Samson Occom
of Occom’s son-in-law, Anthony Paul, traveled to Brothertown. The Oneida Historical Society reports that the town was geographically centered on the home of David Fowler, which also served as one of two places of worship over which Occom presided as pastor. The other house of worship was located in Stockbridge at Hendrick Aupaumut’s home. In 1787, just two years after the founding of Brothertown, the settlement’s utopian vision was shattered by a land dispute between Occom and his extended family and the Oneida, who had initially gifted Occom and his followers with the land. Elijah Wampy, who brokered the deal with the Oneida to provide land for the new settlement, was later urged by the tribe to yield their tract and live in common with the tribe. Occom and his faction, led by David Fowler, had begun to make a living as farmers and did not wish to forfeit their labor to the community. Although a treaty was brokered the following year that reaffi rmed Occom’s and Fowler’s title to the land, and thus affi rmed their right to own tracts privately rather than communally, the bitterness from the dispute lingered. Matters regarding land rights and use continued to haunt the inhabitants of Brothertown. When English colonists began to lease lands from the American Indians, Occom once again resisted. He maintained that lands could only be leased to outsiders with the community’s consent. Included among Occom’s notion of outsiders were not only the white colonists, but members of other tribes from New England that were not “pure blooded,” but had intermixed with Africans. “Occom had introduced into the original deed of gift, October 4, 1774, a condition that no such [people] should have any right to land in Brothertown, for his purpose was to keep the New England blood pure and preserve a tribal unity” (Utica Morning Herald). Samson Occom died on July 14, 1792, at the age of 69. The Reverend Samuel Kirkland preached the funeral sermon. The Oneida Historical Society ended their 1894 meeting with a charge to “fi nd the lost grave of Reverend Samson Occom, whose fame as a fervid Indian preacher lives on in the early
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history and traditions of Oneida county” (Utica Morning Herald).
“A Short Narrative of My Life” (1768) Samson Occom’s “A Short Narrative of My Life” was unpublished until 1982, when the 10-page manuscript began to fi nd its way out of Dartmouth College’s library and onto the printed page of contemporary collections and anthologies of early American literature. Its three sections divide his life in terms of his conversion to Christianity, his time studying with the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, and his life as a missionary after leaving Wheelock. By imagining his life in such a framework, Occom emphasizes the religious and spiritual aspects of his life and diminishes or all but erases his preconversion life among the Mohegan. The fi rst sentence of his narrative establishes a preference for his life after his conversion to Christianity: “I was born a Heathen and Brought Up in Heathenism, till I was between 16 and 17 years of age, at a place called Mohegan, in New London, Connecticut, in New England.” Casting it in this light of heathenism, Occom offers no redeeming qualities about his indigenous childhood except in negative contrast to his life after his midteen years. Such a construction serves more than one purpose: It allies him immediately with an English Christian readership who would ascribe to the very language and belief promulgated in the opening sentence and thus forms an alliance with these readers against non-Christian American Indians. It also creates a trajectory of conversion that would be expected from such readers and thus reaffi rms the kind of work that he performs as an ordained missionary among the Oneida and Mohegan tribes. There remains yet a third purpose served by Occom’s virtual silence regarding details from his own early childhood, and that is that he is able to maintain a cultural allegiance to the Mohegan by not revealing the sacred aspects of their culture to outsiders. The very tensions laid out in analyzing the opening sentence of Occom’s narrative are not fully resolved in the brief tale of his life.