ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 relates the story of William Apess, a nineteenth-century Pequot activist and Methodist minister who learns to leverage his status as an ordained “Indian Preacher” to lobby for increased Native rights. He is the first known Native of North America to write and publish a book-length narrative of his life, A Son of the Forest (1829) along with four other self-authored tracts that he published throughout his career. The chapter details how Native people, including Samson Occom, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, David Cusick, Elias Boudinot, John Norton, and others, begin to strategically mobilize the written word to effect change in their worlds through sermons, political speech, journalism, poetry, and personal narrative, even amidst great upheaval that culminates in the forced removal policies of the Jackson and Van Buren administrations and the infamous Cherokee “trail of tears.”
