Samson Occom Research Articles

The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (review)

Reviewed by: The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility Phillip H. Round (bio) The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility. Laura Stevens. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 259 pp. Among the many cryptic statements to be found in early American texts, two stand out as symptomatic of the problems readers face in trying to interpret just how Native peoples were viewed by the English and what it means for British cultural history. The first is Edward Winslow's famous aphoristic summation of the way the Plymouth Colony was funded and administered—and the way it went about its relations with Native communities. "Religion and profit jump together," Winslow said. The second appears a century later as the concluding statement to Samson Occom's manuscript Personal Narrative. "They have used me thus," Occom complains of the New England missionary society, "because I am a poor Indian." Worse still, Occom protests, "I did not make myself so." Laura Stevens's fascinating study of the emergence of English Protestant missionary discourse during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries goes a long way toward clarifying what both men meant, explaining how such utterances made a good deal of sense in the colonial worlds each inhabited. The Poor Indians makes it clear that from the beginning profit and religion did indeed "jump together" in the North American British missionary enterprise and that "missionary writings often equated financial transactions with spiritual ones" (7). In the process, "an optimistic moral philosophy intertwined with a culture of sensibility" to found "a benevolent imperialist rhetoric" (33) that served as a "justification for colonialism" (43). Her book also shows that Occom was right. He had not made himself a "poor Indian." He had been cast in that role by more than a century [End Page 145] of missionary writings that strove to represent Native peoples in Britain's own sentimental image. Stevens's study focuses on the period 1642–1776, when the English missionary movement in America was most influential and the majority of its texts were focused on North America. Defining missionary writing broadly—including not only "journals, letters, and reports . . . but also . . . sermons, letters, and genres usually marked as literary, written by people raising money for, or merely thinking about, missionary work" (22)—The Poor Indians traces the rise of several important early modern British cultural phenomena to the development of a "discourse of associated philanthropy" (83). The first, and most important to Stevens's work, is the "culture of sensibility," which most histories of the period date to around 1740. Stevens offers two important revisions of our previous understanding of British sensibility. Judging from the missionary texts, it began much earlier, and underwent significant refinement as it engaged both the relative "failure" of Indian missionization, and a contradictory, corresponding outpouring of sympathy for a "vanishing race." Stevens also finds that missionary writings about American Indians also fostered the development of an imagined British national community. Missionary texts reveal "the complex discursive process by which the promoters of missions in America made readers in Britain care about distant projects" (12). Acting much like the newspapers, periodicals, and novels that have been put forward as central to "the civilizing process," missionary writings and the voluntary philanthropic organizations that promoted them "encourag[ed] readers to imagine themselves linked to others in collective act" (73). British missionary texts also demonstrate that this imagined community was transatlantic, and Stevens's perspective is emphatically so. Missionary tracts, she argues, "evoked and peddled a transatlantic sense of togetherness" (14) and a "sense of transatlantic simultaneity" (66). Her study is especially good at backing up this claim in two chapters that deal with the predominance of tropes concerned with husbandry and trade in missionary writings, and the transatlantic epistolary modes these tracts modeled and the discursive circuits within which most of them circulated. Two other chapters—" 'The Reservoir of National Charity': The Role of the Missionary Society," and "Indians, Deists, and the Anglican Quest for Compassion"—address issues more central to the metropolis. In "The [End Page 146] Reservoir of National Charity," Stevens makes a good case for viewing missionary societies as social clubs, purified by their efforts at transparency...

Appreciations

Appreciations Joanna Brooks (bio) As a scholar based in early American studies, I would like to honor the impact of LaVonne Ruoff's work on my home field. Her scholarship has made it possible to think about early American literature in entirely new ways. Her recovery and republication of the Mohegan writer Samson Occom's Sermon at the Execution of Moses Paul served as a clarion call to early Americanists to begin thinking about Native Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as sophisticated and authoritative readers and writers, not just objects of literary representation. Now, a rising generation of early Americanists is trying to continue her work by recovering more texts and more textual traces of Native American authority from the colonial-era archives so that we can all better appreciate the longevity and power of American Indian intellectual traditions. Joanna Brooks Joanna Brooks teaches American literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She is presently completing an edition of the collected writings of Samson Occom. Copyright © 2005 Individual Contributors

American Lazarus: religion and the rise of African-American and Native American literatures

The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of colour in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, 'the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust.' This book explores the means by which the very first Black and Indian authors rose up to transform their communities and the course of American literary history. It argues that the origins of modern African-American and American Indian literatures emerged at the revolutionary crossroads of religion and racial formation as early Black and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions. While shedding fresh light on the pioneering figures of African-American and Native American cultural history-including Samson Occom, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and John Marrant-this work also explores a powerful set of little-known Black and Indian sermons, narratives, journals, and hymns. Chronicling the early American communities of color from the separatist Christian Indian settlement in upstate New York to the first African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston, it shows how eighteenth-century Black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion. American Lazarus offers a bold new vision of a foundational moment in American literature. It reveals the depth of early Black and Indian intellectual history and reassesses the political, literary, and cultural powers of religion in America.

Eulogy on William Apess: Speculations on His New York Death

Eulogy on William Apess:Speculations on His New York Death Robert Warrior (bio) "And while you ask yourselves, 'What do they, the Indians, want?' you have only to look at the unjust laws made for them and say, 'They want what I want.' "1 These words, spoken on two occasions in the Odeon Theatre in Boston in January 1836, are among the last history records of Pequot intellectual, William Apess, speaking in public. They come at the end of what is surely the pinnacle of Apess's intellectual career, his Eulogy on King Philip, a stunning revision of American history in which Apess condemns the historical and contemporary practices by which Natives lost and were losing their lands to invading Euroamerican. Apess delivered the eulogy on January 8, then again in what was apparently a sort of command performance encore on January 26 (O'Connell, On Our Own Ground275). The Eulogy, published in two editions after it was delivered, is the last of Apess's five books, all of which are nonfiction. He also published an autobiography, A Son of the Forest, in two separate editions (1829 and 1831); The Increase of the Kingdom of Christ: A Sermon (1831); The Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequot Tribe (1833); and Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Marshpee Tribe; or, The Pretended Riot Explained (1835) (O'Connell, On Our Own Ground lxxx-lxxxi). Each of these books is remarkable in its own way, especially given the extremely modest background of their author. "Apess's work," according to Jace Weaver, "must be viewed as resistance literature, affirming Indian cultural and political identity over against the dominant culture" (55). Apess is among a number of Native intellectuals from the eighteenth [End Page 1] and nineteenth centuries to whom scholars have paid increasing attention over the past decade and more. Others include Samson Occom, Joseph Johnson, Peter Jones, Elias Boudinot, and George Copway. These scholars have produced a range of work that includes extremely helpful and illuminating anthologies and articles built around recovered writings to full-length archival and textual studies of multiple and single authors.2 The purpose of this paper, though, is not so much to add to what we know of Apess's texts, but to examine the circumstances surrounding his death in 1839, not in New England, but in New York City. A New York Mystery What happened to Apess after he departed the stage at the Odeon is shrouded in mystery; the contemporary realities of the 1830s and the attendant problem of Native invisibility in the northeastern United States surround his story outside of his published work. A year after his orations at the Odeon, Apess published second editions of both The Experiences of Five Christian Indians and Eulogy on King Philip, but has yet to show up in the historical record as having continued his life in the public eye. Indeed, the only public mentions of Apess are in court in debt actions. Even there, an inventory of his household goods appears while he does not. For years, that was all that seemed possible to know after 1836. One early critic speculated that his political activities had made him violent enemies and that he had been murdered like his African American New England nationalist contemporary, David Walker (O'Connell, On Our Own Ground xxxviii-xxxix). Others assumed he fell into dissipation and died anonymously.3 Eventually, 1839 obituaries from New York City papers emerged in archival research, followed by transcripts of an inquest into Apess's death.4 Up to the point of the discovery of the New York obituaries, Apess seemed every bit a product of New England and every inch a New England writer. Then, somehow, Apess had moved from New England to New York City and had died there.5 The inquest, a document handwritten in script, offers no ironclad answers to the circumstances of Apess's death. In attendance were three witnesses: a wife named Elizabeth, the daughter of the owner of the [End Page 2] boarding house where Apess and his wife were living, and a fellow boarder. Apparently, Apess sought medical attention due to pain...

Six Hymns by Samson Occom

Six Hymns by Samson Occom Joanna Brooks (bio) Samson Occom (1723–1792) was a Mohegan tribal leader, an ordained Presbyterian minister, a major fund-raiser for what is now Dartmouth College, the leader of an intertribal revitalization and resettlement movement, and the first published Native American author. His Sermon at the Execution of Moses Paul (1772), the first English-language text written and published by a Native American author, appeared in more than a dozen editions and reprintings—including a Welsh-language translation —before 1820. This sermon and a short autobiographical narrative drafted by Occomin 1768 have been inducted into American literature anthologies and reintroduced to contemporary scholars of early American and Native American literatures. Yet it is not widely known that Occom also wrote and published in poetic forms and that he maintained a lifelong interest in hymnody. In 1774, he compiled, edited, and published the groundbreaking and widely popular A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs; Intended for the Edification of Sincere Christians, of All Denominations; he also wrote at least six hymn-texts published in his Collection and elsewhere. On the merits of the Collection, leading musicologist Robert Stevenson has declared Occom "the first Native American published composer" ("First Composer").More than that, Occom was a leader in the movement to develop an indigenous American hymn tradition. Occom's original hymn-texts also distinguish him as the first Native American to publish poetry in English, and they establish the historical beginnings of Native English-language poetry in the eighteenth century. Occom's interest in hymnody arose from the intersection of Christian and Indian traditions in a context of social, cultural, and religious change. Song had long been an important element of community life and ritual among Occom's Mohegan and other southern New England tribes. During the eighteenth century, the continuity of tribal song traditions and tribal communities themselves came under tremendous threat. War, colonist population growth, poverty, land disputes, missionary colonialism, [End Page 67] disruption of traditional aqua- and agriculture, and other factors caused population reduction and community relocation among the tribes. Many young Indian men and women were indentured as household servants, laborers, and sailors; others were placed by well-meaning parents in boarding schools such as Wheelock's Moor's Indian Charity School (see Silverman). In all of these situations, removal from family, clan, and tribe meant reduced exposure to traditional languages, songs, and stories. The eighteenth century also brought great changes to American religious music, especially in New England where the Bay Psalm Book had long dominated congregational song. The advent of English hymnody and the introduction of works by Isaac Watts in the 1710s and 1720s challenged the dominance of psalmody and attracted adherents among New England clergy and elites. Cotton Mather admired Watts but nonetheless rejected his hymns for use in church worship; his nephew Mather Byles and other young New England poets emulated Watts as they did Alexander Pope. The 1720s also saw the rise of the regular singing movement, which advocated that the old practice of "lining out" psalms be abandoned for printed tunebooks. Thomas Walter, another nephew to Cotton Mather, helped lead the movement with his Grounds and Rules of Music Explained (1721) (see Beuchner). Colonial singing schools soon followed, as venues for instruction in new vocal techniques like fuguing and for the innovation of new tunes. The publication of American tunebooks such as James Lyon's Urania, or a Choice Collection of Psalm Tunes, Anthems, or Hymns (1762), Josiah Flagg's A Collection of the Best Psalm Tunes (1764), and William Billings's The New England Psalm Singer (1770) established this newly extensive tune repertoire. New Light partisans of the Great Awakening and later revivals disseminated and popularized these new developments in hymnody. More radical revivalists also promoted the use of American-composed hymn-texts, which were often paired with folk tunes. For example, the Separate Congregationalist James Davenport wrote his own hymns and led hymn-singing processions through the streets of New London, Connecticut.1 While Davenport's practices scandalized conservative clergy, they were well received among nearby Indian communities. In his autobiographical narrative, Samson Occom credited Davenport and other "Extraordinary Ministers" with effecting the...

Samson Occom and/In The Missionary's Position: Consideration of a Native-American Preacher in 1770's Colonial America

Previous articleNext article No AccessSamson Occom and/In The Missionary's Position: Consideration of a Native-American Preacher in 1770's Colonial AmericaPolly Stevens FieldsPolly Stevens Fields Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 32, Number 1Winter 2001Romanticism and Interdisciplinarity: "Centers and Peripheries": Selected Papers from the 15th Annual Conference of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24044934 Views: 6Total views on this site © 2001 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America

A study of cultural encounter, this book takes a fresh look at the much ignored and often misunderstood experience of Christian Indians in early America. Focusing on New England missionary settlements from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Hilary E. Wyss examines the ways in which Native American converts to Christianity developed their own distinct identity within the context of a colonial culture. With an approach that weaves together literature, religious studies, and ethno-history, Wyss grounds her work in the analysis of a rarely read body of autobiographical writings by Christian Indians, including letters, journal entries, and religious confessions. She then juxtaposes these documents to the writings of better known Native Americans like Samson Occom as well as to the published works of Anglo-Americans, such as Mary Rowlandson's famous captivity narrative and Eleazor Wheelock's accounts of his charity schools. In their search for ostensibly authentic Native voices, scholars have tended to overlook the writings of Christian Indians. Yet, Wyss argues, these texts reveal the emergence of a dynamic Native American identity through Christianity. More specifically, they show how the active appropriation of New England Protestantism contributed to the formation of a particular Indian identity that resisted colonialism by using its language against itself.

The Contemporaneous Reception of Phillis Wheatley: Newspaper and Magazine Notices During the Years of Fame, 1765-1774

Mukhtar Ali Isani [*] The fame of Phullis Wheatley is often measured in terms of references in the writings of such eminent figures as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, but these are only a part of the evidence. Recognition among the common populace, as evident in the newspapers and magazines of the time, is also a valid measure. These commonplace and public documents effectively show the reach and the recognition of the poet. While Bostonians and others attested to her creativity within the limited scope of personal correspondence and in a foreword to her book, American newspapers and magazines broadcast news of the poet to far greater numbers and with some frequency. The notices were brief but fairly numerous, representing six colonies. American newspapers focused on Wheatley as American news and reflected some colonial pride; the British magazines often overlooked local significance but offered greater depth of examination. Current events and current sympathies make the focus on the poet somewhat diffe rent in colonial America and in the mother country, then engaged in antislavery debate. As the main source of public information, newspapers and magazines contributed to the bulk of Wheatley's contemporaneous fame. This article is based on a page-by-page examination of extant colonial newspapers and magazines falling within the period 1765-1774 and on a selective examination of English publications. [1] Its purpose is to verify known newspaper and magazine notices by personal examination, add new items via a cumulative list, and examine the expanded range of Wheatley notices for its reflection of the poet's contemporaneous fame, still not fully documented. The descriptive essay is based upon this greater breadth of material now available. American newspaper and magazine notices of the time are brief and those related to Wheatley's work generally do not amount to reviews, but their number is considerable and they are representative of popular opinion in their approach to the poet. The selectivity enforced by the limitations of space in the 18th century newspapers gives further importance to these notices. The survey of American sources for this study lends substance to the inadequately documented contemporaneous and near-contemporaneous suggestions, including those of Margaretta Odell, that Wheatley was famous in her time. [2] Findings in English newspapers and magazines support American findings, besides providing a critical review unobtainable in the more limited American publications. But even a brief notice in America has its significance, for the colonial newspaper was almost universally only four pages long, with little more than a page devoted to news that was not political or commercial. To win recurring attention in these pages is imp ressive. The Wheatley notices are notable in number and, to a lesser extent, in variety. They show interest in Wheatley both as a person and as a poet. The value of her poetry is recognized, but there is also extraordinary emphasis on her status as a black poet, a slave turned intellectual, and a pious prodigy. One can expect interest in Wheatley in the late 1760s to be mainly local and communicated orally or through private correspondence. Thus her earliest poetry, her meetings with local dignitaries, and her correspondence with the Mohegan preacher Samson Occom [3] probably generated comment, but went essentially unrecorded in newspapers and magazines. Publication proposals in the Boston Censor of 29 February 1772 give 1765 as the earliest date of composition for a Wheatley poem [4] but the newspapers contain no reference to the poet or her poetry until 1767. The Rhode Island Newport Mercury's report on her ability at impromptu composition is the first notice and that newspaper's On Messrs Hussey and Coffin ranks as the earliest-published poem by Wheatley. [5] Perhaps this publication planted in Susanna Wheatley's heart the desire to see her protege produce a book, but the public was not aroused. …

Early Native American Writing: New Critical Essays

1. 'Honoratissimi Benefactores': Native American students and two seventeenth-century texts in the university tradition Wolfgang Hochbruck and Beatrix Dudensing Reichel 2. 'Pray, Sir, consider a little': rituals of subordination and strategies of resistance in the letters of Hezekiah Calvin and David Fowler to Eleazer Wheelock Laura J. Murray 3. '(I speak like a fool but I am constrained): Samson Occom's Short Narrative and economies of the racial self Dana D. Nelson 4. Where, Then, Shall We Place the Hero of the Wilderness?: William Apess's Eulogy on King Philip and doctrines of racial destiny Anne Marie Dannenberg 5. 'They ought to enjoy the home of their fathers': the Treaty of 1838, Seneca Intellectualism, and Literary Genesis Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr 6.' I am Joaquin!': Space and freedom in Yellow Bird's The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit John Lowe 7. This Voluminous Unwritten Book of Ours: early Native American writers and oral tradition William M. Clements 8. 'A terrible sickness among them': Smallpox and stories of the Frontier Helen Jaskoski 9. 'A desirable citizen, a practical business man': G. W. Grayson - Creek mixed blood, nationalist, and autobiographer Robert F. Sayre 10. An Indian ... an American: ethnicity, assimilation and balance in Charles Eastman's From the Deep Woods to Civilization Eric Peterson 11. 'Overcoming all obstacles': the assimilation debate in Native American women's journalism of the Dawes era Carol Batker 12. 'My people ... my kind': Mourning Dove's Cogewa, the Half-Blood as a narrative of mixed descent Martha L. Viehmann 13. 'Because I understand the storytelling art': the evolution of D'Arcy McNicle's The Surrounded Birgit Hans.

Native American Missionary-Writers

In recent years, historians have turned increasingly to biography to explain the cultural changes that Native Americans experienced after the European invasion of America. Native people who lived before the Civil War left relatively few of the records normally used to construct biographies, and individuals appear intermittently in more general sources. These circumstances have limited the length of most biographies to essays, many of which have been published in anthologies that present a collective biography of a particular kind of experience. In The Tutor'd Mind: Indian Missionary-Writers in Antebellum America, Bernd C. Peyer follows this tradition and analyzes in the context of European encounters the lives and writings of four Native converts to Christianity under the premise that these representatives of an Indian proto-elite consciously followed the paths they sincerely believed would lead their people out of the colonial situation (p. 19). Peyer frames his biographies in terms of internal (p. 2) and the personality (p. 3). Internal colonization occurs when colonizers outnumber indigenous people, such as in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and produces a decolonized personality, the tutor'd mind. In such a situation, the dominant society is not interested in cultural exchange or conservation but in imposing its own supposedly superior culture on indigenous people. The tutor'd mind is one tool by which colonizers attempt to accomplish this goal. The individual achievements of the tutor'd mind, however, never qualify him (all Peyer's subjects are men) for full acceptance by the colonizer. As a result, Peyer's subjects made rational and critical assessments of contemporary Indianwhite relations and expressed their own notions for improving their people's situation (p. 20). Samson Occom (1723-1792), the Mohegan protege of Dartmouth College founder Eleazar Wheelock, converted to Christianity as a young man and enrolled in school at twenty for a course of study that totalled about four

The Tutor'd Mind: Indian Missionary-Writers in Antebellum America

Part historical narrative, part textual analysis, this book traces the development of American Indian literature from the seventeenth century to the eve of the Civil War. Bernd C. Peyer focuses on the lives and writings of four prominent Indian missionaries - Samson Occom of the Mohegans, William Apess of the Pequots, Elias Boudinot of the Cherokees, and George Copway of the Ojibwas - each of whom struggled to negotiate a secure place between the imperatives of colonial rule and the rights of native peoples.

Samson Occom: Mohegan Missionary and Writer of the 18th Century

Native American scholarship began early in the 17th century -almost immediately after the foundation of the first New England colonies -as a consequence of efforts made by clergymen such as John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew who hoped to speed up the dissemination of Christianity by educating Native Americans and training them as missionaries. In 1665, the Harvard Indian College commenced offering courses for Native Americans in English, Latin and Greek until 1693, when that institution was again closed down. The missionaries further established a number of Praying Indian Towns -each with its own school and instructors.

An Indian Preacher in England: Being Letters and Diaries Relating to the Mission of the Reverend Samson Occon and the Reverend Nathaniel Whitaker to Collect Funds in England for the Benefit of Eleazar Wheelock's Indian Charity School, From which Grew Dartmouth College

An Indian Preacher in England: Being Letters and Diaries Relating to the Mission of the Reverend Samson Occom and the Reverend Nathaniel Whitaker to Collect Funds in England for the Benefit of Eleazar Wheelock's Indian Charity School, from which Grew Dartmouth College. Get access Jarvis M. Morse Jarvis M. Morse Brown University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 21, Issue 2, September 1934, Pages 260–261, https://doi.org/10.2307/1896898 Published: 01 September 1934

Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England. W. DeLoss Love

Previous articleNext article FreeRecent Theological LiteratureSamson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England. W. DeLoss Love Geo. E. BurlingameGeo. E. Burlingame Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 4, Number 4Oct., 1900 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/477597 Views: 101Total views on this site Journal History This article was published in The American Journal of Theology (1897-1920), which is continued by The Journal of Religion (1921-present). PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.