Wampanoag Art for the Ages, Traditional and Transitional (Paperback)

This book is an Eric Hoffer award finalist for excellence in indie publishing.

Wampanoag Art for the Ages, Traditional and Transitional is the first and only book of its kind. With interviews of foremost Wampanoag artists accompanied by 80 color photos, the book looks at the lifeway of this Algonquian Cape Cod tribe which greeted the first colonists, through its arts. Starting in the wetu (home) the book goes on to look at pottery, wampum, clothing, adornment, matting, twining, finger weaving, contemporary arts and painting, and more -- with Wampanoag creators including: Annawon Weeden, Ramona Peters (Nosapocket), Elizabeth and Jonathan James-Perry, Julia Marden, Robert Peters, Emma Jo Mills Brennan, and Mother Bear. The book includes an appendix of where to see some of the works of art.

Author Lee Roscoe beautifully articulates the tribe's spiritual and material lifeways through their arts. She had access to the tribe's artists thanks to her years of activism, spearheading the saving of hundreds of acres land, some sacred to the tribe, organizing thousands of signatures in favor of the tribe's federal recognition, and writing numerous articles about the tribe for Provincetown Arts magazine, The Cape Cod Times, Journal of the Genealogical Society of Cape Cod, The Cape Cod Chronicle, etc.

Lee is a longtime journalist, covering arts, science, history and hard news, currently a correspondent for Artscope and Provincetown magazines. She is a Woods Hole Ocean Journalism fellow, an awarded environmentalist, and playwright of dramas including The Mooncusser's Tale, a Cape Cod radio drama, and the film Dreams from a Planet in Peril. Cape Cod Museum of Art's director calls the film, "an important piece of art." Her work has often been supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.