"native to the question": William Apess, Black Hawk, and the Sentimental Context of Early Native American Autobiography

Abstract

A review of William Apess's 1831 revised edition of A Son of the Forestin the American Monthly Reviewexpresses frustration over an "error" Apess commits in describing his ancestry. Apess, a Pequot Indian, claims his grandmother was the granddaughter of King Philip, the (in)famous Wampanoag leader, and in doing so he misidentifies Philip as a Pequot. 1 The reviewer concludes by voicing a concern that Apess's future attempts to write Native American history will be inaccurate: If Mr.Apes[s] should undertake the work he proposes, we recommend to him great diligence, discrimination, and accuracy, otherwise he will suffer imposition, and unawares impose upon others. He must enlarge the boundaries of his knowledge of Indian history, and not allow himself to be carried away by every slight and imperfect tradition. 2 Through the word "tradition," a term associated at this time with the oral transmission of facts, beliefs, or social codes, the reviewer strongly implies that Apess's attempt to write his personal and tribal history is tainted by Indian sources. 3 Indeed, earlier in the text he dismisses Apess's genealogical claims with the offhand comment, "It does not appear that there is any authority for this statement, other than the tradition of the natives themselves." The reviewer assumes, as did ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and others in this period, that Native Americans' historical narratives are exclusively oral and innately variable, thus "sound[ing], to ears of sober truth, like attempts at weaving a rope of sand." 4 Such unstable stories lie outside the realm of discriminating and accurate historiographic pursuits; the Indian's knowledge (even this literate Indian's knowledge) is circumscribed by the culture of his race. In the vision of this reviewer, Native American traditions have a volatile and dangerous presence in the writing of history, and unless the writer, or in this case the reviewer, supply the reader with proper historical sources treated with proper historical rigor, all will "suffer imposition." [End Page 246] After this, and after two pages of discounting and correcting Apess's "native tradition," the review ends with the suggestion that, should Apess succeed in "enlarg[ing] the boundaries of his knowledge of Indian history," his Indian-ness may still benefit his writing: "In this way we trust, from the other advantages of his situation, being native to the question,he will make an authentic and valuable book." 5 Through this italicized pun, the reviewer underscores what his presumed audience defines as and values in an "authentic" book: personal investment and expression. To be native to a question is to be personally involved and implicated in an issue, and to be Native in the age of the Indian Question is to be socially and politically restricted due to racial and cultural identity—and therefore to have an unavoidably subjective opinion regarding Native American rights. Ultimately the review calls on Apess to unite an historian's disinterested, rigorous, text-bound research with the personal testimony of an orphaned son of the forest who decries the continuing dispossession of his fellow Indians, to produce a text revealing at once the Indian's authentic feelings and the white man's valuable facts about the Indian situation. For this reason, the reviewer deems Apess's Indian qualities—otherwise detrimental for the historian and citizen of Jacksonian America—"the other advantages of his situation." This rich, suggestive review of A Son of the Forestprovides entrée for a reconsideration of the emergence and cultural work of the Native American autobiography in the antebellum period. Nina Baym's description of the prescriptive work of the mid-nineteenth-century fiction review holds here; this review provides us insight into both a public taste for the authentic Native American narrative and for the perceived dangers of such texts. 6 The attraction of Apess's autobiography lies...