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WORK TITLE: Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
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STATE: MA
COUNTRY: United States
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Phone: 413-542-5594
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LC control no.: n 2018008024
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2018008024
HEADING: Brooks, Lisa A.
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670 __ |a Making sense of mathematics for teaching the pulled small group, 2019: |b ECIP t.p. (Lisa A. Brooks) About the authors, after table of contents (Lisa A. Brooks, EdD; lecturer in the College of Education and Human Performance at the University of Central Florida)
670 __ |a University of Central Florida, viewed Feb. 12, 2018 |b (Lisa Brooks, Ed. D.; associate lecturer; Ed. D. in curriculum and instruction, mathematics education, University of Central Florida)
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Goddard College, B.A., 1993; Boston College, M.A., 1998; Cornell University, Ph.D., 2004.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Amherst College, Amherst, MA, associate professor of English, director, American Studies program, 2012–. Formerly John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University.
AWARDS:Roslyn Abramson Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching, Harvard University, 2008; Dorothy Lee Award, Media Ecology Association, 2011; Native American and Indigenous Studies Association prizes, 2011, 2013; Libra professorship, University of Maine at Farmington, 2012; Public Engagement fellowship, Whiting Foundation, 2016-17.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including American Indian Places, edited by Frances Kennedy, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2008; American Indian Literary Nationalism, by Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack, foreword by Simon Ortiz, University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), 2006; Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, University of Oklahoma Press (Norman, OK), 2008; A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2009; Companion to American Literature and Culture, edited by Paul Lauter, Wiley-Blackwell (Malden, MA), 2009; Maurice Kenny: Celebrations of a Mohawk Writer, edited by Penelope Kelsay, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 2011; Thinking, Recording, and Writing History in the Ancient World, edited by Kurt Raaflaub, Wiley-Blackwell (Malden, MA), 2013; Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England, edited by Siobhan Senier, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 2014. Contributor to professional journals and other periodicals, including American Literary History, International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, Northeastern Naturalist, PMLA, and Studies in American Indian Literatures.
SIDELIGHTS
Lisa Brooks is an associate professor of English at Amherst College in Massachusetts whose research emphasizes the writings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Native Americans. “As a writer, literary scholar and historian,” Brooks declared in an autobiographical statement on the Amherst College website, “I work at the crossroads of early American literature & history, geography and Indigenous studies. In my writing and my teaching, I like to ask questions about how we see the spaces known as ‘New England’ and ‘America’ when we turn the prism of our perception to divergent angles. Indigenous methodologies, including a focus on language, place, and community engagement, are crucial to my research, as is deep archival investigation.” She is the author of the monographs The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast and Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War. “Only recently have scholars begun to re-examine the history of the Indigenous societies that dominated the coasts of the seventeenth-century Northeast during Puritan settlement,” explained a contributor to the Yale Group for the Study of Native America. “This Algonquian-speaking world was a shared social space inhabited by nearly two-hundred-thousand, and its experiences … still too often remain absent” from accounts of the early European settlement of North America.
Brooks makes connections between literature and history that other studies of early American history miss. “‘Our Beloved Kin’ began as the story of James Printer and his three brothers,” wrote Richie Davis in the Daily Hampshire Gazette. “All were converted Christians; all were drawn into the conflict between colonists and Wampanoags, Nipmucs, Naragansetts and Pocumtucs that began just 55 years after Plymouth’s settlers had been welcomed in a spirit of peace by Metacomet’s father, Massasoit.” Most accounts of King Philip’s War rely on the writings of the settlers who virtually wiped out the Native American nations in the conflict in the 1670s, but the Amherst College scholar is able to show a different viewpoint based on the works of the Printer brothers. “‘Our Beloved Kin’ draws on written letters and other materials written by those Indians, who were thought to have been illiterate,” said Davis. “Her creative, readable telling doubles as a relevant and timely interpretation of their history; it also resonates today, with the plight of refugees around the world and racial profiling. Her book traces the interwoven paths of three characters: Wampanoag leader Weetamoo, who as a woman is less known than Metacomet (aka King Philip); James Printer, the persecuted Christian Nipmuc and scholar/teacher; and Mary Rowlandson, the Puritan woman whose own account of her capture in Lancaster is recast.”
Brooks’s study shows that King Philip’s War had as much to do with cultural conflict as it had to do with Puritan land hunger. “A whole generation of literate Christian Native Americans was making its appearance on the scene,” declared William David Barry in the Portland Press Herald. “Their success was starting to bother many of the leading colonials. In this book—for the first time in my experience—the whole of New England, both Native American and Anglo-American, is displayed culturally and politically, with individual aspirations.” “Brooks close-reads materials such as land deeds,” stated a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “to show that indigenous people engaged in ‘strategic adaptations’ to colonial culture.” Brooks’s monograph, Barry concluded, “is a carefully researched, honest and beautifully written book that sets a new balance for the study of New England and North American history.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Daily Hampshire Gazette, January 25, 2018, Richie Davis, review of Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War.
Portland Press Herald (Portland, ME), April 8, 2018, William David Barry, review of Our Beloved Kin.
Publishers Weekly, November 27, 2017, review of Our Beloved Kin, p. 53.
ONLINE
Amherst College, https://www.amherst.edu/ (May 16, 2018), author profile.
Yale Group for the Study of Native America, https://ygsna.sites.yale.edu/ (February 23, 2018), “YGSNA Celebrates New Books from Lisa Brooks and Christine DeLucia.”
Lisa Brooks
AMERICAN STUDIES, ENGLISH
Associate Professor of English and American Studies; Director of Studies
413-542-5594 Please call the college operator at 413-542-2000 or e-mail info@amherst.edu if you require contact info@amherst.edu 112 Johnson Chapel
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BROOKS, LISA
Professional and Biographical Information
Degrees
Ph.D. Cornell University, 2004
M.A. Boston College, 1998
B.A. Goddard College, 1993
Academic and Research Interests
As a writer, literary scholar and historian, I work at the crossroads of early American literature & history, geography and Indigenous studies. In my writing and my teaching, I like to ask questions about how we see the spaces known as “New England” and “America” when we turn the prism of our perception to divergent angles. Indigenous methodologies, including a focus on language, place, and community engagement, are crucial to my research, as is deep archival investigation. My first book, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast, focused on the recovery of Native writing and geographies, including the network of Indigenous writers which emerged in the northeast in the wake of English and French colonization. My next book, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War, reframes the historical landscape of “the first Indian War,” more widely known as King Philip’s War (1675-8). Having become increasingly drawn to the Digital Humanities, I have had the privilege of working with an extraordinary team of Amherst College students and scholars to create an interactive website, “Our Beloved Kin: A Digital Awikhigan,” which features maps that decolonize the space of the colonial northeast, rare seventeenth century documents, and digital storytelling designed to open paths of inquiry.
I have been fortunate to participate in an extensive regional and global network of writers, scholars, and communities. While completing my undergraduate degree, I worked on aboriginal rights and land preservation cases in our tribal office at the Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi. As an emerging writer, I was mentored through Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. After focusing on comparative American literatures and Native American Studies as a graduate student at Boston College and Cornell University, I joined the faculty at Harvard University, teaching a wide range of courses in Native American literature, transnational American history and literature, and Oral Traditions. During that time, I was deeply honored to be elected to the inaugural Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association and to participate in “a paradigm shift” within literary studies. I was part of the collaborative group that published Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, and contributed the widely circulated “Afterword: At the Gathering Place,” to the provocative, collectively authored American Indian Literary Nationalism. Building bridges among scholarly disciplines, I have published essays in Northeastern Naturalist, American Literary History, PMLA, Studies in American Indian Literatures and the International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies. I currently serve on the Editorial Boards of Studies in American Indian Literatures and Ethnohistory, and am a series editor for Native Americans of the Northeast, published by the University of Massachusetts Press. I continue to be active in community-based projects and networks, especially through the non-profit organization, Gedakina, which offers programs focused on cultural revitalization, youth and women’s empowerment, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in Native communities across New England.
Teaching Interests
I came to Amherst in 2012 from Harvard University, where I was the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities, in part because of the close, collaborative interactions between students, staff and faculty at Amherst. For me, learning from students and colleagues and being intellectually challenged in the classroom is a highlight of teaching in a liberal arts environment. I offer a wide range of courses in Native American & Indigenous studies, early American literature, contemporary literature, and comparative American Studies, which foster discussion of the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality and nationhood. I strive to bring participatory thinking and deliberation, which I wrote about in The Common Pot, to class discussions and student-driven projects. I am also fortunate to be able to teach from within the Younghee Kim-Wait/Pablo Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection, housed in the Frost Library Archives and Special Collections, and to work with a phenomenal, ever-expanding network of librarians, academics and tribal scholars on the Digital Atlas of Native American Intellectual Traditions. My classes often feature an interactive curriculum, where we host speakers in the classroom, attend performances, readings, and public talks, and get out on the land. In collaboration with campus partners and the Five College Native American and Indigenous Studies Program, I strive to bring creative writers, scholars, and leaders from the region and beyond to our campus and to the Kwinitekw (Connecticut River) Valley, which has always been a crossroads of exchange.
Awards and Honors
Whiting Foundation Public Engagement Fellowship, 2016-17
Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Prize: Most Thought Provoking Article, 2013, for “The Constitution of the White Earth Nation: A New Innovation in a Longstanding Indigenous Literary Tradition,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 23:4
Libra Professorship, University of Maine at Farmington, Spring 2012
New England Consortium Regional Fellowship, 2011
Media Ecology Association's Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture: The Common Pot, 2011
Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Prize: Reasoning Together. Voted one of the ten Most Influential Books in Native American and Indigenous Studies of the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century, 2011
Roslyn Abramson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, Harvard University, 2008
Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Diversity Fellowship, 2007-2008
Native Americans at Harvard College “Role Model of the Year” Award, 2004
Guilford Dissertation Prize for Highest Excellence in English Prose, Cornell University, 2004
Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, 2002-2003
John Carter Brown Library Fellowship, May-June 2002
Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, Nov.-Dec. 2001
Frances C. Allen Fellowship, Newberry Library, July-August 2000
Jean Stroebel-Starr Memorial Award, 1997: “Apprentice of the Year,” Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers
Selected Publications
Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War, Yale University Press, January 2018
The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast, University of Minnesota Press, 2008
“‘Every Swamp is a Castle’: Navigating Native Spaces in the Connecticut River Valley, Winter 1675-1677 and 2005-2015” Northeastern Naturalist 24:1, Special Issue on Winter Ecology: Insights from Biology and History, ed. Scott Smedley and Thomas Wickman, March 2017
“Introduction” and Section Editor, Abenaki Literature, Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England, edited by Siobhan Senier, University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
“Turning the Looking Glass on King Philip’s War: Locating American Literature in Native Space” American Literary History 25:4 (Special 100th Issue), Winter 2013
“Corn and Her Story Traveled: Reading North American Graphic Texts in Relation to Oral Traditions,” Thinking, Recording, and Writing History in the Ancient World, edited by Kurt Raaflaub,Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
“The Primacy of the Present, the Primacy of Place: Navigating the Spiral of History in the Digital World" PMLA Theories and Methodologies Special Feature: "The Long and the Short: Problems in Periodization," March 2012.
“The Constitution of the White Earth Nation: A New Innovation in a Longstanding Indigenous Literary Tradition” Studies in American Indian Literatures 23:4, Special Issue on Constitutional Criticism, edited by James McKay, Winter 2011.
“Painting ‘Word-Pictures’ in Place: Maurice Kenny’s Empathetic Imagination of Tekonwatonti/Molly Brant,” Maurice Kenny: Celebrations of a Mohawk Writer, edited by Penelope Kelsay, SUNY Press, 2011.
“The Reciprocity Principle and ITEK: Understanding the Significance of Indigenous Protest on The Presumpscot,” with Cassandra M. Brooks, International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 3:2, 2010.
“The Emergence of Sequoyah’s Syllabary in the Cherokee Nation, 1821.” A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, Harvard University Press, 2009.
"Indigenous Oral Traditions of North America, Then and Now." Companion to American Literature and Culture, edited by Paul Lauter, Blackwell, 2009.
“Digging at the Roots: Locating an Ethical, Native Criticism.”Reasoning Together: The NativeCritics Collective, University of Oklahoma Press, 2008.
“Afterword: At the Gathering Place,” American Indian Literary Nationalism, by Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack, with a foreword by Simon Ortiz. University of New Mexico Press, 2006.
“The Grandma Lampman’s Site,” with Louise Lampman Larivee, American Indian Places, ed. Frances Kennedy, Houghton Mifflin, 2008.
YGSNA Celebrates New Books from Lisa Brooks and Christine DeLucia
Image of Lisa Brooks' book Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War and Christine DeLucia's book Memory Lands: King Philip's War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast
Lisa Brooks' and Christine DeLucia's new books, on the subject of King Philip's War, were celebrated at an event on February 20th.
February 23, 2018
On February 20th at the Peabody Museum, YGSNA members welcomed professors Lisa Brooks and Christine DeLucia to celebrate the highly anticipated publication of their new books: DeLucia’s Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast and Brooks’ Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War. Both books were released in January with Yale University Press in the Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity. Both reassess the Native Northeast’s rich and disturbing past, one whose history was recorded by Puritan leaders in the Seventeenth Century and shaped into larger national narratives about the meanings of America.
Only recently have scholars begun to re-examine the history of the Indigenous societies that dominated the coasts of the seventeenth-century Northeast during Puritan settlement. This Algonquian-speaking world was a shared social space inhabited by nearly two-hundred-thousand, and its experiences under the weight of European and English colonization still too often remain absent from analyses of early America.
Both DeLucia and Brooks have written field-altering works that reconsider this history and its enduring legacies. Both take varying methodological and theoretical approaches to the wars of the seventeenth-century, particularly King Philip’s War of 1675-76. In fact, Our Beloved Kin offers “a new history of King Philip’s War,” doing so, as Brooks relays, by providing new subjects of analysis, Indigenous place-names, and narrative strategies that center Native people within this violent colonial conflict.
An Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College, Brooks (Abenaki) has written extensively about the literary and cultural history of the Native Northeast. Her first book, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast, was published in 2008 by the University of Minnesota Press, and like Our Beloved Kin, it works against the totalizing historiographies of Puritan and later American scholars that have often erased Native peoples from the region. Her new book prioritizes Native voices and authority. It particularly assesses forms of Indigenous female political leadership and autonomy across seventeenth-century New England. It also highlights the rich dynamism of Native intellectual production and traces the experiential nature of colonialism through individual Native biographies.
Professor Christine DeLucia is familiar to many within the YGSNA community. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies before taking a position in the History Department at Mt. Holyoke, where she teaches courses in Native American history, historical methods, and environmental history, among others. Memory Lands examines the aftermath of this seismic conflict, which reordered the demographic and spatial order of the Northeast and sent thousands of Native peoples out of the region as refugees, captives, and slaves. DeLucia traces key sites of such legacies and exposes the ongoing colonial and American national practices of erasing such histories of violence.
Both presentations introduced key elements within these ambitious and wide-ranging studies. Their presentations were followed by a book-signing at the Museum and then a dinner at the Native American Cultural Center with NACC students, faculty, and community members.
Print Marked Items
Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King
Philip's War
Publishers Weekly.
264.48 (Nov. 27, 2017): p53.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War
Lisa Brooks. Yale Univ., $35 (448p) ISBN 9780-300-19673-3
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: GeriThoma, Writers House. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War." Publishers Weekly, 27 Nov. 2017, p. 53. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517575701/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7348cb9b. Accessed 25 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517575701
In ‘Our Beloved Kin,’ Lisa Brooks revisits the conflict between New England’s colonists and Native Americans
It raises the question – who were the real savages?
BY WILLIAM DAVID BARRY
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At last, in Lisa Brooks’ commanding, meticulously researched and elegantly readable new book, “Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War,” academics and general readers arrive at something of a fair understanding of the armed conflict between colonial New Englanders and Native Americans.
Brooks, a Native American from Vermont, associate professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College and author of the celebrated book “The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast,” builds on scholarship of recent decades, a clear knowledge of geography as well as her own formidable understanding of deeds, treaties and other rarely consulted documents. She introduces readers to individual Native women and men of the 1670s and delineates their lives, tribal homelands and interconnections as never before. Brooks’ enviable use of maps graphically illustrates what proves to be a massive colonial land grab stretching from Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Hampshire to Caskoak (now Portland), where the book begins and ends.
REVIEW
“Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War.” By Lisa Brooks. Yale University Press. Hardcover. 431 pages. $35.
Early colonial chroniclers, including Increase Mather and Nathaniel Saltonstall, termed this action “the war with the Indians of New England” or “The First Indian War” and dated it between 1675 and 1676. It was not until 40 years later, in 1716, in Capt. Benjamin Church’s “Entertaining History of King Philip’s War” that the bloodbath acquired a lofty name; King Philip was the English name for Metacom, a Wampanoag leader. Church, himself an old Indian fighter, put Metacom at the center of the native forces, a “fact” widely accepted until recent years, a way of inflating the chief to hero or worthy rival status. Metacom’s stirring death fed Yankee propaganda mills for centuries.
An aside – I have been wishing for such a book as “Our Beloved Kin” since 1954. It was then that I inherited a copy of “American Hero Stories, 1492-1865” written by Ava Tappan in 1906. The chapter about Metacom cast him as a sort-of hero, an unpalatable blend of fancy, truth, lies, envy, misdirection and Yankee self-delusion that shocked my 8-year-old self:
“The white man’s gun missed fire, but the Indian’s bullet went straight, and the chief fell dead. It would have broken his heart if he had known the fate of his little boy, for the child was sent with hundreds of other captives to the West Indies and sold as a slave. He was the last of the race of Massasoit, the faithful friend of the Englishmen.”
Talk about a whitewash.
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For the United Colonies, the killing of Metacom marked the end of the First Indian War in 1676, mission accomplished. For the Native American tribes in New England, it meant the beginning of American slave trade, eviction from their lands and a brutal guerrilla war that would smolder into the 1760s and beyond.
There is so much information, so many ideas contained in “Our Beloved Kin” that it is difficult to know which lines to follow in a short review. One of Brooks’ stand-out points is her discussion of the omission of Weetamoo (Namumpum), the female leader of the Pocasset Wampanoag, from (white men’s) written histories: “An influential Wampanoag diplomat, Weetamoo presented a political challenge to the Puritan men who confronted her authority,” Brooks writes. “Her strategic adaption to the colonial ‘deed game’ enabled her to protect more land than any surrounding leader…”
Though the name Weetamoo appears in numerous colonial land transactions and other documents, she is only a footnote in colonial accounts of war, no doubt because making war on a man, and a king/chief at that, seemed far more noble than fighting a woman. When Weetamoo’s defiled and headless body was found, nobody took credit, attributing it to “God … his own hand.” Weetamoo’s head was stuck on a pole in Taunton. The use of the word “savage” is certainly warranted in this instance, and not for the Native Americans.
Throughout history, individual Native Americans, formerly cast as near faceless or war-painted Indians, assume human form in this narrative. We find such participants as James Printer, a graduate of Harvard Indian School, who was the typesetter for Eliot’s Indian Bible (the first Bible published in North America), and other Native scholars and teachers. A whole generation of literate Christian Native Americans was making its appearance on the scene. Their success was starting to bother many of the leading colonials. In this book – for the first time in my experience – the whole of New England, both Native American and Anglo-American, is displayed culturally and politically, with individual aspirations. “Our Beloved Kin” is a carefully researched, honest and beautifully written book that sets a new balance for the study of New England and North American history.
Arts
Raising questions, reclaiming history: A visit with Amherst professor Lisa Brooks, author of ‘Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War’
Author and professor Lisa Brooks. Photo by John B. Weller
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By RICHIE DAVIS
For the Gazette
Thursday, January 25, 2018
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AMHERST COLLEGE NATIVE AMERICANS ABENAKI KING PHILIP'S WAR LISA BROOKS
The story of King Philip’s War, which ended 440 years ago, may be central to the history of the Connecticut River Valley, marked in locations like King Philip’s Hill in Northfield, the Bloody Brook Battle monument in Deerfield, and even King Philip restaurant in Phillipston. The three-year armed conflict is largely blamed on attacks on colonial settlers by Wampanoags and other native “savages.”
But “Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War” (Yale University Press), the second book by Lisa Brooks, an Amherst College associate professor of English and American Studies, depicts the prolonged war on a dozen settlements throughout much of the region as far more complex — the result of mistaken assumptions that English settlers made about the native tribes.
“Our Beloved Kin” draws on written letters and other materials written by those Indians, who were thought to have been illiterate. Her creative, readable telling doubles as a relevant and timely interpretation of their history; it also resonates today, with the plight of refugees around the world and racial profiling.
Her book traces the interwoven paths of three characters: Wampanoag leader Weetamoo, who as a woman is less known than Metacomet (aka King Philip); James Printer, the persecuted Christian Nipmuc and scholar/teacher; and Mary Rowlandson, the Puritan woman whose own account of her capture in Lancaster is recast in this deeper interpretation.
Brooks, who is Abenaki (she also has Polish heritage), began learning about the indigenous history of the region when she worked in the Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi’s Vermont tribal office while finishing her undergraduate degree at Goddard College. That research, on native rights and land-preservation cases, helped her to see a stark reality: For most people, it is surprising to learn that there are still “Indians” in New England. In 2008, Brooks published her first book, “The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in New England” (University of Minnesota Press).
“The illusion in New England was that all these people disappeared,” she said recently, in her kitchen, with its view of the woods. “But the reality is that these people have remained … and know those places like nobody knows those places.”
Brooks also learned then of the vast array of existing written deeds, historical accounts and even collective petitions to the King by indigenous people. She found archives of written accounts by Indians, some of whom — such as Nipmuc scholar James Printer — prepared for training at preparatory schools. Some went onto Harvard Indian College, established as part of the college’s 1650 charter in an effort to convert native people to Christianity. The college effectively taught children of leaders to spread literacy among others in the tribe. And Brooks turned to documents at the Massachusetts Archives and the Massachusetts Historical Society, as well as the vast Native American Literature Collection at Amherst College, where she arrived in 2012, after teaching in the humanities at Harvard.
“What shocked me, when I decided to go to graduate school at Boston College, was that my professors believed there were no sources,” said Brooks, who later earned her Ph.D. at Cornell University. “I realized, ‘Oh my God, people don’t even know native people are still here — they don’t realize how present they are in the historical record, they don’t realize native people are writing about the most pressing issues people are talking about, even when we’re talking about environmental issues.
“A lot of my research came out of that moment of disjunct,” she continued, “where, for me, native history was at the very center of American history and American literature. There was a sense of dissonance.”
‘Kinship’
“Our Beloved Kin” began as the story of James Printer and his three brothers. All were converted Christians; all were drawn into the conflict between colonists and Wampanoags, Nipmucs, Naragansetts and Pocumtucs that began just 55 years after Plymouth’s settlers had been welcomed in a spirit of peace by Metacomet’s father, Massasoit.
“I did not intend to write a book about King Philip’s War,” Brooks said. “I got to talking with people in the Nipmuc community about James Printer. This is an amazing story about four brothers who got caught up in the war … Most people, the war arrives, and you suddenly have to figure out how you and your children and your relatives and the people you care about — how you’re going to survive.”
Printer, along with his brother Job, became a teacher in Nipmuc communities, and a typesetter at Harvard Press, as well as a translator there for its bilingual Bible. While in what is now Marlborough, Printer and other native men were accused of taking part in an attack on settlers in Lancaster, even though there was no evidence, and they were later found in trial to have been attending church when the attack occurred.
“What James Printer goes through during this war is almost unthinkable,” said Brooks. Accused of murdering English settlers, he was part of a group of “Christian Indians” who were led, with ropes around their necks, to prison in Boston, where a lynch mob gathered. After about a month, they were tried, and he was found innocent.
Along with his brother Job — who had served as a scout for colonial troops, traveling 80 miles on snowshoes at one point to warn of a later impending Lancaster raid — he faced a mob mentality that “all the Indians must just be going rogue,” said Brooks. “The English are thinking with a racial logic: ‘All the Indians are going to band together.’ But there’s no such concept here. There’s no sense that we’re all the same race, because race didn’t exist for them. For them, what was more important: What are your kinship relationships? What are your alliances?”
Silent voices
Another story in the book also reflects the difference between the standard narrative and Brooks’ history. It’s about the battle that happened just south of Deerfield’s Mount Sugarloaf — the hills were then known as the Great Beaver — that began hostilities in the Kwinitekw valley in August 1675.
Despite generally good relations between the native people at Nonotuk, the upland north of Northampton and south of Hadley, an attack at Quaboag — now the Worcester County community of Brookfield — caused fear that they would be the next settlement hit by their Indian neighbors. A contingent of Massachusetts forces convinced settlers to launch a surprise dawn raid to confiscate all Nonotuk firearms, which natives used for hunting.
“This was on the verge of the fall hunting period,” said Brooks. “And even today, we know that some native families are dependent on hunting to get through the winter. For some people, not having access to firearms led to starvation. The [colonists] were thinking of it as military disarmament, but to native people, it was about subsistence,” and they fled north, to relatives in Pocumtuc (Deerfield) and Squakheag (Northfield) — pursued by 100 members of the Massachusetts colonial forces.
The confrontation, at the foot of the hills described by the Pocumtuks as Ktsi Amiskw, the Great Beaver, had symbolic significance for the natives, who’d long told a traditional story about a figure known as the Great Beaver, who hoarded resources by backing up the river with its dam, and the Great Transformer, Hobbomock, which restored the balance by battling with the beaver — and eventually breaking its neck to let the water flow again.
“The native story goes back thousands of years, and in some ways it’s about creation of what is now native Glacial Lake Hitchcock and its dispersal, becoming the Connecticut River,” said Brooks. “For me, this is incredibly symbolic.”
Brooks also finds symbolism in how these battles later were marked, memorializing slain settlers, but overlooking the natives’ perspective. In the case of a memorial to Capt. Richard Beers, along Route 63 in Northfield, for example, there’s no mention of its location being on native planting fields, and, Brooks said, “no memory of the native women who planted there.”
While Philip’s sister-in-law, Weetamoo, is well known among the Wampanoags and Nipmucs as a leader in her own right, most standard tellings depict her as a minor player. Or they convey her as a woman wavering between two sides — wringing her hands trying to decide whether to join Metacomet or to help Plymouth Gov. Winslow, who sought her neutrality. Brooks says she tried to present a much fuller picture of a strong negotiator and diplomat, skilled at building alliances and on guard against “deed games” played by colonists trying to grab land.
Ultimately, the kinship network prevailed, and King Philip sought and received refuge with Weetamoo before the colonial forces found him. When Plymouth Colony forces finally arrived at his village, said Brooks, “all they found were some pigs and dogs,” Brooks said.
In early March 1676, Weetamoo was part of a group of women — including Puritan captive Mary Rowlandson — along with children and elders, all pursued by colonial forces across the freezing-cold Paquaug River, now the Millers River in Athol. In Rowlandson’s account — which was printed at Harvard Press by Printer, who also helped negotiate her release — the women used dead wood to build a raft and cross the river, building camp on the other side as they headed north.
The same day that they crossed, she reported being astounded that the colonial army was unable to follow across. The women were saved by their resourcefulness.
Making connections
“Our Beloved Kin,” 10 years in the making, is accompanied by a companion website — ourbelovedkin.com — that was created with Brooks’ research assistants and colleagues at Amherst through Five College Digital Humanities to include many of the photos, maps, documents and side stories that couldn’t fit in the 448-page print edition.
Brooks, who will take part in a March 14 program at Northampton’s Forbes Library, as well as in a Historic Deerfield panel discussion April 28, says, “It was really difficult to research and write, to confront this violence. It was painful. But I had to do it because there were things I needed to learn.”
The author, who’s likely to face the same criticism of revisionism that authors like Howard Zinn and Jill Lepore have, explains: “I don’t want this to be a definitive history of King Philip’s War. What I really want is for this book to raise questions for people. Ideally, people would make connections to issues that are going on now.”