Amherst Reads Transcript

Barry O’Connell: I’m Barry O’Connell and I’m here for a conversation with Lisa Brooks, my dear colleague and friend, who has written a second outstanding book. Both of them should be read by every student of things American. We’re going to talk about her newest book, Our Beloved Kin, and I should say just a word about how much of an honor it is to even sit and have a conversation with Lisa. She’s too modest to accept this but in this case, she’s made a huge difference in a short time at Amherst; a superb teacher, someone who deeply cares about students and colleagues, and is the truest citizen not just of Amherst, but of a whole community she gathers around her and renews and draws sustenance from: that is the American Indian or Native American community throughout new England and we’ll talk more about that because it’s an enormous presence in her book.

I’m going to begin by talking a little bit about the meaning of the title of her book, Our Beloved Kin. In a way it says everything her beautiful book says. “Our Beloved Kin” is not only a reference to all of the indigenous population in New England in their sense in the 17^th century of their relationships to all the other native peoples in New England. “Our Beloved Kin” is a way of subtly saying “we are still here;” native people have not disappeared though they’ve often been rendered invisible by the way they’ve been ignored or presented as gone. So, “Our Beloved Kin” in this book title says “read this book not only for the history, much of which is focused in the 17^th century, but for what it tells you about how native people survived.” Now titles for anybody that has written a book are one of the most difficult things; you can have sleepless nights over titles, you can make lists of twenty or more of titles and find them all just wrong. So it says something about this book that Lisa has worked on for over a decade is that fair? Everything in this book is carefully rendered and when you see this title which is truly a beautiful title, you know something about how the book is going to receive and affect you. You might say a word about how you got to that title.

Lisa Brooks: Well, it was just like that right, not just lists but titles that were merely place holders, right? I mean I never felt satisfied with the title as it was, and with my first book the title came to me when I was in the midst of research. It made sense of all the things I was looking at, at the time and I had it with me through most of the writing. With this one I was almost at a loss for what the title would be until I think I might have already been deep into the final revisions of the book and I think the press actually said to be you know the working title that I had wasn’t going to work, and I didn’t say it at the time but I could have said “well I could have told you that.” This one I think it did come once the press had me down to the wire and I had to pick the final title. This came really quickly and it was almost like a subconscious thing that rolls to the surface and it both is imbedded within the very first document of chapter one, the very first document that deals with Weetamoo the sunksqua of Pocasset but it also speaks to what I found over and over again in the research and in the documents that at every turn every native figure in this history, no matter where they were placed in the war was seeking to protect their kin.

BO:  But I would also say that if you, out there the ones that we are talking to, read this wonderful book, if you look at the acknowledgements you will see another listing of Our Beloved Kin, the people speaking for every indigenous community in New England now to Lisa in doing the research, helping her in an enormous variety of ways beyond what gets listed even that from meals, to hints, to there might be a document here, or there’s an oral history that we’ve kept for a long time that we’re willing to share with you. So that is another aspect of this book that I think is really important. There’s been a renewal in the last thirty years of attention to indigenous people and a great deal of good scholarship. But one of the things that’s often missing in that scholarship is a rootedness in existing native communities. And that rootedness requires people being patient and gaining trust, especially if they’re not native but even in they’re native. The people have to know this is a person, A, who can listen to me and who knows, in this case I’ll use that particular problem, she does not know what she needs to know and is at rest with that. So you might see a little bit of a process of that community and its role in the book. 

LB: I mean you described that experience perfectly because even as a young woman in the Abenaki community and I mean the Abenaki community up in ((ciscoe)) but also the wider community, I knew there were so many people who were either doing research or talking with me or other people about oral history who knew so much about our history and that’s who I first learned from. And most of those people aren’t publishing in academic journals, right?

BO: And aren’t academics.

LB: And aren’t academics, exactly, but that knowledge is very deep and often can’t be accessed in the usual ways that academics would pursue. So I knew really early on that that was important to any work that I would do but I also found out once I got into graduate school that this wasn’t the norm. And so I feel like part of the work that I’ve been doing over the years alongside many, many people and many of your colleagues, I mean this has been ongoing for decades, is trying to really emphasize how important it is that we do that listening, that careful listening, to the tribal historians and community members who hold the knowledge that can help us understand this history. And I do think listening and relationship building is key. And for me, yeah it often was just asking people that I knew to be holders of this history, how do you see this? What do you think about this document or what’s important to you about this place? And it wouldn’t be in an interview format or even as formal as we’re sitting in here today, but it often is walking places, sitting at kitchen tables and, yes, always feeling like I don’t know, and being OK with that as you say, and knowing that even after I’ve spent over a decade immersed in this history, I still don’t know. And so that’s one of the reasons that the book actually ends by not ending by opening it up to more possibilities because I know coming up from tribal communities right now are people of all ages who are wanting to understand more of our histories. So I want to invite people to continue to engage in this history because there is so much that I don’t know that I still need to know.

BO: Well if I take from that, a particular thing I want to take, so to warn people about this, if you’re trained in history and culture as both of us have been, part of that training implicit sometimes but often very explicit is that what you do, if it’s going to be of quality, has nothing to do with any community that is present and outside the walls of the____. So one of the things I would say about Lisa’s work both in The Common Pot her first and magnificent book as well is that, what I always think is a modest and quiet way that might not be entirely fair to you, she has resisted, undermined, and ignored some of the most constricting ideas academic historians have about how you write history.

So one of the things we haven’t yet talked about that’s important in this to me and it abashes me to say pardon me for what I’m about to say, Lisa walks her books. I couldn’t walk the distance she has walked for the first book and the second book. Landscape, not pretty picture landscape but how you get from one place from another on foot, from one indigenous community to another, but following the pathways or figuring out the pathways in the 17^th century that different people and different armed groups and different English people were taking. It probably isn’t the case but you can correct me, that you’ve covered every mile, every possible mile on foot, but you’ve done a lot and what that means in her writing is that the landscape becomes as alive as the characters who are inhabiting it, the historical persons. So that there’s a kind of pleasure in reading Lisa, not only because she’s a wonderful writer, but because she’s unusual in what she does. And part of the pleasure is you live almost three dimensionally in the world she recreates. That’s an amazing achievement, I think. And I know that’s what you were reaching for.

LB: It was and it means so much to me to hear you say that because I really do feel like that is what I was trying to create, is a three dimensional experience for the reader of this history as nearly as I could imagine it and recreate it myself. And I don’t want to- I hesitate almost to use that word “imagination” because I don’t want anybody to think I’m just kind of picturing all of this in my own mind this is based on very deep, archival research on the ground, and the land, and the language and those very important archives. But for me to understand the history, I can spend all the time that I want to immersed in the documents and the maps that help me to try to reconstruct the place in my mind but at the end of the day I almost never could write until I got out on the land in the places that I was writing about. And that is what I think then helped enable me to then create that in the book because you know the finer details of what the land probably looked like in the 17^th century, but the land still teaches you, on the ground, about its character. So even if there’s a farm there, you can still see where the terraces are, where women plated fields, you can still see the time of year that land turns green as opposed to other places and how fertile it is. You can still see the swamps and the many different plants that would have been seen as medicine, as edible plants, but then would have been seen as frightening eminent beings to English soldiers coming through. I guess that is one of the many ways I was taught as a young person probably throughout my life how to be able to read the land. So I think one of the things that I am trying to do in the book is help other people to see that to kind of read alongside me but then to be imbedded in it. So when I’m writing I feel like I’m imbedded in the writing, I don’t feel like I’m trying to understand from up above, so I think that’s one of the things I’m striving to do in both books but especially in this one is to bring people in to that place world.

BO: So I should alert all the people that I hope will read your book after seeing us talking here that this book of yours, Our Beloved Kin, is a slower read. Not because it’s unpleasant but because each piece is so rich. So I read it under some pressure because I was copy editing to help, so I needed to get it back to Lisa, and I remember at one point I was in the middle of the manuscript and I swore out loud. And my wife said, “Is something wrong?” and I said “well there’s this thing she does that I’m trying to get her to stop doing” and that’s using ____ and I had to mark them all and I said no, because I can’t slow down, she’s got me in the middle of this place and I’m not ready to leave it, and I have to keep going. That is like I said the slowness here comes from how much it is alive in the text and it’s a particular and unusual kind of reading experience.

I’m going to turn to King Philips War shortly, but not yet because I think I want to place people, and you can help me do this, in that geography so this is a book that we’re in Massachusetts, we’re in Rhode Island, we’re in virtually all parts of Massachusetts, we’re a bit in Connecticut, we’re certainly in present day Vermont and New Hampshire, and parts of Maine, and these are of course if you know any of these places, there’s an extraordinary variety of landscapes. And those landscapes get animated in this book in part because we’re dealing with a war not only but we’re dealing with a war between a coalition of native peoples, and a coalition of English colonials. And they are coalitions this is to be stressed because they’re not simply united on any side but the way in which they come together antagonism and the way they don’t has a great deal to do with the landscape is and how it speaks to which needs practically of these many peoples so that because of what Lisa does, we really are in those places in new England powerfully, richly.

LB: And it makes me think of two places in particular that became centers during the war which often don’t get as much attention as they should. You know the English at the beginning explained to their native neighbors how despite their own individual feelings that they had to ally with Plymouth because all Englishmen have to do that and they expected that the Indian people would do the same but of course there wasn’t really yet any concept of a racial group that the English called Indians among native people and there was this real questioning of like well why would we do that and why would you do that? They knew right away that when the war opened that this was something very different than they had ever seen before in their homelands and the Nipmuc people in particular created a sanctuary very early on that was initially was to create a space for councils that could not be under the surveillance of this colonial power that was beginning to amass. But that place which was called Matamesit it’s an island place and this network of wetlands became this sanctuary for people from all over and it protected many, many families for many months during this war. So there were these places like swamps so you’re talking particular kinds of lands that created almost what we would think of as a fortress even though they were not built from brick and mortar. And it was because of their knowledge of the land as opposed to the new comers that they were able to create this fortress. But then there were fortresses like Ossipee which is up in what is now part of Maine at the confluents of the Ossipee and Saco River that was another fortress that was out of reach of the English and when the English tried to approach several times but were held back by the landscape. My favorite is their planned expedition on Ossipee in December of 1675 when they planned to go and take this stronghold and they didn’t get far at all because of the four feet of snow. They didn’t know the native technology of snow shoes, they knew about it but they didn’t know how to use it or make it or anything like, that so native people meanwhile are freely moving in these winter landscapes but English people were hindered by it. And Ossipee wasn’t attacked at all during the war it remained this protected place.

BO: So there is a kind of notion, and it’s in the subtitle that this is a new history of King Philip’s War. Now, I’m much older than Lisa and I’ve been doing this much longer, and like her but in a different time, I’ve read many histories of King Philip’s War and I won’t bore you by summarizing where I think they all come out, so I think you should say something about well, new? What is new here?

LB: I use that word almost viciciously because what I don’t want to do actually is claim that this is the new history, disregard all the old histories you know this is the one, and so I think I want to make sure anybody who reads the book immediately before even starting turns to the quotes right up at the beginning of the book, the epigraph, where you’ll see, I will read you the quote from Joseph Laurent who was a phenomenal Abenaki scholar who published a book called New and Familiar Abenaki and English Dialogues in 1884 and these words are drawn from his book ““pili kisos, “the new moon” pildowi ojmowogan, “a new history.”” so I mean this fully a new history in that Abenaki way which is that it’s something that appears to be new but is really cycling back so that when the new moon comes, we experience it as if it’s something we haven’t seen before and yet we know it’s something that comes around every month. It’s like a- I teach a course here called “The Spiral of Time in Native Americanism” and its very much based on this idea of the spiral which is this, it is not that time is a circle, just that the same thing keeps coming around again, it’s that it’s almost like it’s spiraling so if we can imagine history as an activity that’s always spiraling and so this is giving us what might feel to some like a new view but to some others it might feel like an old view coming back around.

BO: So then I need you, myself, to say how it’s new in terms of the other tradition; that is the ((angloo)) historical tradition

LB: There are different ways that I’m approaching this war, many different ways, maybe the most important is that I didn’t set out to write a book about King Philip’s War. That wasn’t my goal at the beginning, in fact if I had even had that inkling early on I would have hesitated to do that completely and even at the moment that I realized “Oh this is beginning to become a book about the war” I was very hesitant to even think of it that way, because it was really the figures and the places I was drawn to ask questions about and understand more. So Weetamoo, the leader of the Wampanoag’s who was a sunksqua, a female leader, a rock woman, I was very drawn to unpacking how she appeared particularly at first in the written sources because she is such a beloved figure in the Wampanoag community and so well known in the native New England community. I kept asking why is it that she doesn’t appear in the histories, and in particular, the histories that have been written by historians during the last many many decades, hundreds of years. Why does she take a back seat? It doesn’t make sense to me. Especially since her story was so powerful and that she’s not an anomaly in other words, she wasn’t an exception because she’s a female and a leader, she certainly wasn’t a heroine. As I’ve said about her as a leader, she was just simply doing her job. So I was very drawn to her story, because I worked at Harvard I was very drawn to the story of the Harvard Indian college the roots of our entire literary and educational system today going back to that place that was both a place of colonial missionary efforts and a place of exchange between people who spoke different languages and came from different cultures. I was especially drawn to James Printer because so many of the stories we tell about early education, Indian education, are about somebody dying or going home or just kind of failing, disappearing and James was just this story of persistence and survival and the way that he used tools like writing, literacy, diplomacy, between different cultures in order to protect his kin. Very drawn to James, Mary Rowlandson who of course wrote really probably one of the first captivity narratives written in English in the colonies, definitely one of the first women writers, and the fact she wrote about both Weetamoo and James in her captivity narrative but also the fact that most people teaching and reading Mary Rowlandson which is taught as you know all over the country have no idea who the native people are with whom she traveled. Including Weetamoo.

BO: And who was her mistress?

LB: Who was her mistress? Exactly, who she traveled with as she said that whole time. And they know very little about the native places through which she traveled or even that there were native places. So I felt an absolute drive to be able to make it so that would change that anybody teaching or learning Mary Rowlandson’s narrative could be able to frame it through those native people she traveled with and the native places with whom she traveled.

And finally because I had been immersed in Abenaki history for my whole adult life I felt like that was a huge context that was missing that most people had no sense of what existed or what was happening north of what is now the Massachusetts border. That story needed to be retold because also so many of the survivors went north and found refuge there. Again so it wouldn’t just be a story of people dying, of some kind of final- the end of native people. So I was really invested in these stories of continuance, whether it was James Printer or whether it was the people who went north.

 BO: There’s a way in which the history of indigenous people across the continent is often, maybe even commonly, written in terms of defeat and disappearance and here there is always an issue because if you end any history in defeat you end Indians. And it’s not that defeats didn’t happen and were not common, they were common, but thinking about how history is not simply a you defeat a people you want to get rid of and everything about them disappears including any survivors, and we fail to understand that real history and by which I mean if I were to write the history of every American in a certain period what that would mean is telling people there are all these people you didn’t even think about there they are and they were doing important things then for a number of reasons they didn’t necessarily draw attention to themselves that was a survival technique for many indigenous people. One of the things that happens in this narrative, and you certainly more than point to it in what you just said, but I think its worth under scoring, King Philips War has been written about a lot from shortly after the war began with Mary Rowlandson’s account actually and going out almost immediately to ministers accounts in which there was a deep investment in presenting this as the end of native people in New England. So one of the things that happens in your book which I think is amazing and I have to talk about it in a certain kind of way, this is a book in which you start with native people, you don’t start with the war, you actually end with the war but not in a way that is terminal but in which you, starting with Weetamoo which is a fascinating character, you begin to have individual native people, in various settings, in various ways, they become characters not fictional characters, they become presences. Now this is remarkable because lots of histories don’t do that except “Great Men” usually sometimes “Great Women” so that as you move through this narrative, you are moving not only in a physical landscape but a human landscape which is individuated at every step. Now what makes this especially remarkable is not only your instincts as a writer to do this, but the fact is it is based as you’ve suggested several times but it’s important to understand an extraordinary archival research. You’ve found and used documents as far as I know no one had ever found before. You combined this in part as some of your primary detectives I think are other native people who got you to look for or know there was something that nobody paid attention to so that the years of research is what allowed you to create as you were an actual Weetamoo, an actual James Printer and we knew more about him but they’ve become human figures to us as we read this book. And this seems to me, again, and extraordinary achievement, and a very difficult one. There must’ve been times, I think, when you got lost.

LB: Oh yeah absolutely. And I think in some ways you benefit from getting lost. And I think that one of the things that made my own research process distinct is that because I wasn’t trying to focus on the war, I wasn’t looking for everything related to the war, I wasn’t trying or aiming to reconstruct a  history of the war, is that I was following Weetamoo for example and her kinship networks. So because that was such a difficult intricate process, it meant that I had to go down a lot of different paths. And so sometimes, yeah, those research paths would lead me to find a document that I was shocked that nobody else had foregrounded or even talked about. But at other times, it lead me down paths that I don’t want to say they went nowhere, because they did go somewhere but they were paths I needed to go down in order to learn things that wouldn’t end up in the book or kind of thinking about an event and how it may have happened and then finding enough context through talking with other people, and through going to the places, and through finding more documents that it turned out no, that’s not the case at all. The thing that really struck me when I was deep in this process is the way that often times the documents that English colonists wrote themselves completely contradicted those later narratives that were designed to show the end of Indians and the justness of this war in England.

I have talked with other people who have written about this war and other wars like it and the hardest thing is sometimes continuing on when you have to look at the violence of war so closely. And there were many times when I nearly stopped because it was too much. And there were many times when I thought about completely abandoning it not because of the difficulty and the challenge of the research, but because of the difficulty and challenge of confronting the violence of this war.

BO: Certainly true, I think, if you are a historian who studies war that you have to learn to deal with loss. But the context here seems to be very sharp that is, that what especially as a native person doing this work that facing the loss which because you individuate it so much there’s not just this mass sense of this happened to Indians, but you also see what happened to individuals which is quite devastating. And finding a way, and I suspect knowing you, you actually intuitively at least knew that you couldn’t stop because you had to go on to keep as it were in writing the people who were alive, alive. And that if they could survive this and go on, that you had to survive it and go on. To say that is not to make that fact at all easy, only when you’ve experienced it do you have some sense of how precarious a decision like that can be and it seems to me that especially because you get close to, granted they’re dead historical persons but that doesn’t make any difference to you once you’ve brought them to life. So Weetamoo seems to me the hardest person in your whole book, that when she is killed, at least I reading the book, I couldn’t pick up the book again for a while. I had to live with this person who comes close to you during that. And I think this speaks back to that other research process as well. Any good historian that is historians who work with documents and archives knows the experience first of all of following the path of the archives, and you want something you’re following a particular path because you want a particular thing or set of things and coming to what feels like the end of it with nothing. And this can be months and even years of looking at certain documents. In fact it does educate you all the time but you don’t know that then so there’s another kind of faith about going on that’s required here. And then there’s the moments actually which I still remember one from my own work where I was studying coal miners and I wanted something from a woman and I’d gone through company files that’s where the histories and usually they’ve destroyed them on purpose to avoid being sued for what they’ve done, and I was going through a set of company documents and I came to a cash of pay slips and it was the end of the day and I thought to myself  “Oh god, who wants to go through pay slips what are pay slips.” So I’m going through them and I’m realizing that some of them had something on the back so I start turning them over on the back and on about the hundredth one I turn it over and on the back it says, my husband was killed in a mine accident, with a date, and this is what the company gave me and this is what the company refused me and this is where I’m left, all in small script. And that’s the kind of- nobody knows and nobody ever turned that pay stub over I think. And you can build from those but it takes an enormous amount of work and I do think that if you’re the kind of historian that you and I care to be, you want to make people in the past real who are commonly ignored.

LB: Yes, and I think one of the things I hear you talking about is the way that we have the capacity as historians to restore, I don’t want to say restore humanity because that sounds like what we do is too important, but to help others to understand the humanity of people who have often been neglected, whose stories have been buried like this woman’s story in these mining records. This is a very important story to tell about mining and if you try to look at mining up at some big level that’s just about the mining companies then you’re not going to see that woman’s story. And I think that has been one of the things that has driven me through this and even when it’s hard to look at, some of the things that happened, including to Weetamoo, it is that empathy that I feel towards her and towards any of the figures I write about that at the end of the day I’m hoping to convey. And I want to be clear here because some people might not think I’m as empathetic towards for example the Plymouth governor Josiah Winslow, but there have been accounts that have been written before where people are trying to get at his perspective and his understanding. But often time’s native people are not human in accounts of the war and when I say that I don’t mean to say that historians that are writing now I don’t want people to think that I’m saying historians who are writing now are not giving enough humanity to native people. I think there’s been a lot of efforts to try to do that but if you read the accounts of the war that are written by English ministers after the war there’s this major dehumanization that goes on that none of us would be surprised to see because we know that this is often part of how colonialism works, even how war works, writing about war works. But that has carried through sometimes. I think sometimes you see it’s as if a native community like the Mohawks or the Wampanoag’s are all like walking in locked step trying to understand the Mohawk motivation or the Wampanoag motivation as if there were not individual human beings who were connected to each other and talking with each other and trying to figure out how to survive this. I think that was a really, really important story to tell and an important way to frame this. I think of that woman that you’re talking about who wrote that on a scrap, I think of a woman whose name was ((MARY)) who was in prison in Boston, whose husband had been one of ten men who were saved from a huge group of native people who were sent down as captives by the English forces to Boston in order to be shipped to slavery. Ten men saved in order to serve as scouts on the northern front of the war. The deal was for this particular family was that ((MARY))’s husband was supposed to be able to keep his wife and his baby in a place that would be protected up north while he was out scouting. She was sent down to Boston, she was sold into slavery by the commander Richard Waldron who later denied it but the record is there to show that he absolutely did. I worked with a group of students at parts of this project on, not only the research for the book but for the website that accompanies the book and one of the students, a woman named Ally LaForge, got deeply invested in this story, and worked to recover as many documents as she could find that told the story of ((MARY)) and then wrote about it and you can see her piece on Mary on the website. But what really struck me about it is that she came to know this story so well that she was even able to, at the end of the day, collaborating with other students, and figure out the last word in the document that alluded everyone. Her, and Cassandra ((LAST NAME)) who was a student who graduated from here at Amherst, figured out that ((MARY)) had a piece of red cloth on her arm. A piece of red cloth. And that red cloth was supposed to signify that she should not be taken down to Boston; that she should not be taken into slavery. And in fact this piece of red cloth is part of the evidence that her husband and missionary Daniel Gookin used to retrieve her from prison and it’s a very uncommon story that you see the retrieval of somebody who was supposed to be sent into slavery. But Ally, Cassandra, the other students, also had a commitment to seeing ((MARY)) as a human being which is much more than say what Richard Waldron did at that time.

BO: I don’t think this is extreme what I’m about to say to you, I do not believe in most insistences that there is any good history that does not pay attention to what I once called ordinary people. I had a student who questioned me and said, “Why would you write about ordinary people?” He said, “They’re dull,” and I said, “No actually they’re easily just as interesting as any other kind of people and the problem with history is we generally write- sometimes it’s a practical problem because you can’t write about everybody- is that too often people who fit certain categories in fact, are never present except as stick figures really.” And the student said to me, “Where did you learn that?” and I laughed and said, “Well, I don’t think I ever learned it well enough because it’s something you have to keep learning all the time.” I said but my mother who is 90 pounds and five feet tall in the 1300 people farm town I grew up in, made me pay attention to every individual in the town. And she insisted that every individual had a story actually, because she told these stories all the time, and every once and a while she’d stop and say “Well I’m not telling you about the bad ones, you’re too young yet.” And that fascinated me.

LB: And then it made you want to know the bad ones.

BO: It did, I thought OK when do I get to know about those? And this reminds me of a story that Eudora Wells the writer tells which I love, that she loved going for rides in the back seat- her mother liked to drive around and she drove around always a good friend Eudora sat in the back seat, and her mother would say, “Now, Eudora, we have to talk with each other” and she said “Then I knew I had to listen more carefully.” And so she talks about how she really became a writer trying to piece together the stories she wasn’t supposed to hear. At first when she was really young, she’d get words, they were all stories of people in Jackson, Mississippi of course, and eventually, she said, I could put whole sentences together, and it was that intrigue and she never left Jackson of course and so she wrote extraordinarily about them.

But it’s fascinating the other piece I have about this that influenced me is that we had a central staircase in the house I grew up in, and the bedrooms were on either side, my mother was an avid card player and she had a card club. They usually played poker but it depended, and they drank lots, and they sat around the dining room table which was at the bottom of the stairs basically. I early on figured out that I could get out of bed and crawl nearly to the top of the stairs where I could not be seen, but I could never hear completely and they’d be telling each other things. To this day I can reconstruct some of these stories, and it would always start with something like “Did you know?” or “What about?” There were que words, and it was intriguing and I think history would be much richer if we paid fuller attention and how necessary stories are to good history.

But we should mention The Common Pot a little bit, I did not think you could write another book after The Common Pot because of what you do in it. In some ways it’s maybe arguably even more unorthodox than this book and it was your first, it was your dissertation. So there’s ways that listeners should understand that writing a PhD that is unorthodox is not orthodox. It’s not to be done, and if you expect to have a future you certainly don’t do it. What makes it so beautiful first of all the writing is extraordinarily beautiful, and it’s, I think it’s probably an easier narrative to construct even though it was your first. That’s the book in which I realized, thanks to you, how much history needs a full landscape in what it does because the land is really in some ways the major piece in that book and it’s place where you get the common pot happens, on land. So the land is what people come across and mix and sometimes conflict but so it’s also a great preparation for this book.

LB: And I think, you know it’s funny because I now think of The Common Pot as, it’s a book that actually you could read after Our Beloved Kin because you know in both Our Beloved Kin and The Common Pot, the land is central but the land is fully animate as it is in our languages. You can’t talk about the land as an it, you can’t talk about trees as an it, you can’t talk about animals as its and so Our Beloved Kin extends not just to the people but to all of the many beings that make up this land. And so, that is something that is very present in The Common Pot but The Common Pot is really about how native people reconstruct their communities and their networks and these relationships in the wake of wars like King Philip’s War, in the wake of colonization that is impeding not just on the land but also on the people’s ability to fulfill their responsibilities to each other and to the land. So I almost think of The Common Pot now as not just the first book but the sequel.

BO: I think that you might spend a little bit more time at the end either choosing if there is a particularly special place in the book in reading from it or the other, I’ve always been intrigued by James Printer and I’ll lay out what my intrigue was because for me it was an opening into a kind of understanding I did not have of native people. I’m convinced that either James Printer or one of his companion peoples or all four or five of them were actually the translators into native language of the first translated bible in New England, that it was never any minister that we always have assigned the names of ministers and that they did not have enough influence in any of the native languages to do this. So that one of the things that gets left out I think in talking about him and the Indian college is that we need to know more and we need to presume more that when we’re dealing with translation here in which English ministers are being given or even taking credit that in fact they couldn’t have done what they take credit for, that native peoples were actually more dual language fluent than any of the English people, in fact more than one.

LB: I love this question, I feel like we could talk about this for hours. Sometimes I’ll have people ask me you know what does it appear that people like James Printer picked up English for example so much more quickly than many of the English picked up native languages here in the North East. You know an easy answer to that question would take into account power dynamics would say well native people would have to pick up English were English people did not have to pick up native languages. But I also know that there were many, many different languages already here long before English or French or Dutch arrived. There were already extensive systems in place for particular people to learn each other’s languages. So there was always a recognition of people who had that linguistic capacity, some of us are born in this world having an ear for language and some of us are not and for some of us it’s easy to pick up languages and for some of us it’s a struggle. And of course when we’re children it’s always almost easier than when we’re adults but you had people who were Abenaki who knew how to speak Enyanghaga or Mohawk, and Abenaki and Mohawk are entirely different languages. But there were people who knew multiple languages already so it would not have been a major feat to then pick up the language of the people who had come in who you needed to trade with, who you needed to speak with, who you needed to figure out who they were and what they were doing here and what that would mean for your people and so when we’re looking at places like the Harvard Indian College, people might wonder why there’s a whole chapter in this book on the Harvard Indian College. But it’s really important to understand that as part of the foundation of this story and there is no question in my mind that the authors of what is called the Elliott Bible which is the first bible to be published here in North America that is often credited to the missionary John Elliott that John Elliott did not have the fluency or the capacity to translate that. In fact he admitted it himself, one of the letters that I quote in here you can see him saying he doesn’t have that capacity and it’s only when you have men like James Printer and Caleb Cheeshateaumuck and Jule Iocoombs who were all affiliated with the Indian college, a whole group of them, it’s only when they become part of this process that suddenly you see this bible being translated and printed, rapidly. So there’s no question in my mind and I think the historical research that I did will be even more expanded as we all learn more from people like Jessie Little Do Baird and the other Wampanoag scholars who are part of the Wampanoag language revitalization project because they are able to read that bible to see multiple voices in that bible and to see the concepts in that bible as I learned from Jessie and other Wampanoag scholars that John Elliott never would have included in the bible so there are ideas that demonstrate the continuity of indigenous world views, of indigenous ideas about different spiritual figures that would have seemed ____ to  John Elliott and if he could read it, like any teacher, if he could actually read his students work he never would have allowed it but he really couldn’t. But all of those men could, all of those men were fluent readers of their own languages, they were fluent readers of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, English, and they helped create a whole body of early American literature that was multilingual, that was multiethnic, and that was really transnational. So when we talk about today, wanting to think about American literature and history in those ways, that is not a new history; that is a new old history and that has been part of the fabric of this country as we think about it from its very beginnings and when I say very beginnings I don’t just mean of the colonies it’s been part of the fabric of this land from long before.

BO: Well actually, I want us to end there by reminding people watching if they didn’t know this that there are a whole series of translations of bibles as you move westward and always they are presented as being done, almost always by a minister or by and English speaking person. That in fact we know is never the case, and how do we know that is never the case? Because in fact when you read these bibles as you’ve said it turns out that imbedded in them, not like a secret code, is a whole notion of spirituality that is when native people are translating in a particular culture the bible, what they’re actually doing is making the bible speak their own spiritual visions. So the different translations of the bible are extraordinary sources if read them this way. So it’s very exciting. And the other point that as an old project in motion of mine, every immigrant group virtually to this continent has had a literature in its own language which very few scholars of American literature are trained to read or even know is there, massive histories of newspapers in some cases two centuries worth of fiction and poetry and so on so in truth this is another way in which as with indigenous people much of what we think we know we don’t know at all because we do not think about what it means in our history of all of the peoples of America and that they have literatures as well as histories. So I’m going to put that on you for the next book.

LB: That’s not too small of a goal. I think the one thing I want to leave us with is just sparked by what you said is that one of the things that I highlight on the website is that despite the fact that James Printer was only a handful of men in the colonies who knew how to run the printing press, the first printing press in the colonies which was housed in the Harvard Indian College, despite the fact that his hand was on so many of these books including Mary Rawlinson’s, his name does not appear on a title page as even a printer never mind the printer until right before his death and it’s called the Massachusetts Psalter so a group of psalms you can see J. Printer from 1709 the beauty of that for me is what you find inside of the Psalter which also shows to me James’s hand and probably other native translators as well but certainly James and one of my favorites is where “My God” is translated to “num-Manittoom” and “Manittoom” certainly could be translated to god but it really is the spirit that flows through all things. So in a fully animate world, it’s the spirit that flows through everything and “Manittoom” is a power that has the potential for both creation and destruction. There’s not a god and the devil in this world, “Manittoom” is this power and we have to be careful with it. In his translation its “num” it’s “my” and I think wow that is such an intriguing concept. So not only does “Manittoom” make its way then into the psalms, so singing to “Manittoom” the spirit that’s in everything but a sense of a personal relationship with “Manittoom” because that “my” is not possessive it’s relational in the language and so that is exactly the kind of thing that as thinkers and readers and scholars and teachers and students that we should be wrestling with.