The Mashpee Wampanoag Work With a Cape Cod Town to Restore Their Fishing Grounds
This is the second of two articles about the Mashpee Wampanoag’s efforts to assert their fishing rights on Cape Cod. Read the first story here. Pocknett drove to Fishermen’s Landing at the members-only Popponesset Beach, stopping at a “beach security checkpoint” run by two teenagers who hid from the July sun under an oversized umbrella. One […]
The post The Mashpee Wampanoag Work With a Cape Cod Town to Restore Their Fishing Grounds appeared first on Civil Eats.
This is the second of two articles about the Mashpee Wampanoag’s efforts to assert their fishing rights on Cape Cod. Read the first story here.
Vernon “Buddy” Pocknett steered his truck through the curving streets of Popponesset Island, Cape Cod, jostling a satchel that hung from the rearview mirror above a trucker hat reading “WTF (Where’s The Fish).” The satchel was made from a seal paw, adorned with long claws that jiggled as Pocknett took the turns, passing Teslas, sailboat-shaped mailboxes, and sunburned cyclists.
Pocknett drove to Fishermen’s Landing at the members-only Popponesset Beach, stopping at a “beach security checkpoint” run by two teenagers who hid from the July sun under an oversized umbrella. One asked Pocknett if he was there to fish, and Pocknett said he was doing research. The teen sounded skeptical and asked what kind. Pocknett patted the sticker on his windshield emblazoned with the official Mashpee Wampanoag tribal seal.
“Oh!” she said, sounding flustered. “You’re all set.”
“You see what I mean?” Pocknett said, with the girl barely out of earshot. “How do they get to say who’s to come down here and who’s not?”
Pocknett was at the beach to identify Indigenous water access points, paths used for generations to reach fishing grounds from shores that are now mostly privatized by non-Wampanoags. Public access points along Massachusetts waters have thinned since the mid-20th century, but their disappearance has been especially pronounced here, in and around the town of Mashpee and the Popponessett Bay, in what was once Wampanoag territory.
Meanwhile, overdevelopment has destroyed abundant wetland areas that shaped Wampanoag life for thousands of years, and water pollution threatens many aquatic species essential to the tribe’s survival. A lifelong aquaculturist and fisherman, Pocknett has recently begun work to restore access to traditional fishing grounds and the ecosystem that supports them.
Fishermen’s Landing at Popponesset Beach, near New Seabury, Cape Cod. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes)
With help from the tribe’s Natural Resources Department, the town of Mashpee is compiling a harbor management plan, an extensive document that will set guidelines for the construction of marinas and docks. The plan will also address encroaching erosion and sea-level rise throughout this Massachusetts municipality. As part of the project, the town has invited Pocknett and a group of tribal elders to identify Indigenous pathways to the water, with the goal of eventually opening some of them back up for public use. It is a modest effort, a starting point to repair fraught relations, reconcile with the past, and strategize for the future. If the plan succeeds, it will help rebuild wetlands and traditional food sources for the tribe, once largely excluded from environmental decision-making.
At Fishermen’s Landing, Pocknett leaned against a freshly painted railing and looked out at Nantucket Sound. Sunbathers floated and dozed below, on a beach where Pocknett grew up fishing, back when it was still a hotspot for striped bass, or stripers. But as in other parts of the bay, the fish have been driven out of these spawning grounds. Since the arrival of European settlers 400 years ago, not a single season has passed without humans harvesting as much as possible from waters that are now increasingly fouled with pollution.
“It’s like they don’t see the impact [on] their great-great-grandchildren,” Pocknett said. “What’s going to happen, four generations from us right here? When’s it end?”
A Plan for the Harbor
The harbor management plan is, among other things, an attempt to ensure generations of sustainable fishing and clean water in Mashpee. The town’s Harbor Management Committee, with support from the Urban Harbors Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston, is compiling its second draft of hundreds of pages detailing everything from dock compliance to potential new aquaculture sites, which can help improve water quality over time. Once the final plan is approved by the town, it could open the door to state or federal funding to contend with existential threats like sea-level rise and a shifting coastline. But finalizing the plan has been a slow process.
Overdevelopment has destroyed abundant wetland areas that shaped Wampanoag life for thousands of years, and water pollution threatens many aquatic species essential to the tribe’s survival.
“It’s a pretty encompassing project, hence why it’s going to take a bit of time,” said Christopher Avis, the town’s shellfish constable. (Each Cape Cod town has a shellfish constable, who enforces shellfish bylaws and oversees aquaculture projects.) “We want to say, okay, here we are today. What do we do tomorrow? And in 10 years, as things change, how do we not only change with them but also kind of be ahead of the curve?”
Avis and other members of Mashpee’s Natural Resources Department are actively working to mend their relationship with the Wampanoag, acknowledging that the stewardship of local waterways is a joint effort. In the past, the two sides have clashed over the tribe’s fishing practices, but increased advocacy from Wampanoags has helped shift the town’s official stance on the “Aboriginal right to fish” from what are now private access points. The harbor management plan represents a chance for the tribe to continue this advocacy in a more formal capacity.
Under the direction of Ashley Fisher—the head of Mashpee Natural Resources until last month, when she was reassigned to the wastewater department—the harbor management plan has served as a sort of olive-branch offering to the tribe, a solicitation for Wampanoag knowledge that can help address the many resource management crises afflicting the town.
To underscore their intentions, the Mashpee Natural Resources Department also plans to include a section clearly outlining Aboriginal rights as they pertain to hunting and fishing, rights that give Wampanoags the option to ignore the “private property” signs that decorate the densely populated wetlands of Popponesset Island and New Seabury. Despite this greater institutional recognition of those rights, water access points have become so impractical—overgrown, gated off, or built up—and the fish so few that only a small group of Wampanoags regularly use them today.
On Daniels Island, a giant rock obstructs access to the beach (left). At right, an example of a privatized water access point in the resort community of New Seabury. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes)
The slow-moving harbor plan is just the beginning of a long reconciliation process that may or may not come. During the early stages of the plan, in February 2023, Fisher told Civil Eats she felt strongly that the opening of access points would be a good-faith gesture to restore trust between Wampanoags and the town—though not without significant hurdles. “It’s going to be a tough sell,” she said. “There’s going to be some angry people, because our waterfront is landlocked.”
Her ambition to partner with the tribe on the harbor plan has at least materialized, though. Pocknett said he and some other tribal “old-timers” met with Fisher this summer to identify access points on a map from their personal memories of “how it was.” There were maybe three or four existing access points acknowledged by the town, but the group was able to identify close to 100 more along the Popponesset and Waquoit bays.
Fisher worried that memories and hearsay wouldn’t be enough to reopen the access points, so she asked the tribe’s natural resource team to search their archives for documentation demonstrating that the areas had been used as “historic passage” for multiple generations. While the team continues its hunt for that documentation, consultants at the Urban Harbors Institute are working to revise the first draft of the plan after an extensive public comment period this past spring and summer.
Avis said his team has “sort of formed a partnership” with the tribe and its aquaculturists, including Pocknett. “If they need something, they call us. If we need something, we’ll call them. It’s been a tremendous relationship with those guys as to utilizing their resources and our resources to pool together to get as many animals in the water to help clean the water,” he said.
Traditional Knowledge Will Shape the Future
Pocknett and his younger cousin, CheeNulKa Pocknett, know about using bivalves to mitigate nitrogen pollution. The two manage First Light Shellfish Farm, the tribe’s aquacultural operation on Popponesset Bay, which the elder Pocknett’s father founded in 1977. Since the 1970s, development on the Cape has exceeded the ecosystem’s capacity to support it, made worse by a lack of central sewage systems and wastewater treatment facilities. From Provincetown to Barnstable, untreated wastewater from homes, hotels, restaurants, and golf courses leaches into bays, lakes, and rivers.
Joshua Reitsma, a marine chemist at the nearby Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, says this effluent is responsible for 80 percent of the Cape’s “nutrient pollution,” leading to algal blooms that blanket the surface in summer and fall to the bottom in winter. The algae smothers keystone species like eelgrass, and coats the sand in muck that can’t support the oysters, quahogs, and soft-shelled clams that would naturally grow there.
Quahog (littleneck) clams freshly caught off Cape Cod. (Photo credit: John Piekos/Getty Images)
The tribe has always protected and cultivated species like oysters and quahogs, in part because of their role in filtering Mashpee’s waterways. By eating nitrogen-rich phytoplankton and incorporating the protein into their tissues, the bivalves maintain the stasis of their aquatic home. First Light farm is the tribe’s attempt to rehabilitate Popponesset Bay in an era of unprecedented wreckage. (The town of Mashpee runs its own separate aquaculture projects, which have anchored its water-quality strategy for decades.)
But no amount of shellfish alone can revive waterways strangled by such heavy pollution. At one of the town’s recent Shellfish Commission meetings, aquaculturist and chair Peter Thomas likened the lopsided reliance on shellfish to “putting a Band-Aid on someone who needs to be med-flighted.” For years, tribal leaders and environmental advocates have raised similar warnings about the quality of Mashpee’s watersheds.
For the Pocknetts, this pollution is personal. The 16th-century settlers who claimed the shores of present-day New England were met by people with a vibrant social order, language, and trade network, shaped by the surrounding natural world. Clan identities are just one example: CheeNulKa’s family is part of the wolf clan. There are no wild wolves left in Massachusetts. The eel clan, too, got its name in honor of once-thriving animal relatives.
“Without the eels, you can’t have the eel clan,” CheeNulKa said. “Without the eel clan, you can’t have an eel dance. That’s how you lose that culture. It’s something as small or as monumental as this, depending on how you look at it.”
“Without the eels, you can’t have the eel clan. Without the eel clan, you can’t have an eel dance. That’s how you lose that culture.”
As Indigenous concerns are increasingly heeded, change is creeping in. The town recently broke ground on a wastewater treatment plan to introduce centralized sewering for the first time, part of a Cape-wide effort that will take roughly 30 years to fully implement. The first phase, which involved the $54 million construction of a wastewater collection system and treatment facility, is underway. The second phase, which would begin in spring 2025 at the earliest, is earmarked for $96 million, according to Cape News. Over time, the two phases are expected to reduce nitrogen levels in the Popponesset Bay by 42 percent.
Indigenous environmental expertise and traditional ecological knowledge are also getting overdue recognition in Mashpee’s Conservation Commission, which oversees wetland building permits and other environmental conservation projects. The commission recently proposed a plan for the town and tribe to co-steward conservation land, a partnership that Wampanoag Chief Earl Mills, Sr., has said would be a “win-win.”
These efforts reflect a pattern emerging worldwide. At the 2022 UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, Indigenous delegates lobbied successfully for a plan that honors the rights of Indigenous peoples, who make up less than six percent of the world’s population but protect nearly 80 percent of its biodiversity.
In an unprecedented expression of partnership, President Joe Biden’s cabinet, including Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Pueblo of Laguna), proposed that dozens of tribes co-steward ancestral lands from Virginia to Idaho, working alongside the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And in November this year, in nearby Bristol, Rhode Island, Brown University confirmed the transfer of 255 acres to the Pokanoket tribe to “ensure appropriate stewardship and management of this unique, historical, sacred, and natural resource for generations to come.”
Generations of Knowledge
From the rocky shores of the Waquoit to the pale sand of the Popponesset, Mashpee holds generations of Pocknett family memories. But the Pocknetts have watched the town and its shorelines disappear, parcel by parcel, into the lawns and patios of the highest bidders.
A private-property sign near Spohr’s Beach on Monomoscoy Island, Cape Cod. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes)
Each privately developed access point contributes to the water’s decline. Re-opening whatever is outlined in the harbor management plan won’t heal the waters or bring back the fish. But it would send a message from Mashpee—a municipality that proudly proclaims “Wampanoag land” on signs on its town line—that its Indigenous residents are vital to the success of its ecosystems.
In July, Buddy Pocknett lumbered down a footpath on Mashpee’s Monomoscoy Island, past a flurry of metal signs that declared, “Spohr’s Private Beach.” His scraggly gray ponytail grazed the neckline of his T-shirt, above the words “Aboriginal Rights” printed in blue script.
He shuffled by a big house and a couple of canoes drying in the shade of the leaning pitch pines, toward an old quahog-digging spot that has gone from public to private in his lifetime. He planted his sturdy brown boots on the sand. The new wave of interest in tribal knowledge makes him cautiously optimistic, he said. But the town has just scratched the surface of collaboration. Moving forward, Pocknett wants Wampanoags to be consulted before the approval of any new developments.
“For years, the tribe has been kind of sleeping and not going to these meetings,” he said. “[Townspeople] have been kind of pulling the wool over our face for a long time, just doing whatever they want.”
With more Indigenous representation at town meetings and in big projects like the harbor plan, Pocknett predicted more checks on overbuilding, more strategic and effective resource management, and better environmental advocacy across the board.
With more Indigenous representation at town meetings and in big projects like the harbor plan, Pocknett predicted more checks on overbuilding, more strategic and effective resource management, and better environmental advocacy across the board.
After all, non-Indigenous control of Mashpee is very new, compared with the 12,000 years that the Wampanoags managed the land. Within Pocknett’s father’s lifetime, the tribe had much more say in resource management. One particularly prominent steward was Pocknett’s grandfather, Will, who kept a fishing camp on the edge of the scrubby woods near Waquoit Bay.
Will was a respected fisherman, whose knowledge of the bay was widely trusted. At that time, in the mid-20th century, Mashpee was still considered a Wampanoag town. Every bay and fishing ground was run by a tribal member, Pocknett said—someone familiar with its particular quirks, like Will was with Waquoit Bay.
“If you went fishing in Waquoit Bay when my grandfather was alive, you asked him and he would tell you where to go,” he said. “It wasn’t just ‘go fishing.’ Each tribal member had a bay. And they would say, ‘There’s more over here today, come fish over here.’ It was equally important to Indian people to recognize the areas that had less fish and leave them alone.”
But even with his influence, Will never claimed to own the bay or the surrounding area, Pocknett said, eyeing the metal signs that stuck out of the reeds and laid claim to the beach beneath his feet. He smiled and said, “Because no one can own the land.”
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