Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Annelie Geissler
Categories
Memoirs

NOTHING MORE OF THIS LAND

Joseph Lee

Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity

From award-winning journalist Joseph Lee, an exploration of Indigenous identity that builds on the author's experiences and questions as an Aquinnah Wampanoag from Martha's Vineyard.

Growing up Aquinnah Wampanoag, Joseph Lee grappled with what it means to be an Indigenous person in the world today, especially as tribal land, culture, and community face new threats. Starting with the story of his own tribe, which is from the iconic Martha's Vineyard, Lee tackles key questions around Indigenous identity and the stubborn legacy of colonialism.

Lee weaves his own storyand that of his familywith conversations with Indigenous leaders, artists, and scholars from around the world about everything from culture and language to climate change and the politics of belonging. As he unpacks the meaning of Indigenous identity, Lee grants us a new understanding of our nation and what a better community might look like

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. This book was awarded a 2024 Silvers Grant for Work in Progress. Follow him on X at @JosephVLee and on Instagram at @Joseph.V.Lee.

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Book Published 2025-07-01 by Atria/One Signal

Comments

Nothing More of This Land is written with scrupulous attention to nuance and ambiguity. It is an exploration of a complex heritage that is self-searching, deeply intelligent and honest. But it is also a book about America, the public realm, what an Indigenous identity means in this country, and how this has molded the life of Joseph Lee, who is a brilliant and sensitive chronicler of his own destiny and that of his community.

Nothing More Of This Land 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.

A wise meditation on belonging, Lee offers the reader a global perspective on what it means to be Indigenous. Lee's desire for reciprocity and community will move readers to think about our planetary future. A journalistic feat, heartfelt, well-researched, and vital.

A forcefully illuminating and utterly compelling blend of personal narrative and vivid reportage, Joseph Lee's Nothing More of this Land is a triumph of complexity and insight. We follow Lee from the red clay cliffs of Aquinnah to the halls of the UN, from the Klamath River basin to a feast of muktuk and tundra greens in Bethel, Alaska; and very early on I realized I'd follow him anywhere. 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.

With lucid intimacy, Lee traces the story of the Aquinnah Wampanoag across centuries and shorelines, anchoring sweeping histories in the particular texture of lived experience. The past is not background hereit presses forward, unresolved. At its core, this is a book about how to stay in relationship with a land, a people, and a culture that colonialism has scattered and strained. What begins as personal memoir opens into a broader reckoning with Indigenous identity in motion. Lee writes not to restore some lost purity, but to chart a map forwardone that embraces contradiction, survival, and the quiet force of continuity. Few books manage to feel this intimate and this expansive, this tender and this unflinching. It's not just beautifully toldit's deeply earned.