In addition to the Israelites, Apess aligned his origin story with that of Wampanoag Chief Metacomet, or King Philip. Not the least because of his ancestry, Apess, a Pequot man, felt a kinship with the Wampanoag people, undoubtedly in part after his “adoption” by the Mashpee tribe during his years on Cape Cod. In his sermon “Euology on King Philip,” Apess exults Metacomet as hero and visionary: “How true his prophecy,” he writes, “that the white people would not only cut down their groves but would enslave them. Had the inspiration of Isaiah been there, he could not have been more correct. Our groves and hunting grounds are gone, our dead are dug up, our council fires are put out, and a foundation was laid in the first Legislature to enslave our people, by taking from them all rights, which has been strictly adhered to ever since” (Apess 306).

Later in the sermon, he pronounces Metacomet “the greatest man that was ever in America … to the everlasting disgrace of the Pilgrims’ fathers” (308). He then breaks from English to recite the Lord’s Prayer in Metacomet’s language: “We will now give you his language in the Lord’s Prayer:

Noo-chun kes-uk-qut-tiam-at-am unch koo-we-su-onk, kuk-ket-as- sootam-oonk pey-au-moo-utch, keet-te-nan-tam-oo-onk ne nai; ne-ya- ne ke-suk-qutkah oh-ke-it; aos-sa-ma-i-in-ne-an ko-ko-ke-stik-o-da-e nutas-e-suk-ok-ke fu-tuk-qun-neg; kah ah-quo-an-tam-a-i-in-ne-an nummatch-e-se-ong-an-on-ash, ne-match-ene-na-mun wonk neet-ah- quoantam-au-o-un-non-og nish-noh pasuk noo-na-mortuk-quoh-who- nan, kah chaque sag-kom-pa-ginne-an en qutch-e-het-tu-ong-a-nit, qut pohqud-wus-sin-ne-an watch match-i-tut.”

This is a powerful and anomalous moment in the sermon, for it performs in literal terms what Apess aims to do metaphorically: rescript a piece of the commonly-held Puritan Christian narrative for the express purposes of Indigenous continuance and resistance.




I include the Wampanoag Bible here as a poignant symbol of this type of syncretism and its afterlives in Indigenous writing projects in the area now called New England. Judeo-Christian frameworks, and more specifically Puritan millennialist narratives, were used to assimilate and vanish the tribes that inhabited this area prior to colonization. But in the mouths of Apess and Occom, those same narratives, those same metaphors, articulate something else. They are the metaphors that, through the complex negotiation of old and new covenant theologies, constitute a political refusal of settler encroachment. Currently, the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project (WLRP) uses the Wampanoag Bible, published in 1663, and its script to provide tribal members a means to reclaim their “sacred privilege and right” — their language. What might be viewed as a vestige of Puritan millennialism becomes a means of reclamation, the act of speaking a conduit for words, symbols, and metaphors that are entirely their own.