SOURCE: “Christian Indians: Samson Occom and William Apes,” in Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts, Pinter Publishers, 1991, pp. 49-64.

[In the following excerpt, Murray argues that the deferential tone in Occom's letters addressed to whites is a rhetorical tactic that allows him to mount criticisms of the whites.]

The difficulties of talking about self-expression and power can be seen particularly clearly in the intermingling, in the early writings of Indians, of their perceptions of their own inferiority and the injustices done to them. The interconnection of these two issues was a historically determined matter, given the unequal relation of whites and Indians. Indians were inadequate and inferior to whites, if left in their natural state. If, therefore, they suffered under the march of progress it was not anyone's fault, least of all the whites'. On the other hand, once they had had the chance of civilisation any backsliding was then a moral failing, and if there was a great deal of backsliding, then that seemed to reaffirm the idea of a natural frailty and inadequacy. (The later development in the nineteenth century of scientific racism, of course, confirmed this natural inadequacy, but did not necessarily remove the moral disapproval.) This is of course a white view, but how were Christian Indians to think of themselves and their actions? How were they to characterise themselves? We can only work for the moment with the evidence we have about how they represented themselves to whites, which is a partial matter at best, but if we look at the way they signed themselves in their letters to whites we find a predictably formalised series of self-abasements: ‘Your Dutiful, Tho unworthy servant’, ‘thy unworthy and ungrateful Servant’, ‘Your undutiful Pupil’, ‘your affectionate though unworthy Pupil’, ‘your most noworthy and Ever Dutyfull Sarvent’, ‘your most unworthy and most obliged Humble Servant’. But when this humility is accompanied by a sense of grievance, as it quite often is in the case of Samson Occom, the same gesture of abasement can carry a sting in the tail. In a letter in which he complains of the poor funding of his next missionary expedition, ‘but I have determined to go. tho no White Missionary would go in such Circumstances’, and where his tone is what Blodgett describes as truculent, he ends:

In a word I leave my poor Wife and Children at your feet and if they hunger, Starve and die let them Die there. Sir, I shall endeavour to follow your Directions in all things. This in utmost hast and with Sincere obedience, is from

Your Good for Nothing Indian Sarvant

Irony is notoriously difficult to pin down, of course, and for that reason profoundly subversive of any attempt at controlling the play of meanings in any discourse, and William de Loss Love, who wants to emphasise the dutiful Christian in his account of Occom, feels obliged to assure us of Occom's lack of irony on particular occasions. When Occom complains of having to make a journey without funds amongst the whites, and adds that ‘if it were altogether among Indian Heathen we might do well enough’ [i.e. they could rely on their generosity], Love tells us that it is ‘a characteristic remark which he did not intend to be humorous’ (1899:103). There can be no doubt, though, about Occom's tone in an exasperated and angry letter to a white neighbour Robert Clelland, who had been gossiping about Occom's drinking:

You represent me to be the Vilest Creature in Mohegan. I own I am bad enough and too bad, Yet I am Heartily glad I am not that old Robert Clelland, his sins won't be charged to me and my Sins won't be charged to him, he must answere for his own works before his Maker and I must answere for mine. You signify, as if it was in your Power to do me harm. You have been trying all you Can and you may your worst, I am not concerned.

Here he throws back at Clelland his accusations, rather than try to justify himself in Clelland's terms. They will both eventually be judged by the same yardstick, and it will not be Clelland's. Refusing to ‘spend my Time and Paper’ any longer, Occom's parting shot is a brilliant way of both giving Clelland permission to ‘represent’ him and a way of totally rejecting it: ‘I am, Sir, Just what you Please, S. Occom.’

Occom's ability to ‘represent’ himself often involves this sort of indirection, by which he moves himself in and out of the stereotype of the poor Indian. In a long autobiographical account written soon after his return in 1768 from England, where he had been fund-raising, and in order, significantly, to counteract ‘several Representations … made by Some gentlemen in America Concerning me’ he takes the opportunity not just to refute their imputations that he had been converted specially for the English trip but also to complain about his second-class treatment. He points out that, unlike white missionaries, he did not need an interpreter (both Occom and Fowler had learned to speak Oneida, which was not their native language, according to Love—1899:94) and was, as ‘School master and Minister to the Indians—their Ear, Eye & Hand, as well as Mouth’. In spite of this he was paid less than the white missionaries, and he poses and then answers the question why this should be. He tells a story of ‘a Poor Indian Boy’ who worked for an English family who always found fault and beat him. When he was asked what it was he was doing so wrong,

he said he did not know, but he Supposed it was because he could not drive [plough] any better; but says he, I Drive as well as I know how; and at other Times he Beats me, because he is of a mind to beat me; but says he believes he Beats me for the most of the Time ‘because I am an Indian. So Im ready to Say, they have used me thus, because I Can't Influence the Indians so well as other missionaries; but I can assure them I have endeavoured to teach them as well as I know how;—but I must say, ‘I believe it is because I am a poor Indian’. I Can't help that God has made me So; I did not make my self so.

(Peyer 1982a:18)

By putting himself in the same position as the poor Indian boy Occom is mounting a criticism of the whites, for whom actual accomplishments are less important than race, and he has by the end turned the phrase ‘poor Indian’ from a term of self-derogation almost into an expression of solidarity. He is fully aware of the danger of speaking so assertively, and even includes this to add urgency to his argument (‘I must say’, and earlier, ‘I speak like a fool, but I am constrained’), and is aware that the most predictable response would be to accuse him of not knowing his proper place. These criticisms were already being made in relation to his experiences in England and in particular his involvement with the Mason controversy, into which he had entered ‘with an unbecoming spirit’ (Blodgett 1935:103), and it is interesting to see how his awareness of Indian powerlessness, but not necessarily unworthiness, is couched in the same terms as his personal grievances:

I am afraid the poor Indians will never stand a good chance with the English in their land controversies, because they are very poor, they have no money. Money is allmighty now-a-days, and the Indians have no learning, no wit, no cunning; the English have all.

(quoted in Peyer 1982b:211)

Being the centre of attraction in England, Occom, according to Wheelock, ‘Some times hath almost forgot what he was—it is a great mercy to be kept sitting at the feet of Jesus; I hope he will be kept so’ (Blodgett 1935: 107). Certainly he was intensely and proudly aware of his key role in raising the funds to support the Indian school, and he became increasingly outraged by the emphasis on white students at the expense of Indians:

I am very jealous that instead of your Semenary Becoming alma Mater, she will be too alba mater to Suckle the Tawnees.—I think your College has too much Worked by Grandeur for the Poor Indians, they'll never have much benefit of it.

(Blodgett 1935:122-3)

It is worth commenting that this language of colour is also used by Wheelock, who refers to ‘My black son Mr. Occum’ (Love 1899:92). Occom complains that he went to England

Hoping that it may be a lasting Benefet to my poor Tawnee Brethren, With this View I went a Volunteer—I was quite willing to become a Gazing Stocke, Yea Even a Laughing Stocke, in Strange Countries to Promote your Cause.

Here we find a hint of the humiliation as well as the celebrity involved in being exhibited as an Indian curiosity, which is not even recognised in the letters of his white companions, of course. To strengthen his case Occom also uses the device of having white people make his argument for him;

The opinion of many white people about here is that you have been Scheeming altogether, and that it was a Pollicy to Send me over to England, for (Say they) now they dont Care anything about you—

Wheelock's response was, predictably, to reprove him for the sin of pride, but we can also perhaps see in his reference to good taste the way decorum, and all the arsenal of a Christian gentleman, can be used as a way of keeping social inferiors off balance and aware of their inferiority;

Your letter has a very ill savor for a Christian or rather if I have any good taste at all, it much savors of pride, arrogance & want of proper concern to heal the bleeding wounds of our glorious Redeemer.

(Richardson 1933:358)

It is interesting to note that the same issue of pride arises with another Indian missionary, David Fowler, who in defending himself from charges of being proud and spendthrift complains he has been ‘as faithful to you as if I had been your Negro, yea I have almost killed myself in Labouring’, and goes on to assure Wheelock that he will be repaid so that

it shall not be said all that Money and Pains which was spent for David Fowler an Indian was for nought. I can get Payment as well as white Man. O Dear me! I cant say no more.

(McCallum 1932:103)

The uncertainty about status expressed here can be seen to be a pervasive and often corrosive issue for educated Indians, whose language, right up at least to Charles Eastman, reflects a conflict between the ‘poor Indian’ and the Christian gentleman (see Chapter 5). It is interesting to notice in the letters of some of the Indians Wheelock sent out ‘into the field’, complaints that sound remarkably like those of later anthropologists thrown into a strange culture. This is largely because they were alien cultures in some cases, since they were sent to tribes whose language they could not speak. Hezekiah Calvin, for instance, was sent to preach to the Mohawks, but asks to be sent to his own people so that he need not be ‘A dumb stump that has no tonnge to use, like as when I was among the Mohawk Indians how tiresome was my life; could'nt understand ym and no body to keep up a free discourse with’ (McCallum 1932:58). On the other hand he seems to imply that he would have to relearn his original language:

And as for the thoughts of my going home, I greatly have a fond for that, that I might learn somwhat of my own Native Language that I might be the better fitted for the Design you have in view.

This very alienation from their fellow-Indians may have had more to do with their poor success as missionaries than the backsliding which Wheelock tends to assume. In many cases they may not have had a comfortable place to slide. David Fowler's account of the Mohawks is full of the disgust and sense of otherness which Stephen Greenblatt (1982:2) has argued implicitly or otherwise accompanies so many ethnographic encounters:

I am oblig'd to eat with Dogs, I say with Dogs because they are continually liking Water out of their Pales and Kettles; yea, I have often seen Dogs eating their Victuals when they set their Dishes down, they'll only make a little Noise to show their Displeasure to Dogs and take up the Dish. finish of what was left. My Cooks are nasty as Hogs;—their Hands are dirty as my Feet but they cleanse them by kneading Bread; their hands will be very clean after they have kneaded three or four Loves of Bread. I am oblig'd to eat whatsoever they give me for fear they will be displeas'd with me; after this Month I shall try to clean some of them. for I must move along by Degrees. if they once get out with me it is all over with me.

(McCallum 1932:94)

The experience here described has often been turned in ethnographic writing into a rite of passage for the doughty anthropologist, a threshold of ethnocentrism which he had to cross in order to be able to function, but within Indian writing it also fits into what is almost a genre of its own, the complaint, part aggressive, part conciliatory and submissive, to whites with power. This ‘genre’, as I will call it for the moment, can be found perhaps most persistently in speeches which, as I have shown, are vulnerable, in being textualised, also to being recontextualised, so as to lose their disturbing properties for the white reader.

Bibliography

Blodgett, H. (1935) Samson Occom, Hanover, NH, Dartmouth College Publications.

Greenblatt, S. J. (1982) ‘Filthy Rites’, Daedalus, Summer: 1-16.

Love, W. de L. (1899) Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England, Boston and Chicago, Pilgrim Press.

McCallum, J. D. (ed.) (1932) Letters of Eleazar Wheelock's Indians, Hanover, NH, Dartmouth College Publications.

Occom, S. (1788) A Sermon at the Execution of Moses Paul, New Haven, CT, first published in 1772.

Peyer, B. (1982a) The Elders Wrote: An Anthology of Early Prose by North American Indians, Berlin, Dietrich Reiner.

———(1982b) ‘Samson Occom: Mohegan Missionary and Writer of the 18th Century’, American Indian Quarterly, 6(3-4): 208-17.

Richardson, L. B. (1933) An Indian Preacher in England, Hanover, NH, Dartmouth College Publications.