The Indian World of Early Americanists

When I was researching my dissertation and drowning in primary sources, my advisor asked me a question that helped me start to make sense of the details: "What surprises you?" Lisa Brooks's Bancroft-winning new book, rich with insights that will surprise the reader over and over, describes her own surprise as she sat down with Wampanoag tribal historians, hoping they would share oral traditions about the distant past. Instead, "out came books" (p. 13). Wampanoags have been reading and writing since the seventeenth century, and books form an essential part of their sources for analyzing and remembering the past. Brooks's attentiveness to many kinds of sources—from rivers to maps to oral history to the written word—makes Our Beloved Kin a startling interpretation of this seventeenth-century indigenous place and time.

Literary scholar Brooks's book on King Philip's War and historian Colin G. Calloway's book on eighteenth-century Indians and George Washington might seem to have little in common, but both take as a given an insight that academic scholars once found surprising and now accept: that Native people are an essential part of American history and are in many ways the central story of early America. Building on a generation of scholars including Daniel K. Richter, Jean M. O'Brien, Mary Beth Norton, Ann Marie Plane, Theda Perdue, and Calloway himself, Brooks and Calloway employ ethnographic methods, reading documents against the grain, and, in Brooks's case, familiarity with Algonquian places and Algonquian historians to provide dense histories of places, people, and interactions.

Both books reveal how closely European colonists and early U.S. leaders and citizens lived with Native people, as individuals and as nations. In praying towns and trading posts, they lived and worked in close quarters, and connections continued beyond those places. Metacom and Little Turtle visited the towns and homes of Europeans and Euro-Americans. Plymouth Colonial Governor Josiah Winslow and George Washington understood the diversity of Indian nations and leaders and how to distinguish allies from enemies. (None of which is to say they deeply understood each other or always respected each other's diversity.)

By recognizing this proximity and writing from Native as well as European perspectives, Brooks and Calloway give well-worn subjects new life. Since the 1980s, Calloway has written over a dozen books on Native history, much of that work on the eighteenth-century people into whose world Washington and his country intruded. Calloway's new book makes a major contribution in turning the story back around to show how embedded this Continental Army general and first U.S. president was in the Indian world that Calloway has done as much as anyone to show us.

Our Beloved Kin builds on Brooks's path-breaking first book, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (2008). That book brought Native literacy to the fore with a literary scholar's approach of analyzing a few individual writers along a common theme. Focusing on the writings of Samson Occom, Hendrick Aupaumut, Joseph Brant, and William Apess, Brooks explained "the common pot" as an Algonquian and Iroquoian metaphor for connectedness and the shared responsibility for maintaining and restoring peace. Our Beloved Kin applies similar analysis to the most studied Native-European war of the seventeenth century, producing a book that is more of an academic historian's kind of narrative than The Common Pot while still deeply embedded in indigenous language and place.

Over and over, both books reveal the central importance of land in early America and the fact that the land in question was Native ground. As Calloway succinctly puts his book's central point, "Washington spent a lifetime turning Indian homelands into real estate for himself and his nation" (p. 477). The debates and wars over...