ABSTRACT
When the American Indian author and orator William Apess delivered his “Eulogy on King Philip” in 1836, he violated almost every convention of the eulogy tradition. Despite its title and focus on a deceased individual, Apess’s speech does not appear to be a eulogy at all: the death he is commemorating had occurred almost 150 years earlier, the audience is not a group of mourners, nor do they necessarily know who the dead man was, and the text does not seek to console. Instead, throughout the speech, the loss of a specific person is overshadowed by historical events, figures, and traumas that elicit anger and resistance rather than grief. Yet, it is through this flaunting of the eulogy genre’s conventions that both the substance of those conventions and the purpose behind Apess’s adaptations become evident.
