Our Beloved Kin: A New History Of King Philip’s War

Taylor Branch ended his monumental Parting The Waters trilogy with a 10 page meditation/summary/riff on one of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite lines of scripture, “Let justice roll down like the waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream,” (Amos 5:24) using it to illustrate how the civil rights movement had unleashed a mighty wave of freedom around the world. Part of that wave poured over academia, as old scholars re-examined their disciplines and new scholars brought new perspectives and insights.

Lisa Brooks, professor of English and American studies at Amherst College, is one of the latter. Brooks grew up within the Missisquoi Abenaki Nation, a state-recognized tribe in Vermont. Her award-winning 2018 book, Our Beloved Kin: A New History Of King Philip’s War, retells the story of that foundational 1675-1678 conflict between English settlers and Native nations in what is now New England, and does so primarily from the Native perspective.

For non-Natives, it may be a discomforting experience. Take something as simple as place names. Brooks uses the names of the time. Settlements like Boston, Plymouth, and Natick—which bear the same names today—are easy. Places like Caskoak (Portland, ME), Nashaway (Lancaster, MA), and Menimesit (New Braintree, MA) provide a useful jolt of disorientation, a reminder that these places once were inhabited by different people who gave them different names in different languages and used them for different purposes. (Brooks and her colleagues have also created a fascinating website of maps and other materials to accompany the book.)

Brooks tells the story of the war primarily through Weetamoo, a Wampanoag tribal leader who confounded the English by the simple fact of being a woman in a role of public leadership (and even more so by her extreme competence); James Printer, a Nipmuc “praying Indian” who navigated between both cultures, attending Harvard College, interpreting for and printing John Eliot’s Indian Bible, and serving as a scribe for Metacom during the war; and through a close and critical reading of Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative of her captivity and ransom during the war.

Despite initiating the war at a time and place of their choosing, the English were losing badly throughout the first year of fighting. Still largely restricted to settlements within 10 miles of the Atlantic Ocean and along the banks of the Kwinitekw (Connecticut) River, the English invested enormous time and energy trying to impose the land use and settlement patterns from their small island to this new continent. Meanwhile, the Indians had thousands of years of experience living with and on this land, and negotiating with each other when conflicts arose.

Once war began, the Natives largely “disappeared” into the swamps and forests that they knew so well, and had used as places of refuge—and natural fortresses from which to attack and counterattack their enemies—for centuries. Only after a year of repeated defeat and frustration did the English switch tactics. The key change was using Native guides to lead them into what were, for the English, uncharted territories so that they could take the offensive. (Among the “inducements” that persuaded the guides was the English practice of holding their families hostage in places like Boston Harbor’s notorious Deer Island. “Help us out here, and we won’t starve your family to death,” basically.)

In most English narratives, the war ended August 12, 1676, with the killing of Metacom (King Philip) and his subsequent dismemberment. (His wife and child were sold into slavery in Bermuda; his body was quartered and hung in trees, while his head remained on a pike at Plymouth’s entrance for at least two decades.)

Brooks argues that “Metacom’s death has been privileged in the narrative of New England’s settlement because it allows for the finality of ‘extinction’ and ‘eclipse,’ the ‘replacement’ of Indians with settlers. In the place where once the Wampanoag leader found a resting place is now the ‘lasting’ home of the New England people, ‘found’ and founded by ‘our fathers,’ the narrative granting legitimacy to colonial claims to land. Metacom’s nobility and resistance are honored here only because both are contained within the past.” (p. 328)

Brooks proposes a different ending to King Philip’s War, and thus a different narrative about Indigenous survival and persistence. After Metacom’s death, the war continued across a vast territory Brooks calls the Northern Front extending from the St. Lawrence River across most of what are now Vermont and New Hampshire, and the southern half of what is now Maine. Only with the 1677 Treaty of Pemaquid and the 1678 Treaty of Casco Bay did hostilities come to an end, and they did so on terms largely favorable to the Wabanaki, limiting English settlements in the region and requiring acknowledgement of Wabanaki leaders and payment for land use. Faced with the intransigence of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonial leaders, the Indians went around them, successfully engaging New York governor Edward Andros as the British Crown’s representative to negotiate the treaties.

“The narrative of war that ends with the death of King Philip suggests that resistance to colonization is noble, yet foolish and futile.” Brooks asserts the Wabanaki treaties point to a different narrative: “...we cannot disregard the power and persistence of Indigenous diplomacy, the ways in which Native people continued to draw settlers into networks of kinship and exchange. Cascoak endured as a site of negotiations and peace councils between English settlers and Wabanaki leaders for many decades to come.” (p. 346)

In the early 20th century photographers like Edward Curtis became renowned for their portraits of Native American leaders from the western United States. A big part of their fame, and the demand for their photographs, was the pervasive sense among non-Indians that these photographs were valuable because they would be the final record of the last generation of Native Americans.

Inconveniently for that belief, the Indians didn’t die out, or melt indistinguishably into the white man’s society. From a low of 275,000 near the end of the 19th century, American Indian and Alaska Native population has rebounded to over 5 million in the early 21st century. Among its other numerous virtues, Our Beloved Kin retrieves both history and narratives that help explain that persistence and offer guideposts for how we live together going forward.