Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity

Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity

• Finalist for the 2026 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction
  
  ATimeMust-Read Book of 2025,An NPR Books We Love Most pick,ATribal CollegeBest Native Studies Book of 2025, and a2026 Great Reads from Great Places Pick
  
  From award-winning journalist Joseph Lee, a sweeping, personal exploration of Indigenous identity and the challenges facing Indigenous people around the world.
  
  Before Martha’s Vineyard became one of the most iconic vacation destinations in the country, it was home to the Wampanoag people. Today, as tourists flock to the idyllic beaches, the island has become increasingly unaffordable for tribal members, with nearly three-quarters now living off-island. Growing up Aquinnah Wampanoag, journalist Joseph Lee grappled with what this situation meant for his tribe, how the community can continue to grow, and more broadly, what it means to be Indigenous.
  
  InNothing More of This Land,Lee weaves his own story and that of his family into a panoramic narrative of Indigenous life around the world. He takes us from the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard to the icy Alaskan tundra, the smoky forests of Northern California to the halls of the United Nations, and beyond. Along the way he meets activists fighting to protect their land, families clashing with their own tribal leaders, and communities working to reclaim tradition.
  
  Together, these stories reject stereotypes to show the diversity of Indigenous people today and chart a way past the stubborn legacy of colonialism.Joseph Lee is an Aquinnah Wampanoag writer based in New York City. He has an MFA from Columbia University and teaches creative writing at Mercy University. His writing has been published in The Guardian, BuzzFeed News, Vox, Electric Literature, High Country News, and more. He was a Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and a Senior Indigenous Affairs Fellow at Grist. He has won multiple awards from the Indigenous Journalists Association for environmental coverage, health coverage, and beat reporting and was awarded a 2024 Silvers Grant for Work in Progress. Follow him on X at @JosephVLee and on Instagram at @Joseph.V.Lee. “Lee brings his expansive journeys and conversations to life in this consistently thoughtful, accessible narrative that blends cultural history and memoir, research and reportage. Clear-eyed about both the destructive legacy of colonialism and the complications and contradictions often forced upon those working to challenge it, he positions himself as a curious and deeply engaged fellow learner, inviting readers to explore questions of community and identity along with him.”
  —Nicole Chung, 10 Best Memoirs, TIME
  
  “A deeply personal account of Lee’s search for identity and a forthright assessment of the modern-day effects of colonialism at home and abroad.”
  —Katy Abel, The Provincetown Independent
  
  “Lee’s writing resists the tendency toward mythmaking that’s common to destinations laden with outsize reputations. . . . Engaging. . . . 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. . . . 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 e
• Lee, Joseph
• ISBN: 9781668087268