{"id":59884,"date":"2024-12-11T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-11T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/civileats.com\/?p=59884"},"modified":"2024-12-11T15:32:27","modified_gmt":"2024-12-11T23:32:27","slug":"the-mashpee-wampanoag-work-with-a-cape-cod-town-to-restore-their-traditional-fishing-grounds-and-ecosystem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/civileats.com\/2024\/12\/11\/the-mashpee-wampanoag-work-with-a-cape-cod-town-to-restore-their-traditional-fishing-grounds-and-ecosystem\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mashpee Wampanoag Work With a Cape Cod Town to Restore Their Fishing Grounds"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the second of two articles about the Mashpee Wampanoag\u2019s efforts to assert their fishing rights on Cape Cod. Read the\u00a0first story here.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>

Vernon \u201cBuddy\u201d 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 \u201cWTF (Where\u2019s The Fish).\u201d 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.<\/p><\/div>

\n

Pocknett drove to Fishermen\u2019s Landing at the members-only Popponesset Beach, stopping at a \u201cbeach security checkpoint\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh!\u201d she said, sounding flustered. \u201cYou\u2019re all set.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou see what I mean?\u201d Pocknett said, with the girl barely out of earshot. \u201cHow do they get to say who\u2019s to come down here and who\u2019s not?\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s survival. A lifelong aquaculturist and fisherman, Pocknett has recently begun work to restore access to traditional fishing grounds and the ecosystem that supports them.<\/p>\n

\"a<\/a>

Fishermen’s Landing at Popponesset Beach, near New Seabury, Cape Cod. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

With help from the tribe\u2019s Natural Resources Department<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

At Fishermen\u2019s 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.\u00a0But 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like they don\u2019t see the impact [on] their great-great-grandchildren,\u201d Pocknett said. \u201cWhat\u2019s going to happen, four generations from us right here? When\u2019s it end?\u201d<\/p>\n

A Plan for the Harbor
\n<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>

The harbor management plan is, among other things, an attempt to ensure generations of sustainable fishing and clean water in Mashpee. The town\u2019s Harbor Management Committee<\/a>, with support from the Urban Harbors Institute<\/a> 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.<\/p><\/div>

\n

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\u2019s survival. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a pretty encompassing project, hence why it\u2019s going to take a bit of time,\u201d said Christopher Avis, the town\u2019s shellfish constable. (Each Cape Cod town has a shellfish constable, who enforces shellfish bylaws and oversees aquaculture projects.) \u201cWe 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?\u201d<\/p>\n

Avis and other members of Mashpee\u2019s 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\u2019s fishing practices, but increased advocacy from Wampanoags has helped shift the town\u2019s official stance on the \u201cAboriginal right to fish<\/a>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Under the direction of Ashley Fisher\u2014the head of Mashpee Natural Resources until last month, when she was reassigned to the wastewater department\u2014the 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cprivate property\u201d signs that decorate the densely populated wetlands of Popponesset Island and New Seabury.\u00a0Despite this greater institutional recognition of those rights, water access points have become so impractical\u2014overgrown, gated off, or built up\u2014and the fish so few that only a small group of Wampanoags regularly use them today.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>

\"A<\/a>\"A<\/a><\/div>

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)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/section><\/div>

\n

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\u2014though not without significant hurdles. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be a tough sell,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s going to be some angry people, because our waterfront is landlocked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her ambition to partner with the tribe on the harbor plan has at least materialized, though. Pocknett said he and some other tribal \u201cold-timers\u201d met with Fisher this summer to identify access points on a map from their personal memories of \u201chow it was.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Fisher worried that memories and hearsay wouldn\u2019t be enough to reopen the access points, so she asked the tribe\u2019s natural resource team to search their archives for documentation demonstrating that the areas had been used as \u201chistoric passage\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Avis said his team has \u201csort of formed a partnership\u201d with the tribe and its aquaculturists, including Pocknett. \u201cIf they need something, they call us. If we need something, we\u2019ll call them. It\u2019s 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Traditional Knowledge Will Shape the Future<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>

Pocknett and his younger cousin, CheeNulKa Pocknett<\/a>, know about using bivalves to mitigate nitrogen pollution. The two manage First Light Shellfish Farm<\/a>, the tribe\u2019s aquacultural operation on Popponesset Bay, which the elder Pocknett\u2019s father founded in 1977. Since the 1970s, development on the Cape has exceeded the ecosystem\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/div>

\n<\/div>
\"image<\/a>

The Mashpee Wampanoag Shellfish Farm helps to improve the water quality of Popponesset Bay. (Photo courtesy of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>

\n

Joshua Reitsma, a marine chemist at the nearby Woods Hole Oceanographic Institut<\/a>ion<\/a>, says this effluent is responsible for 80 percent of the Cape\u2019s \u201cnutrient pollution,\u201d 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\u2019t support the oysters, quahogs, and soft-shelled clams that would naturally grow there.<\/p>\n

The tribe has always protected and cultivated species like oysters and quahogs, in part because of their role in filtering Mashpee\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n

\"Hard-shelled<\/a>

Hard-shelled clams, known as quahogs, freshly caught off Cape Cod. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

But no amount of shellfish alone can revive waterways strangled by such heavy pollution. At one of the town\u2019s recent Shellfish Commission meetings, aquaculturist and chair Peter Thomas likened the lopsided reliance on shellfish to \u201cputting a Band-Aid on someone who needs to be med-flighted.\u201d For years, tribal leaders and environmental advocates have raised similar warnings about the quality of Mashpee\u2019s watersheds.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout the eels, you can\u2019t have the eel clan,\u201d CheeNulKa said. \u201cWithout the eel clan, you can\u2019t have an eel dance. That\u2019s how you lose that culture. It\u2019s something as small or as monumental as this, depending on how you look at it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout the eels, you can\u2019t have the eel clan. Without the eel clan, you can\u2019t have an eel dance. That\u2019s how you lose that culture.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

As Indigenous concerns are increasingly heeded, change is creeping in. The town recently broke ground on a wastewater treatment plan<\/a> to introduce centralized sewering for the first time, part of a Cape-wide effort that will take roughly 30 years to fully implement.\u00a0The first phase, which involved the $54 million<\/a> 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<\/a>. Over time, the two phases are expected to reduce nitrogen levels in the Popponesset Bay by 42 percent.<\/p>\n

Indigenous environmental expertise and traditional ecological knowledge are also getting overdue recognition in Mashpee\u2019s Conservation Commission<\/a>, which oversees wetland building permits and other environmental conservation projects. The commission recently proposed<\/a> 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 \u201cwin-win.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s population but protect nearly 80 percent of its biodiversity<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In an unprecedented expression of partnership, President Joe Biden\u2019s cabinet, including Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Pueblo of Laguna), proposed that dozens of tribes co-steward<\/a> 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<\/a> to the Pokanoket tribe to \u201censure appropriate stewardship and management of this unique, historical, sacred, and natural resource for generations to come.\u201d<\/p>\n

Generations of Knowledge\u00a0<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>

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.<\/p><\/div>

\n

Each privately developed access point contributes to the water\u2019s decline. Re-opening whatever is outlined in the harbor management plan won\u2019t heal the waters or bring back the fish. But it would send a message from Mashpee\u2014a municipality that proudly proclaims \u201cWampanoag land\u201d on signs on its town line\u2014that its Indigenous residents are vital to the success of its ecosystems.<\/p>\n

In July, Buddy Pocknett lumbered down a footpath on Mashpee\u2019s Monomoscoy Island, past a flurry of metal signs that declared, \u201cSpohr\u2019s Private Beach.\u201d His scraggly gray ponytail grazed the neckline of his T-shirt, above the words \u201cAboriginal Rights\u201d printed in blue script.<\/p>\n

\"Spohr's<\/a>

A private-property sign near Spohr’s Beach on Monomoscoy Island, Cape Cod. (Photo credit: Emma Glassman-Hughes)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor years, the tribe has been kind of sleeping and not going to these meetings,\u201d he said. \u201c[Townspeople] have been kind of pulling the wool over our face for a long time, just doing whatever they want.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

After all, non-Indigenous control of Mashpee is very new, compared with the 12,000 years that the Wampanoags managed the land. Within Pocknett\u2019s father\u2019s lifetime, the tribe had much more say in resource management. One particularly prominent steward was Pocknett\u2019s grandfather, Will, who kept a fishing camp on the edge of the scrubby woods near Waquoit Bay.<\/p>\n

Will was a respected fisherman, whose knowledge of the bay was widely trusted.\u00a0At 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\u2014someone familiar with its particular quirks, like Will was with Waquoit Bay.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you went fishing in Waquoit Bay when my grandfather was alive, you asked him and he would tell you where to go,\u201d he said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t just \u2018go fishing.\u2019 Each tribal member had a bay. And they would say, \u2018There\u2019s more over here today, come fish over here.\u2019 It was equally important to Indian people to recognize the areas that had less fish and leave them alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

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, \u201cBecause no one can own the land.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the second of two articles about the Mashpee Wampanoag\u2019s efforts to assert their fishing rights on Cape Cod. Read the\u00a0first story here. Pocknett drove to Fishermen\u2019s Landing at the members-only Popponesset Beach, stopping at a \u201cbeach security checkpoint\u201d run by two teenagers who hid from the July sun under an oversized umbrella. One […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1356,"featured_media":59890,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4481,4478,6920,521,4369],"tags":[],"coauthors":[43533],"class_list":["post-59884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment","category-food-and-policy","category-indigenous-foodways","category-local-food","category-seafood"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWampanoag Tribe Works With Town to Restore Fishing Grounds | Civil Eats<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"If the plan succeeds, it will help rebuild wetlands and food sources for the tribe, once largely excluded from environmental decision-making.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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