Early American Literature

This massive volume is strange, heterogeneous, and compelling. Published by the redoubtable Library of America to coincide with the four hundredth anniversary of the Mayflower's arrival in North America, Plymouth Colony was edited by Lisa Brooks and Kelly Wisecup, two leading scholars of the Native Northeast, who have assembled an anthology of primary sources that invites readers to rethink the volume's titular theme. The book's main editorial goal is announced in the subtitle of its introduction—"Plymouth in Patuxet: A Reorientation"—and it succeeds in this goal admirably, recontextualizing the history of the colony as a relatively "short-lived" episode transpiring within the homelands of the Wampanoag and other peoples living in the southeastern part of what the colonists called "New England" (xv, 1021).

While the book includes several well-known colonial texts (James Rosier's True Relation, Edward Winslow's Good News from New England, William Bradford's Of Plimoth Plantation, Thomas Morton's New English Canaan, and Mary Rowlandson's Sovereignty and Goodness of God among them), its most important scholarly contribution is to publish these alongside lesser-known writings that reflect Indigenous peoples' historical agency in Patuxet—the region surrounding Plymouth—from the early seventeenth century down to the present day. Some of these texts were cited in Brooks's recent study of King Philip's War, Our Beloved Kin (Yale UP, 2018), but are published here for the very first time in their entirety. Included are deeds and treaties, records of councils held by Native and settler leaders, creation [End Page 225] stories inspired by Wampanoag oral tradition, diplomatic correspondence written during King Philip's War, and later reflections by northeastern Native writers about the tumultuous events of the seventeenth century. Some Herring Pond Wampanoag writings concerning Plymouth are missing here, including those collected and translated in Ives Goddard and Kathleen Bragdon's Native Writings in Massachusett (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 185, 1988), which document some of the earliest experiences of Native American communities subject to Protestant missionization. It would be interesting to know why these were omitted, especially since they were written in a Native language; then again, Brooks and Wisecup make no claim to exhaustiveness, and all of their selections are worth reading. The volume ends with an essay by Wampanoag author and historian Linda Coombs diagnosing the "audacity" of colonial knowledge-production over the four hundred years since Plymouth's founding, "as if Native peoples are merely objects of study or discussion, rather than human beings with real knowledge of their own histories" (1096).

It would be difficult to overstate the richness of the texts gathered in Plymouth Colony, or the book's potential usefulness for researchers (including higher-level students) working on Plymouth, King Philip's War, or the Native communities around Massachusetts Bay. For any scholar whose work touches on these topics even tangentially, this volume will be indispensable. Having said that, the volume also has quirks that may befuddle some readers. For instance, roughly a third of the book is given over to reprinting William Bradford's Of Plimoth Plantation in its entirety. Yet this text receives relatively little notice in the introduction, and Bradford's text's Eurocentric, "great man" viewpoint arguably works against the volume's broader goal of recontextualizing Plymouth Colony as an event transpiring in a transnational Native space. Other readers may be confused about why so much of the book is devoted to King Philip's War, which receives just as much attention from the editors as Plymouth Colony per se. Of course, the histories of the war and the colony were very much intertwined in the pivotal 1670s, but the former stretched over a much broader geographical area than Plymouth Colony and involved many more Indigenous nations than the Massachusett-speaking peoples who figure so prominently in this volume...