Abstract
This article examines notions of "labor" and "belonging" in contemporary indigenous-settler relations on the Wampanoag island of Noëpe, a place known all too well in the U.S. as "Martha's Vineyard". I focus on an ethnographic incident in which a Wampanoag fisherman stands before a town council on Noëpe and appeals for the right to fish in ancestral waters without penalty. Conceptualizing labor as agency, I am interested in the kind of work indigenous belonging demands in contested places. I am especially concerned about the vulnerability of small, financially stressed tribes and indigenous selves who must out-maneuver the labored manipulations of settler law and regulation at the level of locality. What are the political alternatives for Indians who are not rich, who are not members of rich tribes? What kind of "labor" must small tribes exert in order to preserve and protect indigenous selves and articulations of self-rule? It is within an economy of labored belonging that this project situates indigenous agency and contemplates the intensity and complexity of its work.
Highlights
I am thinking at the moment about the way indigenous agency in southern New England risks injury from a certain species of malevolence; call it a malicious delight embedded in settler rulemaking and released in the heat of encounter
What interests me here is the extent to which indigenous agency, laboring on behalf of its own notions of belonging, can counter, mediate, disengage or otherwise avoid emotional and psychic injury from what I perceive to be the gothic side of the law, the “law” being understood on this point in its full multifarious splendor, formal and informal
In southern New England, native peoples have been “mixed” for centuries, and like indigenous peoples elsewhere in the region, the Aquinnah Indians are at times imagined as “not real” and eligible for political elimination
Summary
I am thinking at the moment about the way indigenous agency in southern New England risks injury from a certain species of malevolence; call it a malicious delight embedded in settler rulemaking and released in the heat of encounter. While the tribe maintains trust land in certain sections approaching the shoreline of Menemsha Pond, the pond itself – the water – belongs, by settler law, to organisms of the state.3 Non-residents in Aquinnah were allowed to scallop in the pond but only if they applied for and were granted a commercial fishing license and paid a $200 fee.
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