Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War by Lisa Brooks, and: Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast by Christine M. Delucia (review)

In Our Beloved Kin, Lisa Brooks rewrites the history of King Philip’s War and its aftermath as a story of kinship and survival. In this respect, her new study builds on some of the central themes of her much-praised earlier monograph The Common Pot. Methodologically, Our Beloved Kin is an innovative work, organized in what Brooks characterizes as an “episodic” structure, and effecting for readers (through its use of maps emphasizing Indigenous place-names and its engagement with Indigenous languages) a generative defamiliarization of what many view as settled history (7). In a work that combines deep research into the traditional historical archive (land deeds and local court records) with close textual analysis and the techniques of creative nonfiction, Brooks explores the long history of King Philip’s War, highlighting how the conflict’s beginning should be traced to multiple places and events, and how responsible scholarly inquiry must extend (in both directions) well beyond the neat brackets of 1675–76.

To provide the necessary focus for its wide-ranging exploration, the narrative of Our Beloved Kin orbits around two historical figures—the Wampanoag leader Weetamoo and the Nipmuc Christian convert and mediator James Printer. The book is not a paired biography in a conventional sense, however. Brooks’s deep subject is the nature of Indigenous diplomacy and kin networks in the Northeast, and with this as her lens, she is able to present the history of violent colonial conflict in seventeenth-century New England as a long story of the “bonds” and “bounds” between tribal peoples and territories, closely examining the encroachment of those boundaries by English settler colonists over time (29). To tease out the complexity of this story of colonial encounter and survival, Brooks engages in considerable historical recovery work. Choosing a female leader like Weetamoo as one of her focal points is strategic in this regard, as it allows her to highlight the systematic erasure of Indigenous voices (particularly women’s voices) from the historical record, while also offering some incisive commentary on a number of glaring contradictions in that record. One of the great strengths of Brooks’s scholarship is the way it will send readers back into the archive to read against the grain and with a de-colonizing mind-set. In that vein, reassessing the captivity narrative genre emerges as one of the central subthemes of Our Beloved Kin. Brooks’s treatment of James Printer’s experiences at Harvard College and later as a prisoner during the war deeply complicates our understanding of the tropes of captivity, redemption, and conversion. Similarly, her discussion of Weetamoo’s significant role as a political leader sets up a provocative rereading of Mary Rowlandson’s narrative. There Brooks emphasizes Rowlandson’s estrangement in a “webbed landscape” of kinship relations that was, itself, the true target of colonial structures of containment and captivity (255).

As important as her reinterpretation of canonical texts may be, though, Brooks’s synthesis of widely disparate types of evidence is one of the most impressive features of her work, as she models in powerful ways for readers a historiographical approach that is attentive to local geography, ecology, economics, and politics. Brooks’s treatment of the use of free-ranging pigs by English settlers as a vehicle for colonial land-grabbing is just one small example of the arresting insights one finds scattered throughout the book. What pulls all these elements together, ultimately, is Brooks’s clear articulation of the nature of the settler colonial project, which she explores as a multifaceted effort to enclose Indigenous peoples. At the core of her work in Our Beloved Kin is a commitment to interrogating that project. Early in the book...