I am part of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah). Our families have been here in the area that we occupy now since time immemorial. Our Legends of Moshup explains that we came from the mainland, and walked here, and settled to have a small piece of tranquility of our own. We have some that stayed in Aquinnah, and other groups or villages that occupied this entire Island as well as Nantucket and the Elizabeth Islands. Wampanoag people are all over eastern Rhode Island, south of Boston, Cape Cod, and the Islands. We are the indigenous people from the Island.

I grew up on the mainland in Dartmouth. My immediate family became completely detached from the Island – just coming [to the Vineyard] for meetings, or to visit family. Basically, we were more or less visitors versus residents.

After my husband Dan Maltais and I met and got married in 1992, we had our daughter Samantha. I had been coming back and forth from the time I was a child. At that time I was very much involved in the tribal government – sat on many committees, the council. In fact, we came over in 1992 to run one of the tribal enterprises [a Sears store] that ended up not passing the Martha’s Vineyard Commission. However, we had bought the land, built our house, and moved over here.

Dan is self-employed; he’s a modular home dealer. I was in sales at the time. When the opportunity presented itself, I decided to work for the tribe full-time. And I’ve been doing that – initially as the personnel director and more recently as the historic preservation officer.

What brought us back to the Island was my mother’s side. Her mother’s maiden name was Irene Haskins. Irene’s parents were Eunice and Theodore Haskins. Theodore’s parents were Samuel and Charlotte Haskins. Both of those people were part of the rescue efforts for the City of Columbus [a passenger steamer that sank off Gay Head in January 1884, killing 103 passengers and crew]. He has a medal – or had a medal; we don’t know where it went in the family – and she had a certificate because the women gave aid on the shore while the men rowed out at three o’clock in the morning in the middle of that January to rescue the shipwrecked people. Samuel’s father was Amos Haskins, one of the few Wampanoags to rise to the level of captain on a whaling ship.

My grandmother’s father, Theodore Haskins, moved the family off-Island around 1925 so that her brother Ernest could go to school. He was going to the textile university [the New Bedford Institute of Textiles and Technology]. Once my grandmother’s brother was done with school, Theodore and Eunice moved back to the Island, but Ernest, Irene, and their brother Delmar were grown and stayed on the mainland. So my grandmother was the last generation born and brought up on the Island.

My mother straddled the mainland and the Island when she was growing up. As a child she was here in the summer, staying with aunts and uncles and her maternal grandparents. Then she went to school in New Bedford, staying with her mother and father and her other grandmother in the wintertime. At that time the ferry went from here to New Bedford. So she was put on the ferry in New Bedford in the early summer and then picked up in winter.

While she kind of toggled back and forth between the Island and the mainland as a child, when I was growing up I only visited the Island for meetings and family visits. Our daughter, Samantha, was two at the time we moved here. We thought, What a wonderful opportunity to bring her back to her homeland. And it’s a much nicer environment – the school systems, the environment in general. It also allowed her to be the first generation back on the Island.

It’s great for her. She’s very active in tribal activities, the camp program. She knows her extended family back on this side more than my siblings ever had the opportunity to. What was amazing was that when I came back as an adult, I noticed that the Island had changed quite significantly – the amount of housing development, the types of houses that were being built, as opposed to the cottages and small houses to accommodate the need. Now we’ve gone into expansive mansions that accommodate more than any one person or family would need. The Cliffs themselves had changed – the erosion factors, and the air pollution, and rain that affected the colors of the Cliffs.

Coming back and forth as a young person, we’d usually go to visit family all over the Island, primarily in Gay Head. We’d visit the family land and family members that are up there. There was a stint when I was living in Boston that we might just go to the meetings, no visiting or anything. But every time I came here, I knew it was home.

When we came over for meetings, everybody dispatched cars, vehicles – whatever could still roll – to pick up people at the boat. We’d have potlucks. We’d end the meeting and just sit around to spend time with each other because we didn’t see each other as often as we’d liked.

Now that [the tribe is] federally recognized, we have more of a responsibility as a government to provide services to the membership, so there’s less time for socializing, and it’s more work and more business than it is the community coming together. We’re working to try to change that, to get more social and have more fun in the things that we do.

Our tribal youth group just put on the first powwow we’ve had in seventy years, in September in Aquinnah circle. Samantha has been a competitive dancer for about the last four years. I just entered the circle for the first time in twenty-five years last year – that means I actually put on my regalia, registered as a dancer, and did the whole thing. It was Samantha’s commitment to her dance that encouraged me to go out and do it again. Friends and family were amazed that it had been that long. So was I when I thought about it.

How has my life changed since I’ve been back? In a word: rewarding. I love the opportunities that our daughter has – the nice lifestyle, the quiet, the flexibility in my husband’s schedule that allows for Samantha not to have to go and be cared for by anybody else. And with my working for the tribe, in the summertime we get up in the morning and she goes to camp with the program, so we get to spend more time together.

It’s also rewarding in the sense that now I work for something that’s not just for a paycheck or for a company. It’s not only for my people, but it’s for the benefit of all of our people, and our children, and my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.