UTOPIAN PROMISE - Annenberg Media

Samson Occom (1723–1792)
Samson Occom was born in 1723 in a Mohegan Indian community in
Connecticut. At the age of sixteen he was “awakened and converted”
to Christianity under the guidance of white itinerant ministers.
Shortly thereafter, Occom began learning English and studying scripture
under the tutelage of Eleazar Wheelock, a prominent missionary
interested in training young Native American men to act as Christian
ministers to their own people. In 1749, Occom left Wheelock to
embark on such a mission. While teaching and preaching in Long
Island, he met and married Mary Fowler, a Montauk Indian, with
whom he had ten children. Occom was officially ordained as a minister
in 1759.
Maintaining a close relationship with his mentor, Occom dedicated
much of his early life to promoting Wheelock’s missions and projects.
In 1765, at Wheelock’s behest, he embarked on an ambitious two-year
speaking tour of England to raise money for a charity school for
Indians in New England. The mission was a financial and public relations
success, in large part because of Occom’s popularity among the
English. The novelty of a Christianized American Indian attracted a
great deal of attention, and Occom’s dedication to the project brought
in large returns. While in England, he preached three hundred sermons
and raised nearly twelve thousand pounds in contributions.
Upon his return to America, Occom was outraged to find his family
living in poverty despite Wheelock’s promise to provide for them during
Occom’s absence. His resentment toward Wheelock grew when he
learned that the minister had decided to use the funds Occom had
raised in England to turn the Indian school into Dartmouth College,
an institution that quickly abandoned its focus on Native American
students. Occom also complained that he was underpaid, for he had a
large family to support and his wages never approached the salaries
commanded by many white ministers. Finding himself in dire financial
straits and feeling betrayed, Occom bitterly ended his long relationship
with Wheelock. He devoted much of the rest of his life to
preaching and raising funds for the resettlement of Christian Indians
on lands belonging to the Oneida Indians in western New York.
Though he eventually moved his family there and held the position of
pastor within the settlement, the scheme was never entirely successful
because of legal struggles and controversies over land claims. Occom
died in New York in 1792.
During his lifetime Occom wrote extensively and published two
works, making him one of the few Native Americans of the period to
leave a written record of his life and thought. While his best-known
piece is probably the “Sermon at the Execution of Moses Paul,” a transcription
of the speech he delivered in 1772 before the execution of a
fellow Christian Mohegan for the crime of murder, recent critical
attention has also focused on Occom’s brief autobiography. Occom
wrote “A Short Narrative of My Life” in 1768 as a defense against the
criticisms and personal attacks he withstood after his quarrel with
Wheelock. In it, he seeks to prove the authenticity of both his spirituality
and his Indian identity, as well as to expose the injustices he suf-
[6747] John Warner Barber, Sketch of
Samson Occom’s house (1836), courtesy
of the Connecticut Historical Society.
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