The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan

The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan
Author: Samson Occom
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2006-11-09
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0195346882

This volume brings together for the first time the known writings of the pioneering Native American religious and political leader, intellectual, and author, Samson Occom (Mohegan; 1723-1792). The largest surviving archive of American Indian writing before Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux; 1858-1939), Occom's writings offer unparalleled views into a Native American intellectual and cultural universe in the era of colonialization and the early United States. His letters, sermons, journals, prose, petitions, and hymns--many of them never before published--document the emergence of pantribal political consciousness among the Native peoples of New England as well as Native efforts to adapt Christianity as a tool of decolonialization. Presenting previously unpublished and newly recovered writings, this collection more than doubles available Native American writing from before 1800.

The Common Pot

The Common Pot
Author: Lisa Tanya Brooks
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2008
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816647836

Literary critics frequently portray early Native American writers either as individuals caught between two worlds or as subjects who, even as they defied the colonial world, struggled to exist within it. In striking counterpoint to these analyses, Lisa Brooks demonstrates the ways in which Native leadersa including Samson Occom, Joseph Brant, Hendrick Aupaumut, and William Apessa adopted writing as a tool to reclaim rights and land in the Native networks of what is now the northeastern United States.

Samson Occom

Samson Occom
Author: Ryan Carr
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2023-11-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231558368

The Mohegan-Brothertown minister Samson Occom (1723–1792) was a prominent political and religious leader of the Indigenous peoples of present-day New York and New England, among whom he is still revered today. An international celebrity in his day, Occom rose to fame as the first Native person to be ordained a minister in the New England colonies. In the 1770s, he helped found the nation of Brothertown, where Coastal Algonquian families seeking respite from colonialism built a new life on land given to them by the Oneida Nation. Occom was a highly productive author, probably the most prolific Native American writer prior to the late nineteenth century. Most of Occom’s writings, however, have been overlooked, partly because many of them are about Christian themes that seem unrelated to Native life. In this groundbreaking book, Ryan Carr argues that Occom’s writings were deeply rooted in Indigenous traditions of hospitality, diplomacy, and openness to strangers. From Occom’s point of view, evangelical Christianity was not a foreign culture; it was a new opportunity to practice his people’s ancestral customs. Carr demonstrates Occom’s originality as a religious thinker, showing how his commitment to Native sovereignty shaped his reading of the Bible. By emphasizing the Native sources of Occom’s evangelicalism, this book offers new ways to understand the relations of Northeast Native traditions to Christianity, colonialism, and Indigenous self-determination.

Assembled for Use

Assembled for Use
Author: Kelly Wisecup
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2021-11-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0300262310

A wide-ranging, multidisciplinary look at Native American literature through non-narrative texts like lists, albums, recipes, and scrapbooks Kelly Wisecup offers a sweeping account of early Native American literatures by examining Indigenous compilations: intentionally assembled texts that Native people made by juxtaposing and recontextualizing textual excerpts into new relations and meanings. Experiments in reading and recirculation, Indigenous compilations include Mohegan minister Samson Occom’s medicinal recipes, the Ojibwe woman Charlotte Johnston’s poetry scrapbooks, and Abenaki leader Joseph Laurent’s vocabulary lists. Indigenous compilations proliferated in a period of colonial archive making, and Native writers used compilations to remake the very forms that defined their bodies, belongings, and words as ethnographic evidence. This study enables new understandings of canonical Native writers like William Apess, prominent settler collectors like Thomas Jefferson and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, and Native people who contributed to compilations but remain absent from literary histories. Long before current conversations about decolonizing archives and museums, Native writers made and circulated compilations to critique colonial archives and foster relations within Indigenous communities.

Becoming Brothertown

Becoming Brothertown
Author: Craig N. Cipolla
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2013-09-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816530300

"In this book, Craig Cipolla follows the Brothertown Indians and their predecessors across New England, New York, and Wisconsin, disregarding the rigid cultural essences often associated with colonial histories in search of a deeper understanding of colonial culture and Native American identity politics from the eighteenth century to the present"--Provided by publisher.

Dying in Indian Country

Dying in Indian Country
Author: Elizabeth Morris
Publisher: Deep River Books LLC
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781940269719

Dying in Indian Country is the true story of a father who, recognizing how current tribal and federal government policies were destroying his family, embarked on a bold journey of change. The names of children who are perishing daily within Indian Country never make it into the media. Abuse is rampant on reservations because the US government system allows exploitation to go on unchecked and without repercussion. Yet genuine hope is available! While multitudes of tribal members are dying from alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide, and violence, personal responsibility and non-governmental solutions can bring real change to Native Americans. Author Lisa Morris reveals the anguishing reality of how the current reservation system played out in of her own family. After a life-changing experience, her husband, Roland, a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, rejected the mantle of victimhood and blame, became personally accountable, and led their family in a new direction. The greater story within her story is one of spiritual transformation and healing. Readers will gain a deep understanding of the plight of Americans living throughout Indian Country, while experiencing one family's real-life journey away from decades of trauma, toward hope and victory in Jesus Christ.

Samson Occom

Samson Occom
Author: Harold William Blodgett
Publisher: Dartmouth
Total Pages: 240
Release: 1935
Genre: Indians
ISBN:

Writing Indians

Writing Indians
Author: Hilary E. Wyss
Publisher:
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

"In their search for ostensibly "authentic" Native voices, scholars have tended to overlook the writings of Christian Indians. Yet, Wyss argues, these texts reveal the emergence of a dynamic Native American identity through Christianity. More specifically, they show how the active appropriation of New England Protestantism contributed to the formation of a particular Indian identity that resisted colonialism by using its language against itself."--BOOK JACKET.