More Nigger than Indian.”

Welcome to white Mashpee. And oh yes, the name Mashpee is derived from Algonquin meaning “great water.”

When I started working for The Enterprise newspaper in Falmouth, I got a lot more education about why so many white people ostensibly hated the Wampanoags, or People of the First Light. It went back to a land suit that the tribe had filed and it went on for years, tying up a lot of developers’ plans.

The next big story, which was the first of its kind I’d come across, involved the police shooting of a young Wampanoag man. The following is from a Maoist (!) website, the only place I could find to refresh my memory.

“On May 1, 1988, David H. Mace, a white police sergeant in the Cape Cod town of Mashpee, Massachusetts, shot and killed David C. Hendricks, a 27 year old Mashpee Wampanoag, following his pursuit of Hendricks’ car for a traffic violation. Sergeant Mace fired eleven shots from his semi-automatic 9-millimeter pistol. Seven struck David Hendricks. … The last five shots were fired at point-blank range through the driver’s side window after the car had stopped. … The Wampanoag and many of their supporters have suffered from police harassment and surveillance during memorial walks and demonstrations for justice concerning the Hendricks case.”

The longer I lived on the Upper Cape, the more familiar I became with members of the Mashpee Wampanoags. The term “tribe” is used loosely, because it was not until 2007 that the Mashpee group received this designation from the US government, despite the fact that they had lived as a tribe in the indigenous sense of the word from ancient days. One hundred fifty acres of the town that was surveyed and incorporated by white folks in 1847 were ancestral lands, yet the Wampanoags had no say or control over them.

Back to the boat, Chantey. Many people assumed Malcolm and I were wealthy because she was such a beautiful boat and kept up very well. She was built in the 1930s on Long Island using oak from a demolished brewery. Only two families had owned her before. The fact was, though, that I was spending almost every penny of my savings and my pay on her, and we did all the work on her ourselves. Every winter I helped schlepp hundreds of pounds worth of masts, gaffs, and spars on foot to a warehouse where they would be sanded down and varnished. I spent one summer just stripping caulk from the deck seams and heating up tar on a propane stove to replace it. I scraped barnacles from the hull and repainted it with red lead paint.

One day a very preppy looking young man stopped to admire Chantey and we got chatting. He invited us to his family’s compound, which was tucked away in Mashpee. I felt very ill at ease, but Malcolm came from a pedigreed family and could bullshit his way around anyone. However, it soon became apparent what our economic situation was, and the young man, actually called Buff day, soon lost interest in us.

Fast forward to the mid-1990s when a hotshot real estate developer, who had already bought up and developed prime seashore land in Mashpee, bought a mini-mall and decided to create a new Mashpee by building a huge complex called Mashpee Commons. His name was Buff. How many Buffs have I ever known? Just the one.

It seemed like a further slap in the face to the Wampanoags. Buff’s premise was that Mashpee didn’t have a center and therefore didn’t create community. “It will put Mashpee on the map,” he avowed, though the land suit and the killing of David Hendricks had already done that. Cape Cod Life Magazine called it the “heart” of Mashpee.

Capitalism as heart. Fancy stores that local people cannot afford to shop in. Condominiums that local people cannot afford. Never mind the heart of the Mashpee Wampanoags and their years-long fight for their lands and their status as a tribe. Never mind the hearts of the Hendricks family, who never received justice for David’s killing. The policeman was on full salary of $75,000 for five years while not working before he left the all-white force. All attempts to try David Mace for murder went for naught.

So when the Trump Administration’s Department of the Interior in February informed the tribe that it was disestablishing its lands when it was becoming increasingly clear that a world-wide pandemic was going to hit the US like a bludgeon, it got national attention and outrage. It represents yet another broken treaty, in essence, where treaties should not have had to be made in the first place. They are the legacy of “Manifest Destiny” and the white man’s push to own an entire continent rather than share it with the human beings who lived here already.

What I have not found through Googling stories about this situation are any expressions of sympathy from the white residents of Mashpee. Yes, I could have missed them, but my sense is that there would have been a lot of press if the town’s establishment had made its support unequivocal.

I do recommend a work that I found on line, MashpeeIndiansofCapeCod, the thesis of one Mark A. Nicholas presented in 2001 for his Master of History at Lehigh University.