Ok . Do today i am going to is like, wampanoag is a culture of people. One out of over 1000 indigenous cultures going across north america. What makes wampanoag different, from the other 1000, it could be language. It could be diet. It could be the housing we lived in. One common bond we all have is how we think about life in general. We respect all forms of life. Be it human life, plant life, animal life. We do not put ourselves above or below that. That is one thing we have all in common. I do a lot of teaching, right . I ask people, what race do we come from . The human race. Right . So we should all respect each other. And that his rule of thumb for my people. Like i said, we have been here for 12,000 years. That is me up there, my lovely wife, who teaches language. Also right next to me. What i am going to do is im going to bring you to a year, 1613, before any major interruption in our culture. Ok . I am going to bring you to our new years. You think about our new years, a lot of peoples new years starts january 1. Our new year starts when everything comes to life. Now think about it, when does everything come to life . Springtime. That is when the birds start chirping. That is when the oak leaf comes out. That just makes sense. Everything is new again. On our new year, we thank mother earth, we think the creator for having another earth, because it is not guaranteed. We do a lot of dancing. We do a lot of feasting. We do a lot of socializing. But once that happens, we know we have to get to work. And these are the types of houses we live in during the summertime. The spring and summer. We live in a Single Family home during the summer. Because we needed our space for planting. Here areds right cattails. It is a water plant. Maybe on plymouth plantation, same as richard, we have been doing this for years. Everything we do at the museum, we do ourselves. So we go out and gather cattails late august and september and we make these in the winter. They will last maybe three to years. Five they are waterproof. They have a cup to it, so it acts like a natural funnel. And these houses would hold one family. It is different from a european family back then. A european family is husband, wife, kids. Our family has husband, wife, kids, aunts, grandparents. Youre looking at three or four generations inside one house. That is one big thing that was different. So we would have englishmen come into our houses and say, this guy has five wives. Maybe, but maybe not. But then again, not realizing what they are looking at. What they are looking at sisters, grandmothers, aunts, so that is what my job is, to break it down what it means for wampanoag people and indigenous cultures. So those of the houses we live in over the summer. And what we do over the summer, now, this is our planting field. Everybody loves corn, beans and squash. We call them the three sisters. Who takes care of the field . The woman. The woman i consider to be the givers of life. They also give life to mother earth. So, you look at the planting fields. It has a mound. I dont know if you can see the mound. It is symbolic to a womans stomach when they give life. When do you plant corn . You have to wait for different signs of nature. Once the herring stops to run, you wait until the next new moon. The reason you do it on the new moon, the new moon draws gravity up, so it helps the corn grow. So you plant born, corn takes nitrogen out of the ground, and you plant the beans right next to it. The beans at nitrogen back into nd. Grou it will wrap around the stalk of the corn. Vegetables would represent half to two thirds of the diet. Nantucket, probably a lot more seafood. Culture makes up a large part of massachusetts. Going as far west as worcester, parts of rhode island. All the islands, nantucket, marthas vineyard. Let me mention some names to you. Because back then we had about 70 wampanoag communities. Nantucket sound familiar . Sias constant . Mattapoisett . Pocasset . Mashpee . Knauf it . These are name places and town names, but they have always been wampanoag communities. Ok . And at one time, we numbered over 100,000. Today is about 12,000. So that is a planting field. They areis next considered to be the givers of life. What do the kids do . With the kids do during the spring and the summer . Here,s my daughter right one of my daughters. This is her in this picture when she was 11 years old, maybe 10. And that is her younger sister. And what she is doing is picking sumac. Sumac, you pick those berries, you boil them, and that has three times as much vitamin c as orange juice does. Kids were allowed to be kids. They helped out a little bit, but they had fun. They played games, they went swimming, they had races. They joked around. Through fourd go or five different names in a lifespan. As you would change as a person, your name was changed to fit who you are. You would not pick the names yourself. We still have medicine people in our community that give us names depending on how we are. Lets talk about my daughter. What does the name mean . It means one who lifts up. It is not because she is physically strong and all that, but she wakes up in good mood almost every single day. When she wakes up in a good mood, she raises the house and everybody feels good. So you give the name depending on the person. But kids were given more responsibility as they matured. This is me and my lovely wife. We did a lot of fishing back then. Still do today. Still big part of the culture. Saw a lot of men going ocean fishing, freshwater fishing. A lot of women would get shellfish, mussels, crabs. The biggest fish we would go for i am not sure if it was ever here, but large parts of wampanoag country, any idea what the biggest fish was . 20, 30 foot in length sometimes. Somebody said it, i think. Sturgeon. Sturgeon. And sturgeon, they are a big fish, right . We go fishing for these fish at nighttime. We had boats that were nine feet to boats bigt, enough to carry 40 men. Not paddled, sailed. We paddled too. We pulled along the shore. When we went for the sturgeon, we would have torches on the end of our boats. The light of the torchwood attract the sturgeon and they would flip over on their bellies and we would spear them. A lot of the time, the fish got bigger than the boat. So you could not put the fish inside the vote, so you would boat, so you would drag it to the shore. Salmon was another fish. Flounder. Cod. They are so thick. Lobster, not a big deal. We used lobster for fishing bait. Times have changed. We had so much lobster im not saying we did not eat lobster. It was common. No back 100 years ago, lobster was fed to the prisoners in jail. Every single day. The prisoners had a big uprising and they said we are sick of this, we dont want no more. [laughter] there was a law made in massachusetts you could only feed lobster to prisoners twice a week. If you did it more than that, it was considered inhumane. 1623, governor bradford had a ship come in and said im very sorry, this is all the lobster we have for you guys. Not a big deal. Today, different meaning. We did a lot of fishing during the summer. This is different from the women who give life. Where we did the majority of the fishing. After harvest time, we think about going inland. We want to go inland, a little bit away from the ocean. I know it is hard to do in nantucket. You get section from the wind from the ocean. Inland would be half a mile, maybe a mile. These are the houses we lived in. We heard the names for long houses. They are bark covered houses. Normally, during the winter, these houses could be anywhere from 100 foot long, to one of the biggest houses we found when we found the footprint of this house, this footprint was found out in worcester. The footprint of this was 300 foot in length 320 foot in length and 60 foot with. Width. Think of a football field. That is how big the house was. The frames were made out of cedar. Ok . The outside bark normally was elm. We dont have those trees around here anymore, so we use tulip poplar today. We used to use white ash. Unfortunately you have the bug these days that is wiping out those trees. We will talk about that in a minute. The men did the hunting. Like i said, the men were the takers of life. And we had the deer for big game. There was a lot of deer around here at one time. On the mainland, we go for black bear, moose, elk, for big game. Small animals, do you guys like the taste of skunk . Anybody . That is a good answer. Never tried it. Skunk is considered to be a wampanoag delicacy. How do you catch a skunk . Very carefully, right . [laughter] you get two boys. One boy would be in front of the skunk distracting him. You get the other boy, sneak up on him from behind, grab his tail and lift him up. In order for a skunk to spray, he has to be on all fours. Put pressure on his hind legs, and he will release those distinct glands. In the air, they cannot do that. You have a club, you bang them over the head, then you carefully cut them open and take his stink glands out. You take care because if you puncture the stink glands, you will not be welcome in the community for a while. I have not tried it, but some elders say you take that gland of a skunk, you break it open and you rub it on your arthritis, and it really works. [laughter] i do not have arthritis yet. They do not sell that in drugstores yet. In the winter, the women do a lot of the weaving. We are known for our weaving. The wampanoag people. Our weavers are some of the best in the world. Some of their work is in the smithsonian in washington, d. C. There is a woman a relative of mine, wampanoag, and her work is in the smithsonian in d. C. A lot of people say, you guys have string . Yeah, we made string. How did we make string . We used different plants. We used milkweed. We use dog weed. We take stalks, pull them out of the ground, open it up, take the inner fibers out. When the colonizers got here they noticed wampanoag women making string so fast that their eyes could not keep up with them. Then we would dye them with different berries and roots for the coloring. We have small bags like you see here, and we also have large vegetableso store over the winter. This right here is the interior of the house. That is actually all my daughters right there. Three out of four. I have four daughters and no boys. That is my oldest daughter, the two sitting on the ground. I want to break out for a second. I want to tell you where these pictures come from. We have worked with scholastic quite a bit over the years. In 2016, they came and said, can we make a video . And put this video across every third graham classroom across the United States . Sure. We set up a script. He did the colonial side, i did the wampanoag side, and we showed how wampanoag kids lived back then. In the 17th century and before. And it leads up to what they do today. It shows them riding their bikes, playing on the likeround, wearing clothes they do today. That is what kids relate to. They think we are gone. Just because we wear different clothing today at times, we are still here. I do a lot of teaching. This video is literally in every third grade classroom in the United States. Sometimes i walk into these third grade classes and they are playing the video. It is called the wampanoag way. You can google it. I play the father in it. I am dressed up in 17thcentury skin. And when i walked into one classroom, i see a boy watching the video on the screen, he sees me walking in [laughter] he said, yo, you are storms dad. Yeah, i am. It was a real moment. Inside these houses, we have bedding. We dont sleep on the ground. We have furs and mats on the beds. The houses got really big, round shape, really warm. Our houses get to 70 degrees. Rule of thumb when youre making the houses, i build them, every 10 feet or so you want to have a fire pit on the inside. That is just to keep you warm during the winter. It is a round shape. You cant really see on the walls, but we have bulrush mats on the walls. You had bark, interior frame, then you have your masks. You have the onefoot gap. Because the way the house is shaped like a dome, the heat is going to rise. Go down underneath the mats, force the cold air to the middle, and that keeps the warm air going around in circles. When the europeans got here and went inside of our houses, they said the houses were so warm, they saw native children run outside naked in the winter. And jumping into the snow. So it did get quite warm. We lived like that for thousands of years. We went through that cycle. The following spring, we celebrate new years again. We needed space for planting. No need for the winter. Together back together and be more communal. In a Winter Community during winter, it holds anywhere from 300 to 3000 people. Before disease hits. That was before any major interruption. All right . That was the cycle real quick. That is 1513. One thing i want to say real quick is you hear the term lost survival for native people. How could i survive back that . Well, we have been doing this for 12,000 years. You just dont rollover bed one morning and say, geez, where my going to get food today . There is a system already set up, generations long before, and people knew how to fish. So like i said, we call that 1513. Lets move to 1614. There was trading going on. The first european traders that were here was back in 1524. The trades started blooming early 1600s. Back in 1614 though, guys, when trading happened, the english, french, dutch, wanted a lot of otter pelts, beaver pelts. That is what the made the hats in europe out of. But what happened in 1614, there was an english captain. He came down the coast. Remember this date, 1614. He came down the coast and he went to an area called plymouth today. In what we call patuxet. There was a thriving wampanoag community, probably over 1000 people. That is how you describe yourself back then. To patuxettraveling and you said what are you, they would probably not say wampanoag. They would expect you to know this is wampanoag country. They would describe which wampanoag speaking community therefrom. They would say i am patuxet, what are you . But when thomas came to the patuxet, he took 19 patuxet slaves. A lot of people think africanamericans when they think of slavery. This happened to our people, too. Went down totuxet, the cape, took eight more. Sold from there, the remainder was sold to england. One of those guys sold to england was squanto. Have you heard of squanto . He lived in england with a merchant named john sweeney. He lived there for five years. He gained status. He learned a lot about english culture. He knew how to speak english fluently over those five years. ,ut what happened to squanto there was a wealthy man over there who is funding a lot of these trips, asking who is from this area that was called plimoth patuxet. They set squanto they said squanto is. Where is he . He is up in newfoundland. Go get him. I want to do another adventure. So he sends thomas to pick up squanto. Mind you, this is 1619. Almost five years. He has not seen his home since 1614. Hes picked up in newfoundland in 1619 by thomas. They come down the coast, stop at mohegan island off of maine, pick up a sagamore, a chief in his own language. He knew how to speak english, knew a lot of the english captains back then by name. He dealt with a lot of traders prior. As they were going down the coast in 1619, they saw something extremely devastating. The most devastating thing that ever happened to our people. Disease. There was a major epidemic that happen between 1616 and 1618, 1619, when squanto was in england. This plague, the skin turned yellow, people got open sores on their bodies, and they died within two or three days once they got it. It wiped out the native pop elation all along the coast population all along the coast. Anywhere from 70 to 80 were wiped out. That plague did not affect a lot of people on the islands. Like nantucket, the vineyards. Because of the water. But what we know about the ok, skinepatitis, turning yellow, open sores. Disease control came out 10 years ago and they believed the french trade ships coming over, and they had rats on these trade ships. And the feces of the rats get into the water system. Causes an infectious liver disease. That is what the theory is now. I always say this every time i talk. You can put whatever name you want on it, it does not matter to me. What i do know is it was the most devastating thing that ever happened to our people. Period. So as he is coming down the tost with squanto, they come patuxet. They find out patuxet was pretty much devastated. Imagine that . Squanto coming back home, finds out all his people are dead. Is that going to change you as a person . I think so. They end up going to the vineyard. There was a leader in the also taken over to england. He made it back, though. How he made it back was in 1614, they were asking him too, is t here gold on the island you come from . He was a chief. He was not dumb. He started thinking, yeah, there is gold. If you bring me back home, i will tell you where the gold is at. In 1614, they brought him back. That is when he yelled something in his native tongue which the english do not understand. Attacked the ship and he was able to swim to shore. He made it home. Another ship coming in in 1619. So he is home for five years. He is thinking these people might be coming to get me again. There is another fight that breaks out. He gets injured badly. Squanto, somehow is released. They end up in a massive slave community. A lot of people think the great wampanoag leader. Like i said, there were 70 wampanoag communities. What we know for sure is he was the leader of the strongest wampanoag end up there. Strongest wampanoag community. It is in rhode island today. Squanto ends up there. Lets fast track to 1620. The pilgrims are arriving. They arrive they final settle in what is plymouth today. December, 1620. They had a really bad year that winter. A lot of people died. From what i hear, february was the deadliest month. They were building their homes. They settled there because there was good water. It was cleared out already. Two days walk away, 40 miles west of plymouth. Peopled about these building homes. One thing we were used to, we were always used to people, europeans coming over here. The only thing we were not used to were people coming over and staying. That was different. What made these people different is they brought their women and children. That might have meant a friendlier type of people. But they did not know. He calls him over, come here. You speak english, right . Sure. Why dont you go to these people, find out why these people are building their homes. He was a leader, he was not dumb. He was probably thinking, this guy can speak english. He is also not one of my men. I do not know what is going to happen to him. He walksh 16, 1621, into the pilgrim village. They considered him to be naked. He did not have this much clothing on. The goes, and welcome, englishmen. In their own language. We are still shocked at seeing a native person speaking was to them. He told him about the land, about the area, and about the plague that came through. He gave them help that evening. They carefully watched them overnight. He goes you know what . Im not from here. Im going to bring you a leader who is. So he goes back and tells another to come along. Later on in march, he comes along and brings 60 of his men. That is when they make the famous treaty between the two people, the peace treaty of diplomacy. One needed each other at the time. You think about it, i mentioned the plague coming down the coast. That plague stopped them in their tracks right before people started their territory. Any thoughts about that, why it stopped right there . We have two good thoughts. They did not like each other for generations before they were europeans here. Down there, you have a large body of water called narragansett bay. They were seeing that the wampanoag were depleting in numbers. One of the leaders was probably thinking, i will start to attack. The community was located on the border of the narragansetts. The chief came out and so one needed each other because how you really felt here, it was not one universal answer. You have to go from community to community. If your brother was taken by a slave as a slave by traders prior, are you going to be happy . No. But they had a lot of power. Treatyly it is a peace saying if you go to war, i will help you out, and if we go to war, you will help us out. For 55 yearsed with no major conflict or war. That is one1621, squanto comes to live and stay with the colonists antiteaches them how to plant corn. That is what he is famous for. Teaches them how to plant corn. That is what he is in the textbooks about. Like i said, squanto was a changed person. He liked having power. He caused a lot of power back then. He died in 1622. But in that two years, he caused a lot of drama. He would go and so you better watch out, bradford wants to attack. Then run back to bradford and say the same thing. Backandforth, backandforth. He got fed up. He sent his men out to plymouth with his own personal knife and wanted squantos head delivered back to him. Ok . Governor bradford is thinking, hmm, i should do this. This could be one of the first breaks of the treaty. Because it states if one does something wrong to the other, you have to turn that person over. But all of a sudden oh by the way, he comes out with gifts too. With his own personal knife. At the same time there was a ship coming in the water and governor bradford was distracted. And he goes, wait a second, so the guys got frustrated. Squanto died in 1622. I think he leaves Stephen Hopkins and a few others for a trading scenario, a meet and greet. That evening when he was in one of the houses, they said squanto had a nosebleed that would not stop. He had something that was called indian fever back then. Some type of hemorrhaging going on. When he was lying on his deathbed, he asked the english if he would be accepted into their gods. Although he might have been a changed person, he knew what he was doing. This guy right here does not get much praise in the textbooks. If it was not because of this guy, history would have definitely been different today. He made the treaty with the english in 1621, he needed somebody else his village was 40 miles west. He needed an ambassadorship out here. Not out here, but in plymouth colony. He actually lived in between Stephen Hopkins and the fields with his family of over 10 people. 10, 15 years of his life. He was the closest native the english considered to be a friend. They did not say much about his family. They say he has more than one wife. I wish i knew one of his wifes names, because she plays a major role in the diplomacy. She reports backandforth with what is going on, especially with squanto, but they never give her name. They do not say much about his family structure. We guess that he lived in a normal home. But he kept peace between the two people. He was one considered to be one who counsels about war. And one who leads in battle. You are considered indestructible. How do you become one . You are chosen from childhood, and you have special qualities. Special People Choose you. From then on, you are race. One of the final stages, you are given a stone knife. You go into the woods alone for a whole winter. If you came back, you would become one. If you did not, you did not. But he was highly respected among the people. Kept other native people he was a key role player. Lets skip up a little bit here. This right here, if you have ever been on my homeland, this is the oldest meet house in the u. S. It was built in 1864. We have heard a lot about praying towns. Learning about the King James Bible. They say one of my relatives knew the bible so well, he was preaching it to nonnative people. But not everybody liked what he was doing either. There was a chief in chappaquiddick who called him out. He said come here. What are you doing . We have our own ways of doing things. Why are you teaching Something Different . And literally punched him in the face. But he continued to preach. He made it over here, nantucket. We will talk about what he did. We know this was the first praying town in 1651. There are about 14 of them. You had john elliott. Do i have what i am looking for here . Ok. I want to talk about this right here. This is the son right here. Back when the praying town is being formed, john elliott was a missionary. He was teaching native people. Joel was one of them, caleb was another. And these two guys wouldve have been the first graduating class of Harvard University back in 1665. One graduated, caleb did. Joel did not. Ok . Joel was considered the reason he did not graduate is because two weeks before graduation, he went over to marthas vineyard. On the way back, he stopped in nantucket and he got killed. And it was probably his own people who did it. Because christianity did not make it over here until 59, maybe later. You had a lot of traditionalists still here. I was say about the praying indians, you dont know what they were going through until you walk a mile in their moccasins. So i never judge like that. But what harvard did back in 2011, they invited my family and gave us a posthumous degree in his name, which harvard rarely does. And this is it right here. And also when elliott was teaching the bible to native people back in the 50s and 60s, he felt like the native people were not picking up the religion quickly enough. Learning the King James Bible in english. So what he did was he hired needed for interpreters to write the bible in my language. I say that because there is a really good story. How many of you guys have heard about language . Back in the 1990s, there was a woman from my community, and she was having dreams. This was a true story. Having dreams. She said people were coming into her dreams and speaking a different tongue. This happened night after night. She said the people look familiar but did not know their names. One of her dreams, the people spoke english to her. They said the wampanoag people had the chance to get the language back, would they say yes . So she took it upon herself, went to m. I. T. , graduated with a degree in linguistics and started piecing the language back together again. How this was done . Elders could still speak some of the language. Similar language families. What helped a great deal was that bible. The King James Bible written in wampanoag. And we have one of those first additions in our grasp today. So today we have our language back. My wife is one of the teachers of the language. We have them in school. We teach prek up to third grade and every year we add a grade to it. Going back three years ago, maybe two, the wampanoag is taught in high school as a credited course, like english, french, and portuguese. So we open up to other students. That is really cool because if you lose your culture, you lose part of what you are, your identity. And we got it back. Lets fastforward to war. Nobody likes war. But war broke out. What i can tell you, in 1657, and 1660, that is when two of the big leaders lost their lives. When governor bradford passed away so you have the next generation coming up, which did not care for each other whole lot. Why . Land. People thought of ownership and the other people did not think of ownership. So, one culture would build fences around where they lived and the other culture would walk across what they would call their backyard. You cant be here no more, this is not yours anymore. That is my culture. For a native person, they are thinking, what you mean i cant be here no more . I dont get that. That was one of the reasons. In 1675, the kingfield four broke out. The bloodiest war per capita in new england. It lasted in massachusetts about a year or so. A couple more years farther north. Second son, that guy was something to reckon with. He actually heard about on nantucket, native person talking bad about him. He took his canoe and paddled out here to confront this person. He asked people on the island to join into the war. I believe they stayed by themselves. That war lasted about a year. It ended up with benjamin church, led by a native guy, august 12, 1676. When they found him, they dismantled him, took his head off, they took his arms off, limb by limb, threw it around. Took his head back to plymouth and put it on a post. What are they going to do with his wife and kids . They did not think that was right. So a lot of these people were sold as slaves. Only thing close to what is going on today, a lot of these people were sold down to bermuda. One of the islands down there. Those people over those hundreds of here still have their cultural identity. They know who they are. So we asked wampanoag people go down so we as wampanoag go down to visit them. July 4 weekend, if you are around, come see up. See us. They were just up here a few weeks ago. A little forward to what happened here. There is a Large Population of 400 or so people in nantucket. There is a vaccine given to native people in 1763, 1764, that wiped out two thirds of the population of people. You heard earlier, what happened to these people afterwards . A lot of people might have isolated by themselves. A lot of people might have taken off to marthas vineyard. So people were spread out. You hear a lot about the last indians and all that. That is from a persons personal lens. A lot of people say if it is not recorded, its not true. It is not written down, its not true. So, that happened. Lets go forward a little bit about 1830. You guys heard of president jackson . Yeah . 1830, he wanted to remove all native people on the east coast, which he did. West of the mississippi. Oklahoma was one of the states. The reason i bring this up is those agents came around here, too, for wampanoag people. Those agents wanted us out west in oklahoma. And one nonnative voice stood up. His name was john quincy adams. He said if you bring these people at west, they will die. The reason they are going to die is because they rely on seafood for their diet, and they believed him. And that is why we were left alone. Last two. They say indians of nantucket. Who knows . Some peoples lenses. They died within seven weeks apart. Here . Lse do we got this is kind of cool right here. Might be doing this next year out here. Seriously. We just got a 40 foot log, richard, im looking at it next week. A 40foot white pine log. We are going to make a 20man boat. It is going to be considered the largest boat in new england. This picture is from a pow we made in 2002 to marthas vineyard. Back in the 1990s, i had been at the museum for quite a while, we always say we used to make panels to nantucket, to the veneers make paddles to nantucket, to the vineyard. Everything was past tense. Why cant we do this again . The guy in the back, he is wampanoag. We all wanted to share this big 30 foot boat. We looked at each other and said, lets race for it. So we took two 12foot boats and he took one and i took another, and we went across the river to see who would make it back first. Those were like speedboats. He beat me by half of a boat length. [laughter] so he got to steer the boat. This trip took a lot of planning, right . It took three years of planning. We finally made the trip, though. It involved all nations of people. Rd offt you guys hea it . We left august 18, 2002. We left at 6 00 a. M. , we left at the peak of high tide. We had the winds to our back. We landed over tisbury. If it was a straight shot it would have been five miles. I gave you the elements. Took me how long it took. I will also tell you the most experienced paddlers, including myself, said it would be three hours to do. Everyone was saying it would be three hours. There was nobody living saying how long it would take us. Any guesses from the crowd . 1. 5 hours . Absolutely correct. What happened we kind of beat the ferry. Andad 200 people leave, they had to take a shuttle to the ferry, take the ferry over to vineyard haven, then take another shadow shuttle to the beach. And we beat them there by half an hour. They thought we were going to have a big celebration. We are going to dance and sing when you guys arrive. Even a clambake, maybe. I remember paddling in. That day was really crowded really cloudy. Am the fog broke, and i paddling in and im like, where is everybody . We were not wearing watches so we did not know how long it was taking us. We saw people on the beach wearing bathing suits. Sunbathers from the brassica. [laughter] from nebraska. [laughter] they were like, you guys do this every day . Done fors is not been a couple hundred years. But we have this 40 foot boat we are going to be making. We have a lot we want to do with it next year. We have some ideas. So, stay tuned. Leaping up to 1870, thats when a lot of communities got incorporated. Eind being one of them min being one of them. And what that meant for our people is, ok, now its considered a township. We will give you 25 acres of your own land, but now we will tax you on it. [indiscernible] so, that word, incorporation, means Something Different in my language. So we lost a lot of our land like that. Fastforward to the 1900s, cape cod became cape cod, tourist attraction. Where i lived, nobody moved to mashpee until probably the 1990s. And mashpee was the fastest developing town in massachusetts in the 1990s. And today, let me go back, today we have we just got fully recognized by the u. S. Government in 2007 as a people. Ok . And what we do today we have health services, programs for housing, health, education. We do our powwow, which is july 4 weekend. This right here is a special dance we did this past powwow. This is a lot of my family. We did it for my brother who passed away in 1997. He got killed in rhode island. His name was melvin coombs. We danced for him. I want to show you something. I havent visited here in eight or 10 years. But my daughter and myself, we went out to the cemetery up the road where my family is buried. A lot of my family. My father was raised here, my aunt was raised here, my grandparents were raised here, my grandfather was Darius Coombs i, his being Darius Coombs from mashpee. My grandfather was from mashpee. My grandfather moved here. You got my grandmother ruth west born in 1895, passed away in 1964. She had a stillborn son in 1919. I visited the grounds yesterday and i googled indians of nantucket. And i came across this picture that i have in my living room. This is my grandmother. [crowd reactions] and the Nantucket Historical society has it right here. That is ruth west, that is my grandmother. She passed away in 1964. I will do more digging to see where her actual roots are from. This is one woman. Ive heard its not mashpee. She doesnt show up in the records of mashpee. I cannot find her in the records, so i will have to keep on digging to see what i find. Any questions . That is my story, guys. [applause] you are watching American History tv, all weekend, every weekend, on cspan3. Xt, history Professor William crawley gives a talk truman the s. Accidental president and the triumph of true grit. Professor crawley argues that many at the time underestimated truman, in 1945, thinking he was not up to the job. Especially in comparison to his predecessor, franklin roosevelt. This video is courtesy of the university, from their great lives lecture series. Welcome to todays great lives, great president ial lives talk on harry s truman. Late one spring afternoon in midapril, 1945, Vice President truman was summoned to the white house study of eleanor roosevelt, who said to him, harry, the president is dead. Shocked, truman then expressed condolences and asked if he could do anything for her, to which mrs. Roosevelt replied, no. But she added, is there anything we can do for you . For you are the one in trouble now. And he was