“New Lights” in the Forest

In 1768 the Mohegan Indian and Presbyterian minister Samson Occom wrote a short narrative of his life directed at individuals invested in the notion of Indian education. The finished narrative, which does not appear to have found its way to press in his lifetime, began optimistically enough with Occom’s early life as a “Heathen . . . Brought up In Heathenism” and his later conversion to Christianity (Brooks, 52). He pursued a Western education and went on to carve out a meaningful role for himself teaching the Native children of Montauk in their letters and introducing Christian spirituality to the previously unconverted Montaukett and Shinnecock tribes of Long Island. The narrative concludes, however, in a note of frustration, with Occom declaring, “Now You See What difference they made between me and other Missionaries; they gave me 180 pounds for 12 years Service, which they gave for one years Service in another Mission” (58). The implication is that, as a “poor Indian,” Occom was not valued in the same manner as white missionaries who received a great deal more institutional and monetary support while proving not half as successful in the goal of Native conversion. Occom correctly identifies race, and not merit, as the determining factor. Despite their outwardly benevolent language and stated goals of lifting “the benighted savages” of America out of “heathen darkness,” the eighteenth-century missionary societies for which Occom labored were steeped in internalized binaries of savagery and civilization that proved fundamentally incapable of elevating Native peoples to an equal status in their social and religious compacts.

Occom’s narrative has become a staple of early American literature survey classes ever since the Heath Anthology first included it in its collection in 1989. It remains a difficult text to teach, however, as the representation being forwarded finds very little traction in twenty-first-century American consciousness. Students are typically baffled by the prospect of an Indian who readily quotes scripture and presides over the execution of a fellow Native (as is the case in Occom’s other most anthologized work, A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul). Natives are still imagined as “children of the forest” in war paint, feathers, and moccasins, noble in spirit but tragically incompatible with the onrush of white civilization. Christianity is understood as having been bestowed on Indians, not something that Native peoples, themselves, are interested in disseminating. Occom’s writings work to upend such beliefs and problematize deeply cherished notions concerning our nation’s origins. Because modern audiences do not know how to receive its message or place it in any appropriate context, however, they are quick to dismiss Occom’s viewpoint, regarding it as unrepresentative.

Fortunately, a number of recently released scholarly works will contribute to the growing effort to complicate and reorient such entrenched beliefs. Joanna Brooks has compiled Occom’s collected writings in a volume that has already proven invaluable in opening up the discussion of Occom’s life and endeavors. Rachel Wheeler’s book, To Live Upon Hope, sheds new light on the Moravian missionary endeavors at the Native village of Shekomeko in the mid-eighteenth century. David Silverman and Brad Jarvis have written complimentary investigations of the Brothertown Indians who, with Occom...