The people who shared their food—and their lands—with some of the first European settlers in North America are once again in danger of losing what is theirs. A 2,600-member tribe based in Mashpee, Massachusetts, has been laboring to secure a permanent homeland since before the Revolutionary War, but unless Congress enacts legislation to secure the reservation, or an appellate court reverses a US district court’s decision, the Mashpee will once again be virtually homeless. The ongoing legal battle, which has pitted the tribe against a coalition of non-Native locals, a right-wing group, and a casino mogul, represents the first time in nearly six decades that the government has rescinded trust land, and other tribes are watching closely, fearful that the same fate could befall them. Some tribal leaders call the Mashpee situation the first step toward a new era of terminating tribes altogether

The Mashpee were part of the Wampanoag confederacy, which first encountered the Pilgrims in 1620; the Mashpee band was one of nine tribal signatories to the first treaties with the group. The Wampanoags were killed off en masse in King Phillip's War, and the Mashpee fell under the domain of first the English, then the Americans (some Mashpee fought on the American side in the Revolutionary War).

Over the following centuries, the Mashpee have gained—and lost—tracts of land at least twice. A bookkeeping error by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) resulted in the tribe being left off a list of tribes in 1849, and Massachusetts compounded that error by eliminating Mashpee as an “Indian district” in 1870. But regardless of designation, Mashpee children were still swept away to Indian boarding schools.

After a 30-plus year battle, the tribe was finally restored to federal recognition in 2007. Shortly after that, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe asked for two parcels of land that it had purchased, 171 acres in Mashpee and 150 acres in nearby Taunton, to be given reservation status—a process known as “land into trust.”