William Apess, the Raced Body, and the Naturalized Land

The title page of William Apess’s conversion narrative insists twice that the landscape where the author was born determines his identity: the book is titled A Son of the Forest and subtitled The Experiences of William Apes, a Native of the Forest. Initially, Apess’s forest may seem to be a familiar nineteenth-century topos, the generic home of the savages, noble or otherwise, who were the subjects of colonialist narratives of extermination, disappearance, or assimilation. Indeed, after his work was rediscovered, some cultural historians represented Apess as a Christianized Indian who adopted the language, ideology, and identity of his oppressors. Other readers, though, have demonstrated convincingly that Apess strategically adapted and redeployed early national political and religious discourses in order to condemn Jacksonian Indian policy, protest conditions on New England reservations, and lay the foundations for a radical pan-Indian political consciousness. I hope to contribute to the developing appreciation for Apess’s rhetorical “in-genuity” (21) by showing how his autobiography materializes the primitive forest of early national political discourse, evoking rural New England woodlands that were the physical environment Apess’s Pequot ancestors inhabited as common property before they were uprooted by racist settlers. By insisting on the forest’s materiality as the foundation of collective bodily life, Apess also gives it a new symbolic meaning, transforming it from a primeval wilderness into the homeland of an indigenous republicanism that he articulates in the language of anti-racist Methodism. Moreover, I hope to show that Apess redirects the Methodist discourses of temperance and steadiness in order to stage both his own embodiment and his survivance of what he implies is the common material inheritance of all natives in the early national period: both alienation from the land and bodily contamination by white blood and toxic alcohol.