ABSTRACT
This third and final chapter on Native Americans (in American Literature and American Identity) turns to an early Anglophone Amerindian writer, William Apess. Apess takes up many of the same techniques used by James Fenimore Cooper and Catharine Maria Sedgwick to respond to hegemonic views about Amerindians. For example, he deftly guides his readers to shift their perspective from European to Native American. However, there are also some differences. Perhaps surprisingly, Apess is more insistently Christian in his arguments. More predictably, he is aware of Native Americans as readers of his work, and therefore does not write solely for whites. Finally, though he is more ambivalent about interracial love, he does attend to attachment bonds more broadly, stressing the consequences of racism and colonial conflict for what today would be called attachment security.
