The Wampanoag, People of the First Light

Long before Hyannis had a Main Street, this was Wampanoag land, and it still is. The Wampanoag call themselves the People of the First Light, because their homeland faces east, toward the sunrise over the Atlantic. They have lived across southeastern Massachusetts and the Cape for more than twelve thousand years.

Just west of Hyannis lies Mashpee, home of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, which won federal recognition in two thousand seven after roughly three decades of effort. A second nation, the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head, known as Aquinnah, lives on Martha's Vineyard across the sound. It was the great sachem Massasoit, leader of the Wampanoag, who first dealt with the Pilgrims in sixteen twenty-one, an alliance that made the survival of Plymouth possible.

But that meeting came after catastrophe. In the years just before the Pilgrims arrived, from sixteen sixteen to sixteen nineteen, an epidemic swept the coastal villages and killed as many as nine in ten people in some communities. Historians still debate what the disease was, with smallpox long assumed and a more recent theory pointing to a rat-borne infection carried by European ships.

That collapse reshaped the balance of power the Pilgrims walked into. Today the Wampanoag are reclaiming even their language. The Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project, begun in nineteen ninety-three by Jessie Little Doe Baird, brought a sleeping language back into living mouths, work that earned her a MacArthur fellowship in twenty ten.

The People of the First Light are still here.