Saving Seafood

Tribe part of new sweeping petitions to suspend offshore wind

September 2, 2025 — The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), along with a number of other tribal nations and fishing groups, filed two new petitions Wednesday that call for the immediate suspension of all offshore wind projects in the Northeast pending a federal reassessment.

The petitions were filed with nine federal agencies — the U.S. Departments of the Interior, Transportation, Defense, Homeland Security, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Parks Service, U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force — and ask for the suspension of South Fork Wind, SouthCoast Wind, Sunrise Wind, Vineyard Wind, Empire Wind, and the New England Wind projects, many of which are off of the Vineyard.

Read the full article at the The Martha’s Vineyard Times

Gay Head Tribe Sues Over Offshore Wind Farm

June 3, 2025 — The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) joined a lawsuit last week that is attempting to nullify the approvals of a large offshore wind energy project off the Vineyard’s shores.

The tribe, along with several Nantucket residents, fishermen groups and the ACK for Whales nonprofit, filed the suit in federal district court in Washington, D.C., claiming that several federal government agencies did not take enough into consideration when they greenlit the New England 1 and 2 projects.

The tribe and other plaintiffs argue that the approvals violate the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act and other laws around historic preservation.

“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,” said Cheryl Andrews-Maltais, the tribal council chairwoman. “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.”

Read the full article at the Vineyard Gazette

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