The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan

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 Presenting previously unpublished and newly recovered writings, this collection more than doubles available Native American writing from before 1800.

About the Author

Joanna Brooks is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native-American Literatures (Oxford, 2003), winner of the 2003 Modern Language Association William Sanders Scarborough Prize for best book in African-American literature and culture. Robert Warrior is Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professor at the University of Oklahoma. His books include The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction , American Indian Literary Nationalism, and Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions .