Samson Occom

Discussion Questions:

1.) Why do you think some Native Americans not only converted to Christianity but also then became practicing missionaries among their own people?

2.) Imagine that Occom has read Franklin's text and that he asks Franklin for some advice. First, consider what areas of common ground these two writers have. Then, imagine the conversation that Occom might have with Franklin. You may use either a dialogue format or describe what would happen in this conversation. How does Occom's text uphold, complicate, or reject that of Franklin?

3.) At the end of his "Short Narrative," Occom describes in a matter-of-fact way the injustice of the compensation he received for a career of ministry, compared with the normal earnings of a white minister in a similar position. Discuss the rhetorical strategies Occom deploys to handle this inequity throughout the text while maintaining reader sympathy and authorial credibility. What do such strategies manage to establish about the writer whose life story we are reading?

4.) Occom gives substantial space to descriptions of his "methods" for keeping a school at Montauk and for running religious services for his Native American congregation. What is gained and lost by describing these methods in such detail and by giving comparatively little space to his family and domestic life? What "self" are readers left with, and why is that significant to the text's apparent or implicit purpose?

5.) In For Those Who Came After: A Study of Native American Autobiography (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985), Arnold Krupat argues that Native American autobiography is a bicultural composition that narrates the coming together of two radically different cultures, a "frontier" where the familiar meets the other. The two portraits included in this anthology offer snapshots of Occom from the perspective of native and English cultures. Identify passages in Occom's text that uphold, complicate, or negate Krupat's statement. That is, compare these snapshots and then examine the text for traces of each culture.