I went searching for my family. I found them at Shinnecock Hills

The first time I saw Shinnecock Hills, I didn’t understand what I was looking at.

I was in my early 30s, finally reuniting with my family. My grandfather Arnett was driving. We rolled slowly through the Shinnecock Nation, past dilapidated homes and through a landscape that carried centuries of memory beneath the tall grass. Then, almost casually, he pointed toward it. 

And there it was. 

Shinnecock Hills. 

Today, it’s one of the most famous golf courses on the planet. A cathedral of the game. A place where titans of industry roll their putts, where golfers speak about the land in spiritual terms and where the U.S. Open kicks off this week for the sixth time across three centuries.

But that’s not how my grandfather saw it.

He spoke about this golf course the way someone might speak about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the Pyramids of Giza. These links were an ancient monument built by our ancestors. With pride. With ownership. With a passion baked into our DNA. 

At the time, I didn’t fully understand what he meant. Years later, after learning I had been adopted, after discovering that my biological mother was Shinnecock, after beginning my own long journey to reconnect with her and understand where I came from, those memories returned with a different weight. And by then, something else had happened. 

I had fallen hopelessly in love with golf. Like so many addicts of the game, I became fascinated by its impossible pursuit. The perfect swing. The fleeting moments when body, mind and luck align to hit one clean and right. Golf is maddening. Golf is beautiful. Golf humbles you — steals your heart, then hands it back. Pure seduction all in an afternoon.

Somewhere along the way, I began to realize that the new game I loved might also hold clues about the family for whom I was searching. That realization sent me back through history. Back before television contracts, oversized drivers and graphite shafts. Back even before golf became a symbol of wealth and exclusivity.

Back to the late 19th century, when the Long Island shore and the Hamptons were becoming the playground of New York and America’s Gilded Age elite. The Vanderbilts had brought golf home from Europe. The wealthy wanted courses. The newly formed USGA wanted championships. But someone had to build those courses. Someone had to shape the land. Someone had to carry the bags. Someone had to teach the game.

The deeper I dug, the more I realized my family’s fingerprints were everywhere. The Shinnecock people helped clear and maintain the grounds and build the course that would become Shinnecock Hills.

The course itself sat on ancestral land and sacred burial grounds. The early workers found my family’s bones as they crafted fairways and built sand traps. 

For local Native families, the club represented contradiction. It was employment. It was an opportunity. It was an intrusion. It was survival. It was all of those things at once.

Then I discovered the story of Oscar Bunn, a distant relative of mine. He was a Shinnecock golfer. A teacher. A competitor. A man standing between two worlds. And beside him was another young player whose story would become legendary. John Shippen, the son of a Shinnecock minister, and later a caddie, a prodigy. He wasn’t the first Black golf professional. He was the first American professional.

The year was 1896. The second U.S. Open. And against all expectations, Shippen and Bunn were in the field.

Their presence alone sparked controversy. Some competitors reportedly threatened to withdraw rather than play alongside a Native American golfer and a Black golfer. The USGA refused. Shippen and Bunn would play.

I often imagine that week like scenes from a movie. The wealthy arrived in horse-drawn carriages. The crowds gathered.

The tension hanging over the course. The ceremonial blessing before the championship. The beating of drums. The smell of incense and smoke. The honoring of the land.

Then, after all the speeches and symbolism and conflict, the thing that mattered most began. Golf. Because golf has a strange way of stripping everything else away. Race. Wealth. Social status. Family history. Politics. Privilege.

A golf ball does not care who you are. It asks only if you can hit it correctly.

For a while it looked like Shippen might conquer them all. Standing among America’s best golfers, the 16-year-old found himself in contention to win the national championship. Then came the 13th hole in the second of two rounds. A wagon-wheel rut. A bad break. He took an 11. The kind of disaster that makes you want to leave your clubs behind, one every golfer understands instantly. One bad bounce. The difference between history and heartbreak.

Shippen finished 5th. Close enough to imagine what might have been. Far enough that the story faded into the margins, forgotten for decades and buried in an unmarked grave.

Bunn, my great relative, didn’t play as well. But he finished 21st in a field of 35, which to me is still incredible considering he was only 19, and most of the others were all accomplished pros from Europe. He went on to have a career as a golf pro, traveling the world, teaching others how to play and strike the ball.

And, of course, master what can’t be mastered. That’s golf. Because the game lives in that unconquerable space, a netherland between triumph and failure. Between belonging and exclusion. Between luck and skill. Between the past and the future.

As I searched and found my biological mother, and learned more about my Shinnecock heritage, I kept returning to these stories.

Oscar Bunn. John Shippen. My grandfather pointed proudly toward the course. The generations who worked the land and still do. The generations who loved it. The generations who struggled with what it represented. None of it is simple. History rarely is.

But golf somehow held all of it together. The contradictions.

Today, when I stand on a tee box and look down a fairway, I sometimes think about all those people who came before me. And I think about how remarkable it is that a game could become a bridge across generations. Golf did not erase history. It did not heal old wounds. But it created a place where stories of descendants could rediscover one another. A place where a daughter searching for her mother could unexpectedly find herself.

For years, I thought I was looking for where I came from. What I eventually discovered was that part of my story had been waiting for me all along. It was right there. Rolling across the Shinnecock hills. Resting beside the fairways. Hidden in the tall grass, like a lost ball waiting to be found.

Jasmine Sanders is a longtime journalist and radio personality. An avid golfer, she is writing a memoir that weaves together her search for family, the history of the Shinnecock people and the untold story of Native America’s role in shaping the game. Geoffrey Gray is an author, journalist and documentary filmmaker.