Until recently, scholarly consensus located the beginning of American Indian Autobiography in the 1760s with the writings of Samson Occom (Mohegan). In a recent book, however, Hilary E. Wyss has argued for an earlier chronology, one beginning in the 1640s. Wyss draws attention to a range of writings—letters, journal entries, and brief confessions—produced during the century before Occom wrote. These "autobiographical" texts have been overlooked in the past, she argues, because they are embedded within the published tracts of colonial missionaries, "quoting" their converts at length. The issue of mediation here does raise questions about the authenticity of these texts as autobiographical acts, a point that Wyss acknowledges. Nevertheless, her work suggests that Indian "converts" may have been endeavoring to define themselves within Christian narrative paradigms as soon as they were exposed to them.
Though not published in his lifetime, Samson Occom's A Short Narrative of my Life (written in 1768) is the first autobiographical narrative written independently by an Indian writer. One of Reverend Eleazor Wheelock's (a Calvinist New Light Minister of the Great Awakening) first students and converts, Occom stands at the center of a literary and political community of some importance in the history of American Indian writing. A significant amount of material written by Wheelock's students has found its way into print, in fine scholarly editions. Occom's son-in-law, Joseph Johnson (Mohegan) left behind a sizeable collection of letters and a dairy, recently published by Laura Murray. A collection of letters by a range of "Wheelock's Indians" was also published in 1932 by Dartmouth University (an institution founded largely through Occom's own fund-raising). While not all of this material is "autobiography" in the strictest sense, it does provide insight into the way that early Christian Indians engaged with missionary institutions. Occom's political activism (he was instrumental in the founding of the independent Brotherton community of Christian Indians) also highlights the fact that the discourse of conversion did not function simply as a tool of colonial control.
The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw the publication of significantly longer and more complex autobiographical works by Indian writers. In his lifetime, William Apess (Pequot) published a series of important autobiographical works, including A Son of the Forest (1829), The Experience of Five Christian Indians (1833), and Indian Nullification (1835). Apess's literary career reveals a writer growing increasingly inventive in his ability to adapt and transform the rhetoric of conversion into an assertive form of rights-talk. A decade later, a Canadian Ojibwe Methodist, George Copway, briefly became a literary celebrity with the publication of his Life, Letters and Speeches (1847). A LaVonne Brown Ruoff describes Copway's (or Kahgegagabowh) text as the "first full-life autobiography written by a Native American reared within his traditional tribal culture." A somewhat equivocal and opportunistic individual, Copway remains an important literary historical figure, though. His narrative hybridizes traditional oral conventions and western traditions in unprecedented ways.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, Indian autobiography had shifted away from the conversion narrative model. This was not the result of a decreased emphasis on conversion on the part of Anglo-American missionaries; significant resources (including Federal dollars) were poured into evangelism in the western United States after the Civil War. Neveretheless, owing perhaps to the integration of the churches into the institutional structure of the reservation system, as well as to shifts in literary taste, conversion ceased to be the privileged discourse of self-definition. Indian autobiographers would find new forms to explore during the next historical period.