Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War

by Lisa Brooks

Overview

Winner of the 2019 Bancroft Prize: A compelling and original recovery of Native American resistance and adaptation to colonial America

“By making what we thought was a small story very large indeed—Ms. Brooks really does give us ‘A New History of King Philip’s War.’”—The Wall Street Journal

“Provides a wealth of information for both scholars and lay readers interested in Native American history.”—Publishers Weekly

With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Lisa Brooks recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance during the “First Indian War” (later named King Philip’s War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. Brooks’s pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research but also in the land and communities of Native New England, reading the actions of actors during the seventeenth century alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300244328
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	02/19/2019
Series:	The Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	269,312
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Lisa Brooks is professor of English and American studies at Amherst College. She is the author of The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast.

Table of Contents

List of Maps ix

A Note on the Maps xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1

Prologue: Caskoak, the Place of Peace 17

Part I The Education Of Weetamoo And James Printer: Exchange, Diplomacy, Dispossession

1 Namumpum, "Our Beloved Kinswoman," Saunkskwa of Pocasset: Bonds, Acts, Deeds 27

2 The Harvard Indian College Scholars and the Algonquian Origins of American Literature 72

Interlude: Nashaway: Nipmuc Country, 1643-1674 107

Part II No Single Origin Story: Multiple Views On The Emergence Of War

3 The Queen's Right and the Quaker's Relation 115

4 Here Comes the Storm 140

5 The Printer's Revolt: A Narrative of the Captivity of James the Printer 169

Part III Colonial Containment And Networks Of Kinship: Expanding The Map Of Captivity, Resistance, And Alliance

6 The Roads Leading North: September 1675-January 1676 203

Interlude: "My Children Are Here and I Will Stay": Menimesit, January 1676 246

7 The Captive's Lament: Reinterpreting Rowlandson's Narrative 253

Part IV The Place Of Peace And The Ends Of War

8 Unbinding the Ends of War 301

9 The Northern Front: Beyond Replacement Narratives 328

Notes 347

Index 425

Editorial Reviews

By making what we thought was a small story very large indeed—Ms. Brooks really does give us ‘A New History of King Philip’s War.’”—The Wall Street Journal

“Brooks’s project provides a wealth of information for both scholars and lay readers interested in Native American history.”—Publishers Weekly

“This well-written and engrossing title is an essential read for anyone interested in U.S. history.”—Library Journal, starred review

“A re-examination . . . incorporating previously underread accounts from native sources adjacent to the war.”—Connecticut Magazine

“Commanding, meticulously researched, and elegantly readable.”—Maine Sunday Telegram

“The disappearance of indigenous voices and interlocutors during the war produced a problem for historians. . . . In Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War, Lisa Brooks sets out to change this. She effectively reverses a one-sided view of what has long been considered the most devastating war in American history. . . . In so doing, she gives a new account of an event even as she generates a new way of narrating history.” —Sarah Rivett, American Literary History

"Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks's Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Phillip's War is a transformative re-visioning of a crucial moment in US and Indigenous history."—Kirby Brown, Legacy


“An innovative work. . . .Our Beloved Kin aims at nothing less than a paradigm shift in the study of colonial New England, which it largely achieves by illustrating the value of treating King Philip’s War as one incident in the longer history of settler colonialism. . . . [This book] sets out to continue and deepen a tradition of revisionist historiography that began in the 1980s. . . . A major contribution to the field of colonial American history after the ‘linguistic turn.’. . .  [It] powerfully illustrates the transformative effect that foregrounding Indigenous perspectives on the past and present can have for the ongoing construction of the American story.”—David J. Carlson, Early American Literature

Winner of one of the 2019 Bancroft Prizes in American History and Diplomacy, sponsored by Columbia University

 Winner of the 2019 New England Society in the City of New York Book Awards, Historical Nonfiction category

Listed as one of the “must read “ titles in the 19th annual non-fiction category for the Mass Center for the Book Awards.

Winner of the 2019 John C. Ewers Book Award for best book on North American Indian Ethnohistory, sponsored by the Western History Association

Winner of the 2019 Donald L. Fixico Award for best book on American Indian and Canadian First Nations History, sponsored by the Western History Association 

"Brilliant, meticulously researched, a scholarly tour de force, I could not put Our Beloved Kin down!"—LeAnne Howe, Choctaw, author of Shell Shaker

"Our Beloved Kin is a major intellectual feat. With brilliant narration and storytelling, Brooks engages in a critical remapping that centers Indigenous sovereignty and kinship with conceptual rigor, methodological innovation, and important historical interventions"—J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, author of Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity

"In this mesmerizing and methodologically bold reassessment of King Philip’s War, Lisa Brooks brings to life the gendered resistance to colonialism in Indigenous place-worlds through the language and landscape of kinship."—Jean M. O'Brien, author of Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England

"There have been many books about King Philip’s War but none like this. Our Beloved Kin is insightful and a better way to understand New England’s past."—Colin G. Calloway, author of The Indian World of George Washington

“Lisa Brooks brilliantly guides us through the “place-worlds” of Weetamoo and James Printer to create a stunningly original account of King Philip’s War. The Native viewpoint changes everything we thought we knew.”—Mary Beth Norton, author of In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692

From the Publisher

11/27/2017
In this dense and ambitious account of the 17th-century conflicts known as King Philip’s War, Brooks (The Common Pot), associate professor of English and American studies at Amherst College, recovers histories of Native American adaptation and resistance to settler colonialism. Tracking the figures of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag chief, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar and printer, Brooks unveils new archival material as well as alternative histories embedded within well-known colonial documents—including Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, in which both Weetamoo and Printer appear. Though historians have portrayed Native Americans as outside the world of print, Brooks close reads materials such as land deeds to show that indigenous people engaged in “strategic adaptations” to colonial culture, making canny use of written documents to protect ancestral lands and confront white settlers. Reading key texts through the lens of geography and tribal history, Brooks reframes King Philip’s War as a complex set of stories about indigenous persistence. With so much material to analyze, Brooks sometimes struggles to untangle narrative threads, and her use of historical fiction to represent indigenous voices tends to confuse rather than enrich her scenes. Nonetheless, Brooks’s project provides a wealth of information for both scholars and lay readers interested in Native American history. Maps. Agent: Geri Thoma, Writers House. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 12/01/2017
Expanding on her scholarship in The Common Pot, Brooks (English & American studies, Amherst Coll.) recounts the events leading to the "First Indian War." Central to her account are Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc. Through their experiences and that of their relatives, the evolution of the colonial milieu that bred the conflict emerges. Brooks also documents the great depredations that were enacted by the colonists on Native peoples during the war, which were later ignored in historical accounts. Remembered was the captivity story of Mary Rowlandson, which was utilized to portray local Indians as violent savages who must be exterminated for civilization to emerge. The author challenges the historical record by utilizing Native sources, geography, and the reexamination of archival records held throughout New England. His narrative crafts how settler colonialism led to a significant conflict that lasted long after Wampanoag chief Metacom's murder, which historians have utilized to signal the end of King Philip's War. Renaming Metacom as King Philip allowed Anglo-American historians the ability to claim a definitive victory for New England's colonists while ignoring how badly they fared in later stages of the conflict. VERDICT This well-written and engrossing title is an essential read for anyone interested in U.S. history.—John R. Burch, Univ. of Tennessee at Martin

Library Journal