Lisa Brooks

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Lisa Brooks (born 1970) [1] is a 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.

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Brooks is a member of the state-recognized Missisquoi Abenaki Tribe, an Abenaki heritage group in Vermont, and is predominantly of Polish, French, and English heritage. [2] [3] [1]

In 2025, the Abenaki Council of Odanak published a genealogical research report directed by historian Darryl Leroux evaluating Lisa Brooks’s ancestral claims. The report concludes that Brooks’s documented ancestry is more than 99 percent European and identifies only one ancestor, Paule Ouripehenemick (born circa 1660), who may have been Indigenous, with no subsequent Indigenous marriages in the following ten generations. [1] The authors state that these findings are consistent with earlier assessments by the Vermont Attorney General’s Office (2002) and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (2007), which determined that the membership of the Missisquoi Abenaki group did not demonstrate descent from a historical Abenaki tribe. [4] [5]

[2] [6] She received her B.A. at Goddard College (1993), her M.A. at Boston College (1995) and her Ph.D. at the Cornell University (2004). [7] [8] She is the author of many articles, essays and popular books including The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast, (2008) [9] and Our Beloved Kin (2018). [2] Brooks taught at Harvard University before moving to teach at Amherst College. Brooks teaches several classes on "Native American & Indigenous studies, early American literature, contemporary literature, and comparative American Studies" [7]

In 2019, Our Beloved Kin was one of the winners of the Bancroft Prize. [10]

Works

References

  1. 1 2 3 Lisa Brooks Narrative Report (PDF) (Report). Abenaki Council of Odanak. 2025. Retrieved December 10, 2025.
  2. 1 2 3 Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin (Yale University Press, 2018)
  3. ↑ "Professor Lisa Brooks". Amherst College . Retrieved August 5, 2023.
  4. ↑ The Abenaki in Vermont: A Report by the Office of the Attorney General (Report). Vermont Office of the Attorney General. 2002.
  5. ↑ Final Determination Against Federal Acknowledgment of the St. Francis/Sokoki Band of Abenakis of Vermont (Report). U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs. 2007.
  6. ↑ "Professor Lisa Brooks". Amherst College . Retrieved August 5, 2023.
  7. 1 2 "Faculty & Staff - Brooks, Lisa - Amherst College". www.amherst.edu.
  8. ↑ "Lisa T. Brooks | American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program". aiisp.cornell.edu. Retrieved November 23, 2019.
  9. ↑ The Common Pot — University of Minnesota Press, (2008) https://www.upress.umn.edu
  10. ↑ Schuessler, Jennifer (March 7, 2019). "Bancroft Prize for History Is Awarded to 2 Scholars". New York Times. Retrieved January 11, 2020.


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