In 1764, Samson Occom wrote a letter to William Johnson, the superintendent of Indian Affairs for British North America, in a bid of supplication for mediation. In the letter he urgently describes the unwelcome influence of colonial officials on the passing of the Mohegan sachemship, which disregarded traditional Mohegan succession practices.

“We are imposed upon by our overseers, and what our overseers have done, we take to be done by the [Connecticut] Assembly. By what they have already done, we think they want to render us as cyphers in our own land. They want to root us out of our land, root & branch. They have already proceeded with arbitrary power over us, and we want to know from whence they got that power or whether they can maintain such power justly over us” (Occom 144). (Emphasis mine). See a reproduction of the full letter below:

Hon Sir

These, withe true Friendship and Sincere Service, beg your Honrs Notice and hearing,—We bless the Supream being the Governor of all Worlds—that he has given you great Wisdom and understandg and Sent you in these parts of the World, and when you looked all ^cast your Eyes a^ round you, you Saw the Natives ^the Mis- erable Nations of the Land^ to be without understanding, and are liable to ^be^ imposed upon by all other Nations, and it moved your Heart in a Way of Commisiration—and ^god^ hath made you a mideator between the Natives and the other Nations, and Now the Eyes of many Nations are upon you, for help, as the Eyes of ^helpless^ Children, to a tender Parent,—they look with ardent ...

... Desires, both from the East and from the West, from the North and from the South,—And we think and feel ourselves happy that Some of us have had some aquantance with your Honor, and ^that^ we may now not only look from afar—but may nearly aproach your Honor and ^make^ our Cries in your Ears—Sir Besides the Complants Which have been presented before your Honor and What is brought Now from Capt Tracy1—We think we are imposed upon by our ^over^ Seers and What our ^over^ Seers ^have^ done we take to be done by the Assembly2—by what they have alreaday done we think they want render us as Cyphers in our own land—they want to root us out of our land ^root & Branch^, they ^have^ already Proceeded with arbitrary Power over us,—and we want to know from whence they got that Power or Whither they Can Maintain such Power Jusly over us—They have indeed us’d Ben Uncas3 as a Tool in their Hands and Ben Uncas was to do nothing With out his Council While he was our Sachem and Now we have Cast him of ^and he has now Cast of his Councel and Will not^ and we think it but Just and Honest as you Honor may See in a Bit of Paper,— and the English intends to Continue him as a Sachem ovr us, but we have a Law and a Custom to make a Sachem over us Without the help of any People or Na- tion in the World, and When he makes himself ^unworthy^ of his Station we put him down—ourselves—Understand Sir, this Tribe has been in 2 parties, the Gover- ment Pretended to befriend the Indians, and Mr Mason Pretended the Same and each had a Number of Indians, and there is a few of us that Seems to Stand between the two parties—Deacon Henry Quaquaquid will Relate the Whole Matter to Your Honor.

Sir, now we desire to know from Your Hon. Which seems to be Honest in your View, and Desire your Honors advice Where to Stear,—Some Questions we woud ask, Whether we have not Power to Stop Ben Uncas from Pastoring English Creatures, and Selling Wood or Timber and Stone, and Wither the Income of the Leased Lands ought to go to the benefit of the Whole Tribe,—and how Shoud we Proceed in these Matters—and Whither it woud not be as well for ^us^ to be With- out Sachem as With in Time to Come—Whether the kings Instructions Concerning Indian Lands, an’t as much for us as any Tribe—Whither We Cant ^use^ the Farm which Ben Uncas leasd not alone or Whether we Cant lease it out to Whome we have a mind—

Lisa Brooks writes about this passage in relation to what she calls the Mohegans’s writing of their “‘ancient’ relationship to the land” (Brooks 84). Literacy, Brooks argues, was a primary “route” to protecting their lands (84). Brooks writes: “Occom employed a metaphor for indigeneity that ‘rooted’ Mohegans in their native land. He pointed to colonization as the main threat to the continuance of their tree and the growth of their ‘branch’ … In using the word ‘cypher’ he articulated awareness of the colonial processes through which the Mohegans were being transformed into disempowered non-entities, ‘wanderers’ in their own land” (93).

In Occom’s evocation of uprooted branches that will in time wither and die, there are traces of the Israelites saying to Ezekiel that their “bones [are] dried up … we are cut off.” Dry bones become dead roots; eternal salvation enters into a dialectic with land: “I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land,” says the spirit of the Lord. Indeed Occom’s evocations of power, additionally, bring to mind Ezekiel’s acknowledgement of divine sovereignty, casting in relief what Occom calls “arbitrary” power, or unsubstantiated ‘sovereign’ interference, of the Connecticut government.

Occom’s language, willfully or otherwise, connotes images of the dry bones of Israel. Brooks’ use of ‘wanderers’ speaks to this implication, though the use of ‘cypher’ in and of itself does heavy metaphorical work — indeed a cypher is a non-entity, though it is also an entity that, as the OED notes, has “no value by itself, but which increases or decreases the value of other figures according to its position” (OED). Cypher functions as a choice admonition of the ways in which, whether as Canaanites or as Jews, Indigenous people were conscripted as sundry characters of a Puritan millennialist plot that was used to justify colonization and the control of Indigenous land.

The subterranean presence of Ezekiel’s bones in Occom’s writing, however, does not in itself embed or indicate Occom’s own politics surrounding Indigenous identity formation and Old and New Testament figurations of the covenant. Ryan Carr’s work contends that the Canaanite narrative transposed onto Indigenous tribes was a common cultural idiom of Occom’s day: “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,” Carr writes (142). It was an idea that Occom would have been familiar with; Carr suggests that Occom intervened in its cultural circulation by rejecting its Old Testament notions of chosen nations in favor of a New Testament theology rooted in covenants of grace between gentiles and God. This was a theology based on the premise of “non-chosen nationhood” (143).

But Occom’s letter to Johnson evokes neither New Testament covenantalism nor the Canaanite narrative. Instead his choice of metaphor and image suggest that the Mohegans were in a historical position to that of the Israelites — not Canaanites. This common Puritan idiom surfaces not as literal belief, necessarily, but rather as rhetoric in the shifting claims to land and power that characterized Occom’s politics.