RECENT EFFORTS to grapple with the long, fraught history of Massachusetts and its Indigenous communities have been slow, unwieldy, and hampered by conflicting frameworks.
John “Jim” Peters, executive director of the Commission of Indian Affairs and a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, grew up in Mashpee when it was “pretty much a reservation, and it was just our people who were running the place.” He describes the area as “a different world… They still had a touch of the prior years, of the traditional life and living with the land.”
This was before casino ambitions, rising debt, and the uncertainty that comes from ever-shifting federal policy around tribe recognition and their entitlement to land. A day after Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Peters was thinking about living through the civil rights era on tribal lands, the son of a Mashpee police officer and tribal leader known as “Slow Turtle.”
“To try to adapt to that change, dealing with racism and all that other stuff that goes along with it, was very discouraging,” Peters said.
Native tribes in Massachusetts are still struggling with the legacy of racism, harmful housing policies, unequal educational access, and a focus on wealth building that is out of step with Native interests in preserving stable connection to their ancestral lands, according to a report from Boston Indicators, the research arm of the Boston Foundation. Exploring the long arm of colonial and US policy around Native land, the January report aims to re-frame the narrative of wealth gaps to include the ways that Native American communities define wealth.
The report was released against the backdrop of a series of issues – including the redesign of the state seal and the run up to the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution – playing out across Massachusetts that affect Native citizens and their tribes.
Stability and sustainability, the focus groups found, is much more important to Native people than amassing large amounts of money. Well before the boom and consolidation of the state’s iconic cranberry industry, the tart fruit grew naturally in boggy areas and was used for food, dyes, and medicine by Native American tribes that harvested the natural patches.
“And then they were industrialized and commercialized, and it became a different thing, as opposed to surviving, feeding yourself, selling it,” Peters said. “And it’s the same thing with land. We live with the land. To make it a commodity is very different,” and Native groups are not often able to “play that game” of jockeying for land ownership.
The state’s approach to recognizing its Native predecessors and adapting to their current conditions is a mixed bag.
An advertising campaign launched by Massachusetts tourism officials last fall, highlighting the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution largely left out the Native tribes who were here to greet the Pilgrims and fought alongside the colonists in the Revolution.
A new commission to redesign the state seal, flag, and motto is taking a second swing at the task, after the prior commission’s three years of work ended in a punt to the Legislature with no recommendations.
The current state seal features an image of a Native American holding a bow and arrow and a sword hanging over his head. The Latin motto translates as: “By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty.”
“Having a native person on there is probably appropriate, because the state is named after a Native people,” Peters said, “but the sword is the issue.”
The original Massachusetts Bay Colony was named after the Massachusett people, who were cordoned off into praying towns to convert them into Christianity, depopulated, and forcibly interned in the region in the 1670s.
Peters, who was on the prior seal commission, said the process was unwieldy in part because it unfurled in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Commission members had very different views on the vision of liberty depicted on the flag, he said, and none of the surveyed alternative symbols managed to get much energy behind them.
“My way of thinking of seals and so forth,” he said, “is it’s really a statement of the people that it represents. And I felt awkward, because in a sense it was looking to us – the Native people – to come up with an alternative. But it’s not our seal. It’s your seal, the state seal, and what would satisfy them. Leaving the Native person, I thought that would be appropriate and we could change this motto, but that didn’t get much enthusiasm.”
That leaves their fate largely up to the whims of federal policy.
Publications focused on Native issues, like the nonprofit Indian Country Today, have worried about the impact of the presidential regime change. The first Trump administration rolled back national monument protections and pushed forward pipeline work over Indigenous objection even as it recognized seven tribes, repatriated Indigenous ancestral remains from Finland, and established a task force on missing and murdered Indigenous people.
The Trump administration in 2020 ordered 321 acres in Mashpee and Taunton taken out of federal trust from the Mashpee Wampanoag. In the first year of the Biden administration, which appointed Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland as the first Native American to serve as a US Cabinet secretary, the Department of the Interior confirmed the Mashpee Wampanoag’s tribal status and its protected reservation.
Federal recognition of Native tribes comes with rights of self-governance, land protections, services, and funding. There has been some consideration, Peters said, of whether the Massachusetts’ Commission on Indian Affairs might be able to take on some role that could help local tribes seeking federal recognition go through the process. But that would involve Legislative action, he said, and there has not yet been much of a push on Beacon Hill to expand the work of the commission.
Tribes are often in an uneasy position when trying to organize and advocate, Peters said, because they can bring in some revenue through businesses but lack a tax base. Plus, in a state like Massachusetts where land is an expensive commodity, the tribes can’t compete with market buyers.
There have been some positive developments in Peters’ view, like the state Department of Conservation and Recreation hiring a Native person to help them work with tribes to figure out how they can use or reacquaint themselves with their former lands now controlled by the state of Massachusetts.
The fraught history of stolen Native land still creates tensions.
While many localities offer “land acknowledgments” – a few sentences read at the beginning of public and private gatherings to recognize Indigenous people as original stewards of the land – a request for a land acknowledgment from the Wampanoag in Plymouth last year was rebuffed by some Committee of Precinct Chairs members for fear that it might signal some legal implications that could lead to reparations or land back initiatives.
Land acknowledgments are themselves a complicated subject. The 1887 Dawes Act, named for Sen. Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, authorized the President to break up reservation land and parcel it out. An acknowledgment that land was taken is a baseline gesture, Peters notes, but one that can feel like “a slap in the face… we’ve been saying, ‘give us our land back, or some land back,’ as opposed to acknowledging that this once was your land, now it’s ours.”
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