Through the Looking Glass

Who are the children of God? Perhaps you may say, none but the white. If so, the word of the Lord is not true.

-William Apess, An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man

Early Christian Indian writers, especially William Apess, seemed to realize that U.S. society had to understand--if in fact it was capable of any self-analysis whatsoever--that its offenses against Indians were a part of its broken relationship with God. Apess knew that otherwise he could not reach his audience."

--from Reasoning together: the native critics collective By Janice Acoose, Lisa Brooks, Craig S. Womack, Tol Foster, Daniel Heath Justice, Christopher B. Teuton

William Apess certainly does make a lot of Bible-based arguments in Looking-Glass; that much is obvious to anybody who's read past the first page of the text. As a liberal Christian myself, I agree with his line of reasoning. But I also find myself shaking my head in wonder at how the arguments he (and Douglass and Jacobs) uses seem to parallel the debate going on in the US now over gay rights and women's rights, with each side using the Bible to bolster their own arguments, one side trying to increase human rights, the other trying to limit them. And when the side trying to limit rights uses the Bible as a proof-text, the side trying to increase rights finds itself obligated to use the same text as a basis for its own arguments. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, I guess.

However, there's more here than just the Biblical argument. A few other things in the text caught my attention.

In the 2nd paragraph, Apess writes of the Indian women, "they are made to believe they are minors and have not the abilities given them from God to take care of themselves." (Some may argue that he's talking about Indians of both genders here, but earlier in the paragraph he establishes that he's talking about the women: "the females are left without protection" and "one reason why they are left so is . . . .") So while this essay is not specifically about the rights of women and doesn't develop this argument, it does at least mention a key issue that we still struggle with today, the infantalization of women. Cue "I'm Just a Girl"....

It's also interesting the way Apess, as the narrator, shifts his identification partway through the essay. He starts out by calling the Indians of New England "my brethren," but then almost immediately starts referring to them as "they" or "them" - "Their land is in common stock, and they have nothing to make them enterprising". He also aligns himself with his audience when he writes "if these people [that is, the Indians] are what they are held up in our view to be" (italics mine), and again when he addresses the audience with "but stop, friends". By the end of that paragraph, however, he is back to including himself with the Indians: "I do not see why it should so long as they (the whites) say that they think as much of us as they do of themselves" (italics mine, but parenthetical is Apess'). By switching his identity like this, he makes himself into a bridge between his (presumably white) audience and the Indians, and thus leads the audience over that bridge so that they can identify (and sympathize) with the Indians, too.

Then there's the 3rd paragraph. Apess' use of "they" here is ambiguous. The entire paragraph is about the "Agents," which Norton defines as "those appointed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to oversee Indian affairs in such towns as Mashpee," and so "they" clearly refers to these men until we get to the last sentence. Here Apess writes, "Another reason is because they have no education to take care of themselves; if they had, I would risk them to take care of their own property." Does "they" here refer to the Indians or the Agents? It could be seen as either a reference back to the 2nd paragraph, in which he listed the reasons why the women were left alone, and so could mean the Indians, but I think a case could be made that he's really talking about the Agents - if they would take care of their own property, they wouldn't need to encroach on Indian lands, and they need an "education" to make them realize that they're in the wrong (and isn't education the point of the whole essay?).

There's a lot more of this little nit-picky stuff, but I also wanted to mention that the Norton Anthology itself seems to show a bit of bias in its footnotes to this essay, too. When Apess writes, "According to the writings of some, it [the word "heathens"] could not mean the Indians, for they are counted Jews," Norton says in a footnote, "A reference to the (mistaken) notion that Native Americans were descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel." This prompted me to look up Mormonism, since that was once (still is?) their belief. Sure enough, Joseph Smith was writing in the 1820's and 1830's, so it could very well be that Apess had heard of Smith's work. That Norton labels it "mistaken" is amusing because it seems that Norton usually goes out of its way to not call any belief system "mistaken." This is in contrast to the footnote to Apess' statement "it is well known that the Jews are a colored people": "Referring to the belief that Moses and the biblical Hebrews, including Jesus, were people of color" -- here, it's just a "belief" and Norton makes no claim as to the belief's validity.

As Alice is said to have remarked, "Curiouser and curiouser!"


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