Piety and Dissent: Race, Gender, and Biblical Rhetoric in Early American Autobiography

Chapter 7: Finding a Way in the Forest: The Religious Discourse of Race and Justice in the Autobiographies of William Apess

146 7 FINDING A WAY IN THE FOREST The Religious Discourse of Race and Justice in the Autobiographies of William Apess  . . . this cruel and unnatural conduct was the effect of some cause. I attribute it in a great measure to the whites . . . William Apess Most of what is known about the work of William Apess comes from his own published autobiographical writing. A significant voice in the public conversation about Native American–white relations in the 1830s, Apess was an Indian rights activist, a Christian missionary concerned with Indian conversions, and an autobiographer. His texts, which blend Christian didactics with strikingly progressive social analysis, provide a record of Apess’s complex thinking about race and religion through the penetrating lens of his own experience. Barry O’Connell, in the introduction to his groundbreaking 1992 edition of Apess’s complete works, notes the ways Apess anticipates contemporary thinking about race.1 His texts complicate the conversation about nineteenth-century racial discourse and enrich our sense of the overall history of cultural contact and conflict in the United States. The way Apess tells his life story reveals the theoretical and critical framework that informs all his other writings and, indeed, the activism that he engaged in on behalf of others: Indians and people of mixed race in and beyond the Mashpee community in New England. O’Connell; Scott Michaelsen; Anne Dannenberg; and other readers (including my undergraduate students, for example) note with interest Apess’s progressive, polemical politics and his sense of identification with all people of color. In many ways he seems surprisingly modern in his Race and Justice in the Autobiographies of William Apess 147 sense of the overlapping issues for nonwhites, as well as for those marginalized by religion. Apess’s discourse about race and the exploitation of Native and African Americans not only lends itself to analyses in minority and postcolonial criticism—specifically, for example, Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd’s argument about the complex alignment of issues and authority for writers of color, or Homi Bhabha’s concept of resembling and resistant hybridity—but also anticipates the very theorizing of these critics (Donaldson, “Son” 210). Malini Schueller and Edward Watts have recently explored the rich intersections of early American studies and postcolonial theory. In concert with these critics, Apess “interrogates [the] idea of purported cultural hegemony by demonstrating on the local, vernacular level the extent to which American cultural history has always been a contradictory set of narratives depicting an endless entanglement of imperial and colonial experiences and identities” (Schueller and Watts 5). Examining his voice, the way he recounts and interprets his experiences with whites and the Christianity he adopts, allows readers to understand the rich interplay between religion, culture, and the authoritative sense of self he presents. In his autobiographies, Apess calls readers to a challenging ideological journey, one that synthesizes an earnest (and, in some ways, entirely predictable) concern with Christian conversion and a specifically political position in favor of Native American sovereignty. Like the other writers I discuss, Apess presents his life story through the lens of revival religion, but he takes pains to distinguish that religion —specifically Methodism—from other versions of Christianity. Apess survived an early childhood marked by the relentless trauma of family and cultural violence, alcoholism, abandonment, and poverty. His narrow escape delivered him to another set of struggles: indentured servitude in a series of households, where he encountered various strains of Protestant Christianity, and more violence. He rejected the more respectable Christianity of his household masters (in part, he says, to spite them) and embraced Methodism—via the powerful phenomenon of the camp meeting—instead. Interestingly, this is the specific religious culture and theology that Abigail Bailey (and thousands of similarly disposed white American Christians of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) disparaged. Whereas Bailey distinguished her own (clearly more respectable, in her estimation) piety from the disorder, noise, and vulgarity associated with Methodism, 148 Finding a Way in the Forest Apess, like Jarena Lee, found his first experience of authentic religion there, deriving, in addition, a sense of affiliation by way of the twinned biases against both Native Americans and Methodism.2 Born in 1798 Massachusetts, near Colrain, Apess records a few early years of “comparative comfort,” when he resided in harmony with both his parents, but then narrates an account of familial disintegration and violence. When he was four years old, his parents...