Samson Occom and the Brotherton Indians

Samson Occom (b. 1723–d. 1792), a member of the Mohegan tribe of east-central Connecticut, came of age at a time of tribal turmoil and the religious revivals of the Great Awakening. He was converted to Christianity at eighteen, and at nineteen he was appointed a tribal councilor. His father Joshua died the following year, and after attending hearings in a long-standing land dispute between the Mohegans and the colony of Connecticut and witnessing his tribe’s vulnerability to English law and language, Occom went to study with Congregational minister Eleazar Wheelock of Lebanon, Connecticut. Occom studied with Wheelock for four years and was a remarkable student, achieving proficiency in English as well as Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Poor health prevented him from enrolling in college; he went to live on Long Island with the Montauk tribe, where he married, started a family, and became an effective educator and missionary. He was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1759. Occom’s success encouraged Wheelock to start an Indian Charity School to educate Native youths to become missionaries, and he sent Occom to various tribes to finds recruits. In 1766, Wheelock chose Occom to undertake a transatlantic fund-raising mission to raise money for the school. A stirring orator, Occom preached across England and Scotland from 1766 to 1768, amazing audiences and raising more than £12,000, only to return to find the school relocated to New Hampshire, renamed Dartmouth College, and reorganized to educate Anglo-American students. After his long association with Wheelock ended, and the land dispute was finally settled against the Mohegans, Occom became an outspoken advocate for Indian rights and autonomy. Seeking refuge from land expropriation and colonial interference, he helped establish Brotherton, a pan-Indian Christian group that eventually moved to lands offered them by the Oneida nation in upstate New York. Occom died in the autonomous Brotherton settlement of New Stockbridge. He is the most important Indian writer in North America before the 19th century, with a large archive that includes diaries, letters, sermons, autobiographies, ethnographies, petitions, and hymns. He authored the first Indian bestseller, a popular execution sermon that was reprinted more than twenty times. Despite the richness of his life story and his intellectual achievements, Occom’s work only began appearing in anthologies of American literature and Native American literature in the late 20th century. In 2006, his Collected Writings appeared, allowing scholars and students to grasp and examine the full range of his achievement; see Joanna Brooks, ed., The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan (New York Oxford University Press, 2006).