An Analytical Essay on William Apess’s “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man”
Although our world is ever-evolving, there are some things that don’t seem to change. Systematic racism has been a prevalent issue within the United States for centuries and began before our time. While this conflict also began before William Apess, he was born during the heat of the matter in 1798 and personally bore witness to the segregation and disenfranchisement of the Native people while standing as a member of the Pequot tribe himself. However, as the boy grew into a man, he found solace in the company of both the Christian and Native people—a conflicting matter in and of itself. The ability to love and be loved by both sides propels Apess to question the logistics of the white man’s judgments towards the Native. Shortly before his death, Apess composes a speech titled “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man” with the intention of having society reflect on their own hypocrisy. With the collateral objective of addressing racism, what methods does William Apess employ in his speech that allow it to be applied to the whole of society? Left as an embarrassing reminder to change, “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man” uses logic, public appeal, and Biblical reference to challenge readers to reflect upon the societal, political, and religious hypocrisy that contributes to racism.
To begin, to understand William Apess’s literature, it is vital that we also understand the background of his life as well as the European and Native animosities. The turbulence between these two groups of people began long before Apess, when the European Protestants, or Puritans, decided to flee their home country in search of religious and political freedom for all. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the Europeans had already developed prejudice towards Native people due to previous exploration in Asia and Africa, where the tribal folk were dubbed as savages. The settlers pushed this preconception of uncivilized Natives onto the indigenous people of North America, where it was believed that the people required taming. As social sciences major Viktorie Vasova elaborates, “One would assume that these people [the Europeans] would be content with the religious freedom they found in North America,” (13) yet as they settled, there was a growing expectation for the Native people to convert to the new Protestant religion. When there was pushback, the Europeans began to instill harsher rules and boundaries on the Natives, which was only met with deeper contempt on both sides. Regrettably, the grudge between the two races eventually triggered the Europeans to unapologetically slaughter the Natives, fostering the idea that “American Christendom... [is] founded upon the genocide of Indigenous nations” (Mattson). Bringing the attention back to William Apess, he was born to his fully Native mother and his Euro-Native father, making himself of mixed blood with a quarter white. His biological parents abandoned him at a young age, leaving Apess in the care of his mother’s fully-blooded Native parents, his grandparents. At this time, William Apess suffered from a near-death injury at the hands of his grandmother, an action that scarred his opinion of the Native people and later served as the catalyst for him to detest his ethnicity. This trauma subsequently prompted anxiety within Apess as a young boy, and he even wrote of a time where he fled with fear from a Native woman in the woods (Vasova 31). Eventually, he went on to be fostered by Euro-American Christian families that treated him kindly and with virtue, influencing Apess to favor their religion in return. Over the years, “Apess discovered... that the whites were responsible for the violent acts to the same degree as the Natives and often even more.” (Vasova 31). As previously addressed, a few decades before Apess’s birth, the hostility of the country had been growing. The Seven Years War (1756–1763) ensued; it was a bloody battle for land rights that many consider to be the first World War. The Native people were met with more restrictions as a result, with prevalence found in the operation of President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Act had permitted the forceful emigration of Natives who were unjustly marched from their ancestral land into designated plots—a movement known as the Trail of Tears (1831–1850). Having witnessed the beginning of this move himself, as well as other degrees of malicious behavior from both parties, William Apess sets out to be the voice of reason in his 1833 speech, “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man.”
To carry on, now that some background has been covered, it is time to unveil William Apess’s techniques for achieving his goal of having the white man reflect. It is common for a society to have norms or standards—a feature found even in animals—and Apess plays on these societal values in his speech, “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man.” To elaborate, he immediately challenges, “Let a gentleman and lady of integrity and respectability visit these places” (155). Firstly, regarding non-Natives as “ladies or “gentlemen” that possess “integrity” and “respectability” speaks volumes for the European prejudice towards the Native class. Apess uses these godly descriptions to appeal to the social significance of virtue. Second, this invitation serves to highlight the irony of allowing parts of society to live in squalor while upholding high standards for non-Native ladies and gentlemen. Additionally, Apess goes on to describe what the respected civilians would see: “females who are left alone” (155) and “without protection... are seduced by white men and are finally left to be prostitutes” (155). This illustration of prostituted Native women plays on the societal expectation for females to be pious and pure, no matter the era. As far as the land that William Apess invites the audience to view, he is referring to what is modernly known as a reservation—a word that is defined to mean an area held for a particular person or group. In this case, and without getting into the nitty details of the matter, the United States government held specific parts of land that the Native people could freely live on while the Euro-Americans settled into the majority. By mentioning the inhumane conditions of tribal reservations, Apess exposes society’s avoidance of responsibility in their act of sending Native people to be secluded on predetermined plots of land. Consequently, this deed of concealing living arrangements breeds the idea that “if nobody else cares, then I don’t need to either,” although the people with this thought “also know, on a gut level, that they are rationalizing and avoiding responsibility” (Anton 300). Even today, our society would rather focus on their own futile issues than advocate for change in tribal lands, magnifying the continued importance of William Apess’s work. By understanding and elaborating on the societal conscience, Apess holds a candle to the darkness of society and demands they stop turning their heads away from an issue so severe.
As previously elaborated, the Europeans settled in the United States in the search for freedom of basic rights, including education, religion, and choice in politics. Ironically, minorities, like the Natives, were quick to be secluded from this universal code. This fact is known by William Apess and influences him to employ logic in his speech while pondering the legitimacy of racial seclusion within the legal system. To clarify, when Apess delivered “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man,” Natives were unable to hold office, own property, pursue an education, or marry another race. Despite this, William Apess goes on to marry outside of his race and pursue an education. When neither task was met with the perceived limitations, it inspired Apess to question whether it is a sound judgment to “take the skin as a pretext to keep us from our unalienable rights.” (156). He proceeds by calling attention to the fact that if the same judgments were imposed upon the white man, “these very characters who hold skin to be such a barrier... would be the first to cry out ‘injustice!’” (156). With this statement, Apess is encouraging the reader to peer into the looking glass and evaluate whether his laws are just or biased. Additionally, as a final dig at the white man’s law, Apess describes his wife as “of the finest cast” (160). In this case, “cast” refers to the modern word caste, a term used to describe social classes. Although Apess does not directly reveal that his wife is white, he plays on the political and societal idea of white supremacy. Not only is he complimenting his wife’s nature, but he is also juxtaposing it with the revelation that she is a white woman. Moreover, as the speech continues, Apess prompts a rhetorical question with, “If these people are what they are held up in our view to be...” (156)—a phrase that acknowledges the dogmatic opinion against Natives—then why haven’t “the pains been taken to educate them?” (156). It has been a prevalent theme in United States history for the government to restrict, or even illegalize, the unalienable right to education for groups viewed as a minority or threatening. With hindsight, both the slaughtered Natives and enslaved Africans were clearly denied a basic human right, perhaps because the Euro-Americans “were cautious with educating... [knowing] education was a tool through which the minority could defend itself.” (65). William Apess is bringing forth the reality that race is only a perceived barrier but does not realistically limit the right to basic freedoms. With the application of logic and rhetoric, Apess insists that Euro-Americans question the sagacity of their politics.
To proceed, Christianity is known by many to be the religion of acceptance and love, yet William Apess notices that many followers are ironically prejudiced towards other races or ethnicities. Throughout his speech, “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man,” Apess uses logic and the appeal to credibility [God] to provoke his audience to challenge their own beliefs and whether they are truly godly. Apess comes hot out of the gate, immediately laying bare that, “If black or red skins, or any other skin of color, is disgraceful to God, it appears that he has disgraced himself a great deal—for he had made fifteen colored people to one white and placed them here upon this Earth” (157). This imagery of sixteen people around a table of different races puts the world into a perspective that man can comprehend. It brings reality to the situation and allows the reader to conceptualize themselves at a dinner table with people who are defined as being God’s children rather than black, white, red, etc. As the speech persists, Apess’s tone and fury can quite literally be felt as he pleads for the white man to recognize their crimes and rhetorically questions, “Can you charge the Indian’s with robbing a nation almost of their whole continent, and to cap the climax, rob another nation to till its grounds?” (157). At this point, William Apess is referring to the aforementioned slaughtering and enslavement of North American and African natives. As a final blow of logic, Apess invites his readers to consider Christ's own skin color, acknowledging that he is known to be from Jerusalem and would most certainly be a tanned brown color rather than white. This observation serves as the epiphany moment—the one that initiates the white man to consider that his Bible's teachings have been misconstrued to fit a racial agenda. Using the Bible as its own mirror, Apess encourages the followers of Christianity to reflect upon their values and the hypocrisy within.
To conclude, and with all addressed, it can be acknowledged that Apess takes the readers on a mental roller coaster with logical arguments, an appeal to authority, and the use of Biblical references that challenge them to identify hypocrisy in their own social, political, and religious views. Apess forms a strong mental image of a white man peering into the mirror to see a Native American man in the reflection. This imagery is the basis of his speech, as he calls on society to look in the mirror, or reflect, upon their character. Although William Apess composed “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man” to enact the Europeans to change their attitudes towards the Native people, it is not one to be left in the dust as it considers many of the social, political, and religious hypocrisies that are still felt today.
Works Cited
Apess, W. (1992a). An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man. In B. O’Connell & C. G. Calloway (Eds.), On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writing of William Apess, a Pequot (pp. 155–161). University of Massachusetts Press.
Anton, Corey. “Responding to Hypocrisy: Getting a Handle on Its Abundance and Its Apparent Irrelevance.” ETC: A Review of General Semantics, vol. 75, no. 3/4, July 2018, pp. 299–306. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=143840811&site=ehost-live.
Mattson, Stephen. “American Christianity Has a Hypocrisy Problem.” Christians for Social Action, 14 Jan. 2019, christiansforsocialaction.org/resource/american-christianity-hypocrisy-problem/.
Plato, Ann. “The Natives of America.” Poetry Foundation, 1841, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52473/the-natives-of-america.
Plourde, Bruce. “Lecture, Apess, Indians Looking Glass for White Man.” YouTube, YouTube, 3 June 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbhScZn65tA.
St Rose, Stanley. “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man’ by William Apess Summary and Analysis.” YouTube, YouTube, 13 July 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKzNhvNSisM.
Vasova, Viktorie, and Pavla Buchtova. “Christianity and Racism in the Work of William Apess”. Masaryk University, Mar. 2016, is.muni.cz/th/nrj35/DP_Vasova.pdf.
Yue, D., & Yue, C. (1984). The Tipi: A Center of Native American Life. A.A. Knopf.