SOURCE: “Samson Occom: Mohegan as Spiritual Intermediary,” in Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker, University of Oklahoma Press, 1994, pp. 61-78.

In the following essay, Szasz investigates Occom's position as a cultural mediator between Anglo-Americans and Native Americans.

The traveler bound along the turnpike road to New London, Connecticut, in 1764 might have noticed the construction of a large, two-story house just east of the town of Norwich. But the home would have attracted little attention unless a local resident had explained that it belonged to Samson Occom, a Mohegan Indian.

By the 1760s, when the Occom family home was being built, Samson Occom had traveled a considerable distance from his traditional childhood. His move from native wigwam into an English-style home marked the passage from Mohegan upbringing to prominence as a cultural broker moving between Indian and non-Indian worlds. From the era of the American Revolution to...