Earlier this week, members of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) made their way past the rolling dunes of Lobsterville Beach to a wild cranberry bog, just as they have done on the second Tuesday of October for centuries.
Many wore boots and carried baskets and buckets to gather the final berry harvest of the season in a tradition known as Cranberry Day.
While much has changed, much has remained the same. The day is about community, tradition and honoring the land that tribal members have lived on and cared for at the western edge of Martha’s Vineyard, or Noepe, for millenia.
The shiny, red berries were picked from the murky water of the bog by hand or with scoops, many of which have been passed down for generations.
Kristina Hook, a tribal elder known as Auntie among the youth, said she has cherished the holiday since she was a little girl. She continues to forage around the Island and has an encyclopedic knowledge of local plants.
Ms. Hook sat beside a campfire set up in the dunes with her friend Beverly Wright, an elder and former chairperson for the tribe, eating toast coated with cranberry jam.
The holiday and harvest is for tribal members and their families only, they said. “But we’d love for other people to learn about what we celebrated,” Ms. Hook added.
The two friends recalled how in the mid-1940s, when the road along Lobsterville Beach was still in the distant future, they used to wait for Jack Belain to take them to the bogs in his ox cart.
“It was a big deal for me,” Ms. Wright said. “I’d say, ‘Oh, can I ride in the ox cart?’ It was always ‘No, you’re too little.’”
Ms. Wright said the first Cranberry Day she remembers was the last time it was a three-day celebration, when mothers and grandmothers would do the cooking and everyone would sleep beside the campfire at night. She said it eventually became a one-day event because people had to go to work and get children to school.
She also recalled Leonard Vanderhoop and Walter Manning climbing over the dunes and returning with sacks full of cranberries. Most families kept only what they needed to get through the winter, but for a time there was also a commercial aspect to the harvest as some tribal members would take the catboat to New Bedford to sell them on the mainland.
“My grandmother would throw the cranberries under the eaves,” Ms. Wright said. “. . . She’d always say, ‘can you go up and give me a cup of cranberries underneath the eaves?’ And as kids, we’d be up there spucking them, which meant we were walking on them.”
Ms. Wright said that as children they would play a game, where teams of two would choose the largest cranberry they could find. One child from each team would climb to the top of the tallest dune and the other would stand at the bottom of the hill. They’d roll the berries down the dune and race to see which berry reached their partner first.
She and Ms. Hook said kids today no longer play the game because the dunes aren’t as tall and steep as in the past, and are in need of protection. In 1954, Hurricane Carol and Hurricane Hazel hit the Island and completely changed the landscape of the area. Ms. Hook said she was told the dunes were three to four times larger before the hurricanes than they are today.
The storms reduced the size of the bogs too, putting an end to commercial cranberry harvesting. Today, tribal members only harvest what their families will eat. She said climate change is also a factor in reducing the size of the bogs.
“We had a cranberry agent who came down and looked at the bogs and decided how they were doing,” Ms. Hook said. “. . . We don’t have a cranberry agent anymore, but there are those of us that come down and take a look... Occasionally, the natural resources department will go in there and pull out invasive things that are growing.”
After the cranberries are harvested, Ms. Hook said they dry them in the sun or freeze them. She likes to make cranberry bread and cranberry slump, similar to a cobbler, and will sometimes put them in stuffing that she said pairs with Cornish hen.
“When I was a little kid and went to the [Gay Head] School, we made popcorn . . . brought the cranberries out of the root cellar, and used a needle and thread to put a cranberry and popcorn [garland] around the Christmas tree,” Ms. Hook said.
James Hackenson, a member of the tribe, sat in a folding chair by the fire and hugged his eight year-old daughter, Akinah. He said it brings a smile to his face watching her run around with friends and learning from the elders, the same way he did when he was younger.
“[Akinah and I] had a talk about [Cranberry Day] the other day, and she actually used a word to describe it: she said it was special,” Mr. Hackenson said. “. . . She said that because it really is . . . . As Wampanoag people, we’re some of the very few Native people that are still around today that can actually still live on their own Native land, and still be able to do [traditions] like this.”
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