Keith Richards is one of the celebrities who fish with Buddy because they know they’ll catch fish. “I’ve known Keith for thirty years. We used to party at the Outermost Inn back in the late seventies.” – Buddy Vanderhoop Photo by Lisa Vanderhoop

The tribe and the old, old days
Your website has a page dedicated to your Wampanoag heritage. What does it mean to you to be a member of the tribe?

My heritage goes way back. They’ve found artifacts that they’ve carbon-dated to ten thousand years ago and they were my ancestors, obviously. And you know, my grandfather used to play with Tashtego, who was a real guy from Gay Head [not just a character in Moby Dick], and he told me stories.

Herman Melville came over from the mainland and he interviewed a whole bunch of the Gay Head whalers, because they were the best harpooners and the most fearless whalers in the world. Everybody wanted a Gay Head Wampanoag on their whaleboat because they were the best. He mentions that a lot in Moby Dick. My great uncle Amos Smalley killed Moby Dick, and as a matter of fact [getting up to retrieve something] when I was ten years old, my uncle Amos gave me one of his teeth from Moby Dick that he’d scrimshawed [displaying it].

He gave that to me on my tenth birthday. I used to go visit him and Aunt Marie, his wife, almost every weekend. I’d go over there because they’d give me candy, and also, every time I went over there he’d give me fifty cents, because he had no children. And fifty cents in those days would buy you a hotdog, a coke, ice cream, and a candy bar.

Excellent use of your investment.

That’s right. This [the scrimshawed tooth] is still my favorite little treasure. Uncle Amos was a crafty little artist. [Laughing.] Back in 1958, we got the morning off, ’cause Dave Garroway had Uncle Amos on the Today Show, showing how, when, and where he killed Moby Dick.

There was a whale called Mocha Dick that may have inspired Melville, was that the one he got?

No, he got an albino sperm whale, and he had been harpooned several times, he had scars all over him, but he got away every time – until he met Uncle Amos.

When you go out to sea – you know, a short trip back in those days was four years – so when you go out for seven to eight years, you got a lot of time on your hands, so when you don’t see any whales, you got time.

They’d come back with like five thousand dollars, which was major, major, major money back in those days. And then they could retire for the rest of their time and then do lobstering. Lobstering wasn’t that lucrative because – well, that’s why they named Lobsterville, Lobster- ville – because there were so many lobsters. My grandfather used to say they used to go out and haul their pots twice a day, and there used to be so many lobsters in there, you couldn’t fit another one in edgewise.

But lobsters were only eaten by poor people and prisoners, and they were used for bass bait. And here’s a funny story: Swordfish wasn’t eaten till the late thirties. We used to harpoon swordfish for lobster bait, because the swordfish was so oily [that nobody wanted to eat it]. Then you’d get between one and three cents a pound for lobsters, and then you’d use lobster tails for bass bait. In turn they used to sow the striped bass into the field for growing vegetables, and then they’d put their vegetables away for the winter in a root cellar. It would be pretty costly to do it that way these days. [Laughing.] “Hey, I’ll take fifty pounds of swordfish. I gotta go bait my lobster traps, because I need to go catch some bass, so I can grow my vegetables.”

Buddy Vanderhoop and his new 31' boat at Menemsha Harbor, Martha’s Vineyard, 2009. Like Buddy, his boat is one of a kind. Designed by Ovid Ward, it runs two four stroke Yamahas that can snap it into warp speed. Ward started out as an industrial designer in the automobile industry at Chrysler, he later worked on the design of the Delorean, and from there he went on to marine architecture. Photo by Lisa Vanderhoop

So let’s go back to your relationship with the tribe.

A couple of trips a season, I used to take out the tribal children to go fishing. They used to have grant money to charter my boat and my brother’s boat, and we’d take ’em out and just introduce them to fishing, just to give them some knowledge of what happens out there and what’s happened since the beginning of time here on Martha’s Vineyard. A lot of them took up fishing. They don’t have boats, but it got them into fishing, which, you know, keeps them busy and off the streets and out of trouble.

I used to be the repatriation officer for the tribe, which means I used to go pick up the skeletal remains, which are at different museums throughout Massachusetts. It’s illegal for [the museums] to have their bones and funerary objects. One time, this was back in probably the mid-nineties, I went over to meet Slow Turtle, a Mashpee Wampanoag. He’d gotten this mother and her two infant children that they had at the Peabody [Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University]. A lot of these skeletal remains and funerary objects were just kept in the basement and nothing was ever done with them, so I used to bring them back here, and we’d put them back in the grave site and have a little ceremony with the medicine man, Luther Madison, and the chief, Donald Malonson.

I had my own boat, the old Tomahawk, and I went over to New Bedford, picked up the funerary objects and the skeletal remains, and I was headed out of New Bedford harbor, just getting under way. It was a very foggy day, and I was doing probably twenty-five knots and all of a sudden, a really strange feeling came over me like I’d never felt before. I slowed the boat down, because this weird eerie feeling had come over me and I thought, “What the –? What’s going on here?” – and the minute I slacked the boat back, less than fifty feet away from me there was a huge tanker that I would have run into. They wouldn’t see me on their radar, and I didn’t have a radar in my boat at the time, but it probably would have killed me and sunk my boat. I turned off to starboard and it went past me. I think it was the lady, the mother of the two children saying, “Hey, you gotta slow down or something really bad’s gonna happen.” That was a pretty strange thing to happen. She wanted to come back to Gay Head.

The next day, we had a ceremony with a lot of the tribal members, and the chief medicine man, and reinterred her to the grave site down at the old Indian cemetery.

When you have a ceremony like that, is it purely Wampanoag or is it Christian as well?

Pretty much Wampanoag. The medicine man and the chief have words to say to the Great Spirit, welcoming [the deceased] back to their homeland and putting them back to peace, after sitting on a shelf in a museum basement for so long. It was probably a relief to their souls to be back where they came from.

Lisa: But all that being said, you’re all Christian. Luther used to go to the Baptist church all the time.

Buddy: Well, [Christianity] was brought here by the Mayhews back in the 1600s. But there is still a tradition between the Great Spirit and Mother Earth [from] before Christianity was introduced to the Indians. Our particular tribal sect of the Wampanoags has the oldest legends of any tribe in the world. That’s why we got recognized so easily and readily, because of our heritage. And they were holding regular tribal council meetings since before the setback of the 1870s [when all Vineyard Wampanoag families were relocated to Gay Head and allocated tracts of land there]. The different tribes from the Vineyard, the Chappaquiddick Wampanoags, the Christiantown Wampanoags, and the Aquinnah Wampanoags, they used to leave messages for each other in the eye socket of Toad Rock [near the eastern end of Moshup Trail in Aquinnah] – that was a pretty cool thing.

And in the last twenty years they’ve found a bible that was written back when the Mayhews came here, in our dialect, which is different from Mashpee’s. [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] worked alongside Harvard putting the language, which hadn’t been spoken since the 1800s, back together and now they teach the language down at the tribe twice a week. I haven’t had time to go learn it, but my brother Chip, my stepbrother Woody, they speak fluent Wampanoag. It’s great.

Is that something that would only be available to the tribal members?

Yes.

What’s the story with a casino? Is there a connection with the one for the Mashpee Wampanoags?

No, the Mashpee have their own thing. They’ve been in the media, media, media. That’s not the way to do it. We’ve learned over the last fifteen years not to go through the media and you’ll get a lot more accomplished. We’re actually going to probably have a casino before they do. We’re not going to [build a casino] here; we’d probably do it in Fall River, Freetown, somewhere like that – the plans are already drawn up for the buildings and everything.

Has it ever been a bone of contention domestically, that one of you is part of the tribe and one isn’t?

Lisa: No, not at all. We have feisty interactions, but it’s not a bone of contention.

The Island has changed a lot. What do you like most and what do you like least?

Buddy: The least is the amount of people that do come here, but we could not survive without the hoards of people. We couldn’t survive without ’em, but that’s why I stay up in Gay Head all summer!

Since the interview: Buddy is now on the board of the newly formed Martha’s Vineyard/ Dukes County Fisherman’s Asso- ciation, a group of commercial fishermen who have banded together to make sure their concerns are collectively voiced to the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Com- mission. Buddy says, “This is a very good thing for the Island. Where they wouldn’t listen to just one guy before, now we’re in a position where the hierarchy, the powers that be, will listen.” Among other efforts, the new association is working against House Bill number 796 (introduced by Representative Matthew Patrick of Falmouth) to prohibit commercial striped bass fishing and the sale of striped bass in Massachusetts. (The bill would allow some recreational fishing, with restrictions.) Interested parties can contact Warren Doty at 508-564-0150.

This story originally appeared in Martha’s Vineyard Magazine, July 2009.