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

In her foundational book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes of the challenges that historiographic research and writing present Indigenous peoples. Noting that "History"—as both discipline and method—has often served to justify colonial violence and dispossession, Smith argues that Indigenous interventions seek to both re-write and re-right that archive, a project that "requires us to revisit, site by site, our history under Western eyes" (36). Written two decades after Smith's call, Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks's Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War is a transformative re-visioning of a crucial moment in US and Indigenous history that will be of great interest to academic and community historians, critical geographers, digital humanists, and those working in literary, cultural, women's and gender, settler-colonial, and Indigenous studies.

Building upon the work of Collin Calloway, Neal Salisbury, Jean O'Brien, and others, Brooks combines rigorous historiography and close contextual readings of primary and secondary materials with attention to Indigenous community, family, and ecological histories; an innovative use of historical fiction and narrative "interludes" that add texture and immediacy to the events examined; and a series of maps that reinvest the Northeast with Indigenous languages, place-names, and social relationships. As Brooks relates in the introduction, this methodology reflects two related commitments: first, a refusal of conventional paradigms of decline, vanishing, inevitability, and containment that structure contemporary accounts and ostensibly authoritative histories on the period; and second, an Indigenous mode of storytelling, or ôjmowôgan, grounded in a "cyclical activity of recalling and relaying" (4), a collective project that is less interested in causality and conclusion than in mapping the "network of relations" and conflicting visions of kinship, community, place, and belonging out of which the war came to be (7). What emerges is a masterful portrait of "a multitribal Indigenous resistance movement during colonial expansion … forged by multiple leaders … to reclaim and rebalance relations in a shared Algonquin homeland" (168).

Across nine chapters organized episodically into four sections (supplemented by additional materials available at http://ourbelovedkin.com), Brooks's ôjmowôgan meticulously and painstakingly recovers the multiple Indigenous actors, events, locations, perspectives, contexts, experiences, and "scenarios" that animated the conflict and inform its ongoing legacy (12). To these ends, Brooks organizes the story around two figures often relegated to the margins of colonial narratives: Pocasset saunkskwa, or headwoman, Weetamoo/Namumpum, who held kinship relations with Metacom/King Philip and maintained jurisdictional control and political influence across the region throughout the war; and Wawaus/James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar at Harvard's Indian College and leader of a "praying town" who produced some of the first documents printed in the colonies and later put his training to work on behalf of his family and community. By situating both figures within the expansive network of relations that informed their lives and work, Brooks recovers not only their individual stories but also those of dozens of other similarly neglected Indigenous figures whose lives overlapped and intersected with their own.

Parts 1 and 2, for instance, situate Weetamoo within the extensive kinship relations and political alliances that governed life in ndakinna, the Abenaki word which Brooks translates to mean "'our land … the place 'to which we belong'" (8). Whether strategically mobilizing English property law as a way of resisting further incursions from within settler-colonial property law, manipulating European notions of agriculture and improvement to support Indigenous land-use philosophies, or strengthening alliances between Pocasset and other Indigenous communities, Weetamoo comes to life not as the wife of Metacom's brother but as a recognized headwoman and shrewd political negotiator in her own right, entirely capable of navigating a complex matrix of intersecting Indigenous jurisdictions and competing colonial interests affecting her community. Shifting the scene to the colonial center of Boston and mission communities across Nipmuc territory, Brooks...