Description
Cornell: Images from the Rare Book and Manuscript Collections; William Apess (1798-1839), a Pequot, was an itinerant Methodist minister who preached to communities of Native and African Americans and poor whites in New York and Connecticut. He may have been the first Native American to write and publish his autobiography, first issued in 1829, in which he articulates issues of Indian identity. He played an instrumental role the Mashpee Indians' struggle to self-govern their Massachusetts town in 1834, publishing his account of this crisis in Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts (1835).
Image
Drawing
1831
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