Our Beloved Kin
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15
Ratings1
Average rating4
"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. In reading seventeenth-century sources alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history, Brooks's pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research but also in the land and communities of Native New England."--Jacket flap.
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Offers a new history of a largely overlooked period in American history (mid-to-late 17th century). The war turned out to be an inflection point in colonial-indigenous relations, with the dark forces of capital and religious conservatism violently absorbing New England's native peoples into their new regime centered ideologically around fanatic protection of private property. Most notably, Brooks offers a critical reading of a fascinating primary document: “A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson”, in which a Massachusetts Bay Colony housewife recounts the story of her kidnapping by a war party of the Wampanoag coalition. Brooks reads between the lines of Mary Rowlandson's terror and uses the work to highlight the results of the conflict of understandings of the world.
