When berry-picking one afternoon with an adoptive white family, he encountered sun-tanned white women whom he thought were cruel Indians, and fled. The religious zeal of Apess contributed to his confused identity as an Indian. Savior of mankind, and about Native Americans as one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The youthful Apess found himself more inclined toward what he called the "noisy Methodists." Their fervor stimulated his growing personal convictions about the rightness of spontaneous expression in worship, the loving grace of Christ as the Apess sought to attend revivalist meetings and was impressionably receptive to the rhetorical conventions espoused by Calvinists. Around 1809, at the height of the Second Great Awakening, an extremely sensitive religious disposition began to emerge. Life with his grandparents was marked by abuse resulting in a severely broken arm, indenture to neighboring households, occasional friendships with local ruffians, and little formal schooling. Eventually, the family returned to its former home where, upon the parents' separation, young William lived with his maternal grandparents. Apess' parents went to Colrain from Colchester, Connecticut, and Apess biographer Barry O'Connell speculates one reason for this was to elude Candace Apes' slave master, who did not manumit her until 1805. Nineteenth-century records show that the spelling of the surname was "Apes" with one "s" until son William inexplicably added the letter for his later publications. His mother, Candace, was a Pequot who may have had part African ancestry. His father, William, a half-blooded descendant of King Philip, was a shoemaker by trade. Apess was one of several Native Americans who became prominent as ministers, and he is remembered for his prolific literary talent.Īpess was born on January 31, 1798, in Colrain, Massachusetts. Yet, Native Americans were among the general population that responded during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to evangelical Christianity. By the late eighteenth century, the Pequots lived on two reservations, where they took care of their families throughĭay labor and domestic work, and where a vanquished sense of tribal pride made them ripe victims for alcohol abuse and depression. Survivors of this war were sold into slavery in the West Indies or were dispersed to live a hidden existence in southeastern Connecticut. He internalized the values of the conquering Americans, but utilized a religious zeal to construct a renewed sense of Native American identity and selfhood.Īs a Pequot Indian, Apess inherited the legacy of defeat and nearly total annihilation of his people during the Pequot War of 1637. William Apess (1798-1839) was the first Native American to write and publish his own autobiography, A Son in the Forest, and was the most prolific nineteenth century Indian writer in the English language.
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