Abstract

Abstract:

This article illuminates the process of researching and creating digital maps for Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War, including reframing of Indigenous places and colonial stories, such as Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative. A first-person, reflective narrative highlights and reveals Indigenous studies methodologies, including recovering and interpreting place-names and concepts drawn from Indigenous languages; tracking the routes and rivers traveled by captors, converts, and leaders; and working in multiple archives to locate documents that reveal contexts obscured by the conventional histories of King Philip’s War. Drawing on multiple languages and disciplines, the article both raises questions about how we (that is, literary and historical scholars) frame “history” and “literature” and enhances our understanding of writing/mapping (awikhigawôgan) and history-making (ôjmowôgan) as activities in which we engage. As it highlights engagement with contemporary places and communities as well as with historical documents and narrative texts, the article, in both framework and methods, connects to and emerges from scholarship at the intersection of the discipline of history and the interdisciplinary network of Native American and Indigenous studies that seeks “new” modes of making history and literature.

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