Our Beloved Kin

With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Our Beloved Kin recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and 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 Mary Rowlandson. King Philip’s War (1675-1678) is often viewed as the quintessential moment of colonial conquest and Native resistance, but these stories reveal a historical landscape much more complex than its original Puritan narrators conveyed. Our Beloved Kin also draws readers beyond the locus of most narratives of the war, southern New England, into the northern front, the vast interior of Wabanaki, where the war continued long beyond the death of “King Philip.” Beginning and ending at Caskoak, a place of diplomacy, the book explores the movement of survivors seeking refuge, captives taken in war, and Indigenous leaders pursuing diplomacy in vast Indigenous networks across the northeast. Supplemented by thirteen maps and an interactive website, Our Beloved Kin takes readers into Indigenous geographies, braiding together research in historical archives, including little-known revelatory documents, interpretive frameworks drawn from Indigenous languages, and place-based history which arises from reading “the archive of the land” to offer a compelling new interpretation of “King Philip’s War.”