CHAPTER 2Samson Occom, the Public Universal Friend, and a Queer Archive of the Elsewhere
Shelby Johnson
We proceeded to form into a Body Politick—we Named our Town by the Name of Brotherton in Indian Eeyawquittoowauconuck … [and] concluded to live in Peace, and in Friendship.
—Samson Occom, Journal 12 (1785)1
The Public Universal Friend adviseth all, who desire to beone with theFriend in spirit, to be wise unto salvation.
—The Friend, The Universal Friend’s Advice (1785)2
On March 7, 1786, two of the most famous eighteenth-century colonial preachers, Mohegan minister Samson Occom and the Public Universal Friend, born Jemima Wilkinson, met at a funeral near Mystic, Connecticut.3 Occom briefly wrote of their encounter in his journal: “Jamima Wilkinson was Speaking; and I coud not get near so as to See her, the People Crouded so, after while I got so as to see her, but She did not Speake long She sat down, and there was another and another one after another, I saw and heard ten six Women and four men, some spoke repeatedly, Jamima got up 3 times and I spoke & others did so,—after a long Time, they shook hands which was a conclution of their … meeting.”4 After an illness in 1776, the Friend claimed they died, only to be reanimated by a spirit of God. While the Friend never dressed entirely in male attire, they, as one believer put it, were “not to be supposed of either sex” and “neither man nor woman.” They eschewed female pronouns and their birth name for the rest of their life, choosing instead to be called the Friend and the Comforter.5
On first reading, Occom’s journal entry—tantalizing but brief—appears dubious over this unruly rehearsal of gender. Yet it would perhaps be too easy to interpret Occom and the Friend’s positions as diametrically opposed, where Occom expresses a seemingly conventional conception of masculinity and the Friend a nascent refusal of narrow gender scripts. On a second reading, Occom’s conclusion—“after a long Time, they shook hands”—introduces some ambiguity, where “they” could refer either to a plurality of mourners or only to the Friend. Given this possibility, his writings may index ways of recovering Indigenous perspectives on nonnormative personhood that come into further relief when we trace his own confessions of dismay and discomfort with becoming interpellated within colonial gender norms.
Indeed, Occom’s writings often reveal his awareness that colonial heteronormativity and land dispossession were interlocking systems of power that threatened Indigenous bodies.6 When Occom’s Wampanoag friend Moses Paul was condemned for fatally striking Moses Cook, a white miller, outside a tavern in New Haven, Connecticut, in December 1771, Occom lamented that Paul had been “unmanned” by his surrender to alcohol—that he had “lost [his] substance,” as he called it in his Sermon on the Execution of Moses Paul, his most widely read and circulated text (1772).7 A vexed text, Occom there grapples with settler beliefs that Indigenous men were denied the ability to inhabit masculine norms of self-willed sobriety. In response, he shows that Paul’s “unmanning” was driven by systems of colonial violence, what he elsewhere names the processes by which English settlers “want to render us as Cyphers in our own land.”8 Ultimately, Occom transgresses the normative ground of colonial masculinity in the text when he draws on Genesis 2:23 (a verse long recalled in marriage rites) to tell Paul, “You are the bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.”9 Occom’s queer citation of Adam’s first words to Eve reconstitutes the circumstances of colonial violence by naming a shared relation to Paul’s beloved body. In his encounter with the Friend at a funeral, then, Occom navigates an instance of settler nonnormativity when the “substance” of Indigenous relations is nearly always subject to erasure.
This chapter turns to Occom and the Friend’s brief meeting as a lens for addressing two iterations of gender embodiment—and of bodies becoming worlds—in the late eighteenth century.10 For Occom and the Friend, body and flesh can index an ungovernable surrender to an array of precarities endemic to life on the colonial frontier, both quotidian (illness, addiction, poverty) and metaphysical (sin), even while it extends possibilities for supernatural reanimation and collective worldmaking. Their careers similarly reflect their attempts to restore a “Body Politick” after the upheavals of the American Revolution, where Occom led a multi-tribal migration to Brothertown on gifted Oneida lands, while the Friend organized a retreat to a town they named Jerusalem, built on Seneca territory. Both exercises in social assembly bear further resemblances: they occurred only a few years apart—Brothertown in 1785 and Jerusalem in 1791—and were located on Haudenosaunee lands in New York. And both figures’ writings reconceive what counts as grievable life when nonnormative bodies are placed at risk: Occom’s late journals detail his continual presence at funerals, and the Death Book of the Societyof Universal Friends (1773–1830), a major archival source for the Society’s history, retells members’ deathbed confessions.
Yet despite these similarities, Occom and the Friend’s political experiments have never been read together, perhaps an outcome of divergent emphases in early American studies and Indigenous studies. Because of this, their careers coordinate differently legible histories of gender and sexuality, as the Friend has seen a resurgence of critical interest in queer and trans studies, while Occom’s negotiations of a racialization of sexuality has provoked comparatively less investigation. We know from scholars in Black and Indigenous studies that one of my primary terms—flesh—carries a vexed history that reflects these differential conditions of experience, embodiment, and worldmaking.11 For Hortense Spillers, Black flesh reflects the semiotic domain through which the economic and libidinal systems of slavery unfold, emerging as an “ungendering” or “severing of captive body from its motive will, its active desire.”12 When Black bodies are rendered fungible, then “the female body and the male body,” as well as queer bodies, as she traces in later work, “become a territory of cultural and political maneuver.”13 Although the political systems conscripting Native Nations found different expression in law and custom, Indigenous bodies also underwent a radical undoing of pre-contact practices of gender, kinship, and sovereignty, as settler discourses sutured Indigenous flesh to discourses of the “savage.”14 As Chickasaw critic Jodi Byrd trenchantly contends, settler occupation enfolds the nonnormative in agendas of settler expansion: property laws reformat Indigenous flesh as moveable and disposable, while deliberately rendering resulting violences illegible and ungrievable.15 The outcome, as Mark Rifkin argues, is that Indigenous flesh became marked as deviant and nonnormative—and unable to inhabit modernity.16
Given the violent processes through which Indigenous bodies were ungendered and unmoored, I wonder if pathways exist for recovering decolonial improvisations of vibrant flesh and grievable life in heterodox acts of community-building—for what Tiffany Lethabo King calls a “not-yet form” of freedom—in eighteenth- century archives.17 In a field-defining exploration of the co-constitution of Blackness and transness, C. Riley Snorton suggests that histories of coercive fungibility, mobility, and transit could animate “a kind of being in the world where gender … was not fixed but fungible, which is to say revisable,” and this may open “possibilities for valorizing—without necessarily redeeming—different ways of knowing and being, as it is also invested in reviving and inventing strategies for inhabiting unlivable worlds.”18 Read at the intersection of racialized embodiment and settler futurity, the Friend’s heterodox embodiment mediates a nascent iteration of what, from the perspective of a later historical period, Scott Lauria Morgensen terms “queer settler colonialism,” a coordination of whiteness and nonnormativity with the imperatives of settler-national expansion.19 The Friend’s negotiation of personhood and place is thus implicated in the creation of an “unlivable world” by participating in the occupation of Indigenous lands, evacuating queerness of its transgressive potential. Decolonial queer theory may enable us to chart Occom and the Friend’s vexed negotiations of race and gender, while pushing us to acknowledge where and how colonial structures differently impinged on their community’s futures—Jerusalem faded after the death of the Friend, while Brothertown remains, although denied sovereign status.
Put differently, their writings coordinate what I am calling an archive of the elsewhere—a reservoir of their yearnings for a “Body Politick” under conditions of unfulfilled promise.20 By calling this “an archive of the elsewhere,” I am drawing on José Esteban Muñoz, who argues that queer performances can open interstitial moments of utopian possibility he calls a “then and there,” whose temporal imperatives call us “to desire differently, to desire more, to desire better” in anticipation of a future world, as Jeremy and I explored in this collection’s introduction.21 In another sense, however, Occom’s writings echo Fred Moten’s point that Blackness figures as an “elsewhere and elsewhen” that diasporic communities must not only inhabit but come to desire, where Indigeneity similarly encompasses a historically conditioned set of relations and a proleptic embodiment whose arrival is indefinitely forestalled.22 To that end, although Occom’s journals and the Friend’s Death Book were not intended for publication, I orient to this archive as more than merely occasional, but as opportunities to trace how their desires for a new future emerge in scenes of writing that refuse closure—in unfinished sentences, in stutters of anaphora, and in grammars of transitivity. Indeed, transitivity’s multiple meanings—a grammatical mechanic whereby a subject requires a direct object to complete an action, a condition of change and transformation, a movement to another place—animate this essay’s investigations of social experiments as sites of queer possibility and foreclosure. In what follows, I argue that their writings about Jerusalem and Brothertown press on what elsewhere could mean at all, where “elsewhere” indexes a trans embodiment or a racialized sexuality at moments of profound grief.
“MY DEAR REDEEMER; I LOVE; I LOVE; I LOVE”
Scholars of early American sexuality have variously taken up the Friend’s unruly performance of radical prophecy and gender nonnormativity as sites of contestation in imagining social reproduction. Susan Juster has underscored Wilkinson’s role as a “female prophet” in an era that saw a surge in transatlantic women preachers, including Ann Lee, the founder of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing (“Shakers”) in New York, and Joanna Southcott, who published a series of infamous pamphlets from her home in Devon, England, in the early nineteenth century.23 Early national discourses around republican motherhood, as elaborated by figures like Abigail Adams and Judith Sargent Murray, also centered (white) women’s labor in the reproduction of virtuous future citizens. At the same time, several early heterodox leaders, including Ann Lee, mandated celibacy and embodied what Elizabeth Freeman calls an “experimental kinship” that was “neither reproductive nor forward-moving” in their liturgical dance practice, in which “they danced their way out of genital sex and into embodied, holy communion with one another and with God.”24 While the Friend did not command celibacy from their followers, they de-prioritized marriage and the reproduction of the nuclear family and domestic citizenship, values vital to early national norms.
Although this earlier scholarship on the Friend has reflected the contexts of women’s prophecy and republican motherhood, I am interested in exploring how trans readings of the Friend expand critical inquiry to unsettle a gender binary. For example, Scott Larson and Paul B. Moyer clarify that the Friend is merely assigned female at birth, rather than a “female prophet.”25 Read this way, the Friend imagined Jerusalem as a social experiment outside heteronormative scripts of re/production, even while the queer future it evoked participated in ongoing Indigenous removal after the American Revolution. Much of the language the Friend deployed to describe their fleshly reanimation and prophetic office aligns with a vocabulary of possession and occupation that powerfully reverberates with colonial expansion. Indeed, the Friend was born in 1752 in Cumberland, Rhode Island, on lands belonging to the Narragansett and Wampanoag nations. The Friend’s grandfather, John Wilkinson, acquired territory through the Rehoboth North Purchase from Pokanoket Wampanoag leader Wamsutta (Alexander), while Wilkinson’s more well-known contemporary Mary Rowlandson and her family also occupied territory through this land deal.26 In the aftermath of the cataclysmic conflict now known as King Philip’s War (1675–1676), the Friend’s father, Jeremiah Wilkinson, cultivated a small holding of orchards he inherited from the Rehoboth North Purchase, where the Friend and their brothers and sisters—twelve siblings in total, with the Friend the eighth—were born.
In 1776, while still inhabiting lands scarred by Wampanoag displacement, the Friend fell ill with what residents colloquially called “Columbus fever” (likely typhus) and in the aftermath of the fever, the Friend claimed that Wilkinson had left time and had her body reanimated by a spirit. This spirit then proclaimed to gathered witnesses: “Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory for Thee and for everyone.”27 Here, the Friend’s use of anaphora draws on the language of John 14:2 (“In my father’s house are many mansions”) to signal Wilkinson’s death, and yet this spatial imagery also reflects colonial cultures of domesticity that routinely criticized Indigenous peoples for their itinerancy. As the Friend describes their illness, this grammar of transitive possession becomes more overt, when they “droppt the dying flesh & yielded up the Ghost. And according to the declaration of the Angels, the Spirit took full possession of the Body it now animates.”28 The Friend’s theology of resurrection negotiates a paradoxical vocabulary of subjectivity, where flesh is at once a site of self-possession and at risk of holy occupation—an iteration of embodiment that registers differently from the perspective of colonized people of color, who could rarely exert custodianship over their own bodies and communities.
When the Society of Universal Friends finally procured land for the long-awaited community, the title was part of the Nathaniel Gorham and Oliver Phelps Purchase, land speculators who acquired millions of acres of Haudenosaunee territory through a complicated scheme premised on anticipated state boundaries between New York and Massachusetts. Phelps and Gorham paid the colony of Massachusetts $1,000,000, while compensating members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy only $5,000 for a preemptive right to the land title. When rising land prices caused Phelps and Gorham to default on their payments to Massachusetts, American financier Robert Morris purchased the title under the understanding that the Haudenosaunee’s land claim had been irrevocably extinguished because of Mohawk support for the British during the American Revolution.29 In the 1790s, moreover, the state borders between Massachusetts and New York shifted multiple times, and government officials could not agree on who held property in which jurisdiction. Given this transitive property title, the tract for the Society of Universal Friends initially included either fourteen thousand or eleven hundred acres, depending on which state line a surveyor followed. Eventually the Society obtained an additional ten thousand acres, but they had to repurchase this land when the preemption line moved again.30
In 1794, secretary of state Timothy Pickering engaged in negotiations with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy over land rights not under the purview of the Gorham/Phelps purchase. Diplomats met at Canandaigua, a Seneca town only fifteen miles from Jerusalem. While there, American diplomats affirmed the Confederacy as a sovereign entity, a recognition recorded in both the Treaty of Canandaigua and in the George Washington wampum belt held by the Onondaga Nation. One leader at these negotiations was Sganyodaiyo, or Handsome Lake, a Seneca prophet who inspired a revitalization movement. As with the Friend’s encounter with Occom, the treaty meeting placed figures like Sganyodaiyo in proximity to nonbinary settlers like the Friend, where they represented political views alternative to conventional U.S. policy. The Friend spoke at the treaty conference, at one point offering a long sermon (and an even longer prayer). Their presence was unusual, at least from the perspective of American observers, who interpreted the Friend as a woman speaking in a diplomatic context in which white women rarely participated, although Haudenosaunee councils included and valued the counsel of clan mothers.31 William Savery, a Quaker preacher who attended several meetings, reported of the Friend’s sermon: “[One] of the white women had yesterday told the Indians to repent; and they now called the white people to repent.”32 Savery’s observation depicts the Friend as potentially dangerous for the treaty councils and recognizes the Haudenosaunee as savvy negotiators willing to adapt Christian rhetoric to critique ongoing settler incursions on their sovereign territories.
Despite observers’ views on the Friend’s disruptiveness, their presence at these councils replicates a logic of American expansion, even while the social order they cultivated challenges one typically reproduced within colonial heteronormativity.33 Jerusalem’s archive also reflects these dynamics and extends intricate expressions of intimacy between Society members and the Friend. Their intimacies contour the settlement’s improvisation of a grammar of futurity—nowhere clearer than in The Death Book of the Society of the Universal Friends, which reports the last words for individual members in the Society, many of them unmarried women who sought to imagine forms of communal futurity beyond marriage. Indeed, one of the longest entries reflects the loss of the Friend’s closest confidant, Sarah Richards, who renamed herself “Sarah Friend” in a queer reworking of dominant, exogamous practices where a woman takes her husband’s last name. Instead, her new name as “Sarah Friend” delineates her intense attachment to the All-Friend and to their religious community. In addition, the entry in the Death Book indexes a syncopated syntax that reflects the Friend’s acute grief in the loss: “Sarah Friend or Sarah Richards … Expired! And left Her weeping friends to mourn for themselves!” As the entry unfolds, the Friend improvises a queer theology of grievable life: “The Friend attended Her Funeral, and Preach’d a very great Sermon. The exhortation began thus, It is better to go to the house of Mourning than to the house of feasting, for that is the end of all men, and the living will lay it to heart.”34 In this claim that “the living will lay” their losses “to heart,” the Death Book archives how shared mourning navigates intricate understandings of death and reanimation, and embodiment and community.
Another entry, one that memorializes Lucy Holmes’s life and death, extends an even more complex record of nonnormative intimacy. Lucy Holmes, who “left Time, 11th of the 8th Mo 1790,” renders an extravagant representation of heterodox desire: “This departed Saint, as the avenues of mortal life were closing, lifted up her hands in Prayer, said Glory to God in the highest, and unto the Lamb, forever and ever! Saying (with an emphasis which no mortal language can describe) Looking at the Friend, My dear Redeemer; I love; I love; I love. She was.”35 Here, the inscriber struggles to devise a grammar to encompass Lucy’s religious experience, including an affective aura that “no mortal language can describe.” In addition, I want to suggest that Lucy’s spiritual attachment seems not only directed at “the Lamb of God” but also at the Friend, both of whom seem to be invoked when she calls out, “My dear Redeemer; I love; I love; I love”—a repetition that perhaps calls back to the Friend’s use of “Room, Room, Room” in their transitive description of their bodily possession by a holy spirit.
In some ways, the Death Book’s account of Lucy’s passing “out of time” reverberates beyond an expression of intense attachment and toward an articulation of heterodox community. Madhavi Menon argues that formations of queer desire and trans embodiments are nearly always in excess of fixed categories, whether identarian or political: “Whether it is libidinal desire for someone who falls outside the bounds … or a longing that stretches the borders of our politics, desire does not respect limits.”36 Drawing from Menon, I wonder if Lucy’s desire illuminates something queerly embodied about the Death Book’s dissenting grammar for loss. Even from a theological perspective, “My dear Redeemer; I love; I love; I love” evinces a certain slippage—is “My dear Redeemer” Christ or the Friend? Although the Friend never claimed to be Christ, the challenge they extended to conventional Christian doctrine enables a queer excess of desire in a way that “does not respect limits.” At the same time, although “I love; I love; I love” functions as an archival site of excess, the entry for Lucy is also unfinished, trailing off after “She was …” In this sense, the Death Book reflects an attachment never fully enfleshed within space and time, in stark contrast to settler property enclosures. Within that unfinished entry resides not only a queer archive of the elsewhere—indexed on the borders of Lucy’s flesh and spirit—but also a blank space where colonial laws and treaties erased Indigenous sovereignty.
“I HEARD A HEARD HEAVY NEWS”
In contrast to Jerusalem, the Brothertown settlement project was a response both to decades of slow settler encroachment—what Jean O’Brien (Anishinaabe) calls “dispossession by degrees”—and to the immediate crises of the American Revolution.37 From the mid-seventeenth century, a series of land sales circumscribed Mohegan hunting and farming grounds, while a land case that contested these encroachments, Mohegan Indians v. Connecticut (1705–1773), dragged on for decades.38 In 1773, when the Mohegan lost their land claim and were confined to a small reservation, they were confronted with the agonizing choice of whether to stay or make a future elsewhere. Occom joined others in the community, including his brothers-in-law, David and Jacob Fowler, and his son-in-law Joseph Johnson (who married Occom’s daughter, Tabitha), in planning a separate town as a means of communal survival.39 Even so, their efforts were disrupted by the American Revolution, a conflict so destructive to Indigenous Nations that it accentuated the need for Brothertown and halted its planning, as military enlistment and wartime upheaval killed nearly half of Mohegan young men, including Johnson, who died sometime between 1776 and 1777. In addition, American general John Sullivan’s 1779 genocidal incursions into western New York, near Brothertown’s proposed settlement, devastated Haudenosaunee communities, crucial allies to Occom and his cohort.40 In a 1783 letter, he deeply grieves these losses: “This war has been the most Distructive to poor Indians of any wars that ever happened in my Day.”41 Brothertown’s planning documents—“Concluded to live in Peace, and in Friendship”—and settlement’s name, Eeyawquittoowauconuck, turn to an idiom of kinship as a counterweight to imperial violence. These documents, however, also index a more formal grammar from the unfinished sentences and raw emotions of Occom’s journals, which archive his pained efforts to reimagine grievable life and communal futurity during the beleaguered 1770s and 1780s.
By exploring Occom’s depictions of losses and communion with the dead, I want to press on normative conceptions of space and time as a heuristic for addressing Native nation-building.42 Byrd argues that the aims of Indigenous and queer studies are often in divergence: “The two fields act as if the one does not exist at all for the other, not least because of queer investments in ongoing settler colonialism on the one side and an Indigenous commitment to illegibility and outright refusal of recognition on the other.”43 Byrd further presses on the affordances of normativity itself when “it is either presumed that the Indigenous is always already queer to the normative settler or that the colonizing queer cannot and should not encapsulate Indigenous identities.”44 Occom’s journals reflect how figurations of grievable life, with their portrayals of intense sensations, extend methodological difficulties when engaging with Indigenous archives, which are framed by different grammars for orienting to time and space at the very moment formations of U.S. settler-national status are unfolding within an independence campaign from Great Britain. These texts show how Occom turns sovereign conceptions of flesh and community projects to remain rooted to the earth and to each other.
Reading Occom’s late works requires critical frameworks that draw from Indigenous feminist and queer paradigms to survey the improvisation of Algonquian sovereignty against settler projects of expansion, while also tracing the queering of Indigenous intimacies in an era of displacement. Occom’s writings from just before and during this period, including his “Account of the Montauk Indians” (1761) and his extensive journals (1743–1790), primarily index these as struggles to survive imperial wars, painfully reflected in frequent notices of his attendance at funerals. A brief text, Occom’s “Account of the Montauk Indians” (1761) spans only five pages in modern editions and portrays “some of the ancient customs and ways of the Montauk Indians.”45 Occom does this in part through descriptions of mortuary rituals, which offer normative scripts—what Erik R. Seeman calls collective mourning practices or “deathways”—of social belonging and would thus seem a counterintuitive place to find practices for intimacy otherwise.46 Yet, Montaukett burial rites reveal the generational endurance of dense community traditions. While Occom initially composed the text as an aid for English missionaries, his historiographic perspective is shaped by his position as a kinsman participant in Montaukett life through his marriage to Mary Fowler. He begins by observing that the Montaukett bury objects that “belonged to the dead” or “give [them] away” to surviving kin: “And they use to bury a great many things with their dead, especially the things that belonged to the dead, and what they did not bury they would give away.”47 These objects ground a grammar of nonpossession different from colonial norms, revealing how the very ground inhabited by the Montaukett exists as an interconnected series of repositories that bond the community with land and ancestors.
In “Account of the Montauk Indians,” sorrow also embraces a consensual refusal to speak the dead relative’s name until surviving family members bestow it on a child. As Occom writes: “Neither will the mourners mention the name by which their dead was called, nor suffer any one in the whole place to mention it till some of the relations is called by the same name.”48 The transmission of names signals how members “become entangled—through the name—in the life histories of others,” as Barbara Bodenhorn and Gabrielle vom Bruck argue.49 Burial objects and funeral liturgies in “An Account of the Montauk Indians” thus retain Algonquian chronologies that are deeply at odds with the imperatives of early U.S. temporality, based on territorial expansion and Native vanishing, to materialize geographies not only as repositories of collective memory but also as grounds for the reproduction of communal futurity. In this text, Occom shows how Algonquian communities continue to pursue sovereignty by adapting quotidian exercises of land inhabitance and family life, which conflict with settler-national time.50
Even so, extricating Native mourning practices as a counter-national grammar becomes more difficult when displacement fractures Indigenous communities. As part of a growing Algonquian diaspora, Occom had to negotiate what Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks calls “the rememberment of a fragmented world” by reconstituting Mohegan unity even when the nation split between two locations in Brothertown, New York, and New London, Connecticut.51 Occom’s journals record his extensive travels as an itinerant clergyman in the years between 1785 and 1789 as part of this effort, when the Occoms had not yet settled in Brothertown but traveled there often.52 Indeed, Brooks calls Occom’s personal writings “journey journals,” for they “document a network of relations” with “mnemonic geographic and social markers that often correlate with communal narratives.”53 On June 26, 1785, for instance, he describes one journey spent ministering to the ill in New Concord, where he attended “a large number of people … with great Solemnity.”54
The entry abruptly transitions, however, as Occom records the death of his own daughter, Tabitha: “Next Morning after Breakfast went on and got home about 9 found my Well three Days ago I heard a heard heavy News, my poor Tabitha is Dead & Buried, the Lord the Sovereign of the Universe Sanctify this Dispensation to me and to all my Family—.”55 Overall restrained, the entry’s narrative of Tabitha’s death is profoundly raw and abrupt, its syncopated rhythms refusing closure in myriad ways. For one, his narrative of the journey past “my Well” delays his arrival home by layering temporalities—“next morning,” “breakfast,” “about 9,” “three days ago”—relative to the present in which he writes. These temporal markers, which appear simultaneously, slow the sentence’s momentum toward its conclusion, when he learns of Tabitha’s death: Occom, in other words, cannot seem to bear writing until three days after hearing the “heavy News.” Finally, because the entry ends with a dash, Occom suggests that his cry to the “Sovereign of the Universe” remains an ongoing—and unfinished—prayer.
Given that Tabitha’s loss reflects a rupture in kinship and futurity, Occom’s grief brings into relief larger questions of Indigenous survivance under colonialism, specifically in the strange repetition of “I heard a heard.”56 Because his belated arrival prevented Occom from attending to Tabitha in her passing, “I heard a heard” figures as a performative stand-in for the burial litany he was unable to say over his daughter. As Occom pauses his record of a preaching circuit only to try to account for Tabitha’s death, “I heard a heard” renders grief as surrogation, as Joseph Roach describes: “Into the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure … survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternatives.”57 For Occom, that “satisfactory alternative” is constituted through an unfinished prayer and a grammatical stutter—an anguished call to the “Sovereign of the Universe” and a repetition of “I heard a heard.” In a syntactic excess that echoes (with a difference) the “heavy News” of Tabitha’s death, the entry stresses the alienations that accompany Occom’s itinerancy: his physical distance from his family, the linguistic hesitations that put off the moment he scripts Tabitha’s passing, his inability to touch her or her belongings in mourning or in burial. For all the ways “I heard a heard” might seem like a simple error, it remains the surest sign of Occom’s presence in the journals, not in the way it records an event, for it continually retreats from offering any full account of the “Heavy news,” but in how it archives a lived experience of grief. In its orientation to bodies and worlds, the journal reckons with what it means to be present with Native kin across time and space.
Questions of proximity and distance, sensation and chronology, and transitive embodiment and movement also reverberate in another account of profound loss in Occom’s journals. In April 1786, not long after Tabitha’s death, Occom recorded an extraordinary dream where he is encounters the British preacher, George Whitefield, who died years earlier in 1770:
Last Night I had a remarkable Dream about Mr Whitefield, I thought he was preaching as he use to, when he was alive … and I had been Preaching, and he came to me, and took hold of my wright hand and he put his face to my face, and rub’d his face to mine and Said,—I am glad that you preach the Excellency of Jesus Christ yet, and Said, go on and the Lord be with thee, we shall now Soon done. and then he Stretched himself upon the ground flat on his face and reach’d his hands forward, and made a mark with his Hand, and Said I will out doe and over reach all Sinners, and I thought he Barked like a Dog, with a Thundering Voice … [and then] I awoke, and behold it was a dream.58
Occom’s “remarkable dream” lingers with the tangibility of Whitefield’s spectral face and hands, an unusual scene when skin often figures as a boundary that registers ruptured relations to land and kin in early Indigenous writing.59 Instead, Whitefield’s touch is rooted in Christian and Algonquian religious vernaculars, where he reflects dimensions of evangelical charisma, while dogs and wolves are significant in Northeast Indigenous cultures as mediators of spiritual power. Moreover, the vision indexes a transitive dimension in Whitefield’s body, as he moves from standing upright to prostration on the ground and turns from touching Occom to barking like a dog.60 Claire Colebrook defines transitivity as “the condition for what becomes known as the human,” as flesh becomes a site out of which difference emerges.61 In Occom’s dream, however, Whitefield’s movements index a more disruptive and vibrant formation of coextensive life, as the vision’s somatic qualities embrace a queer kinship with human, more-than-human, and nonhuman life—a point that Ula Lukszo Klein similarly takes up in chapter 1.
In one sense, Whitefield’s cry that he will “out doe and over reach all Sinners” evinces an unsettling excess of desire in keeping with many of his sermons, such as “Christ the Best Husband,” which often drew from what Richard Rambuss calls a “sacred erotics” to mark conversion as a marital union with Christ.62 Derrick R. Miller points out that in some formations of evangelical theology “all souls were female since all souls were similarly situated in marriage to Christ,” with Whitefield’s caress of Occom’s face manifesting what Carolyn Dinshaw calls a “queer touch across time.”63 His expression of a profligate similarity with Christ thus marks a possibility for queer union and a re-gendering of the pastor. In another sense, Whitefield’s claim of boundless sin indexes his aural affiliation to the creaturely—with him “[barking] like a Dog.” Yet here, Occom’s dream also exceeds a colonial racialization of gender, often evoked in a material and metonymic deracination of Indigenous persons as dogs, to instead reflect an Algonquian cosmology, where in some stories a “great dog” guards the path to the afterlife.64 If we read Whitefield’s barking as a sensuous call from across the afterlife—and thus as a recuperation of enfleshed relations between human and nonhuman existence across time—then the vision’s conclusion that Occom “shall now Soon done” reflects a promise that his efforts toward Indigenous survivance in Brothertown will be fulfilled in the near future.
WHAT FUTURES NOW?
In their accounts of funeral sites and mourning rites, Occom and the Friend’s writings signal upheavals endemic to the American Revolution’s aftermath, even as settler foreclosures of nonnormative intimacies amplified their experiences of loss. And while state refusals of Indigenous sovereignty additionally constrained Brothertown’s future, Brothertown has endured when Jerusalem did not, illuminating the vexed contours of futurity indexed in different separatist projects. The Society of Universal Friends entered a long decline after the Friend’s death in 1819. The Friend’s considerable personal charisma sustained the sect, and, given their lack of emphasis on marriage and family, the Society never succeeded in replacing members as they died. In contrast to these theological emphases, colonial and early national laws tended to constrain Indigenous futurity. Indeed, Occom’s marriage to Mary Fowler, a member of the Montaukett nation, in 1751 illustrates a different iteration of settler regulations to Algonquian generational endurance. Their relationship conspicuously repudiated New York laws from 1712 and 1754 forbidding exogamous marriages between members of the Montaukett nation and other Native communities—“laws designed,” according to Joanna Brooks, “to hasten Indigenous population decline.”65 While the Occom’s marriage would seem like an exemplary instance of conjugal partnership, its very illegality reveals one way that colonial codes aimed at foreclosing Indigenous futurity. The Brothertowners encountered additional difficulties in the work of creating an Indigenous future. Under pressure from land-hungry settlers eager to move closer to the Great Lakes, the Brothertown residents, together with members of the Stockbridge-Munsee and Oneida nations, moved west to Wisconsin in the 1830s.66 Many of the Brothertowners live there still but have been unsuccessful in gaining federal recognition for their tribal sovereignty.67
Put simply, Occom and the Friend bear witness to the devastating conditions of settler regulations of intimacy at a critical point of transition from colonial to early national governance in the United States. Yet their vocabularies for mourning also require critical frameworks attentive to the transitive convergences and divergences in lived experiences of gender and racial embodiment that their careers exemplify. In a small way, we might see this in Occom’s journal entry on the funeral where he first met the Friend: “But She did not Speake long She sat down, and there was another and another one after another, I saw and heard ten six Women and four men, some spoke repeatedly, Jamima got up 3 times and I spoke & others did so.” Here, Occom’s syncopated account emphasizes the fleeting nature of the Friend’s funeral remarks, as well as the polyphonic rhythms of the ceremony itself, as multiple members of the gathered community speak. Likewise, across Occom and the Friend’s writings, fragmented voices reflect both the collective nature and the incompleteness of community projects, as different speakers extend acts of social assembly into a deeply desired but still unfulfilled future. In this way, the political strivings Occom and the Friend differently exemplify signify an ongoing elsewhere and elsewhen—or “then and there,” to riff on Muñoz—of nonnormative life. Ultimately, their acts of fleshing out grievable bodies and heterodox worlds summon a series of alternative futures toward which eighteenth-century settlement projects tremulously aspire.
NOTES
Acknowledgment: I am deeply grateful to a community of friends and colleagues, including Alyssa Hunziker, Rafael Hernandez, Jeff Menne, and Lindsay Wilhelm, who thoughtfully engaged with this chapter. Conversations with Jeremy Chow, Sari Carter, Don Rodrigues, and Scott Larson generously pushed me toward clarity.
1. Samson Occom, Journal 12 (1785), in The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan, ed. Joanna Brooks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 308–309.
2. The Friend, The Universal Friend’s Advice, in Pioneer Prophetess: Jemima Wilkinson, the Publick Universal Friend, ed. Herbert A. Wisbey (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), 197.
3. Early accounts of the Friend, such as Herbert A. Wisbey’s Pioneer Prophetess: Jemima Wilkinson, the Publick Universal Friend (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), use female pronouns. Given the Friend’s assertion of genderless identity, I use they/them pronouns, drawing from Jen Manion’s call to foreground fluid performances of identity in Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 10–13 and 265–266. For the Friend in the context of trans and nonbinary scholarship, see also Rachel Hope Cleves, “Beyond the Binaries in Early America: Special Issue Introduction,” Early American Studies 12, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 459–468; Scott Larson, “ ‘Indescribable Being’: Theological Performances of Genderlessness in the Society of the Publick Universal Friend, 1776–1819,” Early American Studies 12, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 576–600; Paul B. Moyer, The Public Universal Friend: Jemima Wilkinson and Religious Enthusiasm in Revolutionary America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); T. Fleischmann, Time Is the Thing a Body Moves through (Minneapolis: Coffee House, 2019); and Kit Heyam, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender (New York: Seal Press, 2022), 216–218.
4. Samson Occom, Journal 15 (1785–1786), in The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan, 325–335 (331).
5. Quoted in Moyer, The Public Universal Friend, 9.
6. For the queering of Native bodies and relations under early American settler colonialism, see Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
7. Samson Occom, Sermon on the Execution of Moses Paul (1772), in The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan, 176–196 (192).
8. Samson Occom, “Mohegan Tribe to Sir William Johnson” (1764), in The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan, 144–145.
9. Occom, Sermon on the Execution of Moses Paul, 188.
10. Vincent Lloyd contends that political theology, as an analytic attuned to power, sovereignty, and the exception, could do more to account for racial ideologies lurking within grammars of flesh. See Vincent Lloyd, ed., Race and Political Theology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 1–21.
11. On flesh, see Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203–229; Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 17–18; and Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations in Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), Chapter 3.
12. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 204.
13. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 206. For Spillers’s rethinking of “ungendered” bodies in the context of queerness, see Michelle M. Wright, The Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015), Chapter 2.
14. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, 28.
15. Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xv.
16. Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?, 36–38. See also Qwo-Li Driskill, Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016), 41.
17. King, The Black Shoals, 54. For grievable life, I am also thinking with Judith Butler in Frames of War: What Is Grievable Life? (New York: Verso Books, 2009).
18. C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 59, 7.
19. Scott Lauria Morgensen, The Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 11–13. See also Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 39–40.
20. For flesh, space, and time, I am influenced by what Sara Ahmed names a queerly “migrant orientation,” a phenomenology for inhabiting space and time “as if they extend our skin. At the same time, for queer projects, this is an extension of embodiment that never quite arrives” (10). I am also drawing from Mikhail Bakhtin’s exploration of time and temporality in the chronotope, or in moments where “time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes … responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history” (84). See Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); and Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
21. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 189.
22. Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism) in the Flesh,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 737–780 (746). In The Physics of Blackness, Wright also argues that Blackness is not reducible to inherent biology (a “what”) but is historically conditioned (a “when” and “where”), 1–3.
23. Susan Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); and Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
24. Elizabeth Freeman, Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American 19th Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 28–29.
25. See Larson, “ ‘Indescribable Being,’ ” 580–583, and Moyer, The Public Universal Friend, 9–10.
26. For Mary Rowlandson and King Philip’s War, see Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).
27. Quoted in Larson, “ ‘Indescribable Being,’ ” 577.
28. Quoted in Larson, “ ‘Indescribable Being,’ ” 577.
29. Laurence M. Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 58–89.
30. See Moyer, The Public Universal Friend, 121–128.
31. On Haudenosaunee women and clan councils, see E. Pauline Johnson, “The Lodge of the Lawmakers,” in Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson’s Writings on Native North America, eds. Margery Fee and Dory Nelson (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2015), 42–45.
32. Quoted in Fleischmann, Time Is the Thing, 83.
33. See Beth Piatote, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
34. Wisby’s Pioneer Prophetess reproduces The Death Book of the Society of Universal Friends in Appendix I, 187–195. For Sarah Friend’s inscription, see Death Book, 191.
35. Death Book, 188–189.
36. Madhavi Menon, Indifference to Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 16.
37. Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).
38. For the Mohegan land case, see Mark D. Walters, “Mohegan Indians v. Connecticut (1705–1773) and the Legal Status of Aboriginal Customary Laws and Government in British North America,” Osgood Hall Law Journal 33, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 785–829; Amy Den Ouden, Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 1–3, 68–99; Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 53–80, 83–100; Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 159–170; David Silverman, Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 46–51; and Craig Bryan Yirush, “Claiming the New World: Empire, Law, and Indigenous Rights in the Mohegan Case, 1704–1743,” Law and History Review 29, no. 2 (May 2011): 333–373.
39. Anthony Wonderley, “Brothertown, New York, 1785–1796,” New York History 81, no. 4 (December 2000): 457–492 (464); and Hilary Wyss, Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 126–127.
40. For the American Revolution and the Mohegan, see Silverman, Red Brethren, 109–117.
41. Samson Occom, “Letter to John Bailey” (1783), in The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan, 118–120 (119).
42. For this, I am influenced by Deborah Miranda’s essay on Chumash and Esselen burial rites, which was largely the purview of Two-Spirit individuals within the community. While Miranda’s tribal-national context is very different from Occom’s, I take up her provocation to resist a mode of interpretation that turns exclusively to idioms of tragedy to describe Indigenous experiences under colonialism, instead embracing idioms that “enrich Native lives with meaning, survival, and love.” See Miranda, “Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no. 1–2 (April 2010): 253–284 (256).
43. Jodi Byrd, “What’s Normative Got to Do with It?: Toward Indigenous Queer Relationality,” Social Text 38, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 105–123 (105).
44. Byrd, “What’s Normative,” 107–108.
45. Samson Occom, “Account of the Montauk Indians” (1761), in The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan, 47–51 (47).
46. Erik R. Seeman, The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in Early North America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 2–3.
47. Occom, “Account of the Montauk Indians,” 50.
48. Occom, “Account of the Montauk Indians,” 50.
49. Barbara Bodenhorn and Gabriele vom Bruck, “ ‘Entangled in Histories’: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Names and Naming,” in The Anthropology of Names and Naming, ed. Barbara Bodenhorn and Gabrielle vom Bruck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–30 (3).
50. See Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), x–xi.
51. Brooks, The Common Pot, xxii.
52. Linford Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 184.
53. Brooks, The Common Pot, 226.
54. Samson Occom, Journal 11 (1785), in The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan, 293–301 (294).
55. Occom, Journal 11, 295.
56. On queer futurity, see Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), and Rebekah Sheldon, The Child to Come: Life after the Human Catastrophe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
57. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performances (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2.
58. Occom, Journal 15, 334. On this dream, see Bernd Peyer, The Tutor’d Mind: Indian Missionary Writing in Antebellum America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 97–98; Joanna Brooks, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 84–86; Keely McCarthy, “Conversion, Identity, and the Indian Missionary,” Early American Literature 36, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 353–369; and Jessica M. Parr, Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2015), 103–104.
59. William Apess’s An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man is exemplary here. See Apess, On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 155–161.
60. For queer human-canine kinships, see Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), and When Species Meet (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007). For dogs and histories of race, see Colin Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), and With Dogs at the Edge of Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Deborah Bird Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012); Bénédicte Boisseron, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Joshua Bennett, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020); and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020).
61. Claire Colebrook, “What Is It Like to Be Human?,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2, no. 2 (May 2015): 227–243 (228).
62. Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 1–4. For a reading of Whitefield’s queer sermons, see also Misty G. Anderson, Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief, and the Borders of the Self (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 70–75.
63. See Derrick R. Miller, “Moravian Familiarities: Queer Community in the Moravian Church in Europe and North America in the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Moravian History 13, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 54–75 (57); and Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 3.
64. For the deracination of Indigenous persons as dogs, we must look no further than Occom’s own life. On one occasion, he was not able to fulfill a preaching engagement in New Haven, but at least one attendee mistook a white minister for Occom and grumbled, “See how the black dog lays it down,” an incident described by William Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, 3 vols. (New York: R. Carter and Brothers, 1859), 2:40. However, dogs and wolves are significant emblems of power, with the Mohegan Vision Statement proclaiming: “We are the Wolf People, children of Mundo,” which is included in Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel (formerly Fawcett) and Gladys Tantaquidgeon’s Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons ofGladys Tantaquidgeon (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), 3. I attend closely to settler deracination of Indigenous persons as dogs in my book, The Rich Earth between Us: The Intimate Grounds of Race and Sexuality in the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2024).
65. Joanna Brooks, “ ‘This Indian World’: An Introduction to the Writings of Samson Occom,” in The Collected Writings of Samson Occom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3–43 (15).
66. On the Brothertowners’ move to Wisconsin, see Silverman, Red Brethren, 184–190.
67. For Indigenous and Black sovereignty and land rights in the nineteenth century, see Kathryn Walkiewicz, Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023).