Saving Seafood

Aquinnah Tribe, fishermen file new wind lawsuit

June 9, 2025 — The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), along with environmental groups and fishing charter businesses, filed a new lawsuit last week against federal agencies that approved two offshore wind projects 20 nautical miles south of the Island.

Concern over impacts to the marine environment and mammals, especially the North Atlantic right whale, as well as adverse visual and cultural effects in areas of tribal significance from New England Wind 1 and 2 pushed the Tribe to join the lawsuit.

“We joined the lawsuit because this issue is so very important to us. Like all the other plaintiffs, we as individual Tribal Members and our Tribe as a whole are being harmed by these giant wind farms, making an industrial park out of our waters,” the Tribe’s Chairwoman Cheryl Andrews-Maltais said in a statement. “However unlike the other plaintiffs, the negative impacts to us go back as far as time immemorial and as deep as to who we are as Aquinnah Wampanoag People; harming our culture, traditions and spirituality, which connects us to the lands, waters, sky and all living things. Since individually we weren’t being listened to, we hope that maybe now with this lawsuit our collective voices will be heard.”

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced it approved the two offshore wind projects in July last year, following authorization by the Department of the Interior in a Record of Decision on April 2, 2024. Together, both projects, which will include up to 129 turbines, are projected to have the capacity to produce up to 2,600 megawatts of renewable energy and could power more than 900,000 homes.

But plaintiffs — which include Nantucket-based nonprofit ACK for Whales, Rhode Island-based nonprofit Green Oceans, a group of charter fishing companies, and individual fishermen — argue that government agencies violated several federal laws in authorization of the offshore wind projects. The case was filed in federal district court in Washington D.C.

Read the full article at The Martha’s Vineyard Times

Aquinnah tribe supports wind lawsuit

December 11, 2024 — The leader of the Martha’s Vineyard Native American tribe, and a tribal citizen who runs a popular charter fishing business, are supporting a lawsuit against a wind farm that is undergoing construction off Aquinnah’s coast.

The chair of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), Cheryl Andrews-Maltais, filed a declaration in federal district court in Washington, D.C., stating that the tribe has suffered as the result of the government’s actions approving Revolution Wind, a development under construction 12 miles from the Vineyard.

William (“Buddy”) Vanderhoop has filed a similar declaration; both read like witness statements. Vanderhoop said that the fishing grounds that he brings customers to have not been as productive as in prior years, and he worries about his business as a result.

Describing themselves as a grassroots organization, the Rhode Island group Green Oceans is alleging in the lawsuit filed at the beginning of this year that the federal government has violated a number of laws — including the Endangered Species and Clean Water acts — by approving the construction of Revolution Wind. Some 35 other plaintiffs are part of the lawsuit, including the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance and Save Right Whales Coalition.

Revolution Wind is expected to consist of 65 Siemens Gamesa turbines — which feature blades more than 300 feet long — with the capacity to generate up to 400 megawatts for Rhode Island and 304 megawatts for Connecticut, enough to power more than 350,000 homes.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management approved the wind farm in November last year.

But tribal members, including Andrews-Maltais, worry about the impact the offshore wind development is having on many significant cultural practices, the environment as well as wildlife in the area.

Read the full article at Martha Vineyard Times

MASSACHUSETTS: ‘Deeply troubled.’ Keating, Aquinnah tribe want faster notice after wind turbine collapse

July 31, 2024 — After the July 13 collapse of a Vineyard Wind turbine blade in the project area south of Martha’s Vineyard, 48 hours passed before Nantucket officials got word. For the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), the lag was even longer.

It’s a wait that U.S. Rep. William Keating, D-Massachusetts, echoing the criticism of leaders on the islands, says was unacceptable.

In a letter last week to the head of the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, Keating called foul on a process that failed to alert leaders on Nantucket about the football field-sized blade breaking off in the nearby lease area until two days later.

Keating is now calling on the agency to create protocols that would require local municipal and tribal leaders to be immediately notified of hazardous situations in the wind lease areas south of Martha’s Vineyard and southwest of Nantucket.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Aquinnah Herring Cam Offers Fish’s Eye View of Underwater Action

April 28, 2016 — Since installing the Island’s first underwater herring cam in March, scientists for the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), have had a fish’s-eye view of herring, otters, cormorants and other species making their way through a historic herring run in Aquinnah.

On a chilly afternoon this week, Bret Stearns, director of the tribe’s natural resources department, along with lab manager Andrew Jacobs, stood at the top of a steep bank looking down at a simple fish weir and monitoring station between Menemsha and Squibnocket ponds. Small metal poles formed a V-shaped fence, forcing anything larger than a minnow into a small chamber where an underwater camera is running 24 hours a day. Occasionally a cormorant would splash to the surface on the other side and paddle its way upstream, under a culvert and into Squibnocket Pond.

A long-running moratorium on herring fishing in the state applies to both commercial and recreational use, but Native American tribes are allowed to harvest the fish for sustenance. The natural resources department has long sought a better system to monitor the population and ensure that the fish are being harvested sustainably.

In the past, commercial harvests could provide an estimate for the overall population, Mr. Stearns said, but solid numbers were out of reach. In recent years, the data has been purely anecdotal. “There was really nothing to document how the population was doing,” Mr. Stearns said.

Read the full story at the Vineyard Gazette