Talking Big

About Our Beloved Kin by Lisa Brooks.

Towards recognition. This is a superb book. Winner of the 2019 Bancroft Prize. Quote from the prize committee:

“In Our Beloved Kin, her immersive account of the oft-studied colonial American conflict known as King Philip’s War, Brooks imaginatively illuminates submerged indigenous histories. Written with an experimental and imagistic beauty that resists the closure of more traditionally styled narrative histories, Our Beloved Kin draws readers into a spinning, complex, changing world of tensions, alliances, and betrayals centered on bids for land. Brooks approaches a daunting task – retelling a pivotal event that shaped an era – with an uncommon boldness, creativity, and spirit of collaboration.”

A chilling and apt epigraph from Milan Kundera.

The first step in liquidating a people . . . is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.

—Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978)

Link to the digital companion with maps and images: https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/index

Important contents:

Biographical on Weetamoo, James Printer, (indigenous perspective on Mary Rowlandson narrative), role of translators and guides, the “deed game” to take land from those already on it.