Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson, and New England Native American Evangelicalism

Abstract Samson Occom and his son-in-law, Joseph Johnson, were arguably two of the most enmeshed Indigenous figures of early New England’s missionary circles and produced radically nativist spaces and languages within and beside the discourses of White evangelical religion. Highly visible through their writings and their relationships with prominent evangelical figures, this chapter explores the deep investments Occom and Johnson made in education, religion, and politics in New and Old England while also gesturing toward the silences obscuring Indigenous peoples in English records and in the colonial imagination. Passionately convinced that Christianity had something real and important to offer their Native kin, these Mohegan men spent their lives traversing the Northeast, the Atlantic world, and the precarious terrain between Native and colonial spaces. By foregrounding these Indigenous figures rather than the Euro-American religious leaders and missionaries in religious histories of the Northeast especially among Native nations, the authors propose a reorientation for New England’s evangelical movement, putting Indigeneity and the Indigenous figures who left an indelible mark on the Native and colonial religious landscape of the eighteenth century at the center.