It was a Native voice I heard say, “Settlers practice their religion by going inside and talking to God. Native people go outside and listen to God.” I like that. It makes sense as a way to be in this sacred world.
I remember walks with my dad through the woods that have become Wiley Park in Eastham when I was maybe five or six. I would hold his large hand, and he would remind me to “hush, listen.”
Lately I’ve been listening to the crickets, squirrels chattering in the pines, an occasional quack from the pond, the demanding voices of the jays, and the call and response among the congregation of crows. The percussionist is the oak who has been throwing acorns at my car.
I have also been listening to Wampanoag friends. After a year of putting together a series of Mass. Foundation for the Humanities programs designed to build relationships between our people — descendants of tribal culture and those of the dominant settler culture — a group of us organizers sat down to decide how to continue working together. We especially wanted to go deeper into learning from Wampanoag lifeways how to better care for Mother Earth.
But we found that a question of health emerged. We heard stories and read accounts of inequity and failures of health care for the Wampanoag here. And health crises and struggles for care among our family members and friends are never far from view for most of us. We noticed that our ideas about what well-being actually means are shaped by our cultures — and that became our focus. We decided to call ourselves Delilah’s Healing and Educational Collective.
The name honors the 19th-century Wellfleet Wampanoag healer Delilah Sampson Gibbs, whom Sheryl Jaffe, the artist in our group, had learned about when she was leading programs at the Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum. Also in our group were Aquinnah author and museum educator Linda Coombs; Leo Blandford, whose work at Outer Cape Health Services is about equity; systems thinking facilitator Alyssa Fleet; and me, a radio journalist and Gestalt coach whose family has been in Eastham since 1642 and maybe before that, too.
As we set to work on an event that would bring Wampanoag knowledge-keepers together on the subject of health equity, Linda told us about an area near Plymouth, not far from the Herring Pond Wampanoag tribal land, where acres of trees are being ripped out to mine the sand. Everything is disrupted there, she told us. But people’s efforts to stop the gouging have failed. I had not previously thought about where the sand that the towns receive every year to replenish our beaches comes from. Now I will.
Her story got me thinking about fracking and other extractive relationships humans have with the land. And with each other and all beings. We consume as if the world exists simply for us to devour, with no respect for the multitude of interdependencies among all living things.
Doing this, we modern folk seem to be global colonialists, still imposing ourselves on nature, still unaware of the ancient sustainable practices our Wampanoag neighbors know.
Human health has suffered because of the way we have consumed the Earth. Put another way, the health of Indigenous people — and indeed all people — is intimately related to and dependent on the health of the land.
What we can do about that is the question now before us.
Deborah Ullman is a member of the Martin Luther King Jr. Action Team, the racial justice arm of the Nauset Interfaith Association. The group’s Delilah Collective has organized the We and the Land Are One Thing: Wampanoag Health Equity Symposium on Saturday, Oct. 19 at the Church of the Holy Spirit, 204 Monument Road in Orleans. Email for more information: [email protected].
