The concept of divine sovereignty is a cumbersome one for the earth-bound activist to hold: The idea, as wielded by humans, struggles to overlay the ideals of an omnipotent god with the contests and power plays of ordinary life. In the face of manmade inventions, such as the sovereignty of nation-states, the divine must, according to the tenets of its theology, transcend. How, then, to describe the political ambitions of Christians who earnestly cast their lots with a divine and sovereign god? Eighteenth century Mohegan activist Samson Occom was one such figure, a man who resisted the land grabs of English settlers through rhetorics of divine power.

Occom articulated a somewhat syncretic theology, based on both Old and New Testament covenants between god and man, in order to reconfigure the prerogative of Indigenous tribes in North America during a period of systemic land encroachment and loss.

Prior to Occom, and indeed in Occom’s own milieu, claims of the ‘chosen’ and ‘unchosen’ commonly circulated throughout Puritan society (Carr 142). New England Christians sought to place themselves within the grand narrative yarn that sutured the Old and New Testaments: that they were either living in the thousand-year span leading up to Christ’s return to earth or, perhaps less spectacularly, in the thousand years following his second coming (Bross 12). In keeping with these goliath narratives that swept the western world from the early Christian epoch to the modern age, Christians clung to various portraits of God, which varied across the Old and New testaments, for a glimmer of who they were and who, in a changing world order, they could hope to become.

This exhibit takes as its point of departure the context of Puritan millennialism in New England, which reared its head in radical ways in the 1640s and 1650s and continued to circulate intermittently throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Religious articulations of divine intent hewed closely, for the Puritans, to the political viability of their own presence in North America. Some Puritan millennialists, subsequently, conscripted North American Indigenous tribes into their narratives as justification for conversion and displacement both.

Puritan millennialists, however, are not the primary focus of this exhibit, which is specifically concerned with how Indigenous activists and ministers in this time period used such narratives and their attendant devices to intervene in the Puritan status quo regarding land ownership and use. Indigenous writers became purveyors of these theological narratives as a means of negotiating claims to land that was under attack by Christian settlers. Millennialist narratives, which cast Indigenous people as Israelites or Canaanites, were always implicit metaphors for land claims. In the mouths of Mohegan and Pequot peoples, they took on deeper and altogether new resonances, throwing Old Testament covenant theology into relief with New Testament covenants as a means of leveraging political and material claims on their ancestral lands.

The following exhibit draws upon Samson Occom’s petitions and autobiography in the 18th century, William Apess’ autobiography in the 19th century, and finally the Wampanoag Bible in both the 17th and 21st centuries to illuminate these connections. Though from different tribes and generations, both Occom and Apess occupied dual roles as ministers and activists. The Wampanoag people were also implicated in these histories of colonialism and resistance and the Wampanoag Bible, therefore, can be seen as a material symbol of both Puritan millennialism and Indigenous self-fashioning in both historical and contemporary contexts.

Occom and Apess, as ministers and activists, opposed the sale of tribal lands. How, then, did they speak to both a sovereign, merciful God and the sovereignty of their tribes to retain their ancestral lands? How did Occom and Apess revise a common Puritan idiom in order to contest the encroachment of English colonists onto tribal land? This project understands these two parallel aims — for both salvation in the heavenly realm and a return to the “promised land” in the material — as deeply intertwined. In some ways, they are in search of the same thing: the nature of the narratives — their idioms, metaphors, characters, and images — with which humans justify their acquisition of land.