1 Background
William Apess was part-Pequot, a Methodist minister, and one of a handful of American Indians publishing first-hand accounts of their lives in the 18th and 19th centuries. As a result of the Pequot War in the 17th century, the Pequot had been reduced to a fraction of their previous size. Apess is writing at a time just before Indian removal resulted in the virtual eradication of American Indian communities east of the Mississippi.
2 Apess’ grandma
Apess tells a story of his grandmother beating him nearly to the point of death (on p. 120). The story is a kind of allegory for the native colonial experience.
On p. 121 you get the upshot. He imagines someone inferring from the episode that it is in the nature of the American Indians to be violent. But the violence, Apess argues, was unheard of before the arrival of Europeans. Changes in their culture brought about by European colonization create the conditions of intrafamilial violence. More generally, what his imagined interlocutor puts down to nature is actually, he’s claiming, a product of historical contingency.
3 “An Indian’s looking-glass”
The “looking-glass” metaphor here establishes the basic idea of the essay: to describe conditions of American Indians as a reflection of European colonization. The intention of the metaphor is to transform the customary relationship between reader and text. Instead of being invited into a world they aren’t a part of, the nineteenth-century European audience is shown a world that is a product of European colonization.
Apess describes conditions in reservations on p. 155. Note his description of the causes: Indians have come to accept what the Europeans have convinced them of (that they are incapable of self-government), and (as a result of wars with Europeans) they have no land to cultivate. The explanation continues to the next page. Europeans do not respect Indian land as Indian, and the Indians have no form of education.
There are two very different forms of protest described in the passage on p. 156. Apess imagines someone saying, in so many words, that American Indians are not deserving of an education owing to the color of their skin. And Apess’ first response to this, you might say, is the usual one: that intelligence and moral capacity are not capacities limited to any one skin color. But the second is to highlight the fact that the destitution American Indians live in—and that is taken as evidence of their relative inferiority—is a product of the “bad principle” that is European colonization. Indeed, Apess wonders, how much worse would Indians look if they had done what Europeans have done in the Americas? See p. 157.
Apess is offering a clever inversion of the evident contempt Europeans have for American Indians. The basic idea is that the condition of American Indians is bad, but the root of this badness lies in Europeans. The thing the Europeans ought to hold in contempt is not the Indians but themselves for having brought about the Indians’ condition. At bottom there is, moreover, a certain specifically Christian form of hypocrisy.
4 Lessons
Imagine, maybe just for the sake of argument, Edwards represents the dominant European-American ideology of his time: a universal conception not only of beauty but of moral principles. There is nothing about coercion that is inconsistent with this view. Edwards thinks of punishment, for example, as a form of beauty, because it restores unity.
What Apess is doing is showing how that restoration of unity is in fact the cause of disorder. Impoverishment, alcoholism, and dependence are not, in his view, imperfections of a universal vision of beauty and moral goodness; they are the products of it. What looks from inside Edwards’ world like ‘correction’, say, looks like organized state violence from Apess’ perspective.
A question to ponder: How do you think Apess would respond to Edwards’ view that punishment can be beautiful?
Unrelatedly, I want to draw attention to the importance of experience and testimony in American letters generally. Much of the early literature in the United States was first-personal and autobiographical, and, like Apess, moved seamlessly between the personal and the general. I think that alone tells us something significant about the role of experience in American thought generally. Here we see experience—Apess’ description of his own life, and of the living conditions of American Indians—doing the work of religious and social critique in a way that requires experience to have fairly enormous theoretical importance.