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TRACKING WHITENESS: PORTRAYALS OF WHITES

IN AMERICAN INDIAN LITERATURE

by

MARY M. (PEGGY) RUFF Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

May 2008

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For my DeVry colleagues, I am so thankful. Thanks go to Karen Stabeno and Jan Votto, for teaching my Honors classes when they conflicted with my studies. Ann Rogers, thank you for your continued interest in my work. Lory Hawkes, my mentor, thanks for inspiring and challenging me; your constant care and wise advice have kept me going. To all of my DeVry “family,” thanks for your encouragement and heartfelt wishes for my success.

teaching has opened up new realms of thought and awareness. Thank you, Dr. Ken Roemer, Dr. Stacy Alaimo, and Dr. Neill Matheson, for not only inspiring the genesis of this project but for seeing it through to the end. For your diligence in reading and your invaluable suggestions, I am deeply grateful. Dr. Roemer, thanks for introducing me to American Indian literature, especially the work of Louise Erdrich. Your passion for teaching is contagious, and your gentle guidance and kindness pulled me through this arduous but fulfilling process. My life has truly been enriched by the content of my studies and by the people who crossed my path. For my family, who have put up with my studies and stresses, I am so grateful. Karen, thanks for sharing this entire journey with me, even reading my dissertation. Thanks for your laughter, your praise, and your wisdom. Also, thank you, Karen and Charlotte, for your prayer

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support throughout. To Lacey, my wonderful daughter, thanks for always expressing how proud you are of your mom and for believing in me. To Mike, my amazing, amusing husband, thank you for sharing me with my studies, for consoling me and counseling me, for keeping me sane— I owe you big time. Finally, I thank God for directing my path every step of the way. March 16, 2008

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ABSTRACT

TRACKING WHITENESS: PORTRAYALS OF WHITES

IN AMERICAN INDIAN LITERATURE

Mary M. (Peggy) Ruff, PhD.

Supervising Professor: Kenneth M. Roemer Although whites have pervaded the lives and literatures of American Indians since contact, their own portrayals of whites have remained, for the most part, unexplored. I examine selected works of nineteenth and twentieth-century American Indian writers to discern ways that whites are portrayed collectively and individually. The most salient categories of whites emerge early on as government officials, educators, and missionaries, those most directly engaged in the “civilizing mission.” Similar categories of white characters, with the addition of white doctors, are found throughout twentieth-century American Indian fiction. Also in these works, numerous individual whites are portrayed as multidimensional, dynamic characters whose actions range from greedy, self-serving, and contemptuous to benevolent, respectful, and compassionate. Viewing these portrayals through the lenses of postcolonialist theory and white studies reveals

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that American Indian writers have probed beneath the white skin to see into the hearts of these people who have invaded their lands and lives. Beginning with collective portrayals of whites in nineteenth-century nonfiction works of William Apess, George Copway, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Charles Eastman, and Zitkala-Ša, this study then examines collective portrayals of whites in three twentieth-century novels of Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and Linda Hogan. Individual portrayals of whites follow, as found not only in works of Silko, Erdrich, and Hogan, but also in those of D’Arcy McNickle, John Joseph Mathews, N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Michael Dorris, Sherman Alexie, Greg Sarris, and David Treuer. Overall, portrayals of white characters range from evil to good, from one-dimensional and stereotypical to richly complex and enigmatic. Exposing whiteness in such an array serves to displace it from its center of superiority, privilege, and power.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………….…………………………………. iii ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………….. v PREFACE........................................................................................................................... viii Chapter

1. PALEFACE IN THE LOOKING-GLASS: COLLECTIVE PORTRAYALS OF WHITES IN NONFICTION........................................... 1
2. EXPOSING WHITENESS: COLLECTIVE PORTRAYALS OF WHITES IN FICTIONAL WORKS OF SILKO, ERDRICH, AND HOGAN........................................................................................................... 55
3. WHITENESS WITH A DIFFERENCE: INDIVIDUAL PORTRAYALS OF WHITES..............…..…………………………………………...…........ 107
4. WHITENESS WITH A DIFFERENCE: FALSE AND FAITHFUL “SAINTS”……..……………………………………………………………. 167
5. CONCLUSION............................................................................................... 233

WORKS CITED.......……………………………….………………………………….... 237 BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION………………………..……………………........... 247

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PREFACE

In his preeminent text of postcolonialist theory, The Location of Culture (1992), Homi Bhabha affirms his hope for humanity on the cusp of a new century. Although already marked by strife, racism, oppression, and other legacies of colonialism, the twenty-first century becomes Bhabha’s “beyond,” a site of possibility and promise: The ‘beyond’ is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past.... Beginnings and endings may be the sustaining myths of the middle years; but in the fin de siècle , we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. (Bhabha 1) Today, “[b]eginnings and endings,” as set forth in inscribed histories of peoples, no longer hold true when viewed by other than the dominant cultures; borders drawn to separate different groups of people no longer suffice in this “moment of transit.” Rather, a border or boundary becomes “not that at which something stops but... that from which something begins its presencing ” (Heidegger, qtd. in Bhabha 1). Viewed in this way, borders, no longer limiting features, open up spaces for “the emergence of the interstices—the overlap and displacement of domains of difference” (2). Such spaces in-between become springboards for the “beyond,” where “complex figures of difference and identity” are enacted. In the United States today, where minority groups still clamor for equality and justice, a need for negotiation endures. Following his claim that it is in “the emergence of the interstices..

. that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness , community interest, or cultural

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value are negotiated” (2), Bhabha poses questions applicable to our society rife with cultural difference: How do strategies of representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the competing claims of communities where, despite shared histories of deprivation and discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings and priorities may not always be collaborative and dialogical, but may be profoundly antagonistic, conflictual and even incommensurable? (2) Although numerous communities express “competing claims” and could certainly benefit from negotiation and “strategies of representation or empowerment,” my focus is on American Indians. I will explore their own particular “strategies of representation” of whites, as these groups have interacted throughout American history. Of course, American Indians are not a homogeneous community but are composed of a multitude of tribes with distinctive histories and cultural differences; however, they share in the scars of colonialism and are often viewed from a postcolonialist lens. Problems arise from such a perspective, though, because effects of colonialism in the United States are different from those explored by postcolonialist theorists, who have “drawn almost exclusively from the experiences of populations in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean” (Allen 4). Because of the ongoing colonialism that exists in the United States regarding the indigenous population, different issues arise and conflicts continue. The postcolonialist anathema, “essentialism,” becomes fitting for American Indians whose “discourses often emphasize land and treaty rights” (30). On the other hand, the thrust toward multiculturalism, with its categorizing of American Indians with other minorities, is felt to be “inadequate and misguided” (110). For these reasons, although

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postcolonialist theory is often applied to American Indian literature, it does not always play out similarly to that of other settler colonies’ literatures. However, I have chosen to apply aspects of this theory to the literature of American Indians, mainly because so many of what Ania Loomba terms “legacies of colonialism” are revealed. Also, embedded in their oral and written literatures, at least since the time of contact, are encounters with whites, whose pervading, invading presence overturned and overpowered the Natives’ traditional ways of living. Also evident in their literatures are “strategies of representation or empowerment” by these culturally different colonized peoples, and a study of the formulation of such strategies forms the basis of this dissertation, which focuses on portrayals of whiteness. According to Bhabha, “The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition” (3). For the American Indians, such a “fixed tablet of tradition” would be mainstream history, in which their true tales are rarely told; instead, accounts of white history are embellished with courageous acts, justified by the urge to civilize (or destroy) the indigenous savages. However, Bhabha suggests that such simplistic histories are unacceptable and must also be told by the “other” side: “The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation” (2). Indeed, he calls for a transformation of history, which, neither simple nor fixed, must be articulated also by the minority: “The ‘right’ to signify from the periphery of authorized power and privilege... is resourced by the power of tradition to be reinscribed through the conditions of contingency and contradictoriness that attend upon the lives of those who are ‘in the minority.’ (2) Thus, American Indians, certainly in the minority and on “the

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periphery of authorized power and privilege,” deserve the right to reinscribe history from their own perspectives. In Chapters 1 and 2, I will explore examples of Natives’ rewriting of history from their perspectives through nonfiction and fiction. In all of these works, whites are portrayed collectively as they have acted “through the conditions of contingency and contradictoriness,” and their harsh treatment of Indians is exposed. Since the two become inextricably bound when applied to the history of America, both white studies and postcolonialist theory will form the framework for my exploration of portrayals of whiteness in American Indian literature. In White , Richard Dyer provides applicable theoretical principles even though his “contexts for looking at whiteness” (4) are found solely in “white” texts, and mine are not. However, we share a similar goal: “to see whiteness, see its power, its particularity and limitedness, put it in its place and end its rule” (4). In addition, I agree with Dyer that “[i]n a work of this kind, there must always be an interaction between generalizations and specific instances, between the theoretical and empirical. Theory needs checking against the particularity” (xiv-xv). Therefore, in the overall structure of my own work, I will move from the general (collective portrayals of whites in chapters 1 and 2) to the particular (individual portrayals of whites in chapter 3 and 4) in “checking” the theory. I will also refer to Ruth Frankenberg’s explanations of how whiteness has been constructed and performed from the beginnings of colonialism through today. Ania Loomba’s Colonialism-Postcolonialism will be used to explore imperialism, colonialism, and its “legacies,” which include capitalism, materialism, and greed of the white colonizers. Finally, I will show how American Indian writers move “beyond” Bhabha’s definition of stereotype to discern differences in whites and to portray them with a fairness that is perhaps undeserved. Throughout the literature examined, I

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will argue that fascinating insights into whiteness are revealed, resulting in “complex figures of difference and identity” (Bhabha 1). To provide a context for my own work, a glimpse into scholarship drawing upon postcolonialist theory and race studies is in order here. Although it has been over 100 years since W. E. B. DuBois’s claim that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line” (xli), this statement resonates as strongly now as it did then. Today, however, the people of the United States encounter numerous “color lines” as opposed to the black/white binary explored by Du Bois. Some of these racial distinctions are in the process of blurring with “whiteness” (still the most blinding color), while others have retained marked differences. The American literary canon and its accompanying scholarship, once dominated almost exclusively by white males, now includes racially “different” (as well as differently gendered) works, thanks to monumental changes initiated in the 1960s. With the Civil Rights Movement’s momentum during that decade, along with America’s bitterly protested incursion into the Vietnam War, this turbulent time gave rise to the recognition of non-white voices in the social, political, literary, and scholarly realms. Although African-American voices were the strongest, resulting in ground-breaking changes to college curricula and the literary canon, American Indian voices were heeded when N. Scott Momaday’s 1968 novel House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. The next three decades of American literature would be forever changed with color lines clearly displayed. With the emergence of diverse perspectives articulated in late twentieth-century American literature, scholars delved into the reasons for and results of the past suppression of non-white literary works. The field of critical theory flourished, stimulating studies of

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colonialism, postcolonialism, and race, among others. In addition to creating new approaches to viewing minority literature, scholars began to view white, canonical American literature in innovative ways. In response to Toni Morrison’s call to discern the “dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence” (5) that has always existed in American literature came numerous scholarly endeavors to unearth and dissect portrayals of black characters in white literature. In response to attention focused on literary portrayals of the “Other,” came a counter-study of whiteness, with initial forays into representations of whites and whiteness in American culture and literature. Such representations have, for the most part, focused on (white) American literature and African American literature, corresponding to the salience of black/white relations in race theory and social experience. Although studies have abounded concerning American Indian, Chicano, and Asian writers’ contributions to American literature, scholarly attempts to view whiteness and white characters in these works are rare. One reason for this neglect of scholarship is noted by Valerie Babb, in her 1998 work Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture. Here, Babb not only traces the crafting of whiteness from the settling of the colonies through the twentieth-century, providing a scathing exposure of the pervasiveness of white superiority throughout American culture. She speculates that the reason for “scholarly silence” in this area is that it perpetuates the notion of “whiteness being presumed the norm” (15). Although whiteness has not been scrutinized in American Indian literature, literary critics, both Indian and non-Indian, have explored numerous aspects of this rich area of study. Scholarship focuses on multi-voiced narratives, ties to place and community, identity, adaptation, survival, and continuance, but most often with a concentration on Indian characters

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and their struggles and triumphs in the face of such adversity. However, in his 1988 “Postscript” to his 1967 Savagism and Civilization , Roy H. Pearce envisions “a study of the Indian image of the white as it has become a means of his developing an image of himself, a study of the idea of Civilization as it at once has been introjected into the Indian psyche and helped to shape it” (255). My work in this area provides an attempt to answer part of Pearce’s call; I will closely examine “the Indian image of the white” as portrayed in American Indian literature. My goal, however, is not to discern how whiteness has shaped the Indian, but how whiteness has been exposed and illuminated by the Indian. The scope of this project spans American Indian writing beginning with an examination of five nineteenth-century nonfiction writers: William Apess (Pequot), George Copway (Ojibwe), Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Paiute), Charles Eastman (Sioux), and Zitkala-Ša, all discussed in chapter one. These writers boldly question the effectiveness and value of whites’ civilizing missions, from Christianity through the Indian boarding school system. The next chapters will cover most major twentieth-century American Indian fiction writers. Chapter Two provides an analysis of collective portrayals of white characters in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony , Louise Erdrich’s Tracks , and Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit. In these novels, whites are portrayed as power-wielding and materialistic, intent on appropriating not only land but valuable natural resources in their enterprising spirit. In Chapter Three, close reading as well as theoretical applications of numerous fictional works will provide a broad array of individual white characters. Selected works of D’Arcy McNickle, John Joseph Mathews, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris, Linda Hogan, Sherman Alexie, Greg Sarris, and David Treuer reveal portrayals of white characters from one-

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dimensional to richly complex. The final chapter reveals a panorama of priests and nuns, in works by James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday, D’Arcy McNickle, David Treuer, Michael Dorris, and Louise Erdrich, organized from least to most salient of these “saints.” These writers have created some of the most fascinating and important white characters in American Indian literature. Through this examination of ways that whites have been portrayed by American Indians, I seek to show that postcolonialist theory, especially as related to the legacies of colonialism, and white studies certainly apply yet are not close-ended. Through their rich portrayals of whites, these writers have moved “beyond” and produced “complex figures of difference and identity” (Bhabha 1). However, “difference” here is not that of the “Other,” but rather that of the dominant, (post)colonialist culture. Furthermore, the “‘right’ to signify from the periphery of authorized power and privilege” (2) has been exercised with illuminating insights by these American Indian writers.

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CHAPTER 1

PALEFACE IN THE LOOKING-GLASS: COLLECTIVE PORTRAYALS

OF WHITES IN NONFICTION

In his “Foreword” to Roy H. Pearce’s 1966 reissue of Savagism and Civilization , scholar Arnold Krupat summarizes “variants of American thought about the Indian” (xi). The first, as specified by Pearce, was “that Indians were considered the same as all other men, capable, that is, of seduction by Satan... but also of salvation. The Puritan aim, then, was to transform the Indian, to improve him as land might be improved, lifting him from the wild state of nature to civilization and to God” (xi-xii). From this statement came an important goal of the colonizers of this “New World,” that of improving the original inhabitants, or “savages.” Under the guise of “civilization,” yet often by violence, white, western European values, such as language, Christianity, education, and government, were forced upon the Natives of America. All of the nineteenth-century writers discussed in this chapter reveal varying results of such assimilation, achieved through their adaptation to the civilizing mission of the colonizing whites. In his exploration of the racial imagery of whiteness, Richard Dyer, in White , traces its roots to the concept of embodiment, which is constituted of three elements: “Christianity, ‘race’ and enterprise/imperialism” (14). The idea of “body” is key since Christ’s body is considered the incarnation of God’s spirit. In addition, embodiment refers to bodies, upon which race, generally “seen” in physical characteristics, is inscribed. It is only in white bodies, however, that Dyer’s notion of embodiment occurs: “Black people can be reduced (in white culture) to their bodies and thus to race, but white people are something else that is realized in and yet is not

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reducible to the corporeal, or racial” (14-15). This “something else” involves Dyer’s concept of “spirit” (not to be confused with “soul”). It is this spirit, which Dyer points to as the distinguishing characteristic of whiteness. According to western European Christians, some people were endowed with this “spirit,” and some were not. Evidences of this spirit were in the whites’ qualities of aspiration, intellectual awareness, aesthetics—in short, all that made one “civilized.” Another quality of this spirit was that of enterprise, which was manifested in a penchant for exploration, discovery, and invention. The enterprising explorers, who were mostly white, western European Christians, paved the way for imperialism. Dyer, of British nationality, seems to use the terms “imperialism” and “colonialism” interchangeably, which, Ania Loomba notes in Colonialism-Postcolonialism, often occurs. Loomba distinguishes colonialism, “the take over of territory, appropriation of material resources, exploitation of labour and interference with political and cultural structures of another territory or nation” (6), from imperialism, “a political system in which an imperial centre governs colonized countries.... [and] is primarily an economic system of penetration and control of markets” (6). Loomba also notes that both of these enactments of power are played out somewhat differently depending on historical and spatial contexts. In the context of North America, it was such white Christians from Europe who acted out their enterprising spirit and became not only the major colonizers throughout the world but also the major exploiters of the indigenous inhabitants. Thus, Christianity became associated with whiteness, and this idea of “spirit” became a rationalization for various “brands” of colonialism or imperialism. The Eurocentric notion that the “Others” encountered in explorations must be savage and uncivilized prevailed, and methods of inculcating “white” culture and values were enforced.

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It is these aspects of whiteness, as delineated by Dyer’s idea of embodiment and expanded upon by Loomba’s definitions of colonialism and imperialism , that I will apply to collective portrayals of whites in selected nonfiction works of five nineteenth-century American Indian writers: William Apess (Pequot), George Copway (Ojibwe), Sarah Winnemucca [Hopkins] (Paiute), Charles Eastman (Sioux), and Zitkala- Ša [Gertrude Bonnin] (Sioux). All of these writers have first-hand experience with Christianity, whether practiced by themselves or witnessed in others; thus, Dyer’s “white” aspects of Christianity and resulting actions of Christians become apparent. However, these writers courageously question the whites’ practices of Christianity, which generally do not match the principles preached. In addition to Christianity, other colonialist values are revealed and questioned by these writers, especially Loomba’s points concerning the “take over of territory” and “the interference with political and cultural structures.” Finally, since the last two writers discussed wrote during the Indian boarding school era, I will apply Amelia Katanski’s theory of situational identities and agency as they adapt to white culture. As the dominating whites press ever westward, making and breaking treaties along the way and enforcing assimilation, all five of these writers reveal their attempts to combat “European dominance with the word rather than the arrow” (Ruoff, “Reversing” 212). For all of these early writers, the fact that they used “the word” and published life writings in English attests to their own mastery of the language and conventions of their colonizers. As noted scholar Arnold Krupat states in his 1994 anthology of Native American Autobiography, “Tribal people were oral people who represented personal experience performatively and dramatically to an audience. Personal exploits might be presented pictographically (i.e., in tipi decorations or other types of drawing) , but never in alphabetic

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writing” (3). These “tribal people,” however, to reach an audience much wider than that of their tribe, had to transform oral traditions handed down through their own languages into written English words. Moreover, these writers, in choosing to write about their own, individual lives and concerns, necessitated another re-orientation in worldview, from one based on community to one focused on the individual. Whether an autobiographical or historical work was authored by an Indian or was a collaborative work, the act of communicating such information “may be seen as the textual equivalent of the ‘frontier,’ as the discursive ground on which two extremely different cultures met and interacted” (4). It is onto this “discursive ground” that these early American Indian writers ventured in order to articulate their own particular ways of coping with and adapting to the momentous changes wrought by whites. At the same time, these writers strived to maintain their own sense of pride in their traditional cultures. Also, for true interaction, their writing needed to appeal to white audiences, thus conforming to the dominant culture’s expectations. Thus, this “discursive ground” was fraught with tensions and complexities. The first writer to be examined, William Apess, reveals some of the causes and consequences of such tensions as he articulates his own experiences with whites and with Christianity, which become entangled, both theoretically and practically. David Murray, in Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing & Representation in North American Indian Texts , notes the ambivalence of Apess’s position: “It is the complex relation between on the one side the Christian civilized Indian, affirmer of white values, and on the other the Indian proud of his heritage and bitterly critical of white actions which is most interesting in his work” (57). Indeed, it is this disconnect between white values and white actions that Apess bitterly criticizes,

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especially in “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man.” In addition, Apess explores whiteness as embodiment as well as symbol, issues that prefigure Dyer’s tenets of race studies in the late twentieth century. Underpinning Apess’s portrayals of whites is his “play” with interiority versus exteriority, a pattern noted by Scott Michaelsen in The Limits of Multiculturalism (64). Truly a pioneer in his boldness to speak out, Apess “paved the way for what Native authors can do today” (Womack 3). Furthermore, although the advent of white studies as an area of critical theory did not occur until the 1990s, Apess’s writings of the early nineteenth century reveal similar struggles with the complexities of the concept of race. It is almost as though Apess provides practical applications of Richard Dyer’s theoretical explorations of whiteness. Both grapple with the conflation of Christianity and whiteness; Dyer traces the roots of this conundrum, and Apess reveals the results. In White , Dyer notes the enigmatic blend of whiteness and Christianity, with his “notion of the white body, of embodiment, of whiteness involving something that is in but not of the body” (14). This embodiment incorporates Christianity, race, and the spirit of enterprise, resulting in imperialism and its variations, along with the exercise of power and privilege. In addition, Dyer distinguishes “three senses of white as colour, three ways in which it is felt and understood” (45), which are hue, skin, and symbol. The sense of white as hue carries with it conflicting definitions of white as both the absence of color and white as all colors. This ambiguity causes indeterminacy and “slippage” of whiteness: “The slippage between white as a colour and white as colourlessness forms part of a system of thought and affect whereby white people are both particular and nothing in particular, are both something and non-existent” (47). Another type of slippage occurs with white as skin color or pigmentation, which is not at all truly

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white. In fact, nationalities of peoples with “off-white” skin have been excluded and later included with those of “pure” white skin throughout the history of the United States, mostly depending on economic, labor, and political needs of the time. Finally, the sense of white as a symbol of good with its opposite, black, as a symbol of bad, also results in a slippage, so that “questions of color elide with questions of morality” (622). Then, the sense of whiteness as moral purity and goodness become enmeshed in Christianity, further complicating the notion, according to Dyer. Apess, writing a century and a half before Dyer, strategically uses these same complexities of whiteness as he portrays whites, resulting in censure. Racial specifications seem to be important to Apess, who opens his autobiography by stating, “My [paternal] grandfather was a white man and married a female attached to the royal family of Philip, king of the Pequot tribe of Indians” (4). Apess is then careful to note that his father, a mixed-blood, “joined the Pequot tribe, to which he was maternally connected.... and in a short afterward married a female of the tribe, in whose veins a single drop of the white man’s blood never flowed” (4). Although these claims are debated by Barry O’Connell in the introduction to his 1992 edition of On Common Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot (xxvii n.17), Apess feels such clear racial distinctions are necessary. When Apess was three, his parents separated from each other and sent him and his siblings to live with grandparents, who were “wedded to that beastly vice intemperance” (Apess 5), beat their grandchildren often, and frequently neglected to feed them. Apess is careful to note that these were his grandparents on his mother’s (full-blooded Pequot) side, and that the parents of his (mixed-blood) father “were Christians, [who] lived and died happy in the love of God” (6). However, Apess does not blame his maternal grandparents for their “cruel and unnatural

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conduct” (7). Rather he attributes “it in a great measure to the whites, inasmuch as they introduced among my countrymen that bane of comfort and happiness, ardent spirits—seduced them into a love of it and, when under its unhappy influence, wronged them out of their lawful possessions—that land where reposed the ashes of their sires” (7). Thus, Apess portrays whites as manipulative, greedy, immoral people “for dispossessing natives of their lands and then corrupting them” (O’Connell l) with alcohol. Yet it is from this race of people that come Apess’s rescuers, a benevolent white family who takes him in, provides, and cares for him throughout his childhood. Thus, the ambiguities of race enter his narrative from the beginning. As he adapts to the white ways of his foster family, Apess goes to school, where he learns to read and write in English, and to church, where he is introduced to Christianity. The influence of white ways, coupled with memories of abuse from his grandparents, makes Apess fear his “brethren of the forest,” as revealed in the following account. While seeking berries in the woods, Apess “fell in with a company of white females... [whose] complexion was, to say the least, as dark as that of the natives” (Apess 10). Terrified, Apess runs home, telling his guardian that he “had met a body of natives in the woods” (11 ). In his writing, he reveals that he was terrified of his brethren, or natives, because of the cruelty he had heard they committed upon whites. Ironically, although he notes that the females encountered were white, he calls them natives because of the darkness of their skin. This association with natives fills “his mind with terror” (10) because he has been told “many stories... of their cruelty toward the whites” (11). Here, Apess conflates all three of Dyer’s senses of white: hue (the immediately recognized “color” of the females), skin (dark), and symbol (cruelty of the dark natives). Following this account, Apess, as now-grown narrator, comments on his error:

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But the whites did not tell me that they were in a great majority of instances the aggressors—that they had imbrued their hands in the lifeblood of my brethren, driven them from their once peaceful and happy homes—that they introduced among them the fatal and exterminating diseases of civilized life. If the whites had told me how cruel they had been to the “poor Indian,” I should have apprehended as much harm from them. (11) Thus, upon reflection, Apess’s portrayals of natives and whites become reversed as he reveals what the whites, his adoptive brethren, did not tell him. He has to learn himself of their true nature and actions, which are opposite of their own stories. Interestingly, it now appears that his first fear, that of the (dark) whites, was the more logical one, providing what Murray notes as an interesting twist to this tale: “[A]n Indian being in danger from whites when he ventures into the forest is both a historical truth and an ironic reversal of white fears” (59). Certainly, Apess reveals his own type of “play” with literal and figurative concepts of skin color, in addition to his own “colorful” childhood. Apess’s white upbringing includes his conversion to Christianity, and as he matures, his discerns distinctions between his own practices of Christianity and those of whites professing to be Christians. He denounces them for their hypocrisy and degradation of the Indians, which he claims is certainly not according to the will of God, “who will show no favor to outward appearances but will judge righteousness” (155). Such superior attitudes of whites turn Apess against Christianity until he finds Methodism, a denomination that considered Indians to be as worthy of God’s love as whites. With these God-loving people, Apess finally becomes “convinced that Christ died for all mankind—that age, sect, color, country, or situation made no

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difference” and that he, too, “was included in the plan of redemption with all my brethren” (19). Although Apess states that his “love now embraced the whole human family” (21), he does not perceive this love acted out by whites professing to be Christians. In fact, he is “bold to aver that the minds of the natives were turned against the Gospel and soured toward the whites because some of the missionaries have joined the unholy brethren in speculations to the advantage of themselves” (33). From this example, concluded from Apess’s experience with whites and Christians, we can see how whiteness and Christianity collide. Whiteness, with its accompanying attitudes of superiority, privilege, and power, becomes an embodiment not merely of Dyer’s spirit of enterprise, but of extreme pride. Christianity, on the other hand, the belief the incarnation of Christ, is based on humility. The difficulty of reconciliation of the two is apparent; it seems that one must trump the other, and history is rife with examples of each. Apess, however, strikes at the heart of this problem in his scathing critique, “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man.” The interplay of Christianity and whiteness, of interiority and exteriority, is reflected in Apess’s looking-glass metaphor. In this culminating critique, Apess cites Scripture, with book, chapter, and verse, to demonstrate to white Christians that they are not at all acting as Christ taught. Moreover, he performs another ironic twist on skin color when he condemns white Christians for their superior, hypocritical racist attitudes: “But reader, I acknowledge that this is a confused world, and I am not seeking for office, but merely placing before you the black inconsistency that you place before me—which is ten times blacker than any skin that you will find in the universe” (157, emphasis added). Thus, using what Dyer terms the symbolic sense (albeit it an unfortunate one) of “black,” Apess applies it to the white hypocrites’ actions, or inconsistencies,

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creating “an extended play on the idea of skin colour” (Murray 61). Apess has “seen” whiteness for what it is, for how it is embodied in Christians, and in doing so, has “marked” it by calling it black. Dyer’s sense of white as symbol applies aptly here, and “questions of color elide with questions of morality” (62). The interesting twist here, is that white-skinned Christians’ acts are marked as black symbolically. Thus, what is reflected in the looking-glass (and portrayed by Apess) is not “white” skin but “black” actions. To continue his polemic on white Christians, Apess asks penetrating questions to incite his readers to look at themselves in relation to those with different-colored skin: Did you even hear or read of Christ teaching his disciples that they ought to despise one because his skin was different from theirs? Jesus Christ being a Jew, and those of his Apostles certainly were not whites—and did not he who completed the plan of salvation complete it for the whites as well as for the Jews, and others? And were not the whites the most degraded people on the earth at that time? (158) Here, Apess plays with Dyer’s sense of white according to skin color while referring to Christianity’s historical roots. To be sure, Dyer notes Christ’s Jewish origin (and, thus, skin color) and then maps out the “distinctly white ways” that Christianity has been viewed: “the gentilising and whitening of the image of Christ and the Virgin in painting; the ready appeal to the God of Christianity in the prosecution of doctrines of racial superiority and imperialism” (17). A salient point that Dyer misses is one that Apess picks up on. At the time of Christ, all “others” or non-Jews, were Gentiles, “and were not the whites [Gentiles] the most degraded