Dartmouth College Returns Documents to Mohegan Tribe
Recently, Dartmouth College returned a collection of papers from Samson Occom to the Mohegan Tribe. The papers returned include letters, diaries, sermons and a number of Indigenous herbal remedies.
Photo credit Julia Levine, courtesy Dartmouth Library. Occom’s Hebrew textbook open to page with Occom’s initials and name. Occom’s name is written in English, Hebrew, and Mohegan.
Occom was instrumental in the founding of the college and a member of the Mohegan Tribe. He was born in 1723 and a gifted orator. He became the first Native student of the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock who urged him to travel throughout Europe raising funding for what he believed would be a school in Connecticut for Native students in the 1760s. Instead, the funds were diverted to the founding of college in New Hampshire that later became Dartmouth. The newly founded college catered to the settlers’ sons rather than Natives.
Image courtesy of artsy.net
After centuries of doing little to honor Occom’s contributions to the founding of the college, Mohegan leaders say that these steps toward reconciliation will help build a different relationship with Dartmouth going forward. Between 1769 and 1969 fewer than 20 Native American students received degrees from Dartmouth.
However, the school began recruiting Native students in 1970 and since has graduated nearly 1,200 Native students, including from the Mohegan Tribe. Today, the Tribe provides a wide array of supports to its members so they may create a life they want to live and this includes educational support. The Tribe offers students who are enrolled scholarships, tuition payment, funding for materials, and educational pathway planning. In order to track the information for these cases, they use RiteTrack for their database management needs.
The Mohegan Tribe’s RiteTrack Education Module manages all enrolled member students’ demographic information, scholarships, tuition payments, funding for materials, and educational pathway planning.
The Mohegan RiteTrack system serves as the core hub to run and report on dozens of social service programs including the scholarship program. The system tracks educational path information for members including: schools attended, student majors, enrolled courses, earned grades and scholarships received.
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