In fact, in general the treatment of the Native American identity by the citizens of Mattapoisett relies on a mixture of Native American ideas, yet privileging the Ecological Indian over the reality of Wampanoag Indians.

While hunting and the consumption of the wilderness isn’t a part of the Wamponaug identity that is unanimously preserved, this sense of place appears to be a communal value. This connectiveness to the land echoes the Ecological Indian, with the assumption that Native Americans are more in tune with the land they are on and that they are attached to the landscape they are in. This acts within the goals of the Ecological Indian in mind as this harmonious relationship unfolds. The land informs how citizens of Mattapoisett interact with each other once again, through this kind of Native American thinking that an attachment to the land and village a is more important part of the Wamponaug identity. 
These actions that Mattapoisett takes towards the preservation of the Wamponaug identity are complicated by how they constructed themselves independent of the history of oppression Native Americans experienced, allowing them to blend their assigned identity better with the Ecological Indian. Regularly, the attachment to place manifests as a form of oppression for others to inflict upon Native Americans as they are removed from their land even though Ray points out that “Native Americans are often characterized as living in more environmentally sustainable ways than are contemporary Euro-Americans, yet they are often oppressed in the name of “pristine” nature”. Even though Native Americans were thought to be better for the land they were still removed from it because of the value placed on environmental purity by non-native people. In being kept away from the wilderness because of this, the Native American identity becomes the ecological other because it isn’t allowing the full assumption of the Ecological Indian. Native Americans were repeatedly taken off their land by people who thought they could do a better job, and the utopia is not exempt from this. Their decision to privilege the Ecological Indian over the Wamponaug Indian replicates this treatment. 
While land is not a problem for Mattapoisett, where they are not being kicked off of it, they constructed their Wamponaug identity independent of the history surrounding Native Americans.

Being Wamponaug becomes a loose set of ideas about being Native American that Luciente and others follow, curated from ‘primitive’ societies without understanding what had made them so primitive in the first place. Part of what caused Native Americans to be removed from their land was the thought that they weren’t enough to take care of it, something that Mattapoisett has proven isn’t true as they can care for the land better than anyone as they reconstructed it. They infused these “primitive” societies with the futuristic technology, becoming the savior of these identities. But by cherry picking the best parts of societies they see as primitive the citizens of Mattapoisett are lacking a history that informs how these earlier societies worked. Instead, they remix what they think it means to be Wamponaug in order to privilege the environment over all.  
