Excerpt: I write as a Mashpee Wampanoag. It is who I am and inevitably shapes my views. The Wampanoag have the distinction of being among the “first contact” Tribes in the Americas, and as such we have a four-centuries-old tradition of interacting with the forces of colonization. This means we have four centuries of grievances, but also four centuries of solutions based on experience. We have seen time and again that the promises of “forever” rarely last more than 30 years. We have seen that when the powers of colonization seek to commodify a resource, they often do so one small piece at a time; what they don’t take this year, they will take in 30 years’ time.