The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (review)

In The Common Pot Lisa Brooks has begun to do for Native people of the Northeast, particularly Wabanaki people, a task parallel to what Craig Womack is doing for Muscogee and other Native nations of the southeastern United States, what Greg Sarris has been doing for West Coast peoples, and what the late Paula Gunn Allen did for Pueblo and other (mainly) southwestern people. Brooks’s consideration of early writings in English by Native people from the Northeast shows a great array of political and intellectual responses to the pressures of colonization, and it makes visible the connection between their writing in English and traditional mnemonic representations, like wampum and maps on birchbark scrolls, used to document social organization, law, treaties, and people’s relationship to land. The core of Native being, for Brooks, is “the ongoing relationship and responsibility to land and kin” (xxxii). The act of writing this book proceeds from her sense of responsibility to the Abenaki people from which she comes; while she hopes people from her community will want to read the book, a much wider audience will benefit from the careful research and clear paradigm informing this text.

Citing Womack in her introduction, Brooks declares her purpose to bring stories from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings to contemporary northeastern Native people as a tool for ongoing building of the consciousness of the people: “These early writings help us to see how Native nations continued to imagine themselves into being even as they grappled with forces that threatened to annihilate them. Moreover, these stories help us to imagine ourselves here, in relation to those that preceded us” (xxxiii).

Brooks provides a number of awikhiganak (maps) of the Northeast, some taking a broad view from the Gaspee to the Great Lakes, and some taking a minute view of Kwinitekw (the Connecticut River Valley) or Shetucket (the Thames River), for example. These maps reflect and respect Algonkian and Iroquoian historical relationships to and travels over the land, contextualizing European claims of ownership within a different and much longer continuum than that supplied by Euroamerican historical narratives of the last three centuries. Importantly, Brooks uses English names only rarely on the maps, giving the reader the chance to conceive of places, even those covered by Euroamerican infrastructures such as the interstate highways (routes 95, 91, 84, and 395), in Indigenous terms. However, Brooks clearly argues a view of Native writing as a site of ongoing reconfiguration of reality.

The Common Pot concerns itself with the critical thought and political agency of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mohegan, Mohawk, Mohican, Pequot, and Wabanaki writers. Brooks delineates what their written works tell about how the Native people of the Northeast negotiated, based upon the teachings of their own cultures, the technologies and ideologies brought by foreign colonizers; confluences of language, cultural artifacts, and ideologies of land use (for example) might have resulted in adoption (as English loanwords in Native languages), adaptation (as writing in English), or resistance (to encroachment), but Brooks argues that these confluences always incurred acts of revision informed by the traditions of the Native cultures.

The Common Pot brings a particular focus to the continuity of writing among Wabanaki and other northeastern Indigenous people as a precontact practice. Brooks provides linguistic evidence of this in the Abenaki verb root awigha, to draw, write, or map, and the noun awikhigan, the tool resulting from the act of drawing, writing or mapping. She recounts how the awikhiganak, birchbark scrolls containing symbolic and mnemonic information, were documented in The Jesuit Relations by seventeenth-century French priests at Kespek (the Gaspee Peninsula) who discovered their students creating their own versions of Cliff ’s Notes to help remember Catholic prayers and catechism. Brooks also provides photos of some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Passamaquoddy and Montagnais examples preserved in museum collections and argues that the...