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Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War – Online Event
June 13, 2020 @ 10:00 am - 11:00 am
Free
Join the Bidwell House Museum for our first online history talk! Amherst College English and American Studies professor Lisa Brooks will read from her book, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War. With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, she 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 Puritan mistress 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.
About the Speaker:
Lisa Brooks is an Abenaki writer and scholar who lives and works in the Kwinitekw (Connecticut River) Valley. She is Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College and is active in the Five College Native American and Indigenous Studies Program, which she chaired from 2013-2017. While an undergraduate at Goddard College, Brooks worked in the tribal office of the Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi, on aboriginal rights and environmental preservation cases; this was the place she received her most important education—on
the land and at kitchen tables, with other Abenaki community members. Her first book, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (University of Minnesota Press 2008), which focused on the recovery of Native writing and spaces, received the Media Ecology Association’s Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture in 2011. Her second book, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (Yale University Press, 2018) received the Bancroft Prize for American History and Diplomacy and the New England Society Book Award for Historical Nonfiction in 2019.* As a 2016-17 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow, she worked with a team at Amherst College to develop a digital companion to Our Beloved Kin (www.ourbelovedkin.com), featuring ArcGIS maps, original documents, and place-based images. In additional to her books and contributions to numerous edited volumes, Brooks has published articles in American Literary History, the International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, Northeastern Naturalist, PMLA, Studies in American Indian Literatures, and William and Mary Quarterly. She was honored in 2018 with the Maine Historical Society’s Neal Allen Award for exceptional contributions to Maine history and the Chief Polin Award by the Friends of the Presumpscot River. In 2019 she was honored with the Tomaquag Museum Red Wing Arts and Culture Award. A lifelong tracker as well as a historian, she is currently writing a book on the Indigenous and Environmental History of Eastern Coyote.
This reading will be done via Zoom. **Only one registration is required per household**
The Bidwell House Museum will send you a Zoom link for this talk a few days in advance. Please plan to log-in 5 to 10 minutes beforehand so that we can start right at 10.
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