Samson Occom

"On the strength of his remarkable 1768 autobiography and his bestselling "Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul," the Mohegan-Brothertown minister Samson Occom (1723-1792) has become arguably the best-known Indigenous author prior to the nineteenth century. The vast majority of Occom's surviving writings, however, have been overlooked by scholarly and nonscholarly readers alike, in large part because they seem to be written primarily to advance an evangelical agenda, at least to those reading without access to the context of Occom's views on the situation of Indigenous peoples at the time. Ryan Carr offers insightful new readings of the full span of Occom's writings and, in doing so, challenges the false dichotomy between Occom's piety and a traditionalism that overemphasizes the cultural provenance of the themes of Christian virtue Occom discusses. This dichotomy overlooks his writings' pragmatic contexts and their broader social purpose: to sustain "our custom" as Northeast Natives of being "kind to Strangers." Occom's evangelical practice was an expression of Indigenous traditions of hospitality and stranger-sociability. It was central, not ancillary, to his vision of Indigenous self-determination, which was ultimately fulfilled in the agglomeration of Northeast Native families who put Indigenous stranger-love into practice in the new nation of Brothertown"--