I’m smack dab in the middle of teaching a five-week summer session of ENGL 2110: American Literature to 1865. The difficult time of national tension we’re currently experiencing in the United States of America has intensified the students’ reading experiences and allowed them to make a number of connections with American history through American literary history.

At this point, two and a half weeks in, we’re exploring materials from the first half of the 19th century. Students have just read and begun to respond to William Apess’s “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man” (1833). Apess was descended from the Wampanoag tribe of eastern Massachusetts. His grandfather was apparently a white man who married the granddaughter of Wampanoag chief known to white New England as King Philip. Apess’s mixed-blood father joined the Pequot tribe and married a a tribal woman who might have been a mixture of Pequot and black American. Apess himself converted to Christianity and eventually became an ordained Methodist minister. He believed that race prejudice had no place in the practice of the true Christian faith, and he wrote “An Indian’s Looking-Glass” as an admonition and exhortation to his fellow — that is, white — ministers, to chastise them for their racist practices and encourage them to better, more Christ-like behavior.

From Philip F. Gura’s book on Apess

Several of the students who have commented on this piece have been struck by its clear importance to this moment in the United States of America, as citizens–outraged and sickened by the murder of George Floyd and the realization that this is one of the latest (and not the last) acts of its kind–protest in support of “Black Lives Matter” and against our president’s and our nation’s racism.

Here is a collection of what I refer to as Apess’s zingers:

  • “Now if [the Indians of New England] are what they are held up in our view to be [i.e., ingenious, men of talents], I would take the liberty to ask why they are not brought forward and pains taken to educate them? to give them all a common education, and those of the brightest and first-rate talents put forward and held up to office. Perhaps some unholy, unprincipled men would cry out, the skin was not good enough; but stop friends–I am not talking about the skin, but about principles. I would ask if there cannot be as good feelings and principles under a red skin as there can be under a white? (emphasis added here and below)
  • If black or red skins, or any other skin of color is disgraceful to God, it appears that he has disgraced himself a great deal–for he has made fifteen colored people to one white, and placed them here upon the earth.
  • Now suppose these skins were put together, and each skin had its national crimes written upon it–which skin do you think would have the greatest? . . . Can you charge the Indians with robbing a nation almost of its whole Continent, and murdering their women and children, and then depriving the remainder of their lawful rights, that nature and God require them to have? And to cap the climax, rob another nation to till their grounds, and welter out their days under the lash with hunger and fatigue under the scorching rays of a burning sun?
  • The first thing we are to look at, are [Jesus’s] precepts, of which we will mention a few. ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. The second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two precepts hang all the law and the prophets.’–Matt. xxii. 37, 38, 39, 40. ‘By this shall all men know that they are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.’–John xiii. 35. Our Lord left this special command with his followers, that they should love one another.
  • Now my brethren in the ministry, . . . [d]id you ever hear or read of Christ teaching his disciples they they ought to despise one because his skin was different from theirs? Jesus Christ being a Jew, and those of his Apostles certainly were not whites. . . . And were not whites the most degraded people on the earth at that time . . . [?]
  • Jesus Christ and his Apostles never looked at the outward appearances. Jesus in particular looked and the hearts. . . .
  • By what you read, you may learn how deep your principles are. I should say they were skin deep.

As the United States of America struggles to recognize and realize–to make real–the truth that black lives matter, as our nation continues its 244-year struggle to live up to its principles, I hope that “Native Lives Matter” will also become part of the conversation and healing, part of the way forward. Apess recognized the horrors of the institution of slavery and, by extension, of institutionalized racism, but the USA as a nation has never–with any depth of feeling or meaning–recognized the atrocities committed against the indigenous peoples who were here first.