“William Apess Was Born Here”: Marking William Apess on the Geographical and Cultural Map

“William Apess Was Born Here”Marking William Apess on the Geographical and Cultural Map Drew Lopenzina (bio) He pitched his tent in the woods of a town called Colrain. William Apess, A Son of the Forest Were you to drive into Colrain, Massachusetts, today, however hard you might look, you would find no marker recognizing the town as the birthplace of nineteenth-century Pequot activist, author, and minister William Apess. The employees at the town clerk’s office had never heard of Apess when I first came to sift through their files in the summer of 2012, and, in fact, no record of his birth exists there. No edifice in town has been erected to call up his memory, no street bears his name, no likeness of Apess decorates the walls of the town offices. The Griswold Memorial Library in Colrain holds a single copy of Barry O’Connell’s edition of Apess’s collected works, On Our Own Ground (donated to the library by an Amherst couple in 1992, when the book was first published), but you will find no other work on him there, scholarly or otherwise. Nor does Apess’s name appear in any of the numerous local town histories that have been collected and placed on the shelves. Lining the windowsills of the library are various pamphlets and newsletters produced by Colrain historical societies and booster associations that can be purchased for two or three dollars apiece, but you will learn nothing of Apess’s existence in their pages. Apess is not mentioned on the town’s official website, and, last I looked, he only appears as a sort of footnote on the Wikipedia page for Colrain, at the very bottom, under the subheading “Notable People” (alongside other “notables,” nineteenth-century Congressman Samuel Taggart and actress Elizabeth Perkins, who starred alongside Tom Hanks in Big). And, of course, no stone or plaque commemorates [End Page 1] the place of Apess’s birth (for no effort has ever been made to locate it) somewhere along the town’s forested perimeter, whose slopes and ridges lend definition to the settled landscape. The Apess name remains engulfed in erasures, the result of a kind of passive neglect or historical unwitnessing by which history chooses its subjects and silently averts its gaze from that which is, for reasons left unspoken, not its subject.1 Nevertheless, knowing from his own writings that Apess was born in Colrain, I understood this to be the place for my investigation of his life story to begin and was hoping, in fact, to locate the precise site of Apess’s birth. When the written archive proved unyielding, I took to the hills and forests, following old carriage roads long reclaimed by nature and faint trails dotted out on hundred-year-old maps, sifting through swamps and old cellar holes, looking for chimney falls, scanning the names on the stones of countless moldering gravesites. I, too, pitched my tent in the hills of Colrain and spent evenings staring at the reflection of the night sky in the dark, glassed-over waters of McCleod Pond, and although I often felt as though I were zeroing in on some trace of his presence, some pattern that might materialize in the random ordering of stars across the firmament, I was never able to definitively locate Apess’s place of birth. It seemed an inauspicious beginning to my research, an intimation of more absences to come. About this, thankfully, I was wrong. Yet the absences I encountered in Colrain were instructive in and of themselves and helped me begin to apprehend the reverse, or negative, image of the nineteenth-century world William Apess negotiated and how deep pockets of archival darkness might sometimes, perhaps, be generatively reconsidered as fields of Indigenous light. This article, grounded in ongoing biographical recovery work I have been conducting on the life of William Apess, sets out to investigate Apess’s origin story—a story that in most ways slips entirely between the cracks of dominant historical and archival practices. Apess was an early nineteenth-century Pequot Indian and Methodist preacher whose life and textual legacy present us with an evocative portrait of Native activism...