Three Stories about the Wampanoag People

A Harvard journalism capstone project 2012

Jessie’s Dream

For a week, Jessie “Little Doe” Baird dreaded going to sleep because every time she drifted off, she saw the same vision of her Wampanoag ancestors, reaching out to her.

“Jessie, will you help us?” they cried each night.

She knew the vision was not going to go away until she agreed with the people who came back night after night huddled around the campsite, chanting in a language she did not recognize.

That vision was the beginning of a long journey for Baird, 46, a Native American from Mashpee on Cape Cod and a member of the Wampanoag tribe, the original people of coastal Massachusetts. Along the way she not only rediscovered the history of her people, but helped to bring their extinct language, Wopanaak, back to life.

Her story is just one part of the remarkable journey of the Wampanoags, a tribe that has survived epidemics, war, enslavement and the loss of their ancestral land. Today the tribe is in the midst of a renaissance. It has received federal recognition from the government, set up a language school and runs total immersion language camps, has recently opened a health clinic and is in the process of bidding on a casino to bring in money to fund new projects for the tribe.

Baird recalled the day in September 2010 when she was awarded a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. “The phone rang, the man on the phone told me to get a pen and paper and to sit down. Then he said I was the recipient of $500,000, no strings attached, to continue the Wopanaak language work,” said Baird. She burst into tears.

“When I started this language work I knew very little about Wopanaak, my lost native language,” said Baird. “The language had not been spoken for six generations. I knew the ancestors were going to help me, every time I have needed something, a door has opened for me, “she said.

A lifelong resident of the town of Mashpee, Jessie was a social worker, and a busy mother of four. Her husband was a member of the Aquinnah band of the Wampanoags on Martha’s Vineyard. Together they were raising their children and weaving a tight family life within the ancient boundaries of their community.

Jessie grew up with a strong sense of her Wampanoag roots. Mashpee town contains all that is left of the Wampanoag ancestral land, and is a quilt of parcels of private land owned by members of the tribe. Prior to the arrival of the Mayflower, the Wampanoag territory included present day Plymouth parts of Cape Cod, south Rhode Island and the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.

“We were on a path to extinction by absorption, we lost our language, and were losing our land, she said.

“My community is predominantly Wampanoag in culture. We still have the tight family ties, listen to the elders, and do have our rituals, our songs, our dances,” said Baird. “In Wampanoag spirituality, our ancestors communicate with us in dreams,” she said.

In the spring of 1992, Baird had a series of visions. Over a period of four or five nights that spring, she went in and out of the same dream. “It was an ‘out there’ experience, and I am not an ‘out there’ kind of person,” she said. “I was in that place between sleep and wakefulness. I was very aware of my surroundings,” she said.

In the dream, she walked through a familiar neighborhood of burned out houses. “All of the houses were burnt and smoldering,” she said. The neighborhood was next to the sea. At the end of the street, there was a light coming from a bulkhead door.

Baird went downstairs and was astonished. She saw many groups of Native Americans in traditional dress, sitting in circles, chanting and drumming. She wandered from group to group.

At the far end of the room, she saw people who looked familiar. “I didn’t recognize them individually,” she said, “but they looked like me and I knew I belonged to them. They were chanting in a strange language then they asked me in English, ‘Jessie, what are we saying?’”

Baird said, “We are still here.”

They asked. “Jessie, will you ask our people if they are ready to for the language to come home? Will you help us?”

They kept chanting a lament, a phrase that she couldn’t forget. She wrote it down phonetically.

A few days later she was driving home to Mashpee and saw an exit sign for Sippawisset, an old Wampanoag place name. Baird realized that the strange phrase that came from the dream must have been in Wopanaak.

Back in the colonial times, a lot of effort was put into writing down the language. A Wampanoag bible was translated for Christian missionary work. Legal documents and court records were written in Wopanaak, and the Wampanoags had an ancient verbal tradition of debates, word games, arguments, and storytelling.

“The Wampanoag people have the largest written collection of Indian language documents in North America,” said Baird.

Baird invited tribal leaders to a meeting to talk about reviving the language. “That last record of our language being spoken was in the 1850’s. Fragments of the language had survived, some prayers, a lot of nouns and expressions, but the spoken language was long gone,” said Baird.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) language expert Dr. Kenneth Hale was at the first meeting. Hale was renowned in linguistic circles for rescuing dying languages. “He was fluent in dozens of languages, but I felt annoyed that a white man was going to teach me how to speak my lost language, even though he was the best person to help us. I was very rude.” she said.

Weeks later Baird received an application from MIT for a linguistic fellowship. She sent it in, was accepted, and began the long commute into Cambridge.

On her first day at MIT, she ran into Hale who greeted her jovially and said, “I’ve been waiting for you to show up.” “I apologized for my rude behavior and he apologized for his smug attitude,” she said.

“Tribal elders told me there was a Wampanoag prophecy that there would be a time that the language would go away, and a time that the language would come home. I believe we are fulfilling that prophecy now,” said Baird.

“We began to work together that afternoon,” said Baird. She asked Hale about the meaning of the chant she heard in the dream. Hale said it meant, “We’ve been killed by the yellow thing.”

In 1616, four years before the Mayflower landed, seventy-five percent of the Wampanoag people perished in a yellow fever epidemic.

“Kenneth showed me how the words were set up, and we extracted them one by one from the written documents. He taught me that when you lose a language a large part of the culture goes too, because much of that culture is encoded in the language,” said Baird.

Hale and Baird worked closely together for seven years. Under his guidance Baird began writing the Wopanaak language dictionary which now has 10,000 words.

Hale died in 2001 “He became one of my closest friends,” said Baird. At his funeral, Baird, dressed in tribal regalia stood before hundreds of people and said a prayer in Wopanaak. “It was such an honor, “she said, “I couldn’t have done it without him.”

“One of the remarkable things about the language is that it holds truths,” said Baird. “We have always known that the sun was stationary, and that the earth travelled around it. We knew that from our language because Wopanaak defines words as being animate or inanimate. The animate earth travels around the inanimate sun, we knew that before Galileo got in trouble for teaching the same thing,” she said.

“When we say that we are from here, in Wopanaak, it has a very deep meaning,” said Braid. “We say that our feet are part of the land, like a tree.” The loss of land is expressed in a word that means, “I fall upon the ground weeping, I am devastated to lose my land.”

Baird said her life’s work is helping her people. For now, the Wopanaak dictionary and language materials are being kept within the Wampanoag community. “It is very important for us to take care of ourselves first,” she said. “Our people have gone through a lot, and we need to bring this language home to our own people before we can share it with the world,” she said.

Baird’s fifth and youngest child, Alice Mae, is being raised in a Wopanaak-speaking household. “Of course she has picked up English from the outside world, but she is fluent enough in Wopanaak to correct her dad’s grammatical errors,” Baird said.

Today the Wopanaak Language Reclamation project runs three-day total immersion camps for people of Wampanoag descent. In 2012 they will open the first pre-kindergarten through kindergarten language school. The school plans to offer a tuition free incentive to families where the parents take the language classes too. The program is based on the successful Hawaiian language program which fostered a revival among Native Hawaiian speakers. “We look forward to similar results,” said Baird.

Baird is also medicine woman for her tribe, and is called to offer spiritual support at important life transitions. She had a cousin with a reading disability who wanted learn how to speak Wopanaak. Baird tutored her personally. Then her cousin was diagnosed with cancer.

The Wampanoags believe that when a member of the tribe crosses the barrier between life and death, the ancestors will be there to welcome them to the other side.

When Baird’s cousin was dying, Baird was called to do a ceremony in the hospital. Before she died, her cousin said, “Thank you for our language. Now when I cross over, I can tell the ancestors my Wampanoag name, and they will know who I am, and I can speak to them in our language.”

Baird said, “The big thing is this we were almost wiped out, but we have prevailed. Our language died, and now it is alive again. As I told the ancestors in the dream, “We are still here.”

Leeah and Shirley

Leeah Ochumuk felt like a puzzle with a missing piece. As a child in New Bedford, Massachusetts with a French-Canadian mother and a Wampanoag father, she wasn’t quite sure where she fit in. In a place where names like Medeiros, Chevalier, and Briggs — from the Portuguese, French and Yankee ancestors abounded, Ochumuk — an original Wampanoag surname — once made her feel self-conscious.

Ochumuk’s story mirrors that of thousands of Wampanoags who live on their ancestral land — unnoticed but in plain sight. They are home and business owners, landlords and renters; descended from local farmers, whalers, fishermen and mill workers, yet without the visible cultural landmarks, the churches, restaurants, the community centers. “We don’t stick out, but we’ve always been here,” she said.

“At school people always asked me where I was from.

People thought I was African American, or Cape Verdean,” said the tall, slender 22- year-old college student.

“When I was nine, I realized I was Wampanoag. I found that missing puzzle piece at my grandmother’s funeral,” she said.

At her grandmother’s church funeral in New Bedford, the grief of the mourners made a deep impression on her. “They wailed openly and seemed overcome with sadness,” she said.

Afterwards the mourners moved next door to the VFW hall, and there Ochumuk met her tribe for the first time. “We stood in a circle and a pipe was passed around. They were praying in the old language, and there was Indian dancing,” she said. “After that I knew who I was. I could feel the connection to my roots,” she said.

Ochumuk said that her father has mixed feelings about being Wampanoag. “It was considered a negative thing to be Indian in his generation. This was before the Civil Rights era,” she said.

“I was raised with Wampanoag cultural values, elders are respected, and children are cherished. I’ve always loved nature,” said Ochumuk. “But aside from my grandmother, I didn’t know other local Wampanoag people.”

Three years ago, Ochumuk enrolled in a Wampanoag language summer camp. The summer camp is a total immersion experience run by the Wopanaak Language Reclamation project under the guidance of linguist Jessie Little Doe Bard. “I got to know so many people from my own tribe and found out I was related to most of them,” said Ochumuk.

Inspired by her experience, Ochumuk changed her college major to linguistics. After graduation in December 2011 she plans to work as a Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) instructor in New Bedford. She wants to mentor young Wampanoags as a way of serving her people. “I’ll be using my university training to teach my people our language. It’s the only thing I want to do. It’s my way of giving back.”

Ochumuk feels fortunate to have found a living connection to her heritage. “Our history is too important to forget. We’ve gone through too much for it to be forgotten.”

Every Thanksgiving Day, Ochumuk ponders the cost her people have paid for the generosity they extended the Mayflower voyagers. “Our history was not taught in schools when I was a child, even though it is the most important part of the great Thanksgiving story,” she said, “if not for my people, the English would have starved.”

“In schools Indians are spoken of in the past tense. In fact, the Indian world is all around us, the language, place names, the local food we eat,” said Ochumuk

According to Ochumuk, American democracy is influenced by the government structure of the Iroquois Indian tribe.

Dr. Len Travers, American history professor at UMD agrees. “Absolutely. When the colonies revolted they had already had a hundred years of exposure to the Native American forms of government, which were very different from the European model,” he said.

“Since the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620, the Wampanoags have suffered a series of setbacks which would have obliterated another tribe,” said Travers.

Travers said the bloody King Philip’s War continued the reduction of the Wampanoag tribe. In addition to the loss of life and land, countless Indians were sold into slavery and shipped to the Caribbean and as far as the Iberian peninsula. The Indians were traded for African slaves. At the end of King Philip’s war, there were only 400 Wampanoag left in New England.

After King Philip’s war, the tribe recovered slowly through intermarriage, but the loss of land and language escalated. State and federal property laws dissolved the tribe’s community land and opened it up to individual ownership. As single land parcels were sold to outsiders the Wampanoags lost control over their ancestral land.

Windows to the local Wampanoag past exist and are easily accessible, said Travers. “Anyone who wants to learn a lot in a little bit of time should go to Plimoth Plantation and visit the Wampanoag village,” he said.

Plimoth Plantation offers an authentic encounter with the past. Like other living history parks, the re-enactors, called interpreters, wear period clothing and stay in character.

The Hobbamock Homesite is the recreated Wampanoag village at Plimoth Plantation and is run by modern day tribe members who work at traditional tasks, dress in authentic clothing, and speak frankly about their history, their hopes, and their lives as tribe members today.

Shirley Highrock sits on a seat piled high with animal furs dressed in Wampanoag tribal regalia — deerskin dress and moccasins with wampum beads in her white hair. She sits in a “wetu”, a traditional birch bark dwelling, and instructs tourists and history students about Wampanoag spirituality. “It’s a belief system with great significance today. The ancestral religion is one of ecological sustainability and environmental support. We are only supposed to use what we need,” she said. “I hope things shift before it is too late,” she added, referring to the world’s current climate crisis.

Highrock, 78, is a tribal elder of the Mashpee band of the Wampanoags. A federal employee for her entire career, she retired in 2008 and went to work at Plimoth Plantation.

According to Highrock, inheritance flows along the line of the mother. The Wampanoags do not live on reservations, and their land is all held privately. “We have verbal family agreements not to sell to outsiders. Of course some people do. When my father married again, I hid the deeds because my name was on them.”

Highrock believes she has the gift of second sight — the ability to see spirits. “I see them like real animals, people and shadows. They come to me.” She explains the role of ancestors simply as that of loving parents who watch out for their children. Highrock had a couple of disastrous marriages. She said she was warned by the spirits of her grandfather and father before her wedding days. “They appeared like shadows, I should have listened to them,” she said.

Highrock also believes in the power of focused thought. She said people have to be careful of what they put out there. She referred to three deaths that coincided with a tribe member’s rage-filled thoughts. “I’m not saying it caused the deaths,” she said in the darkness of the wetu, her face illuminated only by firelight, “I’m just saying thoughts are powerful things, and we can’t be throwing them around like they don’t mean anything.”

Highrock spoke with pride about Baird. “I am good friends with her mother,” she said. “Her mother is a clan mother, I didn’t think that Jessie would ever be a linguist, but you just never know what the ancestors will ask of you,” she said.

In Wampanoag tradition, prophecy is part of the body of knowledge that is passed down between generations. “We don’t write it down,” she said, “it has to be spoken out loud.”

Highrock added to Baird’s story of the Wampanoag prophecy. Highrock said the ancestors foretold the return of the language, if people prayed to the Creator in the native language. “We couldn’t speak Wopanaak when I was a child,” she said, “but we all knew how to say the old prayers. I think that is what made the ancestors tell Jessie that is was time,” she said.

“It is a Wampanoag value to embrace your entire heritage,” said Ochumuk. “I happen to live here amongst my father’s people, but I love my French-Canadian mother’s heritage too.” Ochumuk said the “blood quantum” system, of measuring how much Indian blood one has, is not how Wampanoags assess kinship or admission to the tribe. “You are born into a family.”

Highrock said, “We know who our people are. We are a small community and everyone eventually is related. We welcome new relatives, because that is how we will carry on.” Highrock spoke about the importance of the bond between the older generation and the younger people. “We can watch over them and help them along. We tell them our wisdom and they learn to respect us. As women, one of our important jobs is to watch over the young mothers and babies,” she said.

Highrock said, “Many Wampanoag words are part of our daily conversation, for example moose, skunk, squash, pumpkin, succotash, quahog, and wampum. We are better known than most people think,” she said.

“My people are at a turning point,” said Ochumuk, “before I grow old, we’ll have some of our land back and there will be young people who will speak our language. It’s our big historical comeback. We’re still here, and we will be for the rest of time.”

The Chief and the Casino

Moments after Cedric Cromwell was elected as Chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe he stepped outside to greet the gathered crowd. His face beamed in the thin light of the February afternoon in 2009, and he joined the chanting amidst the dancing and drumming outside. Every once in a while he turned his face up to the sky to give thanks. Then he stepped into the crowd, shaking hands, giving hugs and closing his eyes to chant.

Cromwell’s term comes at a time when major events are changing the tribe. In 2007, the Mashpee Wampanoags received federal recognition. In 2010, Jessie Little Doe Baird was awarded a Macarthur genius grant for her work in resurrecting the Wampanoag language, Wopanaak. This fall, “We Are Still Here”, a movie about the tribe, was aired on public television. As of this December, the Mashpee tribe is the main contender for a casino in Southeastern Massachusetts, if it can comply with a short and difficult list of goals with a deadline of July 2012.

This year has been a time of remarkable economic progress for the Mashpee Wampanoags. Cromwell lists the accomplishments they have achieved. “We’ve built a health clinic, an administration building, a government center, have started counseling and substance abuse programs, and have launched a Native Scholars Program.”

The health center, which opened in November, 2011, brings guaranteed medical care to the tribe’s 2,000 members. Dental care follows next year. But the golden prize of economic opportunity is the casino. A Wampanoag-owned casino would bring millions of dollars into the local economy. Cromwell was elected to lead that cause.

Cromwell, 46, was born in Boston and raised in Boston’s Hyde Park and Dorchester neighborhoods. His mother is a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe and he nurtured his roots and became an official member of the tribe in 2006. He holds a bachelor’s degree in management and community planning from the University of Massachusetts. Prior to becoming tribal chairman he had worked at Fidelity Investments.

Cromwell is a man of constant action and it is paying off. In 2011, under his direction, the tribe has secured over $14.6 million in grants and loans to support tribal programs and projects.

Cromwell blends his devout Christian belief with deeply held Wampanoag spiritual traditions. Before the Mashpee High School football team went off to play against Cardinal Spellman High School in Foxboro, he sent them “good medicine” — powerful prayers. They won the Massachusetts Division 4 Super Bowl by a score of 34-8.

Cromwell considers it his duty to shepherd his people toward the benefits they finally have as an official Indian tribe. “As Chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, I am charged with assisting my people to recover from nearly four centuries of colonization and neglect,” said Cromwell.

A casino would be a major step toward that recovery. Hope runs high in the tribe as reflected in the constant positive chatter on their official Facebook page.

Cromwell faces challenges on various fronts. Recently, the tribe opposed energy company Cape Wind’s plan to put windmills in Nantucket Sound. Cape Wind offered the Wampanoags $2 million for their cooperation. The tribe declined because the windmills would have obstructed the view of the sunrise on the horizon, which is central to their cultural tradition and identity as “People of the First Light”.

The Wampanoags have been beleaguered for centuries, and certain pieces of American law have made things very difficult for the tribe. The Dawes Act, adopted by Congress in 1887, contributed to the breakup of American Indian tribes as a cohesive socio-economic unit and resulted in the loss of millions of acres of communal Indian-owned lands.

Ownership of these lands was essential to the organization, sustenance, spirituality, and long-term survival the tribes. The specific provisions of the Dawes Act called for the division of tribal communal lands into individually-owned allotments.

Its stated objective was to help Indians assimilate into American society. However, critics of the Dawes Act charge that the ulterior motive was to obtain control of Indian lands. As result of the act, land owned by Indians decreased from 138 million acres in 1887 to 78 million acres in 1900.

A high court decision, Carcieri v. Salazar (2009), essentially froze the Wampanoags’ petitions for federally protected land. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned lower courts’ rulings to allow the federal government to take land into trust from tribes that were recognized after 1934.

This was a dramatic change in direction from the long-standing interpretation that the provisions of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 applied to any tribe under federal jurisdiction. The National Congress of American Indians states that “the Carcieri decision threatens tribal sovereignty, economic self-sufficiency, and self-determination.”

The decision essentially stalled the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe’s application for placing land in trust for potential casino development.

According to Cromwell in an interview in Indian Country Today, this ruling poses a severe hardship to restoring the Wampanoag’s homeland and that an Indian tribe cannot exercise its sovereignty without a land base.

Cromwell said that tribal lands hold more than mere economic value but rather have great cultural, religious, and — in the modern era, especially — political significance. “Our lands are where we live, where we gather together, and where we exercise our inherent sovereign rights as pre-Constitutional peoples,” said Cromwell.

In October 2011, when the Massachusetts State Senate approved the expanded gaming bill, Cromwell said, “We look forward to the next steps in the process, including passage of a final bill and compact negotiations with the governor. We are excited to start creating jobs, providing revenue and enhancing travel and tourism for Southeastern Massachusetts, the commonwealth and the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe as soon as possible.”

On November 22, 2011, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signed a casino bill into law. The bill allows for three casinos located in different parts of the Commonwealth. It also provides for the governor to negotiate a compact with federally-recognized Indian tribes for one of three casino licenses.

The day after Governor Patrick signed legislation allowing casinos to operate in Massachusetts, KG Urban Enterprises of New York City, a casino development company, filed a lawsuit pointed at the Wampanoags. Calling it an “illegal carve-out provided to Native American applicants in the Southeast region,” Andrew Stern, managing director of KG Urban, said in the complaint. “The act is riddled with explicit, race-based set-asides that give federally recognized Indian tribes a categorical advantage over all other applicants seeking a gaming license in Southeastern Massachusetts.”

Cromwell said the state legislature does not give the tribe an unfair advantage. In a statement from his office he said, “They understand that, as a federally recognized Indian Tribe, we are treated as a sovereign political entity by the United States of America.”

KG Urban Enterprises has selected a site on New Bedford’s historic harbor, steps away from the National Historic Park area.

Rhonda Fazio, a textile artist with a studio in downtown New Bedford, is not pleased with the idea of a casino downtown. “It makes me think of what happened to Atlantic City. Who wants to walk from the Whaling Museum and our beautiful cobblestoned area to a casino?” she said.

In a New Bedford Standard-Times letter to the editor, Lloyd Marden said, “When people talk about casinos, you must remember 95 percent of all tribes in this country have always put their money back into the states, cities and towns. Beware of the Trojans giving gifts to us. I would much rather the Wampanoags have a chance to build a casino here, for I know where their heart stands.”

Cromwell points out that the tribe envisions a destination resort casino and is considering a number of locations, including Fall River, Bridgewater and Middleborough. “We will create jobs for local people. We intend to work with local businesses and chambers of commerce to promote travel and tourism and other economic development throughout southeastern Massachusetts. We’re not some developer from Las Vegas. We’re from here and we’re going to work hard to make sure this project benefits not only our tribe, but our neighbors as well,” said Cromwell in a press release from the tribe’s office.

He ended a recent letter to the tribe with a prayer to the Creator: “May the Creator look over our tribe, heal our sick, nurture our youth, support our elders, help our working people provide, and take care of our mother earth so she can provide for the seven generations to come. As long as the wind blows and the river flows, we are people of the First Light.”