The Never-Chosen: Samson Occom, the New Divinity, and Indigenous Self-Determination

Between his ordination by the Long Island Presbytery in 1759 and his death in 1792, Samson Occom developed an original, powerful, and largely overlooked theological perspective on the Indigenous peoples of North America. Almost all ministers in mid-eighteenth-century Anglophone North America believed that Native Americans were in an historical position akin to that of the Canaanites of the Old Testament who occupied the Promised Land on the eve of the Israelites’ return. According to this interpretive paradigm, Indians were an obstacle to God's chosen nation as it progressed toward its grand historical and eschatological destiny; they were historically important “only as the people Yahweh removes from the land in order to bring the chosen people in,” as Robert Warrior puts it.¹ The theological consensus likening Indians to Canaanites dated back at least to King Philip's War. Earlier in the seventeenth century, a minority of puritan thinkers including John Eliot...