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Authors
Samson Occom (1723-1792)
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The published writings of Samson Occom are A Short Narrative of My Life, composed in 1768 but first published in Berndt Peyer’s The Elders Wrote: An Anthology of Early Prose by North American Indians, 1768–1931 (1982); A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian (1772); and A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs, Intended for the Edification of Sincere Christians of All Denominations (1774). Also see W. DeLoss Love’s Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England (2000). After his death, Occom’s account of the Montauks among whom he had lived and worked was published as “An Account of the Montauk Indians, on Long-Island,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 10 (1809). Harold Blodgett’s Samson Occom, Dartmouth College Manuscript Series No. 3 (1935), is dated, but full of useful biographical information; Blodgett also reprints most of Occom’s extant letters. Peyer’s “Samson Occom, Mohegan Missionary of the 18th Century,” American Indian Quarterly 6 (1982), offers a brief biographical account of Occom. “Christian Indians: Samson Occom and William Apes,” in David Murray’s Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts (1991) is a fine consideration of Occom, and Michael Elliott’s “ ‘This Indian Bait’: Samson Occom and the Voice of Liminality,” Early American Literature 29 (1994), is a sophisticated study. Laurie Weinstein’s “Samson Occom: A Charismatic Eighteenth-Century Mohegan Leader” in her Enduring Traditions: The Native Peoples of New England (1994) is useful, along with Bernd Peyer’s The Tutor’d Mind: Indian Missionary- Writers in Antebellum America (1997). Laura J. Murray’s To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751–1776 (1998), an edition of the writing of a Mohegan who also attended Eleazar Wheelock’s Indian school and who married Tabitha, the daughter of Samson Occom, has much useful information. See Colin Calloway’s The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America (1994).
Born a Mohegan, the northernmost branch of the Pequot tribe, in Connecticut, Samson Occom was deeply impressed by the message of Christian evangelical preachers when he was sixteen, and he later converted. In 1743 he joined the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, who trained Indian men to become missionaries. Occom spent more than a decade with Wheelock before leaving to teach and preach God's word to Indians in New London first, then in Montauk, Long Island, where he married a Montauk woman and was ordained a Presbyterian minister. Occom and Wheelock's friendship ended when Wheelock neglected to care for Occom's family while Occom was away raising money for Wheelock's Indian school and, subsequently, when Wheelock used those funds to establish what would later become Dartmouth College and turned its focus away from Indian students. To justify his break with Wheelock, Occom composed a ten-page autobiography, A Short Narrative of My Life, in 1768, which lay in the Dartmouth archives until its publication in 1982. In his Narrative Occom reflects on what it was like to be an Indian minister and teacher in the rural landscape of the eighteenth century. His other publications are Sermon at the Execution of Moses Paul and A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1774).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Occom's A Short Narrative of My Life is a text recovered recently from library archives and available in a published edition only since 1982. Written in 1768, this account in English by a Native American extends our understanding of a golden age of autobiography, an age intensified by refreshed belief that the self can be understood and celebrated for its worldly experiences and achievements, rather than for private spiritual quests. But as a Mohegan, Occom was also a man of the Christian faith, minister of a religion acquired from a culture which granted him no acceptance. We can feel his predicament keenly in this short account of his life.
1. At the end of the Narrative, Occom writes curtly about the injustice in the compensation he received for a career of ministry and teaching, and the pittance he mentions, compared with the normal earnings of a white man in similar professional life, is astounding--as is the brevity and the matter-of-factness with which Occom describes the difference. Discuss this understatement as a rhetorical strategy: how dignity is maintained, how a life, thus narrated, is not reduced to a protracted grievance, and how Occom's firm and abiding profession of Christian values is not compromised or contradicted by his clear sense of worldly injustice.
2. Occom gives substantial space, in this short narrative, to descriptions of his "Methods"--for keeping a school at Montauk and for running religious services for his Native American congregation. Why does he describe these strategies in such detail and give comparatively little space to his family and domestic life?
