every weekend on c-span 3. darius coombs discusses the culture of the wampanoag people. he explains how they adapted to the presence of the english and how the remaining members including him live today. the nantucket historic association hosted this event and provided the video. >> hello. >> somebody responded. >> that means good morning friends of my language. good morning friends. how are you doing today? all right, good morning, richard. i also have nantucket ties to

here, right? my people have been around this area of massachusetts for over 12,000 years. and we're still here today, okay? now, what i'm going to do today is like wampanoag is a culture of people. what makes it different from the other thousand, it could be language. it could be diet. it could be the housing we lived in. one common one 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 don't put ourselves above or below that. that's one thing we all have in common. i do a lot of teaching, right? and i ask the people what race do we come from? the human race, right? so we should all respect each

other, and that's rule of thumb for my people, you know? so like i said we've been here for 12,000 years. that's me up there with my lovely wife who teaches language. ulse holding a turkey feather mantel. i'm going to bring you to a year 1613 before there's any major interpretation in our culture, okay? i'm going to bring you to our new year's. a lot of people new years starts january 1st, okay? our new year starts when everything comes to life. think about, when does everything come to life? springtime, right? that's when the birds start chirping, that's when the oak leaf comes out. that's when the herring starts to run. in our new year we thank mother earth, we thank the creator for having another year because it's not guaranteed. and we do a lot of dancing, a

lot of feasting. we do a lot of socializing. but once that happens we know we have to get to work, right? and these are the types of houses we live in during the summertime, okay? the spring or summer. we live in a single family home during the summer because we needed our space for planting. now these reeds right here are cattails. cattails is a water plant. and me being at prelimict plantation, we've been doing this for years. and everything we do at the museum we do ourselves. so we go and gather the cattail late august and september and make these mats in the winter for our houses, right? the mats will last me 3 to 5 years. they're waterproof and they have a cup to it so it acts like a natural funnel, and these houses would hold one family. it's different from a uralpeuro

family back then. our family has husband, wife, kids, aunts, grandparents. we're looking at three or four of generations inside one house. that was one thing different, you know? so we would have englishmen coming to our houses and say this guy has five wives. maybe, maybe not. then again not realizing what they're looking at possibly. what they're looking at is sisters, grandmothers, aunts. so that's what my job is to look at these primary sources and break it down, what it means for the people and indigenous cultures. those are the houses we live in during the summer. and what we do during the summer, now this is our planting field, right? everybody loves corn, bean and squash, right? they call them the three sisters. and who takes care of the fields are the women. the women are considered to be the givers of life, okay, so

they also give life to mother earth. so you look at the planting field, right? it has a mound. i don't know if you can see a mound, but the women do a mound of dirt and that's symbolic to a woman's stomach when she gives life. when do you plant corn? you have to look for different signs of nature. 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 that corn to grow. so you plant your corn, the corn takes nitrogen out of the ground. you plant your beans right next to it, the beans will add nitrogen back into the ground and add more stock to your corn. you plant your squashes, watermelons, your pumpkins, and they have a large leaf. and they'll keep the ground soft. vegetables for us will probably represent half to two thirds of the diet.

wampnaug culture, going as far west as wister. going past to rhode island and all the islands, nantucket, martha's vineyard. let me mention some names to you, right, because back then we had over 70 wampanoag communities. at one time we numbered over 100,000. so that's a planting field. and what's next they're

considered to be the givers of the life. what do the kids do during the spring or summer? that's my daughter right there, guys, one of my daughters. and this is her in this picture when she was 11 years old, maybe 10. and that's her youngest sister storm with her. and what she's doing is picking sumac. you pick those berries, you boil them up and that right there as three times as much as vitamin c as orange juice does. so kids were allowed to be kids. they helped out a little bit but they had fun, played games, had running races, they joked around. and a person will go through four or five different names in a life-span. as you would change as a person your name would change also to fit how you are. we still had medicine people in

our community that gives us names depending on how we are. let's talk about tashima. what does that mean? it means one who lifts up. it's not because she's physically strong and all that but tashima wakes up in a good mood almost every single day and when she wakes up in a good mood she raises a house so everybody feels good. kids will get more responsibility as they matured. this is me and my lovely wife. we did a lot of fishing back then. still do today, still a big part of the culture. we saw a lot of fresh-water fishing, ocean fishing. the biggest fish we would go for i'm not sure if it's found around here or ever was here, but in large parts of the

wampanoag country, any idea what the biggest fish was, it was 20, 30 foot length sometimes. somebody said it. sturgeon. and sturgeon, they're big fish, right? and we go fishing for these fish at nighttime in our boats called mashoon. they would range from 1 foot nine man boat to boats big enough to carry 40 men. we have three different recordings of europeans seeing 40 man boats being sailed off the nantucket island. not paddled, sailed. which we paddled, too, which we pulled along the shore. but when we went for the sturgeon we'd dwgo out at nighttime. we'd have torches at the end of our boats. the light of the sturgeon would attract the sturgeon up and they'd flip on their belly and

we'd spear them. a lot of times the fish was bigger than the boat so you'd drag it ashore. you had flounder. cod, you could walk right across the backs of cape cod. lobster, not a big deal. we used lobster for fishing bait. times have changed, right? we have so much lobster you'd go to low tide to pick them off the beach. you go back 100 years ago and lobster was fed to prisoners in jail up by boston, right, every single day. and the prisoners had a big up rising and they said, we're sick of this, we don't want no more. so there was a law made in massachusetts you could only feed lobster to prisoners two times a week.

governor bradford had a ship come in and he was so embarrassed, we're very, very sorry, this is all we have to give you guys. not today. so we did a lot of fishing during the summer. the men are consider today be the takers of life and that's different from the women who give life. after harvesttime we think about going inland. we want to go inland a bit away from the ocean. i know it's hard to do in nantucket. and you would get protection from the wind from the ocean. inland might be a half-mile, maybe a mile. and these are the houses we lived in. they're bark covered houses. and normally during the winter these houses could be anywhere from 100 foot long to one of the biggest houses we found -- we found the footprint of this house, this footprint was found

out in worcester. the footprint was 326 in length and 60 foot in width. i tell kids if you don't know what that means, think of a football field. that's how big this house was. the frames were made out of cedar, okay? the outside bark normally would have been chestnut and elm. we don't have those trees around here anymore and we used to use white ash. we'll talk about that in a minute. the men did the hunting. the men were considered to be the takers of life. and we hunt for the deer, for big game. on the mainland we go for black bear, moose, elk also for big game. small animals, you guys like the taste of skunk?

anybody? that's a good swar right there. never tried it, right? skunk is considered to be a delicacy. how do you catch a skunk? very carefully, right? you get two boys. one boy would be in front of the skunk distracting him, you get the other boy that will sneak up on him from behind, grab his tail and lift him off the ground. in order for a skunk to spray, he has to be on all fours, putting pressure on his hind legs to release those stink glands. you get him in the air, you can't do that. you have a club, you bang him over the head and very carefully cut him open and take the stink glands out. i say carefully because you puncture the stink glands, you might not be welcome in the community for a while. i've heard recently, though -- i haven't tried it but some elders say you take that gland of the skunk and you break it open and you rub it on your arthritis, it

works. i don't have arthritis yet so -- they don't sell that in drugstores yet either. and what we do a lot in the winter is the women do a lot of the weaving. some of our weavers are the best in the world, and some of their work is at the smithsonian down in washington, d.c. there's a woman who's a relative of mine and her work is down at the smithsonian in d.c. people say you guys had string, we made string. we used different plants, milkweed, the tree, we take those stalks after they're dead, pull them out of the ground, open them up. we take the inner fibers out and work them together. when the colonists got here in

1620 they noticed the women making string so fast their eyes couldn't keep up with. so we have small bags like you see here and large bushel bags to store our vegetables so we'd have dry food during the winter. now, this right here is the interior of a house. those are actually all my daughters right there. those are three out of my four. i got four daughters and no boys, yeah. so that's the oldest daughter sitting down. 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 work with scholastic over a bit over the years. and in 2016 they said can we make videos and we said sure.

and we showed how wampanoag and colonial kids did back then and leads up to what they're doing today. that's what kids relate to. they think we're gone just because we wear different clothing today at times, we're still here. and this video is literally across every third grade class in the united states. and every time i walk in they play a video. it's called the wampanoag way. i play a father in it. when i walked in one classroom i see a boy watching the video on the screen, he sees me walking in -- he said, yeah you're storm's dad.

so it's a surreal moment. so inside these houses, right, we have bedding. we don't sleep on the ground. we have furs on the beds, mats on the beds. let's say the houses got really big, round shaped. they get really warm, too. our houses set at 70 degrees. rule of thumb when you're making these houses -- i do quite a bit of these houses myself. it is a round shape, you can't really see on the walls but we have bulrush mats on the walls which you have bark, interior frame and then you have your mats, two layers of bulrush mats. and because the house is shaped like a dome shape, the heats is going to rise, go up, go underneath the mats and force the cool air to the middle and that keeps the cool air in circle.

when the europeans got here they said the houses were so warm during the winter they saw native children running outside during the winter and jumping into the snow. so they get quite warm. so we lived like that for thousands of years, guys, right? we went through that cycle. following spring we celebrate new year's again. we come out in the ocean, come out in family group uzloan because we need space for the planting. in a winter community during the winter can hold anywhere from 300 to say 3,000 people before disease hit. now, that was before any major interruption, all right? that's a 13-moon cycle real quick. that's called 1613, all right and one thing i want to say real quick is you hear the term survival from the native people.

how did you guys survive back then? wa well, we've been doing this for 12,000 years. there's a system already setup generations long before that people knew how to fish so like i said we call that 1613. let's move to 1614. there was trading going on, first european traders that were here it was recorded back in 1524. the trade started blooming early 1600s. back in 1614, though, guys, when trading happened what they wanted was a lot of otter pelts, a lot of beaver pelts in which they made their hats in europe out of. but what happened in 1614 there was an english captain named thomas hunt, he came down the

coast. remember the date 1614, okay? he came down the coast and went to an area called plymouth today and what we call putuxit. and that was a thriving wampanoag community. if you're traveling and you went up to somebody and said what are you, they expect you to know this is wampanoag country, they would describe themselves from the wampanoag speaking community they're from. so they would describes themselves as i'm a putuxut, what are you. a lot of people think african-american and think of slavery, and this happened to our people, too. this is six years before the pilgrims arrived here. took 19 putuxut, went down cape and stopped and took eight,

brought them to spain, sold some there. the remainder were sold to england and one of those guys sold to england his name was squaunto. that sound familiar? his lived over in england with a merchant named john slainy. he lived there for five years. he learnt a lot about english culture. he knew how to speak english flupt fluently over those five years, okay? but what happened to squaunto they were asking who's from this area that's called plymouth cape putuxt, they say squaunto is. where is he? he's up in new finland with captain mason. go get him, i want to do another venture. so he sends charles dermer to pick up squaunto. remind you this is 1619, a little over five years, right? so he hasn't seen his home since

1614. he's picked up by thomas dermer. they come down the coast and stop at the island off maine, and pick up -- considered to be sagamor, knew how to speak english, knew a lot of english captains. they kept going down the coast. when 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 happened between 1616 and 1618 or '19 when squaunto was over in england. this plague, the skin turned yellow, people got open soares n their bodies and died within two or three days once they got this. it wiped out the native

population all along the coast anywhere from 70% to 90% were wiped out within two or three years. that plague as far as we know didn't affect a lot of people on the islands because it's hard for disease to go through water. and people probably moved out here for protection from the plague. disease control came out -- they believed it may be le leptosporosis. the fetus of the rats get into the water system causing an infectious liver disease. and that's what the theory is now. i always say this, you can put whatever name you want on it, it doesn't matter to me. what i do know, it was it most devastating thing that ever happened to our people, period. as dermer is coming down the

coast they come to putuxut. and they find out putuxut was pretty much devastated. so imagine that, squaunto taken as a slave in 1614, comes back home and finds out all his people are dead. is that going to change you as a person? i think so. they end up going over to the vineyard. he was also captured as a slave in 1611, he made it back though. in 1614 -- was asking him, too, is there gold where you're at, is there gold on the island where you come from? he was a chief, he wasn't dumb. he's probably thinking yeah, there's gold, you bring me back home i'll tell you where the gold's at. so in 1614 they brought him back home. and that's when he yelled out

something in his native tongue which the english did not understand. the following day they attacked the ship and he had a chance to run to shore. so he made it home. he sees another ship coming in 1619. so he's home for four years and so he thinks these people are trying to get me again. there's another fight that breaks out. dermer gets injured badly. they got loose and they end up -- like i said those 70 communities and what we know for sure he was a leader of the biggest and strongest wampanoag community. so they end up there, okay, let's fast track to 1620.

pilgrims arriving. they finally 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 good water, it was cleared out already. so massasoit was a two days walk away, 40 miles west of plymouth, pfister island today, he heard about these people building homes. one thing we're used to, we're always used to people coming over -- europeans coming over here, the only thing we weren't used to people coming over and staying, okay. that was different. what made these people different is they brought their women and children and that might have meant a friendlier type of people. still, massasoit didn't know. he probably called over samoset, hey, samoset, come here. you know how to speak english, right? of course, yeah.

go to these people and find out why these people are building their homes. massasoit was a leader. he wasn't dumb. he's thinking this guy is considered to be a sagama chief too but he can speak english and also he's not one of my men, so i don't know what's going to happen to him. come march 16th, march 16, '21 he set into the village. considered naked, he didn't have much clothing on. you see what this guy has on now. he had on just a beach cloth. he goes in and says welcome englishmen in their own language. which they were shocked seeing a native person speak english to them. he told them about the land and the area and the plague that just came through. he stayed in the house that evening, which in my mind is kind of different. but they carefully watched him overnight. he said you know what, i'm not from here. i'm going to bring you a leader who is.

he goes back and tells massasoit that it was all right to come along. later in march massasoit comes along and brings 60 of his men and that's when they make the famous treaty between the two people, the peace treaty, treaty of diplomacy, one needed each other at the time. you think about it. i mentioned that plague coming down the coast. that plague stopped dead in its tracks right before the people started in the territory. any thoughts about that, why it stopped right there? we have two good thoughts. narraganset and wampanoag did not like each other. for at least two generations before there was any european contact here. down there you have that large body of water at the bay and, like i said, disease is hard to go over water. again, the wampanoag were depleting in numbers. one of the leaders said, well, i'll start to attack. massaquoi's community is located

right on the border of narragansett. so before he came out and made an alliance, massasoit's did. one needed each other because how you felt about the english staying here, there wasn't one universal answer. you have to go from community to community. if your brother got taken as a slave by traders prior, are you going to be happy? no. there were leaders who weren't happy but massasoit had a lot of power. it's a piece of the treaty, but basically says if you go to war, i'll help you out. if i go to war, you will help me out. we know that treaty lasted over 55 years with no major, major conflict of war. later on in 1621, that's with when squanto comes to live and

stay with the colonists and he teaches them how to plant corn. that's what he's famous for, teaching them how to plant corn. like i said, he was a changed person. he liked having power and caused a lot of trouble back then. he died in 1622, but in that two years he caused a lot of drama. he would run and say watch out, bradford wants to attack. and back and say the same thing. back and forth, back and forth. he actually sent his men out to plymouth with his own personal knife and wanted squanto's head and hands delivered back to him. governor bradford's thinking, hmm, i should do this. this could be one of the first breaks of the treaty for the states if one does something wrong to another, you have to turn that person over. all of a sudden -- massasoit comes out with gifts, too, by the way to give governor bradford with squanto's head in. but at the same time the ship was coming in the water and they said governor bradford was

distracted and said wait a second. so the guys got frustrated and went back home. like i said, squanto died in 1622 after he leads steven hopkins and a few others down in chatham for a trading scenario, meet and greet, whatever. that evening when he was in one of the houses, they said squanto had a nose bleed that wouldn't stop and something called indian fever back then. there was some type of hemorrhaging going on. when he was lying on his death bed, he asked 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 doesn't get much praise in the textbooks. hobbamock, if it wasn't for this guy, history would have definitely been different today. when he made that treaty with the english in 1621, he needed somebody else -- because this village is 40 miles west.

he needed an ambassadorship out here. not out here but out in plymouth colony. that's when he sent hobbamock to live among the english. he lived with steven hopkins family of over ten people for anywhere of 10 to 15 years of his life. he was the closest friend -- closest native the english considered to be a friend. they don't say much about his family. they say hobbamock had more than one wife. i wish i knew one of his wife's names because she plays a major role in the diplomacy. she actually reports back and forth to massasoit and what's going on, especially with squanto, but they never give her name. they don't say much about the family structure and we're guessing they lived in a covered home like he was used to. but, like i said, he kept peace between two people.

he was considered to be one who counsels on war and leads in the battle and a lot of time the english considered them indestructible. how do you become a pniese? you're chosen from childhood and have special qualities and special people choose you and from there on your raised. one of the final stages, you're given a stone knife. you would go into the woods alone for a whole winter. if you came back, you would be a pniese, and if you didn't, you wouldn't. but he was highly respected amongst the people. he kept other people, native people, informed. he was a key role player. let's skip up a little bit here. praying town. if you have ever been in the homeland, my homeland, this is the oldest meeting house in the united states. it was built in 1684. we heard a little bit about praying town. we know a lot of sites of martha's vineyard and mayhew,

and the higher coombs there learning about the king james bible. we say higher coombs, he was one of my relative, that knew the bible so well and preached it to nonnative people. but not everybody liked what he was doing. there was a chief who called him out and said what are you doing? we have our own way of doing things. why are you teaching something different? and literally punched him in the face. but he continued to preach. he actually made it over here. you heard in nantucket. we will talk about his son, what he did. and we know native, of course, the first praying town of 1651, there was about 14 of them. you had mayhews, cottonwoods, you had john elliotts. do i have what i'm looking for here? okay. i want to talk about this right here. this is the son right here.

back when it was being formed, john elliot was with missionary up there. he was teaching native people. joel was one of them. caleb was another. these two guys would have been the first graduating class of harvard university back in 1665. one graduated, caleb did. joel did not. joel, the reason he did not graduate is two weeks before graduation he went home to martha's vineyard and on the way back stopped here in nantucket and got killed. it was probably his own people that did it. christianity didn't make it here yet. there was a lot of tradition here. i always say about the praying

indians you don't know what they were going through. i never judge like that. what harvard did in 2011, they invited my family up there and gave us a degree in his name, which harvard really does. this is it right here. when elliot was teaching the bible to native people in the '50s and '60s, he felt like native people weren't picking up the religion quick enough. he hired native interpreters to translate the bible. back in the 1990s there was a woman in my community called jesse little doe beard. she said people were coming into her dream speaking a derciffere

tongue. this was night after night. one of her dreams, the people spoke english to her. they said the people had the chance to get the language back, would they say yes? she took it upon herself. whe went to m.i.t. and started to piece the language back together again. elders could still speak some of the language. old records were written in the language. what helped a great deal was that bible, the king james bible. we have one of those first editions in our grasp today. today we have our language back. my wife is one of the teachers of the language. we have school and teach pre-k up to third grade.

going back three years ago, or maybe two, the wampanoag is taught still right now in mashpee high school, it's taught as an accredited course like english, french and dutch. that's a cool story because if you lose your culture, you lose part of what you are. that's your identity and we got it back. let's fast forward to war. nobody likes war. but war broke out. what i can tell you, in 1657 and 1660, that's when two of the first big leaders lost their lives. we know governor bradford lost it in '57. he passed away. we know massasoit lost it in 1660. the next generation didn't care for each other a lot. why? the thought of land. one people thought of ownership and the other people did not think of ownership. one culture would build fences around where they lived and the other culture walked across what they would call their back yard.

you can't be here no more. this is not yours anymore. that's my culture. for a native person they're thinking what do you mean i can't be here anymore? i don't get that. land is part of what you are as a person. that was the reason, you know. and in 1675, battle broke out and it was the bloodiest war per capita in new england, and a couple more years farther north, king phillip was massasoit's second son. that guy was something to reckon with. he actually heard about on nantucket a native person talking bad about him. he took his canoe and paddled out here to confront this person. he also asked a lot of people in the islands to join the war. i believe they stayed by themselves. that war lasted about a year and

it ended up with benjamin church, led by a native guide, finding king phillip. august 12, 1676 at his home, mount hope, pokanoke. when they found him, they dismantled him, took his head off, took his arms limb by limb and threw them around. they took his head back to plymouth and put it on a post for 20 years. they were thinking what are we going to do with his wife or kid. they didn't think death was right. so what happened, a lot of these people were sold as slaves. there's no good story in slavery. the only thing that came close is what's going on today, a lot of these people went down to bermuda and those people still have their cultural identity. they know who they are. so we as wampanoag people go down and visit them one year and they come up and come up to mashpee.

july 4th weekend, if you're around, come see us. they were just up here a few weeks ago. it's kind of cool. we'll go forward to what happened here. now, there's a large population of 400 or so people over here on nantucket and there's a vaccine given to the native people in 1763, 1764, that wiped out two-thirds of the population of people. you heard gino bryant's story a little bit earlier and that's true. what happened to these people afterwards? a lot of people were isolated by themselves after. a lot of people might have took off to mashpee or martha's vineyard, so they were spread out. you hear about the last indians and that's from a personal lens, you know. a lot of people say if it's not recorded, it's not true.

if it's not written down, that's not true. so that happened. let's go forward, to about 1830. you guys have heard of president jackson. 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 for relocation. the reason i bring this up is the agents came around here, too, for wampanoag people. they wanted us out west to oklahoma. and there's one nonnative voice that stood up. his name being john quincy adams. he said if you bring these people out west, they're going to die. the reason they're going to die is because they rely on seafood in their diet, and they believed him. that's why we were left alone. the last two indians of nantucket, who knows?

that was some people's lens. they died within seven weeks apart. what else do we got here? this is kind of cool right here. we might be doing this next year out here, seriously. we've got a 40-foot white pine log which we're going to make a 20-man boat. it's going to be the largest boat in new england. this picture is from a paddle we made in 2002 to martha's vineyard. we landed over tisbury. back in the '90s, we always say, okay, we used to make paddles to nantucket and paddles to the vineyard. everything was past tense. i'm like why can't we do this again? so we had a 30-foot poplar tree

donated and a 20-footer white pine that we made a mashoon out of. the guy in back there -- we all wanted to steer this boat, this big 30-foot boat, right? so we looked at each other and said, hey, let's race for it. so we took two 12-foot boats, mashoons, and went across the eel river and we saw who would make it back first. it was like speed boats. he beat me by half a boat length. he got to steer the boat. this trip took a lot of planning. it took three years of planning. we finally made the trip, though. it involved large nations of people. it involved a lot of places.

we left a place called -- we left -- you guys heard of woods hole? we left woods hole august 18th 2002. we left 6:00 a.m. we left at high tide. we had 10 mile an hour winds to our back. we landed over tisbury. if it was a straight shot, it would have been five miles. we had to get out of ferry lanes. it was a seven-mile paddle. i gave you the elements. tell me how long it took. i'll also tell you that most experienced paddlers were saying three hours. everybody was saying three hours. there was nobody living who would say this is how long it's going to take you. any guesses in the crowd? [inaudible] an hour and a half. what happened, when we made this trip, we kind of beat the ferry. we had a few hour people saw us

leaving. those people had to take a shuttle to the ferry, take the ferry over to vineyard haven and then take another shuttle to the beach. and we had beaten them there by a half hour. so they were telling us, we're going to have a big celebration, we're going to be out there dancing and singing when you guys arrive. very excited. even a clam bake maybe, you know. so i remember paddling in. that day when we left it was really cloudy. when we were coming in, all the fog broke and i'm paddling and i'm like, where is everybody? we weren't wearing watches. so we don't know how long it was taking us. we saw people on the beach in bathing suits. there were eight sunbathers from nebraska there. so once we landed -- because we were dressed in 17th century skins. the first thing out of their mouths, they're like do you guys do this every day? i go this hasn't been done in a

couple hundred years. but like i said, we got this 40-foot boat we're going to be making and we've got a lot of things we want to do with it next year. one will have nantucket involved. we have some ideas, so stay tuned. leaping up to 1870 here, that's when a lot of communities got incorporated, mine being one, mashpee and a few others. what that meant for our people is, okay, now it's considered to be a township. so we're going to give you 25 acres of your own land, but now we're going to tax you on it. >> congratulations. >> yeah, congratulations. so that word "incorporation" means a different term in my language. so we lost a lot of our land. fast forward through the 1900s, cape cod became cape cod, a tourist attraction. where i live, mashpee, nobody

really moved to mashpee, not until probably the '90s. mashpee was the fastest developing town in massachusetts in the '90s. and today -- let me go back. today we have our -- we just got fully recognized by the u.s. government back in 2007 as a people, okay. and what we do today, we have health services. we have programs for housing, health, education. we do our powwow, which is july 4th 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 back in '97. he got killed down in rhode island. his name was melvin coombs. we danced for him. i want to show you something. i haven't visited here in eight

or ten 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 ii. darius coombs, my grandfather, moved here. he was born 1886. you've got my grandmother, ruth west, born 1895, passed away in 1964. she had a stillborn son in 1919. so i visited the grounds yesterday and i googled indians of nantucket and i came across a picture that i have in my living room. this is my grandmother.

the nantucket historical site has it right here. there wasn't a name underneath it. i'm like that's ruth west, that's my grandmother. she passed away in 1964. yeah, i'll do more digging to seebecause this is one woman that i've heard it's not mashpee, she doesn't show up in the records. i'm going to keep on digging and see what i find. any questions? that's my story, guys. [ applause ] >> announcer: tonight president of the american telemedicine association dr. joseph kvedar talks about the growth of the telemedicine industry.

>> what that means is that this isn't an abstract notion. i am back now seeing patients in the office at 40% of our previous volume. when we get a little bit more cranked up, we'll be at 75%. we won't go higher than that. in order for us to meet the demand for patient care we have to have tell health embedded in our work flow. if we can't do that and all of a sudden a public health emergency goes away, there's no way to fix these regulatory restrictions, then we will be in trouble and our patients will be in more trouble. >> announcer: tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern on the communicators on c-span 2. >> announcer: the balance of power in the senate will be decided by the two georgia

runoffs. david perdue and kelly leffler are running against jon ossoff and raphael warnock. hear from the candidates. live coverage on c-span. >> announcer: up next, to mark the 400th anniversary of the pilgrims arrival, "may flower," nathaniel philbrick's book. we recorded this in plymouth, massachusetts in 2006, the year the book was published.