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.?The Common Pot,? a metaphor that appears in Native writings during the eighteenth and nineteent.