3 - “(I speak like a fool but I am constrained)”: Samson Occom's Short Narrative and economies of the racial self

Summary

Samson Occom, Mohegan, Methodist convert, Indian missionary, and founder of Brothertown, is perhaps best remembered for his role in raising the funds that made Dartmouth College's charter possible. His most famous work, “Sermon on the Execution of Moses Paul,” has been paid sporadic attention by scholars of American and American Indian literature. Two Dartmouth biographers have made use of his diaries, though lamenting the sparsity of Occom's entries (e.g., Blodgett 32; see also Love). His hymns have been paid less notice and his autobiographical narratives virtually none. Before the publication of the Heath Anthology of American Literature, few students of American literature had occasion to become familiar with any works by Occom, whose 1768 autobiographical narrative and 1771 sermon on the execution of Moses Paul are reprinted there.

Occom's Short Narrative of My Life consists of some ten manuscript pages from the Dartmouth archives. On its own, but even more particularly in contrast to other early American autobiographical narratives, it suggests the arbitrariness and even violence entailed in early American constructions of subjectivity/self. His text allows us to see how, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., puts it, “colonialism inscribes itself on the colonized” (469). At the same time, it can help us to question the depoliticized logic of the proprietal self figured positively (even mythically) in figures like Franklin. It traces the unacknowledged connections between the individual, property, colonialism, and “race” in early America's Protestant culture, thus also suggesting avenues for inquiry into how colonialism inscribes itself on the colonizer.