SOURCE: “‘This Indian Bait’: Samson Occom and the Voice of Limnality,” in Early American Literature, Vol. 29, No. 3, 1994, pp. 233-53.

[In the essay below, Elliott analyzes Occom's discourse in his correspondence, Sermon, and other writings, contending that the rhetorical strategies he employs reflect his precarious position between white and Indian cultures.]

In 1759, Samson Occom (1723-1792) became the first Native American to be ordained as a minister of the Christian gospel. As both Mohegan Indian and a Protestant minister, Occom held a socially and discursively precarious position in New England society. Perhaps no one event better encapsulates the complexity of his status than the execution sermon he delivered in 1772, which was soon after published as A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian. As the title indicates, the offender was indeed another Native American; Moses Paul was a Christian Indian who had been convicted of murdering a white man. This unique racial configuration was surely the source of the particular interest in the work, of which there were nineteen different imprints.¹ The sermon was both an opportunity for English Americans to watch Native Americans enacting the judicial rituals of the dominant culture and a chance for American Indians to hear one of their own people speak from a position of cultural authority (D. Murray 45-47). The triumph of the sermon, and of Occom's other writings, is that Occom was able to use the predominant rhetorics of his day to address the needs of both groups. But since the sermon remains, with the possible exception of a handful of hymns,² Samson Occom's only published work, it also indicates the implicit limits of what his rhetorical project could achieve within the confines of eighteenth-century New England.

In the sermon, Occom uses Protestant religious discourse to play off the mixed racial composition of his audience at the execution. Consider his description of the lowly state of “man”:

[H]e is haughty, and exalts himself above God, though he is wretched and miserable, and poor, and blind and naked. … Sin has made him beastly and devilish; yea, he is sunk beneath the beasts and is worse than the ravenous beasts of the wilderness.

(Occom 1772, 10)

This admonition is typical of the Calvinists' account of the human condition, but there is more at work here; “poor,” “blind,” “naked,” and “beastly” precisely echo the terms essential to New England's racial discourse. (Even Eleazar Wheelock, the minister who educated Occom, once referred to two of his Indian students as “poor little Naked Creatures.”³ By combining racially charged language and a Christian teaching, Occom leaves his description open to multiple interpretations. The passage insists upon a spiritual equality among its readers (and listeners) by suggesting that all of humankind is uniformly depraved, an important assertion in the racially charged environment of eighteenth-century New England.⁴ At the same time, Occom's composed and distinguished demeanor, as well as the eloquence of his sermon, illustrate the essential inaccuracy of this discourse of the savage beast when applied to Native Americans by “haughty” Euro-Americans who “exalted” themselves in ways that American Indians and African Americans did not. Indians hearing Occom's words would understand that they were being included in this Christian narrative and that the “gift of grace” would be available to them, even as Occom's rhetoric reminds them of Anglo-American racism.

Occom's ability to affect such multiple meanings stems from his liminal presence within society. As an Indian, Occom was viewed in much the same way as the penitent criminal, for whom the possibility of conversion assured the English that such possibilities undoubtedly existed for them as well (Cohen 79). Occom embodied the move from “savage” to “saved.” The liminal state as defined by anthropological discourse, however, is one that is occupied only temporarily. Occom, however, needed to be permanently situated at an in-between place in the social structure as he spoke to the two groups that he was trying to bridge. He needed to be able to identify himself, as he does in the sermon, both as a ‘Minister to the Gospel” and as “kindred” to the Indians.⁵ His authority as a speaker derived from this liminal state in which his Indian identity was never put under complete erasure; he represented an ongoing conversion to English society that could never be completed.

Occom's liminality, though, does share one important feature with the formal anthropological category described by Victor Turner; it continually risks being rendered culturally invisible because “most of us see only what we expect to see, and what we expect to see is what we are conditioned to see when we have learned the definitions and classifications of our culture” (Turner 95). Occom did not fit into New England's “definitions and classifications,” and in order to avoid invisibility Occom attempted to inscribe his liminality into the conventional discourses used by New England's religious hierarchy.⁶

It is, however, when Occom's liminal state is most important that his writing poses the greatest challenge to our reading of him. His published sermon, for example, closes with a lengthy exhortation specifically addressed to “my poor kindred,” the Indians, on the subject of drunkenness (28-32). A devout New Light Calvinist, Occom most likely regarded inebriation as sinful behavior—a violation of God's law. At the same time, Occom recognized that alcohol abuse was an obstacle to cultural survival for his people, and speaks more forcefully about alcohol abuse as it relates to material, not spiritual concerns:

By this sin we can't have comfortable houses, nor any thing comfortable in our houses; neither food nor raiment, nor decent utensils. We are obliged to put up any form of shelter just to screen us from the severity of the weather; and we go about with very mean, ragged and dirty clothes, almost naked. And we are half-starved, for most of the time obliged to pick up any thing to eat.—And our poor children are suffering every day for want of the necessaries of life; they are very often crying for want of food, and we have nothing to give them; and in the cold weather they are shivering and crying, being pinched with cold.—All this for the love of strong drink.

(29)

Occom's reproaches are also complicated by the presence of the Anglo-American audience that was overhearing this intraracial castigation. He surely knew that the English considered drunkenness to be an inherent flaw—perhaps even preordained by God—of Native Americans; Occom himself had been accused of this violation of the New England moral code. Occom, therefore, seeks to overturn this Anglo-American assumption, even as he lectures his “kindred” on the dangers of drink. To do so, he not only denounces the drunkard, but also those “who put their bottles to their neighbors mouth to make them drunk” (31)—an attack on the English culture that first introduced alcohol to the Native Americans and then censured them for using it (D. Murray 47).

The complexity of Occom's public presence makes it difficult to discern exactly how Occom was heard and by whom. Did Native Americans understand that Occom was delivering a different message to them than to his Anglo audience? Could Anglo-Americans see that he questioned their treatment of American Indians? To what degree did any of his listeners or readers question the sincerity of Occom's Christian faith? The sophistication of Occom's rhetorical strategies and the unique historical context of the sermon suggest that our understanding of it must ultimately be a qualified one.⁷ Occom uses the discourses available to him to fashion a text that makes equally possible multiple, and often contradictory, readings. Without such pluralistic rhetoric, Occom would never have been able to disseminate the messages contained within the execution sermon—nor would he have even had such an opportunity. The discourses used by Occom, however, carried with them their own limits; Occom's multiplicity was not always adequate for the problems that beset him and his goals for Native American peoples. The shortcomings of a liminal voice nonetheless became most evident in that very same arena in which Occom developed it: his relationship with the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock.

II

Occom first came to Wheelock's school in 1743 at the age of twenty.⁸ From that time until the men stopped speaking to one another more than thirty years later, their relationship was of central importance to both. Despite their disputes and disagreements (and there were many), Wheelock was Occom's most important benefactor; Wheelock educated Occom, provided financial support for his Mohegan student from his own pocket and through his solicitation of outside sources; he was also the primary figure responsible for Occom's ordination. On the other side of the ledger, Wheelock's experience of educating Occom led him to found the Indian Charity School that brought him such fame. Occom also recruited the students that the school needed, and his successful preaching in the colonies and in England repeatedly served to enhance Wheelock's financial base and reputation.

We can imagine that Occom's correspondence with Wheelock afforded the Mohegan minister the opportunity to focus upon an audience of one, an audience that symbolized the New England religious society that so heavily influenced Occom's actions. By reading the correspondence between Occom and Wheelock, we can see that the strategies employed in Occom's execution sermon were first tested and refined in a less public setting. A private correspondence, however, is not entirely private writing. Wheelock—a New Light Congregationalist and enthusiastic supporter of the Great Awakening—was a member of the Anglo-American religious hierarchy, and his conversations with Occom were subject to the approval and disapproval of others in that establishment. Even when his relationship with Wheelock was at its most intimate, Occom could not expect to escape the public eye through a sealed envelope.

The relationship between Wheelock and Occom has been likened to that of a father and son,⁹ and although I find this metaphor to be ultimately inaccurate, the correspondence, particularly in the earlier letters, bears similarities in tone and style to the manner in which parents and their offspring often communicated with one another in the eighteenth century. Occom dutifully reports details about his health, his contact with notable members of the New England clergy, and his plans for the immediate future. Wheelock responds with either approval or disapproval as he deems it appropriate, and offers advice in a mild imperative—even though he fully expects Occom to follow his wishes.

This correspondence, however, is filled with tension arising from the complex symbolic importance the interlocutors took on for one another. The letters became a field upon which racial definitions and cultural boundaries were enforced by Wheelock and disputed by Occom, a dynamic demonstrated by the following exchange between the two. In a 1769 letter written by Wheelock, the former teacher relays a rumor of drunkenness to Occom:

There is an ugly report bruited of you [Occom] in Windham by Mr. Prosper Wetmore of Chilsey. it is said to come from him, viz. that you was overtaken with excessive Drinking at Chilsey near the Time you was here—and that you had been Several Times disguised by it—I gave no credit to it & told all I heard discourse about it, that I believed there was no truth in it. If it be fact indeed, it is said indeed. …

(WP, 769209.2)

Wheelock leaves Occom (and us) in doubt as to whether he believes this rumor. He claims that he gives it “no credit,” but he nonetheless scolds Occom for any potential misconduct. Such behavior, and even an “ugly report” of it, would serve to take Occom's reputation down a peg by attaching a popular stereotype, the drunken Indian, to Occom's name. That this letter comes after Occom's highly successful fundraising tour of England, which added to his celebrity status, may not have been coincidental; Wheelock could have felt threatened by Occom's good fortune (even though it benefited Wheelock as well [Blodgett 102]). By repeating this gossip and adding an ominous conclusion (“If it be fact indeed, it is sad indeed”), Wheelock claims the moral high ground and suggests that Occom may be a false convert to Anglo-American culture. The logic of the letter suggests the possibility that Occom was not “disguised” by drunkenness, but instead alcohol has stripped away Occom's masquerade to reveal the unconverted Indian beneath. The image of the Indian drunk was so morally charged and culturally powerful that even this hearsay, couched in conditional language, would be sufficient to restore Wheelock to a position of authority. The threat contained in this letter—that Occom's drunkenness would reveal his true unconverted state—relied upon the deep cultural anxiety that religious conversion could be faked, that false converts might usurp the rightful places of Anglo-American leaders through skillful performance. Such fears placed Occom on the defensive throughout his public life.¹⁰

Significantly, Wheelock's discussion of drunkenness was a prelude to an injunction with which Occom was all too familiar:

For many Reasons I think it will be best you Should go as Soon as the Way & Season will permit. … Have you concluded to take David [Fowler, Occom's brother-in-law] with you to erect a School among the Onandaga?

(WP, 769209.2)

Occom was being ordered, and not for the first time, “into the wilderness.” Wheelock had reasoned that the best place for Occom would be among the Indians of New York—a conclusion that would have placed Occom at the literal, physical margins of English-American society. Occom's extraordinarily successful 1767-68 fundraising trip to England had made him more popular than ever. Both the charge of intoxication and the injunction to be a missionary to Native Americans were attempts on Wheelock's part to put Occom back into his place, to remind him that his Indian heritage had consequences that could never be overcome by conversion.

Although Eleazar Wheelock is an unsympathetic character in this and other exchanges, there is a danger in attributing Wheelock's actions to an individualized fear of Occom. We should consider Wheelock's attitude as emblematic of a culture that needed to see Indians as either the noble savage—uncultured and childlike—or as the fierce savage—cruel, dangerous, and irresponsible—but that could never be secure within that simple dichotomy.” A Native American such as Occom, whose liminal position threatened the social order even as it reaffirmed the possibility of the grace it promised, could not be placed in either of these categories. Wheelock's letter, then, can be read as illustrating the need of the dominant culture to recover its ways of speaking about Indians by dislodging Occom from his chosen place within it. It attempts to assign Occom either to a fallen state of sin or the wilderness of the racial “other.”

Wheelock threatens both moral and geographic exile by employing religious discourse and questions Occom's right to participate in that very dialogue. Drunkenness, Wheelock writes, would be a “Wound to Christ and his Cause,” and Wheelock implies that Occom's faith should make him eager to perform a mission. Occom, however, counters Wheelock by referring to the same rhetoric of Christian discipleship in his reply. Notably, Occom's letter addresses the themes of martyrdom rather than Christian duty:

I don't remember that I have been overtaken with strong drink this winter, but many white people make no bones of it to call me a drunkard, and I expected it, as I have many enemies round about here, yea they call me a liar and rogue what not, and they curse and damn me to the lowest Hell …—these intended Christians are seven times worse than the Savage Indians. …

(WP, 7692167.2)¹¹

Occom had been accused of being both an “intended Christian” and a “Savage Indian.” By juxtaposing these two terms and suggesting their similarity through the hyperbole of righteous indignation, he creates the linguistic ambiguity that he needs to counter Wheelock's attempt to pin him down to a fixed social and moral position. All descriptive categories can lose their epistemological certainty when wielded by a figure like Occom, who fits at once into all of them and none of them.

Occom further disrupts Wheelock's efforts by appropriating the discourse of Christian persecution here to explain his present situation in a way that would be difficult for Wheelock to dispute. The terms he uses to describe inebriation are chosen carefully enough to display his awareness of the intransigence of pejorative categories. Occom remarks that people have repeatedly called him a “drunkard,” which in the discourse of the time is something different from being “overtaken with strong drink.” The latter is an action that bears little relation to the former label. “Drunkards,” on the other hand, refers to a pervasive, racist idiom (still persisting today) that presumes all Native Americans to be alcoholics.¹² Though Occom is making efforts to portray himself as the victim of this false premise, what is less clear is the role he wishes to assign to Wheelock in this model of persecution. Wheelock, by raising the question of Occom's sobriety, is at least associating with his student's “enemies,” but the question that Occom neither raises nor answers is whether Wheelock is to be counted as one of those cursing him “to the lowest Hell.” Probably not, but nowhere in this letter does Occom explicitly oppose Wheelock to his enemies or express any kind of favorable emotion toward him except in closing: “your most unworthy sarvant,” a phrase that can be read with overtones of either irony, or sincerity, or conventional parting, or all three.

Occom's letters, while not always as visibly angry or pessimistic, are composed against the backdrop of this tension in his relationship to Wheelock and the pressures placed upon him by his material and social standing, even when he is not in direct conflict with Wheelock. As he meets with success, Occom makes an effort to appropriate the Anglo-American terms for how success might be determined and what it might mean. An example appears in a letter from Occom to Wheelock, dated June 24, 1761. The letter was written in New York City, where Occom had arrived with Fowler; the two were about to begin their first missionary trip to the Oneidas, who lived in what was then a remote portion of that state:

Revd Sir:

We reached New York ye 15 Inst and to my Surprize, the Gentlemen had Concluded not to Send me at all, and all the Reason that they can give is, they are afraid the Indians will kill me. I told them, they could not kill me but once, and told them I intended to proceed on my Journey, and if I Perish for want of Support, I perish—But I intended to use your Money Sir that David has with him; and when they Perceived my Resolution, they Emediately Consulted the Matter, and Concluded that I should go, and a Collection should be made for me, and Recommendations shou'd be sent by me to Genl [Jeffrey] Amherst and Sir William [Johnson].

And the whole Matter is Acomplished to my Surprize beyond all my expectations. The Last Sabbath after the afternoon Service was over at Mr. Bostwick's Congregation, they made a collection for me and my Family's support, and it mounted to £60, s. 15, d. 7, and Monday Evening the Baptists made a Collection for me at their Meeting House and it mounted to £13. And my Recommendations are done by the Most Noted Gentlemen of this Place, not only to the generals, but to other gentlemen of their Acquaintance, from this City to the furthermost English Settlements. …

(WP, 761374)

This narrative, structured around the two incidents of “surprize,” indicates both the level of Occom's awareness of the effects of his Native American identity and his ability to function within the world of English-American Protestantism. While Occom is clearly outlining those events that happened specifically to him, he implies that the way in which those events occurred was a function of his Native American, rather than his personal, identity.¹³ This identity is the missing explanation for both the refusal that causes Occom's initial surprise and the tremendous change of heart that results in his second. The way in which Occom's “Indian-ness” functions on a symbolic level links these two narrative episodes together and is crucial for understanding how the second could follow the first, even though this identity is never explicitly articulated.

Occom measures his success, however, in terms recognizable to all inhabitants of eighteenth-century New England: monetary collections and personal recommendations (which also functioned as a sort of currency).

Occom shows Wheelock that he is as diligent in negotiating New York clerical society as any other minister; he even garners interdenominational support from the Baptists. (Wheelock was a Congregationalist; Occom was ordained by the Long Island Presbytery). This financial boon, though, is made possible by Occom's Native American identity, just as that Native American identity requires the economic language in order to measure its affects. The letter is based entirely upon Occom's liminality, in which Native American heritage and Anglo-American experiences are inextricably linked. He was valued because he was a non-Indian, removed from his people by his outward signs of English civilization, yet he needed to retain his “Indian-ness” in order to be recognized as someone worthy of attention (and money). That Occom could make such complex cultural maneuvers might have made him an even more powerful (and threatening) figure than if he had been able to “purge all the Indian out,” to use Wheelock's telling phrase (WP, 764560.1, quoted in Axtell 98).¹⁴

To those accustomed to the evangelical rhetoric of the late eighteenth century—a language that usually registers progress in the number and quality of souls saved—the central role that money plays in this and other letters between Occom and Wheelock may be unexpected. On the one hand, the money garnered in support of Occom and Fowler's mission could be read by Wheelock as a measure of the return of his investment (spiritual and monetary) in educating his Native American students. At the same time, Occom could tout his success at “Mr. Bostwick's Congregation” as a sign of his independence; the letter suggests that Occom could rightly take credit for the funds he received toward supporting himself and his family.

The metaphoric quality of money—its use in determining worth and indebtedness that extend beyond the financial realm—plays a central role in much of the correspondence between Occom and Wheelock. In the early letter excerpted just above, Occom exhibits two different attitudes toward this economic discourse. In the first paragraph, Occom seems to be attempting to reject economic validation; he states he will conduct his mission regardless of his financial backing: “… if I perish for want of Support I perish.” In the second paragraph, though, Occom is willing to appropriate the symbolism of money, as it marks his success. In this section, the letter illustrates how valuable an Indian minister was to the project of converting “heathen” tribes, a value that the New York congregations expressed through their pocketbooks. Perhaps Occom's desire to resist the economic language that he comes to appropriate stemmed from his understanding that this language could be turned back against him and his people, for most Anglo-Americans assigned little, if any, financial value to the presence of Native Americans. When, in his published appeal for support of his project, Wheelock addressed the monetary value of training Indian missionaries, he did so in slighting terms: these preachers would require only half the funding that their English counterparts needed (Wheelock 16-17). Occom was not a treasure, but a bargain. “Money is almighty now-a-days,” Occom wrote in a 1766 letter, “and the Indians have no learning, no wit, no cunning: the English have it all.”¹⁵ In the face of overwhelming English material supremacy, Occom recognized that he had to move both through and around this “almighty” economic discourse of value. The multiplicity that Occom tried to create through the language of money could not eliminate the ways in which this discourse could affect him and his goals negatively. The same liminality that made Occom a powerful figure left him in a precarious position regarding those who “have it all.”

Nonetheless, the language of economics had attractive features for Occom. The donations that he received for his missions and, later, for Wheelock's school were concrete markers of Occom's success as a preacher in the Anglo-American world. This language also had particular significance in his relationship with Wheelock, whose stature and wealth grew with each of Occom's triumphs. Economic discourse is literally the language of exchange; its terms are of public, not private, value. This exchange value might have even been more apparent to Occom, who must have recognized that money obtains its value from social convention rather than any inherent value.¹⁶

Even though Occom suffered at the hands of the New England clergy at times, he continued to use economic and religious language as he had before, never abandoning this rhetoric altogether. The pressures upon Occom forced him to use both discourses in concert, and led him to fit the voices together in different ways that would enable him to represent himself to Wheelock during the more tense moments of their relationship. Such a moment was the cause of a 1764 letter from Occom to Wheelock, when Occom and Fowler were en route in yet another mission to the Six Nations. Economic language is crucial to Occom's representation of this moment, though he records destitution instead of accumulation. Wheelock had sent Occom and Fowler without any support, but with the hope that they could obtain funding (again) in New York:

Reverend Sir

I am Sorry you couldn't get at Least Some Money for David, it looks like Presumption for us to go on long Journey through Christians without Money, if it was altogether among Indian Heathen we might do well enough—But I have determined to go, though no white Missionary would go in Such Circumstances—I leave my House and other Business to be done upon your Credit, and it will be Dear Business in the End. … Besides all I have Said my family now wants Clothing—and provision they must now have, or my Business Can't go on—I have lately heard there is Salt meat enough at the Landing to be Sold—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, Samson Occom.

(WP, 764508.3)

While there is no explicit religious rhetoric in this letter, religion provides the subtext. Occom implies that it is only because of his religious devotion that he is willing to put up with these trying circumstances—including Wheelock's treatment of him. Yet I would suggest that the language one usually finds accompanying such zeal is purposefully absent. By leaving the question of his faith unaddressed, Occom places it beyond reproach; Wheelock cannot question the legitimacy of Occom's faith because Occom offers planned actions and not religious sentiment. Though there is a lack of religious rhetoric that suggests an urgency to Occom's financial problems and helps Occom affect a different tone from his previous letters, the religious voice and the issues it raises still lurk in the background.

Foregrounded are issues that are normally left unspoken, or are at least spoken in more coded language: race and material need. That Occom was undertaking a journey under circumstances that no white minister would suffer was perfectly clear to Wheelock, who had already written that the tolerance for low pay and miserable conditions was one of the advantages of training Indians to be missionaries (Wheelock 16-17). In restating this obvious fact, what Occom communicates to Wheelock through the language of economics is his own awareness of his second-class status among the clergy, even as he tries to resist that financial discourse by claiming that he will travel in spite of his lack of support. By suggesting (perhaps with a hint of humor) that “if it was altogether among Indian Heathen we might do well enough,” Occom not only makes a comparison of Native and white hospitality that is unfavorable to the latter, he also sharply indicates that his material want is the result of his immersion in Anglo-American culture, and that his membership as a second-class member of this elite clerical society is exacting an excruciating price from him. These references, together with those to the destitute state of his family, reminded Wheelock of what Occom had sacrificed because of his devotion to the Christian ministry. Wheelock lived near the Mohegan settlement and would have known that Occom belonged to a prominent family and could have been more financially secure if he had cultivated his land and influence there. ¹⁷ The parodic flourish that closes the letter, “Your Good for Nothing Indian Sarvant,” is at some level true. Occom has been “good,” but “for nothing”; despite what he garnered for Wheelock, he has no material wealth of his own to show for his efforts.

The most difficult, and most powerful, statement of the letter is Occom's bleak summation of his family's condition: “I leave my Poor Wife and Children at your feet and if they hunger, Starve and die let them die there.” The dramatic vision of this moment—that of Occom's family dying at Wheelock's feet—and Occom's posture of servitude that follows can be read as a larger commentary on the complex nature of the relationship between these two men. By exaggerating the humility and meekness expected of him, Occom chides Wheelock for exacting such a terrible price from him and suggests that he may indeed be one of the “intended Christians.” By the end of the letter we, and Wheelock with us, must doubt very much whether Occom will in fact continue in his liminal state as an “Indian Sarvant” and follow Wheelock's directions “in all things.” What is not clear is what Occom can do to change his position other than to point out the inherent contradictions of the ideological forces that pressure him and cause him to suffer.

Occom could only speak about these issues by complicating the normal (and normative) terms that described and reinforced hierarchical relationships, but he could not completely resolve his difficulty with Wheelock by any manner of speech. Even when Occom's liminality enabled him to be both a minister and an Indian, he could not collect the due that he felt Wheelock owed. The balance was larger than a monetary sum; the relationship between Wheelock and Occom went beyond economics. Just how much was at stake for each becomes evident by the ways in which each man characterized his position during their final dispute, a dispute in which the integrity of both came directly under fire.

III

Though Occom could not substantially alter those unequal power relations in which he had become enmeshed, what later letters show is how completely he understood how discourse functioned in the exercise of this power and that he used that discourse as well as the ambiguity of his own position in an attempt both to circumvent and to overturn it. The full range of Occom's understanding is perhaps best exemplified by his final exchanges with Wheelock, which focused on the future of the Indian Charity School in the wake of Occom's successful fundraising tour. When Wheelock received the charter for Dartmouth College and moved his Indian school to Hanover in 1770, Occom realized that the money he had worked to raise in England would not be used solely for the purpose of educating Native Americans or even English who would then minister to the distant Indian tribes.¹⁸ This turn of events must have hurt Occom deeply, for it was a discontinuation of a project around which he had shaped his entire life and identity. When Wheelock reproached Occom again in the summer of 1771 for failing to perform a mission, ¹⁹ Occom replied with the harshest language he had ever addressed to Wheelock. The reply is among the last surviving letters between the two, and there is no evidence they were ever genuinely reconciled after it. ²⁰ It would be wrong, though, to read the letter as simply the product of a blistering; emotional tirade. The letter is filled with emotion, but it is also a carefully constructed indictment of Wheelock's actions and, as such, it merits close reading.

Occom begins the letter by using religious language to justify his own actions and to question Wheelock's presumed authority to reprimand him. He writes, “I am obliged to you So far as it is agreeable to god.” And Occom claims that he in fact can judge God's agreeableness as well as, if not better than, Wheelock. If God had wanted him to make the trips that Wheelock suggested, he argues, “God would Certainly gave me Strength Sufficient.” Occom is exploiting New Light Calvinism's emphasis on equality under God here even more explicitly than he did in his published sermon. He then defends his standing among the New England Indian community (a standing Wheelock had questioned); “I need not say more than this, I am as well, if not better receiv'd by them than ever.” Occom's very reticence indicates confidence in the truthfulness of his position; he need not say more because he is in the right. After having summarily refuted these and other of Wheelock's insinuations, he plunges into the main subject of the letter, Wheelock's plans for Dartmouth College:

I am very Jealous that instead of your Sementary Becoming alma Mater, She will be too alba mater to Suckle the Tawnees, for She is already adorned too much like the Popish Virgin Mary. She'll naturally be ashamed to Suckle the Tawnees for She is already equal in Power, Honor and Authority to any College in Europe, I think your College has too much Worked by Grandeur for the Poor Indians, they'll never have much benefit of it,—In so Saying I speak the general Sentiment of Indians and English too in these parts. …

(WP, 771424)

Though Occom's indignation is the natural result of his “crossover” Native American identity, the rhetoric he uses to berate Wheelock refers, at first, to Anglo-American, not American Indian, culture. He displays a knowledge of Latin through his punning substitution of “alba” for “alma,” replacing the communal “our” with the restrictive “white.” The very image of the mother nourishing her children is related to the same figures of condescension in Christian missionary discourse that enabled Wheelock to call Occom his “black son.” And the white mother is an even more potent comparison when tied to Occom's mention of the “Popish Virgin Mary”; Occom is no longer labeling his white enemies as savages, but casting them in the (unwelcome) role of grandeur-seeking Roman Catholics—an even worse charge for a New England Protestant minister of the time.

Despite this Protestant, Anglo-American rhetoric, Occom is drawing clear racial lines in this passage. He is not related to the “alba” mother, but to the tawny children who will not “suckle” at her breast. He is one of the “Poor Indians,” even though he can speak with authority about European colleges, and it is this unique liminal position that he discusses later in the letter in order to describe the injustice he has personally suffered:

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—We Loudly Proclaimed before Multitudes of People from Place to Place, that there was a most glorious Prospect of Spreading the gospel of the Lord Jesus to the furthest Savage Nations in the Wilderness, through your Institution. …

(WP, 771424)

Occom has been, to use a New Testament metaphor, a “fool for Christ's sake;”²¹ he has sacrificed his own dignity for what he believed to be a greater good. Now that the idol has proven to be false, his articulation of his own role is part of his abandonment of that role in an effort to become the one thing that a “Gazing Stocke” is not, a fully speaking subject with his own separate integrity.

Perhaps Occom is suggesting that if he can return the objectifying gaze of the Anglo-Americans and the English by successfully expressing his liminality, his “Tawnee Brethren” will be able to as well.²² Other parts of the letter certainly imply that Occom believes his own fortunes to be representative of Native Americans as a whole, particularly in regard to their neglect by Wheelock:

Your writing to Esqr Thornton to my Disadvantage and not one word in my favour, gave me to think that your Indian Scholars had reason to Withdraw from you, and you Missionaries and School Masters too, the opinion of many white People about here is that you have been Scheeming altogether. …

(WP, 771424)

Occom uses the run-on structure of this sentence to combine several different strands of thought (strands that Wheelock, in his reply, would attempt to separate). Not only are Wheelock's betrayal of Occom and of his Indian pupils linked, but both are tied to another betrayal that Occom mentions earlier, that of the English donors to the Indian Charity School. “I am afraid, we shall be Deemed as Liars and Deceivers, in Europe,” Occom writes.

The way in which Occom links these levels of deception can be read as an attempt to prevent Wheelock from merely replying with an attack on Occom's personal conduct rather than addressing the larger problem of the school (which is, in fact, exactly what Wheelock did). For Occom, however, the fate of the school and his own position were indeed closely interrelated; both operated as symbols for the larger fate of American Indians. For the school to suffer in its attention to Native Americans did not bode well for Occom. A well-funded, well-administered Indian Charity School could have trained more Indian leaders similar to Occom, and furthered his goal of both converting Native Americans to Christianity and insuring their material subsistence. Perhaps as important, a successful Indian school would have created a peer group in which Occom could have circulated. The solitude inherent to Occom's liminality could have to some degree abated and perhaps the nature of this liminality could have been altered by the prestige and community of a sympathetic institution so as to be less tortuous.²³

Occom's insistence on bringing these issues together should also be seen as part of an attempt to articulate his own personal identity. Like the school, he was associated with Indians, but he also had personal concerns and experiences peculiar to the English-speaking world. Occom was the only person who could report both the disappointment of Connecticut Indians and also repeat the warning of the renowned Great Awakening figure George Whitefield,²⁴ which Occom did in a later section of this letter. He recounts a conversation he had had with the famed revivalist:

… ah, Says he [Whitefield], you have been a fine Tool to get Money for them, but when you get home, they won't Regard you, they'll set you a Drift,—I [Occom] am ready to believe it. Now—I am going to Say Something further, which is very Disagreeable. Modesty would forbid me, but I am Constrained So to Write,—Many gentlemen in England and in this Country too, Say if you had not this Indian Bait you would not [have] Collected a quarter of the Money you did, one gentleman in Particular in England Said to me, if he hadn't Seen my face he wouldn't have given a happence but now I have 50£ freely—This one Consideration gives me great Quietness.

(WP, 771424)

What force has “Constrained” Occom to articulate these charges? While Occom's language recalls, in part, the power of individual conscience, I would argue that the constraint comes from a more complicated realization on Occom's part. Occom understood the potential of the place he held in relation to Wheelock and to the larger New England society. While others could criticize Wheelock's abandonment of Native Americans (and Occom himself), none could do so with the powerful range of weapons that Occom utilizes in this letter. Occom uses his position of being both inside and outside Anglo-American culture; he voices the concern of an authority figure in the religious establishment and uses economic language to point to moral failing. Meanwhile, his acerbic use of the term “Indian Bait”²⁵ to describe himself deflates the objectifying gaze of Wheelock's Anglo-American society and indicates Occom's acute level of self-awareness. “[T]his Indian Bait” is not an outsider sympathizing with those Wheelock has neglected, but the primary victim of Wheelock's “Scheeming.” In using labels such as “Gazing Stocke” and “Indian Bait” for ironic self-description, Occom shows how hollow this racially charged discourse actually is, and how morally bankrupt the Anglo-American clergy (including Wheelock) has been in its own employment of it. Yet this same hollow language is what Occom himself has spoken; through it, he broadcast a voice of liminality and forged a critique of the New England social order.

Occom's self-characterization as “Indian Bait” raises the most pertinent questions about his own liminal position within New England culture. Who exactly was Occom trying to catch? For whose benefit? Much of his life was spent preaching to Indians about the possibilities of conversion and, as in the execution sermon's discussion of alcoholism, about the steps he viewed as necessary for cultural preservation. At other times, he lobbied the English and English-Americans to be sympathetic and financially generous to projects benefiting Native Americans. In terms of these dual goals, Occom's greatest achievement as “Indian Bait” came in his Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, delivered a year after the explosive letter quoted above was written. In that sermon, not only did Occom bridge the gap between his two audiences but he overcame his own marginal status by breaking into the sphere of the published word. “[A]s it [the sermon] comes from an uncommon quarter, it may induce people to read it, as it comes from an Indian,” Occom wrote in the sermon's preface (n.p.). Here, Occom's liminality became writ large for everyone to see; he momentarily shed his status as a “Gazing Stocke” and emerged as a best-selling author.

“Indian Bait,” however, also implies the violence and mutilation that Occom's position entailed. His precarious social position often not only made his daily existence a struggle but also forced him to endure the psychological struggles reflected in the letters. On the linguistic level, this “Indian Bait” was continually having to dispute the very terms of the discourse available to him for self-expression. Perhaps that is why he did not complete his attempt at autobiography, which dovetails into an angry tirade about the unequal pay he received as a missionary. This autobiographical fragment, written long before his final dispute with Wheelock, ends with the story of an Indian boy who is beaten by an English family no matter how hard he works for them. When asked why he is abused in this way, the boy answers, “because I am an Indian.” Occom ends the piece by comparing himself to the boy:

So I am 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.

(Occom, “Short Narrative” 18)

This statement of identity—“I am a poor Indian”—was representative of Occom's rhetorical project in both its mode of ironical self-representation and in its stark depiction of Anglo-Native race relations. It was a move of negotiation forever bound up with the power relations that enforced Occom's own liminality. He could show that this phrase was a misnomer; he could turn the language that named him as a poor Indian back upon itself. At the same time, in order to speak through that discourse and represent his life through it, he could not escape inhabiting the space of a “poor Indian,” like the boy with whom he sympathizes.²⁶

In his final sentence, Occom declares, “I did not make my self so.” Yet his liminal position required him to make and remake himself continually in order to fashion his multiplicity into a permanent presence. And Occom's liminality requires us to approach him without holding to the notion of a tangible, fixed, speaking Self. Though such an approach leads us away from traditional notions of authorship, we cannot dismiss the possibilities crucial to Occom—those of self-making and remaking through language—that are usually implied when referring to the figure of the author. The success of Occom's preaching career, his tour of England, and his published sermon all indicate that he was indeed able to straddle and reshape the racial frontiers that were part of his world. Yet the suffering described in his letters, in the conclusion of his aborted autobiography, and in his choice of the phrase “Indian Bait” indicates that such making and unmaking was excruciatingly difficult.

An even greater testament to this difficulty and to the limits of his textual critique is Occom's decision later in life to move to upstate New York as part of a separatist Indian settlement.²⁷ This migration was an act of cultural self-preservation on the part of the settlers. For Occom, though, this move was also an act of physical self-marginalization away from the New England culture that he had struggled so assiduously to change. Perhaps he believed that he could no longer survive as “Indian Bait” in the dangerous waters that he inhabited.

Notes

1. Peyer 1982b, 214-15. Peyer points out that Occom's sermon was even translated and published in Wales. The edition to which I will refer is the first: A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian (New Haven: T. & S. Green, 1772).

   For an account of the general interest in execution sermons, see Ronald A. Bosco, “Lectures at the Pillory: The Early American Execution Sermon.”

2. Following the sermon's publication, Occom published a Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs (New London, 1774). It is unknown exactly how many of these hymns were actually written by Occom (Blodgett 144-46).

3. Axtell 95. The letter which Axtell quotes can be found in the Wheelock Papers (number 761625.1), administered by the Dartmouth College Library. Citations to the Wheelock Papers will hereafter use the abbreviation “WP.” For a guide to the papers, see A Guide to the Microfilm Edition of the Papers of Eleazar Wheelock … (Hanover: Dartmouth College Library, 1971).

4. As Frank Shuffelton puts it: “Despite various attempts to create a myth of ethnic homogeneity before the Revolution, the multiethnic character of America was solidly founded well before that, and that ethnic founding was accompanied by both the promises and the problems associated with ethnic difference” (14).

5. He is identified on the frontispiece as a “Minister to the Gospel” (not, interestingly, as an Indian). In the preface, he calls himself “kindred” to his Indian audience.

6. I agree with Michael Warner's proposition in The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America that the printed word of the time was not a “neutral ground,” but rather coverdy identified with the class of propertied white males (including clergy). Warner cites Olaudah Equiano as a marginalized figure who understood print as a “technology of power.” Like Occom, Equiano utilized Protestant imagery extensively in his writing. See Warner, 11, 48.

7. I hope this reading illustrates what Arnold Krupat calls criticism in the “subjunctive,” “the domain of if-I-were-you or should-it-turn-out-that” (28). It is certainly possible that Occom did not have all of these nuances in mind when he composed the sermon, but to ignore the possibility that these inflections could be deliberate would be to underestimate his ability to read the cultures he inhabited.

8. Perhaps the best source of biographical information is Harold Blodgett's Samson Occom (1935). This book is, however, dated and is interesting as a historical document in its own right. Blodgett, after all, was a Dartmouth College professor and the biography was published as part of the “Dartmouth College Manuscript Series.” A shorter, though more recent, biographical piece has been published by Bernd Peyer as “Samson Occom: Mohegan Missionary and Writer of the 18th Century.”

9. Wheelock called Occom his “black son” in a letter to George Whitefield (Love 92). In addition, Wheelock used the address “My Son” in at least one letter to Occom (compare with his address of “My Brother” to a white minister), and Occom closed at least one letter with “Your Indian Son.” Laura Murray addresses the “father-child metaphor” at length in her article on the correspondence between Wheelock and two of his other students, Hezekiah Calvin and David Fowler. Her work shows that although the metaphor was “mutually agreed upon,” (51) it played an important role in organizing Calvin and Fowler's “strategies of resistance.” Murray also shows the importance of writing and correspondence in Wheelock's efforts to maintain discipline over his Native American students.

10. My understanding of how early Anglo-American culture comprehended the Indian relies heavily upon Roy Harvey Pearce's Savagism and Civilization.

11. The copy of this letter in the Dartmouth College Library is not in Occom's hand; presumably it was copied by someone for Wheelock.

12. Occom never could escape these accusations. In his Travels in New York and New England, published in 1822 (thirty years after Occom's death), Timothy Dwight writes that Occom's “character at times labored under some imputations.” Though Dwight adds that “there are good reasons to believe that most, if not all of them, were unfounded,” Dwight still feels obliged to mention the “imputations” instead of ignoring them altogether (2:73).

    For an excellent contemporary discussion of this popular stereotype, see Gerald Vizenor's chapter entitled, “Firewater and Phrenology” (300-319).

13. See Krupat, 201-31, for his chapter on “Native American Autobiography and the Synecdochic Self.”

14. Wheelock is actually speaking of another Native American student, but is doing so in the context of reviewing his larger educational project with the Indians. The complete sentence reads, “I have taken much Pains to purge all the Indian out of him, but after all a little of it will sometimes appear.” …

15. This letter is quoted in Frances M. Caulkins, History of Norwich, 163-64. According to Caulkins, Occom was writing to “a friend” regarding a long-standing land dispute between the Mohegans and the colony of Connecticut known as the “Mason controversy.” The case had been decided in Connecticut's favor, and the complete quotation of Occom's letter in Caulkins runs as follows:

    The grand controversy which has subsisted between the colony of Conn. and the Mohegan Indians, above seventy years, is finally decided in favor of the colony. 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 almighty now-a-days, and the Indians have no learning, no wit, no cunning: the English have it all.

16. It is worth pausing here to consider whether the use Occom made of monetary discourse might be involved with the similarities of language and money as objects that have socially assigned significance. There is, though, a tension between this arbitrariness and the role money plays in firm, quantitative measurement.

17. Although Occom would not have been wealthy by the standards of the English, he held a leadership position within the Mohegan tribe at the age of 19, before he studied with Wheelock (Peyer, “Samson Occom” 209).

18. James Axtell's chapter, “Dr. Wheelock's Little Red School,” is the best account of which I know describing Wheelock's founding of Dartmouth. In the piece, Axtell notes that Wheelock had the idea of founding a college as early as 1761, ten years before the date of this letter (107). He also points out that Wheelock carefully worded the charter so that his benefactors would believe that the college would have the education of Indians as its primary goal, with a few additional English students. The opposite was in fact true, and Occom knew it. In fact, Dartmouth graduated only three Native Americans in the eighteenth century and eight in the following one (108).

19. This letter has been lost, but its general content can be surmised from Occom's reply.

20. There is evidence of four more letters (one lost) from Occom to Wheelock; the last was written about two years after this one. The first of these letters followed Wheelock's reply, but made no mention of the conflict. It seems painfully polite to me. The others do include Occom's complaints, but none detail them so extensively. See Blodgett 124-37.

21. “We are fools for Christ's sake …” (1 Cor. 4:10). Occom does not use this phrasing, but he certainly echoes this sentiment.

22. Just how much of “Gazing Stocke” Occom had been can be illustrated by his journal entry for June 23, 1766, written while he was in London: “[T]his evening I heard, the Stage Players, had been Mimicking of me in their Plays, lately—I never thought I Shou'd ever come to that Honor,—O god wou'd give me greater Courage—.”

23. It is important not to confuse what Occom might have envisioned an Indian school to be with what in fact they were in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The violent process of Americanization enacted there, however, may in some ways dramatize the ambitious nature of Occom's agenda. And, in fact, Native Americans' boarding school experiences were often as complex as Occom's.

24. I think it is possible to read George Whitefield as a potential rival to Wheelock for Occom's attention. Occom praises Whitefield in his journal (February 14, 1766) for being a “tender father” to him on his fund-raising tour, but never writes about his relationship to Wheelock.

25. The only other publication of which I know that reprints this portion of this letter does not include this phrase. Blodgett's 1935 biography of Occom mistakenly transcribes this phrase as “Indian Buck” (124). Examination of the ms, however, leaves no doubt in my mind that Blodgett is in error, though it is assuredly an honest one. I have found other inaccuracies in Blodgett's transcriptions, but this is the most important.

26. David Murray argues that Occom “has by the end turned the phrase ‘poor Indian’ from a term of self-derogation almost into an expression of solidarity” (54). I agree with Murray on the whole, but would stress the continuous tension between the two connotations.

27. The Brothertown settlement founded by Occom's group in New York moved to Wisconsin in the 1820s (about thirty years after Occom's death) in order to again avoid encroaching whites (Trigger 15:182).

Works Cited

Axtell, James. The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America. New York: Oxford, 1981.

Blodgett, Harold. Samson Occom. Hanover: Dartmouth College, 1935.

Bosco, Ronald A. “Lectures at the Pillory: The Early American Execution Sermon.” American Quarterly 30 (1978): 156-76.

Caulkins, Frances M. History of Norwich. Norwich, 1845.

Cohen, Daniel A. Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993.

Dwight, Timothy. Travels in New England and New York. Vol. 2 Ed. Barbara Miller. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969.

A Guide to the Microfilm Edition of the Papers of Eleazar Wheelock … Hanover: Dartmouth College Library, 1971.

Krupat, Arnold. Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992.

Love, William DeLoss. Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England. Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1899.

Murray, David. Forked Tongues: Writing, Speech, Representation in North American Indian Texts. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1991.

Murray, Laura. “‘Pray Sir, Consider a Little’: Rituals of Subordination and Strategies of Resistance in the Letters of Hezekiah Calvin and David Fowler to Eleazar Wheelock, 1764-1768.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 4.2-3 (1992): 48-74.

Occom, Samson. “An Account of the Montauk Indians, on Long-Island.” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Boston, 1809. 10:105-11.

———. A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian. New Haven, 1772.

———. “A Short Narrative of My Life.” The Elders Wrote: An Anthology of Early Prose by North American Indians 1768-1931. Ed. Bernd Peyer. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1982. 12-18.

Occom, Samson, and Eleazar Wheelock. Various papers and letters. The Wheelock Papers. Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.

Pearce, Roy Harvey. Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and American Mind, 1967. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988.

Peyer, Bernd, ed. The Elders Wrote: An Anthology of Early Prose by Native American Indians 1768-1931. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1982.

———. “Samson Occom: Mohegan Missionary and Writer of the Eighteenth Century.” American Indian Quarterly 6.3-4 (1982): 208-17.

Richardson, Leon Burr. An Indian Preacher in England. Hanover: Dartmouth College, 1933.

Shuffelton, Frank. Introduction. A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America. Ed. Shuffelton. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983.

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Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967.

Vizenor, Gerald. Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1990.

Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990.

Wheelock, Eleazar. A Plain and Faithful Narrative of the Original Design, Rise, Progress and Present State of the Indian Charity-School at Lebanon, in Connecticut. Boston, 1763.