The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America (review)

Recent decades' attempts to diversify understandings of American history and literature have been unusually slow to saturate early American literature, most likely because so many U.S. citizens credit seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Euro-American writings for the stories, definitions, and ideals that created the United States. Perhaps for this reason, although any schoolchild has heard stories of Columbus, Pilgrims, and founding fathers, most of us are still surprised the first time we read that Columbus posited the world was breast-shaped rather than round, that Pocahontas had no romance with John Smith, and that when the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock, a Native man named Squanto greeted them in English and taught them the trade on which their colony relied. To the reassessment of early American writing that scholars still work to facilitate, Joanna Brooks has added an invaluable resource with this edited collection of the writings of eighteenth-century Mohegan minister Samson Occom. Occom's writings expand notions of early New England and New York not just by introducing the perspectives of a Native person but also by allowing us to redefine the roles of citizenship, immigration, literacy, and theocracy within the colonialism of the early eighteenth-century American Great Awakening.

Samson Occom (1723-92) was raised in traditional (as he calls it, "heathenish") Mohegan culture in Mohegan, Connecticut. He converted to Christianity at sixteen and thereafter worked for four years to become conversant and literate in English, then he studied Latin, Greek, and Hebrew with Connecticut missionaries Eleazar Wheelock and Benjamin Pomeroy. Occom was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1759 and helped establish ministries and schools among several Native communities in New England and New York while fathering ten children and negotiating the hardships occasioned by the Seven Years' War, Pontiac's War, and the American Revolution. He is perhaps best known for his work in the Americas and England raising funds for Moor's Indian Charity School and as the victim of betrayal by Wheelock, who eventually preferred white to Native students, moved his school to New Hampshire, and changed its original mission to found what would become Dartmouth College. Less known is the history of Occom's activism on behalf of Native communities and his work to found the separatist Christian Native towns at New Stockbridge and Brotherton, New York.

In this volume, Brooks has assembled and edited over one thousand archived pages of Occom's writing, including, among other works, a visionary testimony by a Native woman Occom converted, an early draft of his autobiography, seventy-six surviving letters, thirteen government petitions, "twenty-four hand-sewn manuscript diaries spanning almost five decades from 1743 to 1792" (8), and twenty surviving sermons, among them the 1772 work for which Occom gained celebrity in his own lifetime, "A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian." The collection allows us to dissociate Occom from an unjust critical history in which, as Brooks describes it, "a consensus view once developed of Occom as a missionary apologist for Christian imperialism" (9). Read for the first time as a body, his known writings allow us to deepen perceptions of Occom's roles as teacher, preacher, and converter of souls. Brooks includes the many hymns Occom composed. His recipe book of healing "Herbs and Roots" (1754) reveals his knowledge of traditional medicine. He writes ethnographically in his "Account of the Montauk Indians, on Long Island" (1761). "The Most Remarkable and Strange State Situation and Appearance of Indian Tribes in this Great Continent" (1783) shows Occom's passion for justice and compassion for Native people, be they Christian or otherwise. His letters provide full expression to the range of Occom's emotions: his fear and disappointment at his son's intemperance, the indignant sarcasm with which he treats Wheelock's betrayal, and, in a response by Phillis Wheatley to a lost letter from Occom, his abolitionist advocacy of the natural rights of...