The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast

by Lisa Brooks

Literary critics frequently portray early Native American writers either as individuals caught between two worlds or as subjects who, even as they defied the colonial world, struggled to exist within it. In striking counterpoint to these analyses, Lisa Brooks demonstrates the ways in which Native leaders--including Samson Occom, Joseph Brant, Hendrick Aupaumut, and William Apess--adopted writing as a tool to reclaim rights and land in the Native networks of what is now the northeastern United States.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Native American, Indigenous, Nature, Local History, Indigenous History

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Lisa Brooks is an historian, writer, and professor of English and American studies at Amherst College in Massachusetts where she specializes in the history of Native American and European interactions from the American colonial period to the present.

Reviews

[Siobhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just about everyone I know considers this the most important book published in Native American Literary Studies in the past few years. One of the best things it does it make you think of Native American writing (whether early petitions, or contemporary poetry) as a kind of RE-MAPPING of space as primarily indigenous. This is radical, especially for New England, which uses all kinds of strategies (public monuments, place names) to map itself as somehow devoid of Native Americans.

Further, this book offers brilliant new readings of some early Native American writers, like William Apess and Samson Occom: while these guys have often been read as either unique (like they were the "lone" Native people writing in their day) or "Christianized," Lisa Brooks shows that they were deeply imbedded in wide-ranging NETWORKS of Native intellectuals, many of whom did indeed happen to be writing. In line with this, she offers important readings of other early Native writers (like the Abenaki linguist Joseph Laurent) who haven't yet got the attention they deserve.

SO: if, as the Ojibwe historian Jean O'Brien has wittily pointed out in her own groundbreaking book, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England, non-Native historians have worked hard to create a New England landscape "thickly populated by the 'last'" of a given tribe, then Brooks creates a new landscape THICKLY POPULATED by Native people who were WRITING.

[Phillip · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the theoretical framework for this book, but not much of the actual content because the primary focus is on Indigenous rhetoric, writing, and politics from the colonial era and the Early Republic US period, which is about two centuries before what I'm interested in, which is contemporary First Nations drama. The titular metaphor is useful for my research because Brooks establishes a long history of communalism and relational ethics (relation not only between human beings but between humans and flora, fauna, spaces, geography, water, etc.) among Indigenous North Americans, and she shows that these ideas were central to Indigenous ideology going back centuries.

[John Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book re-imagines contact between Europeans and indigenous people in the Northeast. Not only does it help to reconceptualize the historical period, it serves as a model for how this could be done in other areas of the United States. Brooks also reminds us that the native space continues to exist, despite mythology about lost people.

[Jansyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s a great thesis. I just hate historical books. I was mostly interested in the concept of “the Common Pot” which was mostly discussed in the first chapter. I tried finding more info about “the common pot” online, but came up short of any more references to the concept. If anyone knows any…. Let me know!

[Kate Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with Our Beloved Kin, this book is geared toward people who already understand the history of this region -- so I was sometimes confused, especially through the chapters that go further west to the Great Lakes area. But even still, I really appreciate the work Brooks has done to reframe this region as indigenous land and make its history more present.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Ai Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really important book that maps and remaps Native New England space through writings by Native people from the area. I was impressed by the ways that Brooks was able to disrupt colonial geographies, and still render the land legible--a testament to her commitment to using place names and inscribing the world with indigenous knowledge systems. The chapter about Samson Occom's preaching and fight for Mohegan land was particularly instructive in the ways that Native people negotiated territory claims through language. A really great book, even if all of the literary analysis was not 100% my cup of tea.

[Indigo (Aimee) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for Ethnohistory class, definitely not selling back.