BOOK REVIEW
Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War
by Lisa Brooks 2019
About the Author
Lisa Brooks is professor of English and American studies at Amherst College. She is the author of The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast.
About the Book
“In this mesmerizing and methodologically bold reassessment of King Philip’s War, Lisa Brooks brings to life the gendered resistance to colonialism in Indigenous place-worlds through the language and landscape of kinship.”—Jean M. O’Brien, author of Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England
“There have been many books about King Philip’s War but none like this. Our Beloved Kin is insightful and a better way to understand New England’s past.”—Colin G. Calloway, author of The Indian World of George Washington
“Lisa Brooks brilliantly guides us through the “place-worlds” of Weetamoo and James Printer to create a stunningly original account of King Philip’s War. The Native viewpoint changes everything we thought we knew.”—Mary Beth Norton, author of In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
Winner of the 2019 Bancroft Prize: A compelling and original recovery of Native American resistance and adaptation to colonial America
With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Lisa Brooks recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance during the “First Indian War” (later named King Philip’s War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. Brooks’s pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research but also in the land and communities of Native New England, reading the actions of actors during the seventeenth century alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history. https://ourbelovedkin.com
VolumesOfValue 