The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (review)

The Common Pot is Lisa Brooks’s contribution to a growing body of early Native American studies that have been notable in recent years for their highly imaginative, innovative, and thoroughly interdisciplinary methodologies, as well as for an impressive interchange between local and global perspectives. Building on this tradition of scholarship by Laura Murray, Joanna Brooks, Hillary Wyss, Kristina Bross, Bernd Peyer, Maureen Konkle, Helen Jaskoski, Sandra Gustafson, Matt Cohen, Birgit Rasmussen, and others, Brooks argues that early Native American writers who became conversant in the European alphabetical medium and rhetorical conventions did not so much “acculturate” to European norms and ideologies as adopt and adapt alphabetic literacy. They did so in the service of a political activism that aimed to reclaim lands and rights in order to ensure the survival of “the common pot,” even as it transformed from “an abundant bowl that feeds the whole” through the traditional system of communal and reciprocal land tenure to an “inescapable dish enmeshed in conflict” resulting from European colonial encroachments, land alienation, and capitalist exploitation of natural resources, to a “clearing in which its participants strive to create a kettle of peace, and finally to a dish reclaimed in an attempt to protect its inhabitants from the sources of its destruction” (xll–xli). This appropriation of the European medium, Brooks argues, amounted not to a radical break with an indigenous “oral tradition” (assumed to be paradigmatic of Native cultures by an earlier generation of scholars) or to a compromise of their Native identity (as has often been lamented by European and Euro-American fetishizers of Native “purity”), but rather to an extension of and incorporation into traditional indigenous (albeit nonalphabetical) forms of “writing” such as wampum and pictographs recorded on birch-bark scrolls whose use long predated the introduction of European literacy into the Native Northeast. In order to understand early Native American writings by individuals such as Samson Occom, Joseph Brant, Hendrick Aupaumut, and William Apess, Brooks argues, they therefore need to be placed in the context not only of their rhetorical functions in European colonial space but also of their function in Native space.

Each of the first four chapters offers historical reconstructions of networks of textuality that construct “Native space” from the Connecticut River valley to the southern coast of New England, to the Mohawk River and Ohio River valleys. Chapter 1 elaborates the book’s central concept and organizing metaphor of the “common pot” as the Native ethos that “whatever was given from the larger network of inhabitants had to be shared within the human community” (5). It offers an analysis of the ethnographic record (starting with the seventeenth-century Jesuit Relations and English Separatist writings) in order to present a taxonomy of the spatialized semi-otic systems of indigenous “writing” in the Northeast through the use of wampum and birch-bark scrolls. In particular, the chapter focuses on a Native petition posted on an English fort (“Fort No. 2”) on the Connecticut River in 1742 by four Native men. Through the lens of traditional Native American stories, it tracks the petition in Native space through an extensive network of waterways and familial, geographical, and political relations that continued precolonial communication practices which relied on the use of wampum. Thus, Brooks concludes, “[w]riting was taking on a function similar to that of wampum in preserving the memory of councils and enabling the community to collectively recall them on a regular basis” (47).

Chapter 2 attends to the critical role that indigenous writing played in the intricate politics of the Mohegan land case, as alphabetical literacy intersected with wampum, communal histories, and formalized agreements between Native nations. Brooks begins the chapter by looking back to the seventeenth century in order to lay out competing visions for the “common pot” on the part of Narrangansett leader Miantonomo and Mohegan leader Uncas, as each attempted to respond to changes brought about by the English colonial presence that threatened the...