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Afterword O’ Brothertown, Where Art Thou? Silence a people’s stories and you erase a culture. To have graphic evidence of this phenomenon, all we have to do is look at a map. Mapping is, of course, an intensely political enterprise, an essential step toward appropriation and possession. Maps write the conquerors’ stories over the stories of the conquered. —Louis Owens It is tempting at this point to want to achieve some kind of closure, or to suggest that the achievement of establishing a new home ground for Mohegan and Mohican survivance somehow culminated in the coming together of the Brothertown settlement in Upstate New York at the close of the colonial period. Certainly this was the dream of Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson, Hendrick Aupaumut, and others, but a dream deferred. Occom would travel back and forth in the years after the Revolutionary War from his house in Mohegan to the newly established village. On the first of these trips in 1785, he wrote in his journal of the welcome he received as he rode up to the fringes of the settlement after weeks of travel. Coming upon David Fowler’s house in the rain, he relates how, “I heard a Melodious Singing, a number were together Singing Psalms hymns and Spiritual Songs. We went in amongst them and they all took hold of my Hand one by one with Joy and Gladness from the greatest to the least, and we sot down awhile, and then they began to sing again.”1 The words to one of his own hymns might have certainly struck home on this joyous reunion, “For I will come as fast I can, / A long that way I stear / Lord give me Strength, I shall at length / Be one amongst You there.”2 In the following weeks Occom would recount the drawing up of the plan for the town. On Monday, November 7, 1785 he wrote, we proceeded to form into a Body Politick—we Named our Town by the Name of Brothertown, in Indian Eeyamquittoowaucon315 316 Red Ink nuck. J. Fowler was chosen clarke for the Town. Ralph Waupieh , David Fowler, Elijah Wympy, John Tuhy, and Abraham Simon were chosen a Committee or Trustees for the Town, for a year and for the future, the committee is to be chosen Annually .—and Andrew Accorrocomb and Thomas Putchauker were chosen to be Fence Viewers to continue a year. Concluded to have a Centre near David Fowlers House, the main Street is to run North & South & East and West, to cross at the centre. Concluded to live in Peace, and in Friendship and to go on in all their Public Concerns in Harmony both in their Religious and Temporal Concerns, and everyone to bear his part of Public Charges in the Town.3 Unlike the original Stockbridge mission where the traditional Native leadership hierarchy was undermined in the creation of a new colonial town government, Brothertown was fully Native owned and operated. The plan bespeaks a dream of permanence, order, hope. And at least in its early days there was a sense of communal effort with “everyone to bear his part of Public Charges in the Town.” Some critics have argued that the very name of the town reflected the patriarchal order of Western epistemologies that had crept into this fashioning of Native space. But the relationship of “brethren” between various Native bands had been long established in Native tradition and Brothertown was, in fact, the coming together of many Native brethren in a new shared identity.4 If the scheme and organization of the town was based somewhat upon the European notion of the grid, it is important to keep in mind that Native villages were always carefully oriented to the cardinal points as well. Occom spent the next few days surveying the territory, much as William Cooper, James Fenimore Cooper’s father, would do later in that same fateful year, but whereas Cooper saw a primeval wilderness stretching out before him in want of European improvements, Occom relates joyfully in his journal, “Thirsday Fryday and Saturday, look about a little to see the land and it is the best land I ever did see in all my Travils.”5 Occom did not immediately resettle in Brothertown, but he returned yearly to the community he had promised to make his “Home and Center .”6 He preached for both the Brothertown and the neighboring New Stockbridge settlements in Oneida in the years that followed, becoming a close associate with...

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