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  • The Economic Education of Samson Occom
  • Reginald Dyck (bio)

During his lifetime Samson Occom (1723–1792) experienced the transformation of tribal life in southern New England. As a Mohegan and pan-tribal leader, he spent his adult working life as a Christian minister and missionary. Occom’s profound sacrifices make clear the depth of his Christian beliefs.1 Nevertheless, he increasingly challenged the Christian practices of Anglo-US society.2 Key to understanding Occom’s life and writing is recognizing the acuteness of his distinction between belief and practice. This essay analyzes his effort to differentiate between religious beliefs and their resulting economic practices, both for the form of Christianity to which he converted and for the Mohegan religion into which he was born. I argue that Occom’s writings—journals, sermons, petitions, and other documents—show that this differentiation led him to reject Anglo-US economic practices as fundamentally unchristian while remaining faithful to the New Light Christian beliefs of the Great Awakening. And although he turned away from the beliefs of his birth, he found in Native traditional lifeways a truly Christian economic practice. Through his experiences of both Native and Christian beliefs and practices, Occom gained an experiential economic education that shaped his role as a tribal and pan-tribal leader.3 This work culminated in his efforts to help found and guide the separatist community of Brotherton. Through his negotiations between these two, Occom gained an experiential economic education.

His early education was in the Native economics of subsistence living, which had provided well for the Mohegan people. His commitment [End Page 3] to these lifeways is evident throughout his life. However, with his conversion to Christianity and his resulting vocation, Occom’s education shifted. His experience of inequitable missionary wage structures prompted a sharp critique of Anglo-US economic practices, as did his participation in land leasing and sales disputes, particularly the Mason-Mohegan case. His developing critique of Christian practices and his commitment to Native economics culminates in his efforts to help establish the Eeyawquittoowauconnuck-Brotherton community.4 Here Occom and the other leaders created a Native nation that rejected, as much as was possible, the dominant culture’s economic practices that failed to follow its proclaimed Christian beliefs. Instead it embraced an economics, adapted from Native tradition, that more closely followed the community’s New Light Christian beliefs.

Occom’s economic analysis of Christian practice occurs within a broader debate in Anglo-US society because of the increasing use of abstract economic systems. Paper money, banknotes, and public debt created a new system of value. Cotton Mather, like Occom, was concerned with the intersection of economics and Christian community. With his vision of “godly capitalism,” Mather saw public paper money as a tool for strengthening community bonds because participants would be tied together through mutual financial obligation (Baker 29, 27). It also offered an indirect reassurance of difference between the embattled Puritan community and the Native peoples they were dispossessing of their lands. For Mather societies without money were “brutish and savage,” revealing “ignorance of Writing and Arithmetic” (qtd. in Baker 29). Similarly, many of Occom’s eighteenth-century Anglo-US contemporaries, including Benjamin Franklin, thought that for the newly independent nation, public credit would help strengthen its fragile cohesiveness. This system could only work, like language, if everyone agreed to its meaning (5).

Occom’s problematic is quite different, however, particularly in his (and the Mohegan tribe’s) economic interactions with the Connecticut Colony and the missionary boards that supported him. Later, as a leader of the Brotherton experiment, Occom did concern himself with the intersection of economics and community. Internally [End Page 4] he focused on religious unity as the basis of economic mutuality. This unity was based on Native values as well as Christian teachings. His external analysis focuses on economic power relations with the outside organizations on which the Native community was dependent. Paper money as a means to wealth was not his concern; rather it was economic survival—for himself, his family, and the Native groups with which he worked—in the face of practices carried out in the name of Christian civilization.

Occom’s negotiation of belief...

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