(He says almost nothing, in any of his work, about New England native cultures.) Thus, without entirely ruling out the possibility that native oral performance of one sort or another might possibly have influenced Apess, it seems reasonable to point out that he lived in a time when the lecture hall-which might feature Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, or Frederick Douglass-and the pulpit provided abundant examples of the powers of oratory. It is tempting to assign this tactic to the influence upon Apess of some form of traditional Native American oral performance, but he nowhere writes of Pequot or any other native oral performances. The regular use of direct address-although the address is always to the "reader"-and the number of insistent interrogatives-"Now I ask," "Now I would ask," and so on-all suggest a situation in which a speaker stands before an audience, sometimes sharply pointing a finger. RHETORICAL STRATEGIES IN "THE INDIAN'S LOOKING-GLASS"Ĭareful attention to "An Indian's Looking-Glass" will note the ways it works against the dominant society's racialist construction of Indians as an inferior race and employs a still-powerful religious discourse to insist that native people and people of color generally are equal to whites in the sight of God.Īlthough "An Indian's Looking-Glass" was not delivered orally by Apess, its oratorical style is immediately apparent. As the conclusion to this book, Apess published "An Indian's Looking-Glass." (He did not reprint it when the Experiences was reissued in 1837.) In 1836 Apess published the last of his works, the eulogy for Metacom, or King Philip, a leader of the Wampanoag nation in the seventeenth century, claiming Philip as a distant ancestor and calling him "the greatest man that ever lived upon the American shores" (p. (An earlier, eighteenth-century autobiographical text by a Mohican, the Reverend Samson Occom, was onlyĪ sketch of several pages, and for some time Native American autobiographies would, for the most part, be dictations to one or another white person.) Apess followed this with an abbreviated version of his life story along with short biographies of his wife and four other native converts to Christianity in The Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequ'd Tribe (1833). Apess died in New York in 1839, apparently of alcoholism.Īpess's first publication was a full-scale autobiography, A Son of the Forest: The Experience of William Apes, a Native of the Forest (1829), the first such text to be written entirely by a Native American person. He was baptized into the church in 1818 and was ordained a minister in 1829. In 1813 he had had a religious experience, and he turned to evangelical Methodism to help him regain control of his life. He had taken up drinking in the army, and after leaving it in 1815 he wandered about and held a number of odd jobs. Apess eventually ran off from his master's house and, later, although still a very young man, participated in the unsuccessful American attack on Montreal in the War of 1812. Early in his life his parents moved back to Connecticut and unfortunately entrusted his care to his alcoholic grandparents who beat him severely and then sold him as an indentured laborer when he was only four or five years old. William Apess was born in 1798 in the small town of Colrain, Massachusetts, some distance from North Stonington and Ledyard, Connecticut, where his people, the Pequots, mostly resided on two small reservations. His extraordinary essay "An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man" (1833) is a powerful indictment of what Apess called color prejudice and what would today be called racism. "AN INDIAN'S LOOKING-GLASS FOR THE WHITE MAN"Īlmost forgotten until the late 1970s, the writing of William Apess-"Apess" has become standard although the name is also sometimes spelled "Apes"-a Pequot, exists today in a volume of complete works and in a growing body of critical work.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |