The Sound of a Sacred Place

As the sun rose in the crimson sky on Tuesday, two men sat in the bitter cold, watching it together. One is charged with protecting the natural resources and heritage of the United States of America, the other with the same duty to his people, the Wampanoag American Indians.

For hundreds of years, their two nations have struggled over land. And for all that time, the sun has risen each day over Nantucket Sound, just as it did when Mashpee Wampanoag tribal chairman Cedric Cromwell and Interior Secretary Kenneth Salazar observed it side by side.

Mr. Salazar calls himself an outdoors man who understands a place more from experience than from maps and briefings. So he came to spend time with the Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag people in their land, because ultimately he will rule on whether Cape Wind may develop the Sound with power-generating turbines, over the tribes’ objections.

His was a sign of respect the tribes have not received from many other quarters; the Wampanoag concerns have been belittled in national newspapers and treated with contempt by clean energy proponents.

The tribes’ objections are cultural and spiritual, and such notions are hard to fit into the Cape Wind picture, crowded as it is with high-stakes politics, billion-dollar business, legal gamesmanship, science, technology, personal property and conservation zeal.

Whether for economic or environmental reasons, most people have made up their minds on Cape Wind. No matter which side you take, consider what Mr. Salazar has done. Consider the sacred.

The Ken Burns history of America’s national parks — treasured parks themselves created and sometimes obstructed by Mr. Salazar’s predecessors at the department of the interior — notes that “If a dollar value becomes attached to a sacred place, it becomes vulnerable.”

Now sacred place is a phrase tossed about a lot lately, with a lot of assumed baggage. Though conservationists often invoke the term, its meaning remains distinct for native and nonnative people. Most Europeans relate to the land and sea through trails and property lines and maritime markers. Native cultures define geography through myth, ceremonies and spirit power. As Emily Cousins has written: “This difference highlights perhaps the widest gulf between the two cultures. It also represents a place where we must meet, as both cultures face environmental crisis.”

The Wampanoag appeal for respect of their sacred tradition is not merely a last-minute delaying tactic, for the cultural and spiritual practices they cite in their objection to Cape Wind’s siting are long-documented.

Their tribal name translates as People of the First Light; this landscape always has defined who they are, how others knew them and how they have lived. They fished and hunted and planted and harvested and fostered harmony with the environment long before Columbus discovered it. Beginning with the Moshup legend, Wampanoag stories have been fixed in this place, even as the place changed around them.

Some four hundred years ago white settlers brought the Wampanoags disease and dislocation. Chief Massasoit shared his people’s wilderness skills with white settlers, and in turn they observed a peace treaty until he died. But as Europeans settled in, the native people became something in the way. Missionaries saw that those who practiced tribal ceremonies were punished, and tribal authority disintegrated. The people of Noepe, as Martha’s Vineyard was known, became the people of just Aquinnah, Christiantown and Chappaquiddick, then of Aquinnah.

Over the past 100 years, changes in the local economy forced tribal members, like many other longtime Islanders, to sell their lands, move to other parts of the Island, or to leave the Island altogether. Only in the past twenty years has the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) been formally recognized by the federal government. Tribal leaders now are reclaiming their language, and children are learning traditional skills almost lost to their people.

Whatever their past successes or failures, the Wampanoag people know it remains their sacred duty to be good stewards of this place, which will be here long after our own bodies pass.

The question of stewardship is not a simple one — for global climate change and the geopolitics of fossil fuel mean that we must lessen the terrible energy burden we are placing on this planet, our home.

Whatever your position, after what has been an entrenched battle, this nine-year Cape Wind debate, some thoughtful, sunrise contemplation of our duties will provide some perspective.

The Scottish-born early American conservationist John Muir was moved by such contemplation to remark, “One learns that the world, though made, is yet being made. That this is still the morning of creation.”