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Samson Occom: Radical Hospitality in the Native Northeast

By (author) Ryan Carr, Foreword by Megan Fulopp, Foreword by Amy Besaw Medford

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The Mohegan-Brothertown minister Samson Occom (1723â€“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 Occomâ€™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 Occomâ€™s writings were deeply rooted in Indigenous traditions of hospitality, diplomacy, and openness to strangers. From Occomâ€™s point of view, evangelical Christianity was not a foreign culture; it was a new opportunity to practice his peopleâ€™s ancestral customs. Carr demonstrates Occomâ€™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 Occomâ€™s evangelicalism, this book offers new ways to understand the relations of Northeast Native traditions to Christianity, colonialism, and Indigenous self-determination.