“In Mohegan language, our ancestors are alive. We feel them. We know them. Occom is still with us.”
So begins Forgotten Founder: The Untold Story of Samson Occom and Dartmouth, a remarkable new documentary about the 18th-century Mohegan scholar and minister whose efforts to raise funds for a school for Indian youth laid the foundation for what would become Dartmouth College.
These opening words, spoken by Beth Regan, an educator and chair of the Mohegan Council of Elders and a descendant of Occom’s on his mother’s side, set the tone for a 28-minute film that helps show how Occom’s story lives on—and in the process, reframes Dartmouth’s history with its Indigenous roots front and center.
A co-production of the Mohegan Tribe and Dartmouth that was nearly three years in the making, Forgotten Founder will have its Dartmouth premiere at 7 p.m. Friday, May 8, in Loew Auditorium, on the eve of Dartmouth’s 54th annual Powwow. The free, unticketed event is open to the public and will be followed by a reception and a discussion with the filmmakers.
Written by Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, a Mohegan historian and vice chair of the Council of Elders who is also an Occom descendant, and co-directed by Tantaquidgeon Zobel and Signe Taylor, a senior producer in Dartmouth’s Office of Communications, the film uses almost entirely Native voices, presenting interviews and conversations, archival documents, original music and artwork (including a painting by Mateo Silva ’26), and a portrayal of Occom himself by Mohegan actor Bruce Two Dogs Bozsum.
“We explored narrative storytelling as well as documentary, and you really see both within this piece,” Tantaquidgeon Zobel says. “That was a way to mesh more traditional Native storytelling with classic documentary film. We wanted folks to get a feel of Occom’s way of telling stories. And we wanted to have Native people in conversation about Samson Occom, because you never get to see that. It’s often been told through the eyes of people who are not Native people. So it was important to us to try and explore him with our own eyes to see where that went.”
“When I was a student, I would never have imagined that Dartmouth would have been willing to stand up as an institution and say this is our shared history,” says Occom descendant Sarah Harris ’00, vice chair of the Mohegan Tribal Council and a member of Dartmouth’s Native American Visiting Committee, who co-produced and appears in the film. Harris was the first Mohegan woman to attend Dartmouth. “I don’t know if I want to use the word proud, but I’m grateful. I think it’s long overdue. I’m really proud of the film and excited for folks to see it.”
Occom, born in 1723, grew up immersed in traditional Mohegan society, but sought a Western-style education in order to better advocate for his people within the colonial British legal system. He spent four years studying with the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock—learning to read and write in English, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew—before being ordained as a Presbyterian minister.
In 1766, Wheelock planned to open a new school in Connecticut to teach Native American students, and asked Occom to undertake a fundraising voyage to Great Britain on its behalf. Occom spent two years preaching in England, Scotland, and Wales, ultimately raising about £12,000 (the equivalent of more than $2.4 million today)—the initial funds on which Dartmouth was built.
But on his return to America, Occom found that Wheelock had moved his school north to Hanover, New Hampshire, and had shifted the school’s focus to the education of white students. Between 1769 and 1970, fewer than 20 Native students graduated from Dartmouth.
“I really do see him as a founder of Dartmouth, but the role that Samson Occom played is not well known,” Bruce Duthu, the Samson Occom Professor and chair of the Department of Native American and Indigenous Studies, says in the film. “We have for most of our existence as a country worked pretty steadily to erase the imprint of an Indigenous history. It’s all about dispossession, of erasure, of forgetting.”
Since 1970 Dartmouth has recommitted itself to its founding charter—graduating nearly 1,500 Native and Indigenous students to date and establishing the Native American Program, the Department of Native American and Indigenous Studies, and the Tribal Leadership Academy.
Forgotten Founder grew out of a larger effort to heal the relationship between Dartmouth and the Mohegans—an effort that in 2022 led Dartmouth to formally return its archival collection of Occom’s letters, journals, sermons, and other texts to the tribe. Several of those texts appear in the film.
“Understanding our own history matters, especially as we’re asking students to engage with hard questions and different perspectives,” says President Sian Leah Beilock, who attended a special screening of the film on Mohegan land in March. “A willingness to look honestly at where we’ve fallen short, and to do that work openly, is part of what a Dartmouth education teaches. I’m grateful to the Mohegan Tribe for their continued partnership in telling this story.”
In April, Forgotten Founder screened at the Boston International Film Festival, where it won the Audience Choice Award for Best Short Film and the Indie Spec Award for Best Documentary.
The film strikes a balance between “acknowledging wrongs that have been done in the past and yet leaving a road open for the future,” says Dean of Libraries Susanne Mehrer, one of the film’s producers. “We’re not saying, ‘Oh, this bad thing happened, end of story,’ but, ‘This happened, we acknowledge it, and hopefully we can build a different future.’ And that still gives me goosebumps. It is such a great message.”
“This was a labor of love,” says Taylor, the co-director. “I just want people to know who Samson Occom is, especially people in the Dartmouth community.”
As Regan says in the film, “It’s important that Dartmouth recognize Samson Occom because the truth is what matters in history. The truth is what guides us through history. And so when we confront our dark moments in history, it’s healing not only for Mohegan, not only for Samson Occom and his legacy, but also for Dartmouth.”
“Very simply, it’s never too late to do the right thing,” Harris says. “I’ve been really grateful for this process, and for how receptive the institution has been to telling this story.”
