Joseph Lee '17 Publishes Debut Book, 'Nothing More of This Land'

Writing alum and acclaimed journalist Joseph Lee '17 published his debut book, Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity, through One Signal Press, a division of Simon and Schuster, on July 15, 2025. The memoir in reportage investigates big questions about the nature of tribal identity in America through Lee’s perspective as an Aquinnah Wampanoag growing up in the Boston suburbs and on Martha’s Vineyard.

Lee published an essay in The New York Times about his formative summers working at his family’s gift shop on Martha’s Vineyard, where ignorant tourists caused him to question his identity. “Because I was constantly pushing back against what other people thought Native identity was, I had no time or space to figure out for myself what it actually was,” he wrote. In Nothing More of This Land, Lee reclaims his identity, building community across diverse indigenous experiences and at home. 

Lee’s memoir connects readers to indigenous life from the Klamath River basin to Bethel, Alaska, but its heart is the red clay cliffs of Aquinnah, Massachusetts, where Lee’s ancestors fought for federal recognition as a tribe in the 80s. 

“When I grew up in the tribe in the 90s, it was just a few years after my tribe, the Aquinnah Wampanoag, had received federal recognition, which in the US is kind of like the US recognizing your sovereignty as a sovereign nation," Lee told NPR. "And so I grew up in this space where the tribe was really proud of this achievement and excited by it and excited for all the opportunities and for what we could do with it. And also just, I think, happy that we were finally being acknowledged as a people, as a nation, which had been denied for so long. 

“But what surprised me and what I've learned is that it's not something you can just sit on... There are all these other ways that you need to practice it and employ it and defend it and build it and that was one of the really exciting things for me in the reporting I did, is traveling around the country and seeing tribes really using and flexing their sovereignty and using it to push back against some of these US structures.”

Associate Professor Leslie Jamison said of Nothing More of This Land, “Lee has given us a timely reckoning with Native sovereignty and community that is adroitly committed to the mess and nuance of lived experience, rather than sentimentalized accounts of victimhood or resilience. Nothing More of this Land is tender, ferocious, surprising, and tenaciously thoughtful; its existence makes the world a bigger and truer place.”

Poet, essayist, and Macarthur Fellow Hanif Abdurraqib said Lee’s book "is a stark, beautifully rendered reminder of all that had to occur for the happening of our existences to take place, and all who lived and fought against their own erasure to maintain a semblance of a legacy. This is a profound, and moving book, a powerful indictment of the colonial mindset that firmly balances an ode to people, to place, to remaining."

Joseph Lee is an Aquinnah Wampanoag writer based in New York City. He has an MFA from Columbia University and teaches creative writing at Mercy University. His writing has been published in The Guardian, BuzzFeed, Vox, High Country News, and more. He was a Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop and a Senior Indigenous Affairs Fellow at Grist.