Although he may have produced a certain dissonance by criticizing white hegemony, for Native Americans Apess’ actions signified the emergence of a new era. (Son 53 emphasis in original)Īpess contradicted Euro-Americans’ idea that Native Americans were “savages.” As he unequivocally attacked the causes of his brethrens’ disenfranchisement, Apess was able to map out inconsistencies in the construction of what Euro-Americans called the Republic in which all would acquire basic civil liberties. With this end in view, they sought to ‘engage them in war, destroy them by thousands with ardent spirits, and fatal disorders unknown to them before. He wrote:Įver since the discovery of America by the celebrated navigator, Columbus, the ‘civilized’ or enlightened natives of the Old World regarded its inhabitants as an extensive race of ‘savages!’ Of course, they were treated as barbarians, and for nearly two centuries they suffered without intermission, as the Europeans acted on the principle that might makes right-and if they could succeed in defrauding the native out of their lands and dive them from the seaboard, they were satisfied for a time. Therefore, his purpose was to articulate the abundant social and political grievances within the Native American community. In his determined rhetoric, Apess argued that the decentralization of his culture was a direct result of whites’ subjugation. And during the wars between the natives and the whites, the latter could, through the medium of the newspaper press, circulate extensively every exaggerated account of ‘Indian cruelty,’ while the poor natives had no means of gaining the public ear. My people have no press to record their sufferings or to make known their grievances on this account many a tale of blood and woe has never been known to the public.
Justice has not and, I may add, justice cannot be fully done to them by the historian.” Lamenting that the white man had poorly characterized his brethren’s struggle for egalitarianism, Apess furthered: “The Indian character,” wrote Apess, “…has been greatly misrepresented. William Apess, the Pequot author, Methodist minister, and political activist, set out to remind Euro-Americans of this fact when he wrote his 1829 autobiographical work, A Son of the Forest: The Experience of William Apess, A Native of the Forest, Comprising a Notice of the Pequod Tribe of Indians, Written by Himself. As Robert Yagelski argued, “Most of the texts…of speeches by Native American leaders…are…given in the context of negotiations over treaties or of surrender to white armies, and nearly all were recorded by white observers” (67). Until they began to tell their own stories and develop their own voices, the history of the mistreatment of Native Americans was filled with discords and inconsistencies.
He is author of Origins of the African American Jeremiad: The Rhetorical Strategies of Social Protest and Activism, 1760-1861 (McFarland, 2011) and editor of We Wear the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Politics of Representative Reality (Kent State University Press, 2010). is associate professor of English at Kent State University where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in African-American Literature. "'Sons of the Forest': The Native American Jeremiad Materialized in the Social Protest Rhetoric of William Apess, 1829-1836" by Willie J.
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