“In de Dark Wood, No Indian Nigh”: William Apess and the “Indian Hymn”

This essay approaches the colonial archive from divergent angles, first as an archival search for the author of the anonymous “Indian Hymn” appearing at the end of William Apess’s 1829 A Son of the Forest, and second as an interrogation into how the archive persistently warps the representation of Indigenous identity, the “Hymn” itself serving as what Anishinaabe historian Jean O’Brien refers to as a “replacement narrative,” barring the path to Native claims of modernity. The hymn’s placement in Apess’s text and the identity of its author have proven a puzzle to scholars, who generally find its reductive presentation of Native identity antithetical to Apess’s authorial ambitions. As it turns out, however, the hymn has a life and history of its own, and A Son of the Forest is only a single resting place on its journey. As nineteenth-century Natives in the Northeast negotiate their own complex relationship to settler colonial culture and spirituality, the hymn surfaces again and again as a marker of deferred origin, repositioning Native identity in the “dark wood” beyond the recovery of settler longing and imagination.