William Apess Research Articles

Captivity and Conversion: William Apess, Mary Jemison, and Narratives of Racial Identity

The question of who defines the Native, and how, becomes complicated when Natives actively participate in a discourse that historically has defined them in their absence. Euro-American definitions of Native Americans have long been rooted in specific genres of written discourse-the captivity narrative, the travel narrative, European eyewitness accounts of authentic Native communities-diverse forms that nevertheless complement each other in their attempts to explain Native Americans to a Euro-American audience. Natives are regarded as authentic only as they fit into the preconceived generic constructions constituted by Euro-American observers. Jana Sequoya, a contemporary Native American scholar, emphasizes the frustrations of this situation: In order to be perceived as speaking subjects, American Indians must adopt categories of meaning and codes of representation that convey an implicit set of goals in many ways contrary to those that articulate their own stories.' To be heard in the dominant culture, then, Natives must often negotiate story lines written about them with little regard for their particular experiences. The problem of representation is further exacerbated by individuals whose

Early Native American Writing: New Critical Essays

1. 'Honoratissimi Benefactores': Native American students and two seventeenth-century texts in the university tradition Wolfgang Hochbruck and Beatrix Dudensing Reichel 2. 'Pray, Sir, consider a little': rituals of subordination and strategies of resistance in the letters of Hezekiah Calvin and David Fowler to Eleazer Wheelock Laura J. Murray 3. '(I speak like a fool but I am constrained): Samson Occom's Short Narrative and economies of the racial self Dana D. Nelson 4. Where, Then, Shall We Place the Hero of the Wilderness?: William Apess's Eulogy on King Philip and doctrines of racial destiny Anne Marie Dannenberg 5. 'They ought to enjoy the home of their fathers': the Treaty of 1838, Seneca Intellectualism, and Literary Genesis Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr 6.' I am Joaquin!': Space and freedom in Yellow Bird's The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit John Lowe 7. This Voluminous Unwritten Book of Ours: early Native American writers and oral tradition William M. Clements 8. 'A terrible sickness among them': Smallpox and stories of the Frontier Helen Jaskoski 9. 'A desirable citizen, a practical business man': G. W. Grayson - Creek mixed blood, nationalist, and autobiographer Robert F. Sayre 10. An Indian ... an American: ethnicity, assimilation and balance in Charles Eastman's From the Deep Woods to Civilization Eric Peterson 11. 'Overcoming all obstacles': the assimilation debate in Native American women's journalism of the Dawes era Carol Batker 12. 'My people ... my kind': Mourning Dove's Cogewa, the Half-Blood as a narrative of mixed descent Martha L. Viehmann 13. 'Because I understand the storytelling art': the evolution of D'Arcy McNicle's The Surrounded Birgit Hans.

Sarah Winnemucca: [Post]Indian Princess and Voice of the Paiutes

As anyone who has made such an effort will know, students of Native American literature looking for critical studies on Paiute author Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (1844?-1891) will be unsuccessful in finding more than a handful of articles and short references to her work because very little has been done on this author, first American Indian woman to write an autobiography.(1) The reason for this, I suspect, stems from a discomfort critics have for Indian writers like Winnemucca who seem to be overly assimilated and sympathetic with dominant culture. Students of Native American literature look for ways writers overtly resist dominant culture, and Sarah Winnemucca, initially at least, appears taken in by it and therefore of little value for literary study. As Randall Moon writes of William Apess, another early Native American writer, there a political over Apess because he writes too much like a white person, with no trace of a Native `voice,' and [he is] too Christianized to be recognized as an `authentic' representative of Native America (52). The same political unease exists for Winnemucca, and some of few critics who have written about her reflect that sentiment. For example, one of only comments Gretchen Bataille and Kathleen Mullen Sands make about her work that Life Among Piutes is heavily biased by her acculturated and Christianized viewpoint (21). Catherine Fowler observes that there widespread distaste for Winnemucca for similar reasons: light of twentieth century ethnohistoric and ethnographic hindsight ..., Sarah's position on assimilation, perhaps more than any other single factor, has led scholars, and to a certain degree her own people, to diminish her contributions to Native American scholarship (33). In studying Native Americans, or any colonized people, one must use term carefully, since some degree of assimilation essential to cultural and physical survival. On other hand, history of as an official means of repressing Native American languages and cultures well-documented. Thus, term here deceiving: perceptions that label writers such as Winnemucca as assimilationist tend to construct a binary assimilationist/tribal opposition that fails to allow for an ethnocritical reading that would look at Winnemucca's position as one that negotiates what Mary Louise Pratt calls the contact which she defines as social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination--like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across globe today (Imperial Eyes 4). Winnemucca spent most of her life in middle of contact zone acting as a mediator for her people, and in negotiating contact zone, Winnemucca, like other colonized people, often appropriated ideas and conventions from dominant culture in order to gain power and respect from Euro-Americans. Thus, as implied by Fowler and Bataille and Sands, suggests an appropriation of dominant culture at expense of tribal, but Winnemucca learned to adapt to onslaught of westward moving emigrants in order to maintain as much of her Native identity as was possible. While there were aspects of Euro-American culture that she valued over her own--for example, she unflinchingly noted that her happiest years were spent living with whites in comfort of Santa Clara, California, while attending Catholic school, her main interest was survival of her tribe in face of relentless colonization of Paiute homeland (Brumble 65). As evident throughout her autobiography, Life Among Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), in seeking a peaceful coexistence with whites (Fowler 34), Winnemucca was willing to negotiate with people who began settling on Paiute homeland when she was a child. …

A son of the forest and other writings

Designed especially for classroom use, this book brings together the best known works of the nineteenth-century Indian writer William Apess, including the first extended autobiography by a Native American. The text is drawn from On Our Own Ground, which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book. Barry O'Connell has written a new introduction for this abbreviated edition.

Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms by Cheryl Walker

Book Reviews 321 their novels and to set up dialogue between characters and the reader, thus giving “a sense of orality to the written text” (23). This invites and even demands reader involvement—the reader becomes one of the community of listeners. Additionally, Smith believes that the multiple voices and per­ spectives presented in these novels can effect change in the reader “as the trickster liberates the mind” (24). This results in reader involvement which expands the notion of the community to include cross-cultural connections. Smith contends that these works “suggest a trickster-based model of com­ munity that thrives on multivocality, connection, and exchange” (155). In Writing Tricksters, Smith suggests a new multicultural approach to the study of contemporary American literature—an approach that can be expanded to inform more than our study of the three authors included in her work. Although her emphasis is on women ethnic writers, Smith iden­ tifies the trickster’s “importance not only to theme but also to stylistic inno­ vation in the contemporary ethnic novel” (156)—ideas that can be applied to both male and female ethnic authors. She provides a model for ways to bridge and connect cultural themes, communities, and authors. Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms. By Cheryl Walker. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. 256 pages, $49.95/$16.95. Reviewed by Renée L. Bergland Dartmouth College Cheryl Walker begins Indian Nation by defining “the subject of America” as “a conversation, perhaps, or a set of stories” (1,2). The purpose of her book is to recover the Native American voices that contributed to American conversations about nationhood during the nineteenth century. In her treatment of works by William Apess, Black Hawk, George Copway, John Rollin Ridge, Sarah Winnemucca, and Simon Pokagon, Walker argues that nineteenth-century Native American writers were as engaged with the questions of American nationalism as were their white contemporaries. At the same time, they struggled with Justice John Marshall’s 1832 description of American Indian tribes as “domestic dependent nations” (qtd. in Walker 115). Indian Nation shows that Native American writers used a variety of strategies to negotiate between United States and Native American con­ structions of nationhood and identity. Critical conversations about American nationalism used to start from the assumption that in the nineteenth century, American nationhood was only important to European Americans. Recently, some scholars have chal­ lenged this monolithic conception by discussing African American, Hispanic American, and Asian American ideas about nationalism in the 322 WAL 33(3) FALL 1998 nineteenth century. John Ernest and Henry Louis Gates discuss African American conceptions of American nationhood; Ramon Guttierez and Genaro Padilla present Hispanic American ideas about nationalism; while Malini Schueller, Lisa Lowe, and Lucy Salyer address Asian American con­ tributions to the construction of American national identity. In addition, critics such as Jared Gardner, Barbara Ladd, Toni Morrison, and Priscilla Wald explain the importance of African American and Native American presence in shaping the American national culture. However, Walker is the first scholar to address Native American writers’ understanding of American nationhood in terms of their own identity. By bringing forward the works of several Native authors, Walker opens up the contemporary conversation about nationalism, thus making “the subject of America” far more nuanced and interesting. The primary importance of Indian Nation is that it shows that Native American writers criticized and made important contributions to American nationalism during the nineteenth century. By showing the importance of Native American ideas, Walker herself makes an important contribution to current theories of nationalism. Further, the book provides useful sum­ maries of and responses to the works of Michael Paul Rogin, Richard Slotkin, and Arnold Krupat. In response to Krupat’s critical model in Ethnocriticism, Walker uses rhetorical paradigms that she calls “transposi­ tional and subjugated discourse” in her explications (16). This rhetorically based strategy sometimes overcomplicates her arguments, though at times (for example, in her brilliant discussions of the writings of William Apess) the discourse models are quite illuminating and useful. Finally, Indian Nation includes the complete text of The Red M an’s Rebuke by Simon Pokagon, originally printed on birch bark and sold by the author...

The Frontiers of Women’s Writing: Women’s Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion by Brigitte Georgi-Findlay

322 WAL 33(3) FALL 1998 nineteenth century. John Ernest and Henry Louis Gates discuss African American conceptions of American nationhood; Ramon Guttierez and Genaro Padilla present Hispanic American ideas about nationalism; while Malini Schueller, Lisa Lowe, and Lucy Salyer address Asian American con­ tributions to the construction of American national identity. In addition, critics such as Jared Gardner, Barbara Ladd, Toni Morrison, and Priscilla Wald explain the importance of African American and Native American presence in shaping the American national culture. However, Walker is the first scholar to address Native American writers’ understanding of American nationhood in terms of their own identity. By bringing forward the works of several Native authors, Walker opens up the contemporary conversation about nationalism, thus making “the subject of America” far more nuanced and interesting. The primary importance of Indian Nation is that it shows that Native American writers criticized and made important contributions to American nationalism during the nineteenth century. By showing the importance of Native American ideas, Walker herself makes an important contribution to current theories of nationalism. Further, the book provides useful sum­ maries of and responses to the works of Michael Paul Rogin, Richard Slotkin, and Arnold Krupat. In response to Krupat’s critical model in Ethnocriticism, Walker uses rhetorical paradigms that she calls “transposi­ tional and subjugated discourse” in her explications (16). This rhetorically based strategy sometimes overcomplicates her arguments, though at times (for example, in her brilliant discussions of the writings of William Apess) the discourse models are quite illuminating and useful. Finally, Indian Nation includes the complete text of The Red M an’s Rebuke by Simon Pokagon, originally printed on birch bark and sold by the author at the Chicago World’s Fair. Pokagon’s essay is not available anywhere else, and it would be an excellent addition to an introductory course on American or Native American literature. Indian Nation is an essential resource for students and scholars of Native American literature. It is equally important for those who study American nationalism. The Frontiers of Women’s Writing: Women's Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion. By Brigitte Georgi-Findlay. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996. 349 pages, $45.00/$ 19.95. Reviewed by Anne L. Kaufman Sidwell Friends School, Washington, D.C. Scholarly attention to women in the West has clearly proceeded beyond the first flush of discovery. Brigitte Georgi-Findlay, an associate pro­ fessor of American literature at the University of Bremen in Germany, Book Reviews 323 makes this evident in the structure of her book as well as in the content. She uses the introduction to summarize previous scholarship in history, lit­ erature, and geography, from the obligatory look back to Frederick Jackson Turner, Henry Nash Smith, Leslie Fiedler, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Annette Kolodny, Sacvan Bercovitch, and Richard Slotkin, among others. This list alone demonstrates Georgi-Findlay’s efforts to cross disciplinary boundaries and mesh literary criticism and rhetorical, social, and historical analyses as she explicitly positions her text as “modifying] the discussion that Kolodny began” (12). Analyses of issues of power (rhetorical and otherwise) and control and the ways “texts authorize themselves” (16) serve as the author’s point of entry into the critical discussion of the writings, as Georgi-Findlay works cautiously with the interpretive framework of colonial discourse. Her chief goal, however, is to look carefully at the implicit assumptions govern­ ing much of the previous body of scholarship on women’s writings about the West, and this is one of the great strengths of this book. Georgi-Findlay works chronologically from “Surveyors of the Terrain, 1830-1860” to “Army Women, Tourists, and Mythmakers, 1860-1890” to “Missionaries, Reformers, and New Women, 1890-1930.” This effort, as Georgi-Findlay states in her introduction, forces choices among writers and texts, although I regret her decision to exclude “western novels written by women in the twentieth century, because this would have required a new methodological framework” (xvii). A n analysis of the rhetoric of westward expansion might well have profited from attention to those very same west­ ern novels. Although the text focuses primarily on the writings of white women, Georgi-Findlay is sensitive to issues of race, class, and gender...

The Tutor'd Mind: Indian Missionary-Writers in Antebellum America

Part historical narrative, part textual analysis, this book traces the development of American Indian literature from the seventeenth century to the eve of the Civil War. Bernd C. Peyer focuses on the lives and writings of four prominent Indian missionaries - Samson Occom of the Mohegans, William Apess of the Pequots, Elias Boudinot of the Cherokees, and George Copway of the Ojibwas - each of whom struggled to negotiate a secure place between the imperatives of colonial rule and the rights of native peoples.

The 4th of July and the 22nd of December: The Function of Cultural Archives in Persuasion, as Shown by Frederick Douglass and William Apess

The 4th of July and the 22nd of December: The Function of Cultural Archives in Persuasion, as Shown by Frederick Douglass and William Apess

The 4th of July and the 22nd of December: The Function of Cultural Archives in Persuasion, as Shown by Frederick Douglass and William Apess

fectively, we are most accustomed to talking about what they do, not what they know. We say that they employ a productively recursive composing process, or structure their arguments convincingly, or shape their sentences with mature complexity. When we discuss what students are writing about, usually we look at content only in terms of how it contributes to the elaboration of structure or style-to note, for example, that a writer has given good evidence for her position, or illustrated his account with vivid anecdotes. True, we sometimes link knowing and doing when we advocate writing assignments that let students choose their own topics; the argument here usually is that students will choose to write about things they know about, and thus write better. But note that even in this argument, the actual content of the student writing is unimportant. In effect, we are saying that we don't care what it is students know about, so long as knowing about it enables them to write better when they write about it. The same neglect of content holds true in writing courses where reading is assigned. When we assign reading to students, as I have argued elsewhere (see Theories of Content), we seldom consider its content as other than a source of models for structure and style, if, indeed, we do not simply regard it as a prompt to get students generating contents of their own. I have seldom heard of anyone testing students on whether they have mastered the knowledge content of reading assigned in a writing course. One might say that students are tested in their ability to write about assigned reading sensitively and coherently. But even so, we typically let students choose their own angles of approach to assigned reading

Denominated "SAVAGE": Methodism, Writing, and Identity in the Works of William Apess, a Pequot

IN 1829, A THIRTY-ONE YEAR OLD PEQUOT PREACHER NAMED WILLIAM Apess gained notoriety with the publication of his memoir. Titled A Son of the Forest, it was the first full-length autobiography published by a Native American.' Like African Americans, it was through the genre of autobiography that Indians effected their first significant interventions in Euro-American print culture.2 As numerous critics have noted, this is paradoxical, as the production and publication of an autobiography assumes at least three conditions, none of which automatically apply to those on the margins of society: an appreciation of the importance of one's experience; an interested, literate audience; and access to resources for printing and distribution.3 This essay begins by asking how an impoverished Pequot could presume to publish his autobiography, let alone numerous caustic polemics against white racism. The answer is found in a place that may seem unlikely to many: Apess's Methodism. Apess's work is admired today for the modem tone of its attack on the Puritans' providential conception of history and the brand of racism that it sanctioned. But Apess was no anachronism; the upheavals of his day were the enabling condition of his voice. He wrote at the intersection of three highly-charged controversies of the 1820s and 1830s: Andrew Jackson's plan to expel Indians from the southeast, immediatist-abolitionism, and the Second Great Awakening. Apess played on Euro-Americans' temporarily heightened interest in Indians

Henry James and the Art of Teaching

Henry James and the Art of Teaching John Carlos Rowe As I write this essay, I am involved in the second year of our summer institute, “Bridging the Gaps: Critical Theory, American Literature, and American Culture,” which brings together teachers from Southern California high schools, community colleges, four-year colleges, and universities to the University of California, Irvine campus to do collaborative research. 1 This summer’s topic, “Race and Gender in Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” was the result of work by a coordinating committee composed of representatives from these different segments of higher education. Sometime last fall, the coordinating committee selected the following four literary texts to focus our collaborative research during the summer: Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), William Apess’ A Son of the Forest (1831) (and other shorter selections from this Pequot-American’s writings), and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). Each of the six members of the coordinating committee proposed a literary text, and we talked about its appropriateness for our summer institute and possible adoption as a classroom text in the several different kinds of higher education represented in the institute. My proposed text for the summer was Henry James’s In the Cage (1898), which I proposed because of its potential for raising questions about late nineteenth-century attitudes toward gender roles and sexual identities. As one of the few texts by James to deal centrally and explicitly with the conflict between the working, middle, and upper classes, it impressed me as an opportunity to teach Henry James to students without lapsing immediately into the stereotype of James as a difficult, modernist defender of bourgeois values. It was precisely these assumptions about Henry James that shaped my colleagues’ decision not to include In the Cage in the syllabus of our summer institute. The text was voted [End Page 213] down as “too difficult” for high school and community college students, too “restricted” in its “scope,” and insufficiently “relevant” to our announced focus on nineteenth-century race and gender. Let me begin first with the notorious problem of James’s difficulty. Of course, James’s writings require great concentration by the reader, careful attention to the dialectic of form and content, a special ear for shifts in tone, and a heightened awareness of how narrative perspective is often worked through multiple narratorial centers. For formalist critics, just such technical and stylistic difficulty was what established James as one of the preeminent modern writers and made him a “major author” in most post-World War II college and university curricula in literature. For my teachers in the 1960s, when formalist methods still held sway, James’s writings were virtual textbooks in the key aesthetic techniques and rhetorical devices used by “great” or “classic” literature. The primary emphasis on Jamesian technique has always impressed me as an odd, even perverse, strategy for teaching Henry James. It has been just this emphasis that has caused contemporary students and their teachers to think of Henry James as a difficult writer. In practical terms, this focus on aesthetic form is best suited to the specialized group of creative writing students who study literary texts to develop their own techniques, understand literary conventions, and otherwise reflect on literary craft. Graduate students and those preparing for graduate work in English and American literatures might also be reasonably expected to develop expertise in such aesthetic and technical areas of literature, even though such concerns should not be the primary areas of their training. Yet in too many graduate programs, just such an obsession with the rhetorical and stylistic techniques of literature, to the exclusion of other literary functions, remains central to the curriculum and professional training of graduate students. One reason for this is that despite the waning of the New Critical and formalist assumptions about literature, many graduate programs are still dominated by senior faculty trained in the critical age when formalism and modernism worked in complementary ways to justify themselves. In addition, many high school and community college teachers of literature studied literature in the formalist era and have, in many cases, not had opportunities to read any...

Defying Assimilation, Confounding Authenticity: The Case of William Apess

(1996). Defying Assimilation, Confounding Authenticity: The Case of William Apess. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 1-18.

On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot

On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot

On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess. A Pequot

On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess. A Pequot

On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot

On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot

On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot.

On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot.

On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot

William Apess was the first Native American's to fully, and publicly, speak out regarding the racism and unfair treatment that he and others endured. The author's writing is eloquently delivered, instilling the reader with a realistic framework of a political, historical, and personal mindset.

On our own ground: the complete writings of William Apess, a Pequot

On our own ground: the complete writings of William Apess, a Pequot