Profiles
Jason Baird
September 17th, 1974
Oak Bluffs, MA
Contractor (Carpentry and Masonry)
“It has taken not one or a few tribal elders or ancestors to make me…but it has taken everyone it has taken the whole, all the good and any bad, to pass on what it is to be us. This may be what I can sense in a tribal prayer circle or alone in the woods, it is the energy of us. It is thousands and thousands of years of Aquinnah Wôpanâak living and teaching in this place.”
Harrison Vanderhoop
February 19th, 1877
DOD: October 10th, 1967
Gay Head, Massachusetts
Fisherman, Entrepreneur, Postmaster
“He fished for a living. I remember mostly scalloping where they shucked the scallops in a little shack behind my grandparents house. When both my grandparents got older they had a stand at the cliffs: where they sold our clay pottery, beaded items and my grandmothers famous yard dolls.”
-Beverly Wright, Granddaughter
Luther Tacknash Madison
November 9th, 1924
DOD: March 12th, 2009
Gay Head, Massachusetts
Forestry, Proprietor, Town Selectman, Bus Driver
“I have seen changes from well…after the Lighthouse Road was put in…It changes the whole aspect of place.”
Donald F. Malonson
July 25th, 1917
DOD: August 22nd, 2002
Gay Head, Massachusetts
1st Aquinnah Deputy Chief of Police, 1st Aquinnah Chief of Fire Department, Mechanic, Bus Driver, U.S Naval Construction Forces (Seabee)
“I have never stayed away from Gay Head too long…I was half way around the world and I seen a lot of things I liked, and a lot of interesting things…there was no comparison to what, you know, what I had left here.”
Napoleon Bonaparte Madison
April 2nd, 1887
DOD: May 28th, 1973
Gay Head, Massachusetts
Whaleman, Fisherman, Entrepreneur
“And then he went to sea. And traveled around the world. He may have been younger than eighteen…he was five when he started working. He could pick a fourteen quart bucket of blueberries in a couple of hours!”
-Wenonah Silva, Daughter
F. Ryan Malonson
November 2nd, 1962
Gay Head, Massachusetts
Chief Peacemaker of Aquinnah Wampanoag Judiciary, Purchased Referred Care Supervisor for Wampanoag Tribe
“We’d go up the cliffs and see everybody and then go up and go down…that was before the cliffs eroded.”