136 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865more aware of Native American history, their rights and, often, how badly they had
been treated by the white majority. Among these was the earliest significant Indian
writer of the nineteenth century, William Apess (1798–?), whose paternal
grandmother was a full-blooded Pequot and who claimed descent from Metacomet,
the chief known as King Philip among the English. Converted to Methodism when
he was 15, Apess became a lay preacher. Then, in 1829, his book A Son of the Forest
appeared, the first autobiography written by a Native American to be published.
Apess was raised mainly by whites, and the book is, unsurprisingly, a cultural mix. It
is in the tradition of white spiritual autobiography favored by, say, Jonathan Edwards
and John Woolman, but it emphasizes Apess’s Indian origins and the basic humanity
of the Indian people. To add to the mix, it also insists on the potential of the Indian
people for adapting to white culture. This was followed by three further books: The
Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pecquod Tribe, a shorter life history
published in 1833 but probably written before A Son of the Forest, and two more
historical works, Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts,
Relative to the Marshpee [Mashpee] Tribe (1835) and Eulogy on King Philip (1836).
These three books reveal a more openly critical attitude toward whites and, in
particular, a fierce critique of what Apess sees as the brutality and hypocrisy of their
general behavior toward the Indian peoples. “Now I ask if degradation has not been
heaped long enough upon the Indians?” he declaims in the 1833 book. “I would ask
if you would like to be disfranchised from all your rights, merely because your skin
is white, and for no other crime?” Jesus, Apess points out to his presumably white
readers, came from “a colored people,” the Jews of the East. And, in any event, “did
you ever hear or read of Christ teaching his disciples that they ought to despise one
because his skin was different from theirs?” As Apess argues it here, white people
could hardly have assumed “a more efficient way to distress” Indians, to “murder
them by inches,” than the one they have adopted. And, in adopting the ways they
have, they have not only forgotten that there can be “as good feelings and principles
under a red skin as there can be under a white”; they have also violated the biblical
precept “to love your neighbors as yourself.” Nevertheless, Apess writes more in hope
still than in sorrow or anger. His essential belief, expressed in all his books, is that,
with education, the Indian can still rise; with proper observance of Christian
principles, the white man can still help him; “the mantle of prejudice” will be “torn
from every heart,” Apess hopes – and “then shall peace pervade the Union.”
An even more popular Indian autobiography than A Son of the Forest was The Life,
History and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (George Copway), a Young Indian Chief of
the Ojibwa Nation. This was published in 1847, republished as The Life, Letters and
Speeches of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, or G Copway in 1850 in New York, and as Recollections
of a Forest Life; or, The Life and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gha-bowh, or George Copway in
London in the same year. In its different versions, this book had a widespread reader-
ship. And it encouraged the author, George Copway (1818–1869), in his new career as
a writer and lecturer on Indian matters; prior to that, he had served as a Methodist
missionary among the Indians. The book is divided into four sections. The first is an
account of the Ojibwa culture into which he was born; the second rehearses how hisGGray_c02.indd 136ray_c 02 .indd 136 8 8/1/2011 7:54:40 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 40 AM