Samson Occom: Radical Hospitality in the Native Northeast. By Ryan Carr

While Samson Occom is a familiar figure in the scholarship of the early northeast, Ryan Carr does the important work of situating Occom in the context of Indigenous community past and present. The volume opens not with Carr's words, but with the words of two Brothertown women, Megan Fulopp and Amy Besaw Medford, who organized a reading group in which Carr workshopped early drafts for several years. Fulopp and Medford's forward helpfully explores the continuing sovereignty of Brothertown as a modern community, as well as its formation from seven Algonquin communities in the northeast and the colonial pressures that forced them west to their current tribal headquarters in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Carr's dialogue on Occom with modern Brothertown is evident throughout the text and is a significant scholarly contribution.Occom was born among the Mohegan, educated among the Mohegan and English, and made his home and work among the Montaukett, Oneida, and Brothertown in the mid to late 18th century. Carr acknowledges that Occom's literacy and prolific writing that make him so well-known also render him somewhat exceptional as an Indigenous person in the 18th century. Carr interprets Occom more fully as a specifically Indigenous writer, shaped by his connections to many Indigenous communities and his concern for Indigenous collective self-determination. Drawing on the work of Robert Warrior and Audra Simpson, Carr examines this literary sovereignty in Occom's writing as an expression of agency deeply embedded in the ethos of many northeastern Native communities. In foregrounding the hospitality and “stranger-love” evident in Occom's religious writing—which, on the surface, are not about Indigenous themes—Carr uncovers how Occom's evangelicalism was rooted in his political and cultural concerns about settler colonialism and Indigenous community.Carr also places Occom in the scholarship and history of 18th-century transatlantic Protestant evangelicalism as a way to reveal Occom's religious heterodoxy (Or, as Carr frames it for undergraduate teaching: making Occom “unboring”). He argues that while Occom was influenced by and in dialogue with notable Anglophone religious writers like Jonathan Edwards and Eleazar Wheelock, Occom's writing was far from derivative. Rather, he linked Native people to the Gentiles of the New Testament and presented an anti-colonial framework for Indigenous Christianity. Carr argues that Occom coupled this approach with a self-consciously plain and public style meant to reach as many Native and non-Native people as possible, making Occom's anti-colonialism doubly evangelical.The volume is arranged in paired chapters. The initial chapters discuss Carr's methodological approach and what it means to say that Occom's writing was “about” Indigenous communities. Here Carr unpacks Occom's traditionalism—guided by the Mohegan sensibilities that Occom carried throughout his life—separate from but related to Occom's religion. Carr shows how to read Occom, a difficult proposition given the way that Occom addressed his texts. Although necessary and important, some undergraduate classrooms may struggle with these chapters while graduate methods courses in diverse areas of study will benefit from Carr's careful discussion of approaches and stakes. Carr's writing, while beautiful and nuanced, may pose a struggle for the non-specialist.The heart of Carr's argument is centered in Occom's religious thought, specifically his rejection of the idea that Native people were chosen by God for a special destiny that required wholesale cultural change. This section may work best to make Occom “unboring” for readers; Occom emerges as a radical figure of anti-colonial politics. The final chapters offer an interesting meta-reading of the life of one of Occom's physical manuscripts. Carr also parses Occom's own understanding of religious awakening and the act of reading and writing. He argues that Occom's writings may have had a social life of circulation among Native communities like Brothertown previously unknown to scholars, and that Occom understood his own religious awakening as a return to ancestral ways of relating to the natural and human worlds.The volume concludes with Occom as a young man first learning to read and write in several languages, including Mohegan, and his work as a preacher in homes and public houses. This return magnifies Carr's argument about Occom's radicalism, showing how he used literature to position his Christian evangelicalism as an act of return to ancestral Indigenous understanding of the world. By situating Occom in the multivocal space of the Native and Protestant Anglophone northeast, Carr draws out Samson Occom as a complex religious thinker and public intellectual.