The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan

Overview

About four hundred pages, the gathered writings of Samson Occom, a Mohegan, composed across the 1750s through the 1790s and collected in 2006. Occom converted during the Great Awakening, was educated by Eleazar Wheelock, became a Presbyterian minister and preacher in England, and spent his later life founding the Christian Indian town of Brothertown in New York.

The volume collects his short autobiographical narrative, his journals of missionary travel, his letters and tribal petitions, his hymns, and the 1772 sermon preached at the execution of the Mohegan Moses Paul, the first work published in English by a Native American and a bestseller in its day.

What happens

Conversion during the Great Awakening. Occom converts to Christianity during the Great Awakening’s religious revivals, beginning a lifelong engagement with the faith that will shape his subsequent education, career and writing across the following decades.

Education under Eleazar Wheelock. Occom is educated by Eleazar Wheelock, receiving training that prepares him for ministry but that also establishes a relationship marked by unequal treatment Occom would later document in his own writing.

Ministry and preaching in England. Occom becomes a Presbyterian minister and travels to England to preach, achieving considerable success and fame there even as his treatment by colonial institutions back home remains persistently unequal.

The 1772 execution sermon. Occom preaches his sermon at the execution of the Mohegan Moses Paul, a work that becomes the first published in English by a Native American and a genuine bestseller in its own day.

Letters and tribal petitions. Occom’s collected letters and petitions document his sustained advocacy on behalf of Native communities, engaging colonial institutions directly on questions of land, treatment and tribal welfare across decades.

Founding Brothertown. Occom spends his later life founding the Christian Indian town of Brothertown in New York, building an actual functioning community for displaced Native peoples rather than only writing about displacement’s difficulties.

How to read it

Read the 1772 execution sermon as establishing Native authorship within English print culture at a moment when such authority was rarely granted or even imagined possible for an indigenous writer; its bestseller status marks a genuine historical breakthrough.

Pay close attention to how the autobiographical narrative recounts Occom’s education under Wheelock followed by a considerably less successful later career, as colonial institutions repeatedly failed to extend him equal treatment or pay despite his genuine accomplishment and service.

Notice how founding Brothertown represents Occom’s own practical, considerable achievement, building an actual functioning community for displaced Native peoples rather than merely documenting displacement’s difficulties in writing alone.

Consider how collecting sermons, journals, letters, petitions and hymns together gives readers rare direct access to a single Native intellectual’s full range of genres and registers across four decades of sustained engagement with colonial religious and political institutions.

Read these writings alongside Douglass’s Narrative to compare how two writers from communities subject to different forms of colonial and racial oppression each used autobiographical and rhetorical skill to claim authority within a print culture that had rarely granted them voice.

Questions it raises

• Does the gap between Occom’s considerable success as a preacher in England and his persistently unequal treatment by colonial institutions at home suggest something specific about how English audiences and American colonial society each understood his Native identity differently?
• How does the 1772 execution sermon’s status as bestseller complicate our understanding of its content and purpose? Does its popularity suggest genuine engagement with Occom’s message, or curiosity about Native authorship as novelty?
• What does founding Brothertown suggest about Occom’s own evolving relationship to Christian mission work? Does building a genuinely Native Christian community represent continuity with his earlier missionary education, or a departure toward greater Native self-determination?
• How should a reader weigh Occom’s letters and petitions documenting unequal treatment against his own considerable institutional success as minister and preacher? Do these coexist as complementary evidence, or does one complicate how we should read the other?
• Given that this collection gathers sermons, journals, letters, petitions and hymns spanning four decades, what does this range of genres reveal about Occom’s own understanding of which forms of writing were available and appropriate for different purposes and audiences?
• What does Occom’s status as the first Native American published in English suggest about the barriers facing other indigenous writers of his era? Does his individual breakthrough illuminate broader patterns of exclusion his success may have only partially overcome?