Early American Literature

Abstract:

This essay analyzes how William Apess's Indian Nullification (1835) articulates a form of belonging that emphasizes inclusivity and communality (affiliative belonging) against settler colonialism's insistence that belonging is anchored in possession and property (proprietary belonging). It draws on recent critical appraisals of Indigenous kinship and community that emphasize the commingling of Native and white practices, but it centers tangible environmental markers—specifically the cutting and carting away of wood as presented in Apess's text—as the loci for a more general argument over how people should live with each other. I draw much from Apess's depiction of the Mashpee Meeting-house, a religious structure made of wood whose retrieval by the Mashpee concurrently pushes to establish their conception of communal belonging with nature and with each other. The Mashpee form of belonging is also incarnate in two other ways in Indian Nullification: in Apess's discussion of his adoption into the Mashpee tribe and in the very structure of the book. By contrasting how the Mashpee treat the management of wood and wooden creations with settler colonial impositions, Apess conceptualizes how Indigenous peoples could create communities and express an alternative idea of belonging in the antebellum United States.