Intimate and lively ... Unafraid to proclaim what he does not know, he is constantly posing questions, working his way toward answers and offering himself as a humble proxy for the reader curious about Native life. In that sense, the book (inevitably, given the ongoing state of American ignorance) is also an 'Indians 101' explainer ... Lee recruits experts to make sense of it all, and the book features compelling profiles of Indigenous leaders and intellectuals ... Though Lee turns to international Indigenous governance for examples—Maori in New Zealand, Sami in Norway, Kichwa in the Ecuadorean Amazon—his story remains most evocative in its domestic context ... Lee’s reflections demand one contemplate not only the governments in Indian Country but the troubled experiment in government that is the United States of America.
Aside from the opening pages, Lee’s writing resists the tendency toward mythmaking that’s common to destinations laden with outsize reputations ... These are the sorts of complexities that course through Lee’s engaging text, which is as much a personal memoir as it is the story of his family and his tribe’s history ... Despite the author’s deep breadth of knowledge—in addition to his lived experience as an Aquinnah Wampanoag, he’s also a journalist who covers Indigenous affairs—he is refreshingly frank about his own misconceptions while coming of age and how he learned to correct them while researching and writing this book.
Tourism, in particular, emerges as an essential, if thorny topic that Lee explores with great nuance ... By offering these glimpses into his mind and his own internal conflicts, Lee proves to be an adroit, honest narrator, resisting any desire to wax poetic by instead reminding readers that real people live here ... Through a diverse array of sources, Lee offers readers a valuable understanding of the many forms that 21st-century Indigenous life can take and how they might evolve in the future ... It’s clear how much Lee cherishes his connection to Martha’s Vineyard, a place that’s easy to love. And in these pages, he’s crafted a must-read for anyone who seeks to know the island with depth that extends well beyond its superficial myths.
