Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, reprinted numerous times, shaped an understanding of King Philip’s War as a battle between cruel “savages” and defenceless colonists. What happens when we see the war from the vantage point of the other side?
Many Americans learn about Mary Rowlandson in high school. Her tale of traveling with Indigenous people as a prisoner in 1676, during King Philip's War, is still read in US high schools and colleges.
Far fewer Americans know about Weetamoo, the Pocasset saunkskwa with whom Rowlandson travelled, who did all that bravery and humanity could to try to prevent the outbreak of the bloodiest war in what we call “American” history.
This video records our online book club discussion, on Tuesday, July 12, when we read Dr. Lisa Brooks' groundbreaking book Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War and Rowlandson's short captivity narrative,The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. Led by Lori Rogers-Stokes and Lance Young, we focused on Lisa Brooks' eye-opening retelling of the Rowlandson captivity narrative through the lens of Weetamoo and the Indigenous experience.
Rowlandson's Sovereignty and Goodness of God was published in 1682 and, reprinted multiple times, quickly became a bestseller. In it, Rowlandson crafted a narrative of cruel, savage Indians celebrating the deaths of English men, women, and children, indifferent to her suffering in “miserable” swamps. She wrote in particular of a “proud and haughty dame” who thought herself an Indian queen. The harsh treatment the prisoner received from this woman, whom Rowlandson did not dignify with a name, lives on in the reader’s mind, and helps justify their happiness at the end of the story, when the Indians are vanquished, the English victorious, and Rowlandson returned to her husband, family, and friends.
The story wraps up so completely that few would even wonder how the war might have been experienced by anyone other than English colonists.
In Our Beloved Kin, Dr. Lisa Brooks turns Rowlandson’s story on its head, taking us deep inside the Indigenous experience of King Philip’s War, the bloodiest war in American history. Her protagonist is none other than that “haughty queen” of Rowlandson’s story, but readers come to know the real woman: Weetamoo, the Pocasset saunkskwa who did all that bravery and humanity could to try to prevent the outbreak of the war.
The title page for the first, 1682 edition of Rowlandson's captivity narrative dedicates the story to her "dear children and relations.” While Rowlandson rejoined her family and the English colonies emerged more set on a course of domination over Native people, Weetamoo and her family and people faced a dramatically different outcome.
Who were the equally "beloved kin" Weetamoo fought for? Who were the Indigenous people, nations and individuals, who inherited a broken, nearly irreparable world after the war? We can read Rowlandson’s narrative as it’s traditionally been viewed, as a story of Puritan providentialism and the colonists’ terror. Through Lisa Brooks’ uncovering of the other side of the story, we gain a fundamentally new understanding that challenges the story we thought we knew.
READINGS
Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), pp. 252-298.
Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, 1682
DISCUSSION LEADERS
Lori Rogers-Stokes is a PHB board member, independent scholar, and author of Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638-1629, Heroic Souls. She is working on a new book on Indigenous Congregationalism in Woodland New England.
Lance Young (Eagle Wolf) is sachem of the Nemasket Nation, Wolf Clan, and descendant of the Nemasket squa sachem Aime, daughter of Ousamequin Massasoit, chief sachem of the Pokanoket.