Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War by Lisa Brooks (review)

In 1935 the Narragansett princess Red Wing trumpeted the arrival of the Narragansett Dawn, a new magazine that would chronicle the “sunrise of better times” for the Narragansetts and directly challenge the Rhode Island General Assembly’s 1880 effort to extinguish the tribe.¹ Considering how many scholars have declared the extinction of Indigenous peoples by ascribing finality to genocidal wars and massacres, such stories of sunrise and rebirth can be difficult to find or to believe. Over the last two decades, however, literary scholars have joined with many Indigenous communities to demonstrate that Red Wing was neither alone nor mistaken in her hopes for the future of her people. Gerald Robert Vizenor, Hilary E. Wyss, Craig S. Womack, Siobhan Senier, and others have traced the rich literary and scholarly traditions that, as Womack has argued, have set Native communities apart from their non-Native neighbors as individual “nation[s] of people with distinct worldviews that deserve to be taken seriously.” This intellectual work, Womack continues, “is an important exercise of sovereignty.”² For Red Wing, the insistence on sovereignty was also the work of nourishing community and homeland. She imagined that Narragansetts “who have come thru that long night of oblivion” would continue to cultivate the seeds of a community so that their children could “find the heritage of the Narragansett fathers and mothers, and loyalty to our country in their own back yard.”³

Lisa Brooks’s work has been at the heart of these intersecting worlds of literature, history, place, and community. Our Beloved Kin is her latest effort to demonstrate that scholars have much to gain from spending time in all four. In taking on a “new” history of King Philip’s War, Brooks has chosen a daunting task: to reframe a familiar story of Indigenous peoples in seventeenth-century New England and to demonstrate that Indian sovereignty in New England did not die with Philip. This work is important in its ambition and the newness of the history it tells, as well as in its emphasis on sometimes unwieldy details. It is perhaps even more significant for the difficult questions it poses.

Like Red Wing, Womack, and others, Brooks seeks to “reverse the narrative of absence and reveal the persistence of Indigenous adaptation and survival” (6). For her, this entails a cyclical process of recovering and relaying stories, part of “a decolonizing process of expanding the strategies” (4) of historical scholarship. These strategies include directing a healthy skepticism toward the original Puritan written accounts of the war, developing familiarity with the Indigenous languages that describe the ecologies and the world- views of the region’s Algonquian peoples, devoting careful attention to the landscapes that Algonquians understood and cultivated, and maintaining a close connection to the Indigenous communities who know these lands and their stories. Brooks has found so many layers to uncover that she has assembled a host of primary sources, maps, and photographs of some of the important settings on a website associated with the book.⁴

With these different approaches, Brooks expands our appreciation for the people who inhabited New England in the seventeenth century. Although many histories have explored the collective interests of different colonial and Indigenous groups at the time of King Philip’s War, Brooks focuses on the lives and experiences of individuals. For example, the long-overdue attention Brooks pays to Weetamoo, the sachem of the Pocassets and sister-in-law of Philip, brings her out from historical shadows and shows her to be a careful defender of her people before and during the conflict. Similarly, Brooks shows how the Nipmuc James Printer sought out new sources of power for his community by studying at the Harvard Indian College and serving as an indispensable collaborator in the first English- and Massachusett-language publications of the Harvard Press. Brooks carefully traces these lives...