Hymnic Placemaking: Samson Occom’s Collection and Brothertown Orientations

On February 3, 2018, eleven members of the Brothertown Indian Nation community gathered in New Haven, Connecticut, and sang from Indian Melodies (1845), a nineteenth-century tunebook composed by Brothertown author Thomas Commuck. They were joined by members of nine other Native communities (Lumbee, Nehantic, Ohkay Owingeh, Pequot, Poarch Creek, Schaghticoke, Shinnecock, Wirrarika, and Yaqui) as well as non-Native singers from the area. Altogether, more than eighty people attended the event, where they spent the day singing from Indian Melodies and learning the history behind the music (Gonzalez 2018). According to the Brothertown Indians, Yale University affiliates, and local musicians on the organizing committee, this was an occasion to reflect upon “the historical and present-day significance of Commuck’s work for the Brothertown Indian Nation” and to voice anew his tunes “celebrating indigenous life and resilience” (Baldwin et al. 2018: 1). The gathering marked the beginning of what some Brothertown people see as a revival of their tribe’s hymnody, a singing tradition that spans back to the community’s eighteenth-century origins.

More than just reaching through time, the music also reached out into space. Although today the Brothertown Indian Nation’s population is dispersed across nearly all fifty US states, those who traveled to New Haven used song to transform Yale’s oldest building into a vibrant place of community building. Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Courtney Cottrell (pers. comm., March 7, 2019) was impressed by the sheer volume of singers’ voices: “For individuals who have never been in a room that is filled to every corner and every crack with music, it is quite an experience. . . . And there is no doubt that the sing in Connecticut really filled the room, if not the entire building, with musical sound.” Her words underscore the arresting materiality of vocal sound, its ability to permeate even the smallest crevice. Amy Besaw Medford, another Brothertown citizen in attendance, observed a palpable change in the campus venue as voices “filled” the space. Comparing her experience of the music to a “hug” from her Native relatives, she reflected, “When I see all of us in this room together, and all of us singing these songs . . . I feel that warmth and that welcome and that community. It’s beautiful” (Wenger 2018).

This article situates the communal forms of placemaking at work during this 2018 singing event in a long trajectory of hymnic placemaking within the Brothertown Indian Nation. I use the term hymnic placemaking to name a set of lived practices that have been taken up and retained within segments of the tribe since its inception. Hymnic placemaking describes how generations of Brothertown Indians have repurposed the forms and rituals of Christian hymnody in order to denote and organize places of worship, articulate shared connections to important sites, acclimate to new surroundings, construct permanent or temporary sanctuaries for community members, and otherwise modify or manage Native environments. We can trace this distinctive style of placemaking back to Commuck’s musical-literary precursor Samson Occom: the famous Mohegan/Brothertown minister who compiled a hymnal in the same years he helped plan the intertribal Brothertown Movement. I argue that Occom’s A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs; Intended for the Edification of Sincere Christians, of All Denominations (1774) established hymn singing as a central placemaking practice for the Native Christian community that formed at Brothertown, New York. Hymn singing remained an important resource for placemaking as the community carried its hymnody with it through successive relocations. Tracing the Collection’s impact on the historical arc of Brothertown hymnody illuminates the longstanding practice of hymnic placemaking through which Occom and other Indigenous people have used and continue to use sacred song to cultivate sovereign spaces.

This article adds to a growing body of scholarship on Indigenous hymn singing, which has explored the development of Indigenized Christian traditions within many tribal nations by demonstrating how Native peoples folded Christian hymnody into already-existing spiritual and social practices.¹ While this scholarship has productively centered the role of song in Native relationship making and community building, it has given less attention to song’s role in shaping the places that anchor Native relations and communities, particularly across multigenerational contexts of displacement.² To illustrate the creative work hymns do as placemaking tools—and how among Native groups such work is inseparable from hymnody’s social functions—I turn to frameworks offered by literary scholars, historians, and anthropologists in the field of Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS). Lisa Brooks (2008), Margaret M. Bruchac (2005), Keith H. Basso (1996), Trevor G. Reed (2019), and Christine M. DeLucia (2019), among others, have shown that Indigenous writings, cultural practices, and, indeed, songs always emerge out of particular places. These productions and expressive acts reciprocally engage in placemaking: producing memory, history, and relational networks in specific sites. DeLucia (2019: 75) defines placemaking as “the articulation and reshaping of cultural landscapes through language, actions, markers, rituals, and other human activities.” Place, from this perspective, “is not a static entity universally visible and accessible to everyone” but instead a dynamic “set of relations” whose coordinates can be renewed or rearranged through a variety of activities, including storytelling about landmarks, journeys, and homelands; the performance of ceremonies at sacred sites; and the creation of monuments, signs, trails, or maps (75).

Along the East Coast, where the Brothertown Indians’ ancestral homelands are located, Indigenous communities have drawn on diverse repertoires of placemaking. For instance, Bruchac (2005: 73) discusses oral traditions of “Algonkian earthshapers and placemakers,” ancient beings who left physical traces by reshaping natural earth formations and carving out rivers and lakes. These “placemaker” stories not only record significant happenings but also imbue sites with cultural meanings, fostering relationships among ancestors and living descendants who care for those places. Though hymns, it must be stressed, are distinct from the traditional Algonquian stories studied by Bruchac, they too contain figures and settings that accrue meaning in relation to singers’ and listeners’ “place-worlds,” their “particular universe of objects and events” (Basso 1996: 6). The Brothertown Indian Nation survived multiple migrations in the face of land dispossession, and hymnody proved a resilient tool as the community’s place-world shifted and extended across multiple geographies: first from the East Coast to central New York, then to Wisconsin, and eventually throughout the United States. Hymnic placemaking points to the vital role the tribe’s hymn-singing traditions have played in maintaining connections to ancestral lands as well as navigating and interpreting unfamiliar terrain. Reading Brothertown hymns in relation to this history of serial displacement reveals that Native hymnody is both embedded in specific geographical homelands and exceptionally portable, creating new ties and recalibrating old ones across a range of locations. These two characteristics exist not in contradiction but rather as intertwined elements of Indigenous literary practice under conditions of ongoing settler colonialism.

By analyzing how sung hymn-texts have reinforced and reshaped Brothertown people’s relations to an array of meaningful places, I call attention to the embodied dimensions of sound-based Indigenous placemaking practices.³ More specifically, I consider how hymns have contributed to what NAIS scholar Mark Rifkin (2017: 3) calls “Indigenous orientations,” directional tendencies that develop within Native groups in relation to particular ancestral territories and histories of inhabitance and displacement. Rifkin borrows Sara Ahmed’s (2006) concept of “orientation” from Queer Phenomenology, which provides a helpful paradigm for considering how all human actions influence the ways people inhabit space. Starting from the “here” of the body, Ahmed (2006: 5–9) theorizes, our intentional acts “turn” us toward certain objects and away from others. As we situate ourselves, we develop orientations gradually, through repetition: “In moving this way, rather than that, and moving in this way again and again, the surfaces of bodies in turn acquire their shape” (16). Orientations consequently shape one’s starting position—the point of view one’s body takes as given—affecting how each of us comes to “find our way” (1) in a constantly shifting world.⁴ Approaching Native sonic expressions through the lens of Indigenous orientations can help account for the placemaking that occurs when repeated rituals of hymnody inform the movements of Native bodies. This article examines the ways Occom’s Collection shaped various Brothertown spaces by articulating, promoting, and coordinating bodily orientations among Indigenous singers. I will discuss the specific forms of mobility and alignment the hymnal has prompted over time, from the daily travel it motivated across the original eighteenth-century town to the hollow square formation singers used in 2018 when performing Indian Melodies.

Uncovering the full breadth of hymnic placemaking under ever-shifting conditions calls for a transhistorical lens, one which reads the literary history of Brothertown hymns alongside the contemporary work hymns are doing in the Brothertown Indian Nation. Therefore, my readings of hymns have been guided by consultation with the Brothertown Indian Nation Council and interviews with community members. This community-engaged method is essential to identifying the places, contexts, and lived experiences that give Brothertown hymnody its meanings and its creative power. Based largely on dialogue with tribal citizens, the first section gives a brief overview of Brothertown history and outlines current struggles related to the tribe’s communal places. Then, I turn to Occom’s eighteenth-century hymnal to demonstrate the centrality of hymns to the tribe’s earliest placemaking efforts. Finally, I show how Occom’s hymns have resonated through the nineteenth century all the way into the twenty-first, offering an alternative account of the place-worlds that inhabit American literature.

The Brothertown “Place-Vacuum”

To unpack the significance of hymnic placemaking to the Brothertown Indian Nation, we first need to map out the places important to Brothertown history. The Brothertown Movement originated in the early 1770s along the East Coast, where tribal communities in southern New England and on Long Island faced increasing settler encroachment on their homelands. Wary of further land dispossession and mounting pressures of colonial assimilation, a group of about one hundred and fifty Native Christians from seven different tribes (Narragansett, Tunxis, Mashantucket Pequot, Mohegan, Montaukett, Niantic, and Eastern Pequot) chose to relocate to Oneida lands in central New York and build a new town apart from European settlers.⁵ They envisioned this town as a sanctuary from the violence and corruption of white colonists—as Commuck (1859: 293) later described it, “some more friendly clime, where they would be more free from the contaminating influence, and evil example, etc., of their white brethren.” Reverend Samson Occom took on a leadership role within the movement, collaborating with his son-in-law, fellow Mohegan Joseph Johnson, and his brothers-in-law, Montaukett teachers David Fowler and Jacob Fowler, to organize the seven communities and obtain enough land for them to live together. The outbreak of the American Revolution delayed a full migration, and it was not until 1783 that large groups could safely make the move.

Finally, on November 7, 1785, “a new Nation sprang into existence” when Occom and the other migrants formally established Brothertown and its government (Commuck 1859: 293). Yet colonial infringement on Native territories continued after Occom’s death in 1792. White settlers and New York state officials exerted relentless pressure on Brothertown land in the coming decades, and the community once again needed to seek out a new home. By the mid-1830s, most of the tribe had relocated to lands purchased from the Menominee in present-day Wisconsin, where they formed a second “Brothertown” on the eastern shore of Lake Winnebago (Loew 2013). Once there, the migrants were threatened almost immediately by federal policies of Indian Removal. They petitioned Congress for land ownership rights by accepting US citizenship in 1839—not to assimilate but rather to avoid yet another displacement (Cipolla and Andler 2007; Jarvis 2010: 216). By becoming US citizens, the Brothertown Indians may have gained some protection against forced removal, but they were still forced to contend with the tide of Euro-Americans moving west. White farmers purchased large parcels of Brothertown land in Wisconsin as the nineteenth century wore on. Many Brothertown families moved away by the turn of the twentieth century to pursue better economic opportunities elsewhere.

The difficulties of maintaining a geographically dispersed community have been compounded by the Brothertown Indian Nation’s unrecognized status. The Brothertown spent thirty-two years in the federal acknowledgment process until, in 2012, the Department of the Interior (DOI) declared itself unable to acknowledge the tribe. The DOI claimed that the 1839 Act of Congress granting citizenship to Brothertown members had terminated the tribe’s nation-to-nation relationship with the United States and that only Congress holds the authority to restore it. Brothertown legal scholar Kathleen A. Brown-Pérez (2013: 254) concludes that the tribe’s only remaining option is to seek congressional restoration, “another long and complicated process.”⁶ Despite these challenges, the Brothertown Indian Nation now has more than four thousand enrolled members, well over twenty-five times the number of people who originally migrated from the coastal parent tribes. Its tribal government is centralized in Wisconsin, where many Brothertown citizens still reside, but enrolled members live from coast to coast.

Brothertown citizen and historical researcher Megan Fulopp (pers. comm., July 16, 2019) explains how the tribe’s fraught histories of movement have created what she calls a “place-vacuum”:

Fulopp’s figure of the “place-vacuum” renders land dispossession as a felt absence—the disorienting loss of a physical center that has been sealed off and replaced by intangible, virtual spaces that never fully recapture the experience of material communal grounds. It speaks to the sense of a missing center that results from serial displacement, raising important questions about Native placemaking within a settler colonial state. When an Indigenous community’s relations are grounded in ancestral homelands, how does repeated land theft affect communal identity? How can a federally unrecognized tribe protect and sustain its communal sites? The area formerly known as Brothertown, New York, has since been split up into several towns and villages in Oneida County—the namesake of an entire community replaced by places named after individuals, such as Deansboro (for Indian agent Thomas Dean) and the Town of Kirkland (for missionary Samuel Kirkland). The challenges to accessing Old Brothertown extend to the cemetery where Occom is believed to be buried: a Private Property sign stands within a few feet of the roadside marker memorializing him.

Yet, as Fulopp describes it, Old Brothertown remains an integral source of connection. Although the community has moved from location to location, she holds that “place still matters” for the Brothertown Indians: “our original reservations still do shape our lives even when we’re nowhere near them spatially.” Significantly, hymnody remains a potent channel through which the community relates to its New York lands. When around fifty Brothertown citizens took a bus trip to Old Brothertown in 1999, they attended a special service at a local church, where the choir performed some of Occom’s hymns (Cipolla 2013: 49–50). The church service—like the New Haven sing two decades later—shows that despite the place-vacuum currently impacting the Brothertown community, Occom’s hymns have not only survived but are being continuously performed by and for Brothertown people.

The abiding presence of hymn singing within the Brothertown Indian Nation suggests that the forms of placelessness imposed by settler colonial violence do not deter or diminish the tribe’s own placemaking strategies, through which past and present Brothertown singers have asserted competing understandings of place and articulated their own sense of belonging within contested territories. In the remaining sections, I open up several key moments in the life of Occom’s Collection, considering how his hymnal forged or facilitated linkages between the embodied experience of singing and specific physical sites among the Brothertown people who used it. By fostering shared orientations among singers, Occom’s hymnal laid the groundwork for hymnic placemaking at Brothertown, and it has continued to orient the tribe’s communal singing ever since.

Moving, Collecting, Orienting

The stories of Brothertown and its hymnody first intersect in the figure of Samson Occom, whose role as co-organizer of the Brothertown Movement was simultaneous with his role as editor of his ambitious Collection. Occom began collecting hymns at least as early as his preaching tour of Great Britain, where from 1766 to 1768 he raised funds on behalf of Moor’s Indian Charity School.⁷ While there, he acquired hymns by British writers not yet published in the colonies and even met hymnodists who would later appear in the Collection, most notably “Amazing Grace” author John Newton (Occom 2006: 271–72). Upon returning to America, he sought out other unpublished hymns and started writing his own. A newspaper advertisement for his hymnal appeared near the end of 1773, and he published the Collection just a few months later (Connecticut Gazette1773). This first edition contains one hundred and nine hymn-texts without printed music; singers could choose any memorized tune of the appropriate meter to pair with a given text. It assembles compositions from more than fifteen known writers, including one original hymn by Occom and twenty-nine hymns whose authors—possibly other Indigenous writers—are unknown.⁸ Occom (1774: 4) purposefully drew from a variety of sources when crafting his book: in a short preface, he writes that he has “taken no small Pains” to gather hymns from “a Number of Authors of different Denominations of Christians, that every Christian may be suited.”

Speaking to “every Christian,” Occom frames the hymnal not only as a binding agent but also as a source of direction, its one hundred and nine hymns reliable companions for a long journey: “Here I present you, O Christians, of what Denomination soever, with cordial Hymns, to comfort you in your weary Pilgrimage; I hope they will assist and strengthen you through the various Changes of this Life, till you shall all safely arrive to the general Assembly Above” (4). Occom uses the trope of the pilgrimage to emphasize the importance of shared direction in the Christian journey. Since all true believers will one day meet in a single “Assembly,” the path to heaven implies a common orientation that binds the faithful.

This idea is steeped in biblical precedent, but the trail motif also evokes the spiritual tradition of Occom’s native Mohegan tribe (J. Brooks 2003: 77). According to Mohegan Medicine Woman and tribal historian Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, designs on Mohegan basketry and beadwork incorporate curvilinear “lifetrails” to represent the people, plants, and omnipresent “spiritual force” encountered on the journey through life (Fawcett 1995: 37). The lifetrail expresses the entanglement of material and supernatural landscapes in Mohegan culture:

Lifetrail patterns circulated between Occom and his relations; late in his life, he would send an elm bark box inscribed with lifetrail designs from Brothertown to his sister at Mohegan (Fawcett 2000: 135). If Occom cites biblical authority to show how trails unite Christians, he also pulls from Indigenous epistemologies to show how they unite Native people. Further, by activating elements of both Christian and Mohegan symbolism, he evinces the inextricable link between spiritual pilgrimage and journeys over the earthy “fabric” of Native land.

Indeed, the “weary Pilgrimage” mentioned in the preface anticipated a very specific journey. Occom published the Collection in April 1774, just three months before traveling some three hundred miles over land and water to Oneida territory in upstate New York. He made this weeks-long trip to survey a tract of land promised by the Oneida Nation to the “New England Indians” (Johnson 1998: 242) who had joined the Brothertown Movement. His journey marked the path that dozens of Native families were preparing to take. For them, his offering of “cordial Hymns, to comfort you in your weary Pilgrimage” was not merely metaphorical but reflective of lived realities. While there is an undeniable tension between the notion of voluntary pilgrimage and the displacement confronting Occom’s community, the pilgrimage archetype may have provided one way to find meaning in their difficult choice to leave—a strategic response to land dispossession, though not the only response available (L. Brooks 2008: 102–4).

Read in the context of the impending Brothertown migration, Occom’s preface positions the hymnal as a kind of compass for the Brothertown Indians, one that could help them navigate new terrain as a fledgling community. Joanna Brooks’s (2003: 72–78) pathbreaking work on the hymnal has shown that Occom indeed kept the proposed settlement in view while compiling the Collection, incorporating hymns that reflected the musical tastes and thematic preferences of the tribes who would be uniting there in coming years. The preface suggests that these hymns were not just aesthetically pleasing, spiritually rich choices for Native singers but also useful guides to the acts of travel and settlement that lay ahead for Occom and other Brothertown migrants. Pursuing this latter thread requires reading for experience—a valuable critical category for discerning the situatedness of Native texts, as Robert Warrior (2005: xxx) has also proposed. Reading the Collection’s pilgrimage or lifetrail imagery in terms of the embodied, lived experiences catalyzed by the Brothertown Movement brings into view the orientations Occom’s hymnal imparts and strives to engender in its users via song.

At the time Occom released the Collection, hymns were already a powerful orienting force within the seven Brothertown parent tribes. Following the midcentury Great Awakening, many Native Christians in the Northeast had adopted hymnody into their traditional religious practices and lifeways.⁹ Tribal communities embraced Christian hymnody both as a vehicle for extending Native musical traditions into the present and as an access point for new forms of spiritual power that could help alleviate, in some measure, the hardships of colonialism (Wheeler and Eyerly 2017). In a March 4, 1771, letter to Benjamin Forfitt, a London-based benefactor who had previously donated hymnbooks to “the poor Indians,” Occom (2006: 94) reported that “the Indians are greatly Delighted and edified with Singing . . . Indians in their Religious meetings round about here, Sing more than any Christians and they have frequent meetings in all Indians Towns.”¹⁰ On November 14 that same year, Brothertown cofounder Joseph Johnson (1998: 105) journaled about one such gathering in Occom’s home at Mohegan, where they “spent the Evening in Singing” with David Fowler (Montaukett) and Eastern Pequot guests. Johnson’s diaries are filled with other examples of intertribal singing: just the next day, for example, the Niantic woman Hannah Nonesuch taught Johnson a tune at Occom’s house, and later that winter he visited Groton, where he worshipped with Pequots, Narragansetts, and other Mohegans (106–7, 133–34).

By influencing rhythms of travel and turning discrete groups of Native Christians toward common meeting places, hymnody galvanized intertribal orientations that became the very basis for the Brothertown Movement. When on March 13, 1773, “a Vast number of People Men, Women, and Children . . . Indians of seven Towns” gathered at Mohegan to discuss emigration—a meeting later detailed by Johnson (1998: 207) in a 1774 speech to the Oneidas—the attendees followed routes and met with faces which were by that point quite familiar. These paths and relationships were rooted in earlier political alliances and intermarriages, but they gained new dimensions through the intense spiritual connections cultivated by Native-led revivals and regional singing circuits.¹¹ The appearance of Occom’s Collection in 1774 and its distribution throughout Native communities reflected orientations that had been forming for years, even decades, within his network of relations. At the same time, it arrived at a major juncture in the lives of many people close to Occom, and it harnessed those shared orientations to support their turn toward a new home. By energizing rituals of singing that already had drawn hundreds of Native Christians together, his hymnal stimulated bodily activities that might further align the Brothertown migrants as they prepared for their upcoming journey.

Harmonic Orientations in Occom’s Collection

As editor of the Collection, Occom elevated some models of embodied motion, collectivity, and consensus over others, imbuing his hymnal with aesthetic patterns that could harmonize orientations among singers. He chose to include numerous hymns structured around physical journeys, thereby extending the pilgrimage motif from the preface. Images of the “narrow Path” (Occom 1774: 43) or “consecrated Way” (98) pervade the hymnal, with various selections guiding singers across “barren Land” (32), through “a Vale of Tears” (31), and even into the depths of Christ’s crucified body via his “open Side” (31).¹² Hymns throughout the collection repeatedly associate this traversal with communal worship: “As ye journey sweetly sing: / Sing your Saviour’s worthy Praise” (40), one verse commands.¹³ Such self-reflexive moments highlight the hymnal’s own role in guiding singers’ steps. Like other hymnbooks from the period, the Collection is a pocket-sized volume, and families would have carried their own copies between home, church, and worship gatherings (Phillips 2018: 1–2). It is likely that many Brothertown migrants brought their copies on the multistage trek to New York.¹⁴ The hymns they carried stress the need to “Direct my Heart and voice aright” (Occom 1774: 54) when walking the “narrow Road” (49), implying that communal song actively coordinates the orientations that propel successful journeys.¹⁵

Hymn 4 (Samuel Hall’s “Hail! happy Pilgrims, whence came ye?”) suggests that Brothertown Indians may have expressed and strengthened these shared orientations through certain singing styles. This call-and-response hymn draws on one of the oldest Christian typologies, narrating the convergence of two groups of “Pilgrims” who escaped bondage in Egypt before meeting on their way to Canaan, the Promised Land.¹⁶ In a series of alternating couplets, the first band of travelers poses questions, and the second group answers:

The second group tells their redemption story in the succeeding stanzas, recounting the schoolmaster’s frightening warning about Hell and their eventual deliverance after an evangelist shared the Gospel with them.

The first group reveals that they were likewise freed from “Bondage” and “redeem’d,” and they accept the new arrivals as “dear Brethren, well agreed” (9). To signal their alliance, the antiphonal structure of the hymn dissolves completely by the closing lines:

The final stanza’s depiction of separate groups becoming one through travel and praise—“walk[ing]” and “sing[ing]”—stages an alignment of their somatic and sonic orientations, illustrating song’s ability to bind and steer collectivities. This ending resonates not just with themes of Christian brotherhood but also with traditional values; as Daniel Heath Justice (2018: 77) reminds us, song has always helped Indigenous peoples connect with one another. The hymn-text’s performance, furthermore, enacts the pilgrims’ union through a blending of singers’ voices. Music historian Glenda Goodman (2012: 794) asks us to tune our ears to the soundscapes created by Indigenous sacred song; she contends that vocal sounds themselves are “charged with cultural meanings” beyond the words’ literal sense. The “aural effect of blending voices,” she elaborates, can help build “communal cohesion” among worshippers (795). In this selection, parts alternating between two groups of performers resolve in a final verse in which all these voices are brought together. The hymn’s progression vocalizes Occom’s unifying mission for his hymnal and the Brothertown effort, concurrent projects that both nurtured an expanding community of “Brethren.”

Whereas the call-and-response form demonstrates how song can turn a community in tandem, Occom’s own contribution to the Collection demonstrates how sound carves out communal space. His original composition advances a theory of hymnic placemaking; it powerfully illuminates the means by which his own Native Christian community might make room for themselves through song. Occom’s hymn, “Throughout the Saviour’s Life we trace” (Hymn 77), unfolds as a spatial reconstruction of Jesus Christ’s path to Calvary. Before transporting singers to this site of crucifixion, the first stanza invites them to gather into a “we” and “trace” Christ’s life together:

From the outset, singers must collaborate to make meaning out of the discrepancy between Christ’s “spotless” life and his unjust fate—and cope with their implication in the “Sin” that demanded his death.

But suddenly, in the second stanza, the “I” is detached abruptly from the “we” and thrust into an intimate face-to-face with Jesus: “On the cold Ground methinks I see / My Jesus kneel, and pray for me” (78). Ushered into the biblical Garden of Gethsemane, the “I” is placed into contact with the “cold Ground” infused with Jesus’s “chilly sweat” (78); Christ’s embodied suffering seems to seep into and transmute his surroundings. When the hymn shifts to detail his torture along the path to Calvary, his corporeal pain continues to imprint on the environment:

As he carries the cross, his “Blood and Tear” physically mark the space around him, creating the archetypal pilgrim’s trail so central to other hymns throughout the collection. This space of concentrated individual suffering can only accommodate the individual singer. Cut off from the “we,” the “I” follows Jesus along this bloodstained path alone.

Once Christ is raised onto the cross, a midstanza shift to second person reminds singers that they are not truly alone in witnessing these visceral sights:

The second person perspective here calls attention to the existence of an Other—another observer to share in making meaning about the crucifixion and the mixed emotions of guilt and gratitude it induces. Gradually, the hymn begins to readmit the possibility of relation that its first line introduced but that was violently severed by Christ’s torture.

Occom’s hymn ultimately ends where it began, returning to the first-person plural point of view. A newly defined community appears on the scene, refiguring what was formerly a path of pain and persecution into a shared space of celebration:

What had contracted into a space for “me” in stanza two expands into a space for a “Choir” in this final stanza. Over the course of the hymn’s performance, the communal experience of “shout[ing]” praise stretches the constraining path to Calvary into a space wide enough for a community of faith to reemerge—this time as kin, as “Brethren.” In the hymn’s final, rapturous notes, their raised voices take a space of intense personal suffering—a place that scatters—and transform it into a communal space of joy and redemption—a place that gathers.

The cyclical progression of Occom’s hymn troubles any assumption that individual orientations precede shared orientations. Reversing this expected sequence, Occom shows that shared orientations are not simply a collection of individuals’ preexisting orientations but serve as the very basis for the direction each person takes. The “we” must “trace” the “Saviour’s Life” before the “I” can “see” the Savior’s death. Only after asserting a “we” in the first line is each singer made witness to the “pricking Thorn” placed on Christ’s head, the “Bones” exposed by his lashings, and, finally, the moment he “dies in Anguish on the Tree” (78–79). The path each individual walks—here, a path of both trauma and salvation—depends upon the initial “we” to which he or she belongs. The sonic dimensions of the hymn’s performance underscore its message that we need others in order to orient ourselves. The opening verse invites singers to bring their voices in relation to each other, and later verses, despite asserting an “I,” are still sung in harmony; the “we” is maintained sonically even when the text signals its loss. Moments of disjunction between the hymn’s language and its sound impress the simple but comforting fact that singers literally are not alone, even when the lyrics conspire to make them feel like it.

Taken together, the narrative arc of Occom’s hymn-text and the soundscape of its performance illustrate not a linear process of community formation but a communal act of placemaking, dramatized by the expanding biblical trail. His hymn proposes a model of hymnic placemaking, demonstrating how hymn singing transforms space by synchronizing orientations—or, more precisely, by articulating and reinforcing shared orientations already in place. Its climactic proclamation—“Shout, Brethren, shout in songs divine”—can be read as an instruction for singers to tap into longstanding bonds, which, when activated through song, hold the power to transfigure the environment. When Occom wrote this line, he was looking forward as well as backward, establishing continuity between kinship values shared by many Algonquian peoples and the new community he foresaw at Brothertown. His hymn offered the first generation of Brothertown Indians an appealing model for placemaking, one rooted in the harmonic orientations they were already vocalizing and continually refining through their everyday singing practices.

Hymnic Placemaking at Brothertown, New York

Samson Occom did not make his first visit to Brothertown, New York, until fall 1785, twelve years after the initial planning meeting at Mohegan. On October 24, after riding through rain and mud and traversing “some Places very Mirely,” he finally set foot in the town he had labored to create (Occom 2006: 306). “Our Eyes did us but little good” (306), he recalls in his journal, noting that he and David Fowler had spent the last mile journeying through the dark. When they emerged from the surrounding forest, however, a “Melodious Sin[g]ing” helped them find their way:

When Occom arrived at Brothertown, he entered a place whose contours had been shaped by many factors: land negotiations with the Oneida Nation determined the boundaries of the new settlement; the Revolutionary War had stalled construction, forcing the advance party to retreat before they could finish building and planting; community members’ kinship networks informed the organization of residential and public spaces.¹⁷ But for all this, in Occom’s first encounter with Brothertown, it was hymnody that instantly proved the key to navigating its physical geography. The intertribal singing that had been happening routinely in New England was now concentrated in the more compact space of the settlement. Guiding Occom’s steps through the dark, familiar sounds helped him orient himself in unfamiliar surroundings. His journal passage also suggests that worship oriented people within interior spaces. When Occom entered the house and joined hands with each singer “one by one,” mingled voices were paralleled by bodily touch, a source of communal bonding that united the “Greatest” with the “least.”

Hymnody’s orienting effects extended well beyond this wet October evening. Subsequent journal entries show that singing was part of daily life at Brothertown. The day after his arrival, Occom writes, “I kep Still all Day at Davids House and it was Crouded all Day. . . . In the evening Singers came in again, and they Sang till near ten” (306). As visitors entered and exited the building, Fowler’s house oscillated between a domestic space where Occom could rest and a lively community center where social connections were formed through clusters of sonic activity. The next day, turbulent weather covered the town in “ancle Dee[p]” snow, but Fowler’s house still drew a crowd from various directions when “in the evening we had a little Singing again” (306). For the third consecutive night, hymnody motivated lines of travel that converged at the same building. Accumulating over time, even these ordinary acts of mobility left lasting impressions. Singers’ everyday movements through Brothertown engendered physical pathways that became more worn and more familiar as they made repeated trips—a process silently recorded by the tracks they left through the snow.

Occom’s notes over his three-week visit emphasize these routes among worship gatherings in order to map out the settlement as a dynamic network of religious meeting places. On October 28, confined to Fowler’s house due to back pain, he notes that some “Young Folks went in the evening to Abraham Simons [Narragansett] a mile of from David Fowlers to Sing” (306). His mental map of Brothertown begins expanding here through the addition of another place of worship. Unable to make the trip himself, he contextualizes the mile between the Fowler and Simon homes as the distance between two places of communal song. That Saturday, even cornfields turned out to be settings for praise, forming more nodes in Brothertown’s constellation of musical sites. Describing the seasonal corn harvest, an important festival within Mohegan and other northeastern tribal traditions, Occom reports that “Huskers Sung Hymns Psalms and Spiritual Songs the bigest part of the Time” (306).

These scenes from Occom’s journal offer glimpses into hymnic placemaking in action at Brothertown. The recurrent performance and circulation of hymns coordinated Brothertown’s denizens, promoting shared orientations through joint experiences of travel among singing locations, particular positionings that aligned groups of worshippers, and the motion at play in the embodied activity of singing itself. The examples related by Occom consistently point to the body’s status as intermediary between sound phenomena and place: bodily engagements such as walking to meetings, sitting and standing in unison with a group, shaking hands, husking corn, even moving one’s vocal and facial muscles in sync with others to produce certain sounds—these all emplace song in specific sites. The centrality of embodiment is only underscored by the moment Occom’s “back Continued out of order” (306), when his bodily pain keeps him confined indoors and hinders him from singing at Simon’s.

In all of these cases, sound and place intersect in the body, and this vital connection ensures that seemingly ephemeral phenomena like vocal sound and performance can be acts of placemaking that gradually remake environments. “Bodies build places,” philosopher Edward S. Casey (2009: 116) puts it concisely; through activities such as traveling, constructing, and dwelling, “the living-moving body converts the flatland of sheer sites into the variegated landscape of habitable or traversible places.” As the Brothertown Indians’ rituals of hymnody reoriented their bodies to the settlement around them, they reshaped its terrain in the process. Hymnic placemaking sometimes happened quite conspicuously, through supplementary activities such as harvesting corn. It also involved building the infrastructure necessary to support communal life, including widespread singing. As hymnody actuated rhythms of travel to and from David Fowler’s house, this regular traffic had material effects: Occom and other town leaders soon established the main intersection near the Fowler home, after it had already become a popular singing venue.¹⁸ Town roads and bridges were crucial connectors for singers hiking across the settlement, accommodating the worship routes they most often took. When in October 1786 “most of the Bridges were Carried off” due to flooding in the creeks, Occom (2006: 344) commented in his journal on the unusually low turnout of nine adults for Sunday services at Fowler’s.

While it is certainly significant that decisions relating to the town’s physical layout coincided with its citizens’ worship customs, DeLucia (2018) warns that an overemphasis on visible evidence of placemaking, such as streets or ruins, can privilege Western over Indigenous ways of understanding landscape. She argues that “countless practices of placemaking hinge on invisible qualities, aspects of human connection to place that are not readily apparent to investigative eyes and leave no marks or only transient ones” (18). In addition to overt modifications of Brothertown’s topography, hymnic placemaking also manifested through subtler changes that hymnody effected in singers’ navigational habits, quotidian fields of perception, and—especially traceable in Occom’s diary—shifting senses of the town’s organization and scope. Hymn singing at Brothertown influenced lived realities of religious belief and practice in both visible and invisible ways, and the settlement was reconfigured by the movements and activities of its Native Christian inhabitants.

The embodied worship practices that supported the community’s hymnic placemaking were instilled in large part by Occom’s own hymnal. On November 3, 1785, his Collection served as the nucleus of Brothertown’s first wedding. According to Occom’s (2006: 307) journal entry for that day, the ceremony concluded with “a Marriage Hymn,” identified by Joanna Brooks (2003) as Hymn 106 from the Collection. Suited to the occasion, this hymn of unknown authorship facilitated a prayer for “Harmony and holy Love” (Occom 1774: 109) between the new husband and wife. In his journal, Occom (2006: 307) describes how next “the People Sat down” to eat together—a moment of collective repositioning—“and after Supper, we Spent the Evening in Singing Psalms Hymns and Spiritual Songs.” These hymns seemed to orient the departing singers successfully: “After that every [one] Went home Peaceably with[out] any Carousing or Frollicing” (307), he writes approvingly. The absence of “Frollicing” implies only disciplined steps, an embodied reflection of the guests’ moral and spiritual alignment even as they walked their separate paths home.¹⁹

The interpersonal links forged through hymnody affected Brothertown residents’ experiences of continuity and discontinuity in their place-worlds. Throughout Occom’s journal, Brothertown and other places marked by Native Christianity maintain more definite spatial coordinates than the nebulous “Wilderness” (307), as he figures the Haudenosaunee territories surrounding them.²⁰ These distinct coordinates surfaced as Brothertown people established worship networks that led them to travel to certain places and not others. On October 30, 1785, for example, Occom noted that Christian Mohicans from the nearby community of New Stockbridge journeyed a precise “distance of Six miles” (307) to worship at David Fowler’s. On the following Sabbath, Occom reciprocated their visit by trekking the same “Six miles” (308) to New Stockbridge, where he preached and sang with a mixture of Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians. Treading the same path in reverse, Occom and his companions reinscribed the connection then forming between the neighboring towns. Patterns of congregation and dispersal across settlement lines continued uninterrupted for years, resulting in more permeable borders than those raised between Brothertown and purportedly non-Christian tribes.

Internally, the Brothertown community worked to bind together its members. Occom’s journal entry on November 7, 1785, records the historic meeting at which he and other town leaders officially resolved to “form into a Body Politick” and agreed upon the town’s name: “We Named our Town by the Name of Brotherton, in Indian Eeyawquittoowauconnuck” (308).²¹ Mohegan linguist Stephanie Fielding translates this Mohegan-Pequot-Montaukett word as “he does so like someone looking in a certain direction” (quoted in J. Brooks 2006: 25n28). Her translation suggests that Brothertown Indians became “brothers” by facing a common direction—their shared orientations encoded into the settlement’s very name. At the end of his November 7 entry, Occom (2006: 309) logged his own intention to “make this Town my Home and Center.” Evidently, the town’s establishment reorganized his own place-world and shifted his sense of orientation within it. More than that, his language of centering indicates that the appearance of a “Body Politick” hinged on the inhabitants’ collective orientation around this shared “Center.”

I have argued that Occom’s hymnal and the routines of hymn singing it instituted played major roles in fashioning and bolstering the shared orientations that underwrote placemaking at Brothertown, New York. It is apt, then, that Occom refers to consensus as “Harmony” in his entry on Eeyawquittoowauconnuck’s founding: “Concluded to live in Peace, and in Friendship and to go on in all their Public Concerns in Harmony” (308–9). The melodies he curated in 1774 resounded the harmonic orientations he and other migrants experienced when they set their sights on Brothertown, and they continued to foster social and political harmony at the settlement itself. It was not until his third week at Brothertown that Occom consciously “look[ed] about a little to See the land,” concluding in his journal, “It is the best land I ever did see in all my Travils” (309). His sense of sight seems to catch up to his attentive ear: weeks after hearing “Melodious Sin[g]ing” upon his arrival, he could now “see” that Brothertown lived up to his hopes.

Indian Melodies: Hymnic Placemaking in Wisconsin

Hymn singing remained a cornerstone of Brothertown Indian spiritual life after Occom’s death in 1792, enduring even as residents’ perception of their communal identity evolved over the next several decades. The second and third generations of Narragansett, Tunxis, Mashantucket Pequot, Mohegan, Montaukett, Niantic, and Eastern Pequot peoples living at Brothertown came to see themselves not simply as coinhabitants but as a unified tribe (Cipolla 2013). Their sense of group identification was strong enough that the community took the name “Brothertown” with it after leaving New York.²² As the Brothertown Indians constructed a new settlement in Wisconsin, they resumed their hymnic placemaking. One observer in 1836 recalled that they “sang with might and main” in neighbors’ homes, the “shanty” schoolhouse that doubled as a church, and even the lakeside forest, where “the woods would ring with their music” (Wright 1894).

Thomas Commuck (Narragansett/Brothertown) and his wife Hannah Abner Commuck (Eastern Pequot/Brothertown) were among the first Brothertown families to emigrate to Wisconsin. Once there, Commuck (1845: iv) “commenced trying to learn, scientifically, the art of singing,” and he soon began composing his own music. In 1845, he published one hundred and twenty original tunes as Indian Melodies. He hoped his tunes would find success among the general public—admitting, too, that he could use “a little money” (vi)—but intended them especially for his “brethren of the Methodist Episcopal Church” (iv), which stood on the corner of his property. Unlike Occom’s hymnal, Indian Melodies includes printed music along with lyrics, making Commuck the first Native author to publish musical compositions using Euro-American notation (Levine 2002: xxxvii). Even so, Commuck (1845: vi) titled his tunes after Native individuals, nations, and place-names as “a tribute of respect,” such as his long meter tune “Occum” (Commuck 1845: 31). Dedicating a tune to the Brothertown cofounder and hymnodist, Commuck not only honored an ancestor but also inserted himself into a longer tradition of Brothertown hymnody.

Even more suggestive is Commuck’s tune “Old Indian Hymn,” which cites and transforms a piece from Occom’s 1774 Collection (fig. 1). Commuck sets “Old Indian Hymn” to a hymn-text that was first brought to America by Occom: “My Soul doth magnify the Lord,” written by British hymnodist John Mason and published as Hymn 24 in Occom’s Collection. Commuck’s iteration borrows five verses from Occom’s earlier hymnal and adds a new opening verse as well as a choral refrain. His most striking addition, however, is the footnote beneath the musical staves, which recounts the tune’s miraculous origins:

Commuck, and perhaps other worshippers with Narragansett ancestry, experienced “Old Indian Hymn” as music embedded in ancestral tradition. Pairing it with a hymn-text from Occom’s Collection, Commuck projected their shared music history backward, before European contact, to anchor it firmly within precolonized Native space. The footnote raises the possibility that the Brothertown Indians sang the Collection’s Hymn 24 to “Old Indian Hymn” when they were still living in New York, decades before Commuck committed the music to paper.

Indian Melodies thus establishes sonic continuity with earlier generations of Brothertown Indians, exhibiting the tribe’s hymnody as a highly portable tradition that could be transplanted wherever its people went. Commuck’s musical notation offers another telling clue. He produced copies of Indian Melodies in both standard notes and shape notes, an accessible notation system named for the various shapes (triangles, ovals, rectangles, and diamonds) noteheads take on the staff. Shape-note music is sung a cappella by four different voice sections, with the tenors carrying the melody. Based on surviving descriptions of early Brothertown singing, which emphasize democratic participation and harmonies in multiple parts, independent scholar and musician A. Gabriel Kastelle (2018) hypothesizes that shape-note style characterized Brothertown hymnody from its very beginning. By cross-referencing the contents of Occom’s Collection with texts in later shape-note compilations, among other evidence, Kastelle (pers. comm., June 29, 2019) has concluded that Brothertown people sang selections from the 1774 hymnal using techniques popularized by New England singing schools—techniques that were later formative for nineteenth-century shape-note singing.

The continuity Indian Melodies maintains with prior Brothertown hymnody extends to its ambition as a placemaking project. Through his tunebook’s design, Commuck presents hymnic placemaking as a fluid practice that persists across temporal and geographical boundaries. The precolonial Atlantic coast called up by his metatextual commentary on “Old Indian Hymn” is embedded within the tunebook’s much larger web of places. For example, some tunes are titled after Native northeastern towns where first-generation Brothertown people were born, such as “Montauk” and “Mohegan.” Others are named for sites of Brothertown migration, including “Oneida,” “Winnebago,” and, of course, “Brothertown.” By memorializing these significant places through music, Indian Melodies asserts that the where of Brothertown encompasses all the places Brothertown people called home: where they were born, where they had traveled, and where they were at that moment.²³ By situating Brothertown, Wisconsin, within this vast network of interlocking sites, Commuck offered his “brethren” at the Methodist Episcopal Church a way to orient themselves to the community’s expanding, ever-changing place-world. His tunes encouraged them to reaffirm and reactivate ties between their present location and other homelands—interconnections sustained by new voices that echoed far beyond the bounds of the original settlement.

Reviving Brothertown Hymnody

Hymn singing still brings Brothertown people together, and it continues to orient them toward their homelands, even as community members’ perspectives regarding place—and especially what constitutes a “Home and Center” (Occom 2006: 309)—have undergone remarkable change since Occom’s and Commuck’s lifetimes. Hymnic placemaking was again brought to the forefront at the 2018 sing in New Haven, where this article opened and where we now return. A booklet published for the event by its organizing committee interweaves thirty-two Indian Melodies tunes with historical commentary that connects the Brothertown Indian Nation’s journeys to the story of its hymnody (Commuck 2018). In her introductory essay, Fulopp (2018: 3) tells how hymn singing began to fall out of practice when Brothertown citizens moved farther apart in the late nineteenth century: “The seeds of hymnody scattered by our ancestors since our very beginning were no longer able to find Brothertown soil to take root in, and its practice amongst us was nearly forgotten.” For a time, the place-vacuum that had materialized under the pressures of settler colonialism generated a correlating sound-vacuum—the lack of stable, accessible gathering places damping the potential for collective song. Today, though, Fulopp continues optimistically, “Brothertown hymnody is once more being reseeded within the hearts and minds of the Brothertown people” (3).²⁴

By gathering at New Haven and singing Commuck’s music, Brothertown participants filled the modern-day place-vacuum with their living voices. Singers organized into a square formation facing inwards—called a hollow square in shape-note tradition—while a leader stood in the center and beat time. The hollow square facilitates an embodied relationality among singers, organizing their bodies so that each voice section faces all the others and is directed toward a common center. Brothertown singers used the hollow square to reinhabit shared orientations that could, in turn, reconnect them with ancestral places. Mark Baldwin, a Brothertown citizen and direct descendant of Samson Occom, details his own experience of listening from the center:

The “live” performance of “Old Indian Hymn” via the hollow square synchronized orientations among a roomful of singers such that “harmonies from all directions” coalesced into a living cultural memory. Enclosed within the hollow square, Baldwin bowed his head while voices from every side transported him to a precise locale in Brothertown geography. His “transcendent” experience suggests that hymnic placemaking continues to affirm the links between Brothertown people and their homelands, even if their proximity to those territories has shifted over time.

The 2018 sing points not just backward but also forward to new scenes of Brothertown Indian placemaking. Similar events involving tribal members have followed in other places, including two other singings from Indian Melodies at All Nations Indian Church and the University Baptist Church in Minneapolis. In 2019, Commuck’s tunes were performed at a memorial service held in Chicago for tribal elder Reverend Gordon J. Straw (Jessica Ryan, pers. comm., February 4, 2019). As part of two dedication events in 2022, Brothertown citizens and friends sang “Old Indian Hymn” at Union Cemetery (the tribe’s largest burial ground in Wisconsin) and another Commuck tune, “Mohegan,” at Deansboro Cemetery in Old Brothertown. If the New Haven event filled “every corner and every crack with music” (Courtney Cottrell, pers. comm., March 7, 2019), subsequent performances are seeing Brothertown music spill over into other geographies, amplifying and reshaping the Brothertown Indian Nation’s place-world through sound.

By situating the current revival of Brothertown hymnody within its longer history, I have shown how these developing soundscapes build on a legacy of hymnic placemaking that has always been exercised within the tribe. On the East Coast, singing reinforced preexisting relations and new ties of faith among an intertribal community, orienting them toward a common destination in New York and paving the way for the founding of a politically sovereign “Body Politick.” When the tribe moved to Wisconsin, it again drew on hymnody to regather its community and attend to shared histories. Today’s Brothertown singers testify to the resilience of these bonds and loudly declare their nation’s ongoing presence, revitalizing their hymnody to meet the needs of a growing community whose members may live far apart but who nevertheless build communal space wherever they join in song.

These acoustic geographies challenge readers of Native literatures not only to read closely but to listen carefully—to recognize that sonic expressions supply vital materials for Native placemaking. If Indigenous literary history pushes against the deep-seated perception of “American literature as a corpus centering around the emergence of the political body of the United States” (L. Brooks 2012: 313–14), it also disrupts modes of reading premised on US-centric notions about placemaking, mapping, and boundary formation. The Brothertown Indian Nation’s hymn singing—rooted in specific locations and historical events and yet reverberating across place and time—makes audible an alternative set of coordinates, a nexus of Indigenous homelands given voice through the generations.

I am deeply grateful to many Brothertown Indian Nation citizens, Council members, scholars, and singers for sharing their knowledge about Brothertown hymns and histories. I owe special thanks to Courtney Cottrell, Megan Fulopp, Jessica Ryan, Amy Besaw Medford, and the late Mark Baldwin for invaluable suggestions and conversations that made this article possible. I thank Betsy Erkkila, Vivasvan Soni, Barbara Newman, and A. Gabriel Kastelle for their insightful feedback on various drafts. Folks in the NAIS Working Group at the Newberry Library asked pivotal questions at an early stage. On-site research was supported by a fellowship from Northwestern University’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research.

Notes

References