William Apess and Copyright Law
Apess’ status as a proprietary author also did not entail complete freedom from the influence of outside forces in the publication of his work. Apess states in the preface to the 1831 second edition of A Son of the Forest, “It has been carefully revised; those parts which some persons deemed objectionable have been stricken out; and in its improved form it is now submitted to the public, with the earnest prayer of the author that it may be rendered a lasting blessing to everyone who may give it even a cursory perusal.”[3] Round helpfully interprets this statement as “demonstrat[ing] [Apess’] rights and powers as a proprietary author” and “perform[ing] in public print his awareness of the ‘social contract’ between authors and readers.’”[4] However, while Apess certainly exercised agency in making and relaying his editorial choices, his decision to remove a section about the discrimination he faced as a Native American in the church[5] also represents a capitulation to the preferences of a majority-settler audience. Apess had to navigate a settler-dominated print culture and all the pressures and mediations it entailed.
Despite the constraints with which Apess dealt as a Native American author, his autobiography subverts the practice of converting Indigenous writing into paratext. The Appendix to A Son of the Forest cites a selection of white and settler authors, whose writing thus functions as paratext to Apess’ autobiography. Yet by centering Indigenous authorial presence and using settler-authored works as paratext, Apess does not simply flip the script by adopting the same appropriative practices historically deployed against Native authors. Instead, he models a genuinely collective, rather than appropriative, approach to authorship and citational practice. In the Introduction to the Appendix, Apess states that he “is indebted in a great measure to the works of the venerated BOUDINOT, late president of the American Bible Society, BRAINARD, COLDEN, and several other gentlemen, as well as to the newspaper press and missionary journals, for many of the interesting facts, &c., which will be found in this department of his work.”[6] By framing his Appendix as a tribute to “venerated” authors to whom he is “indebted,” Apess honors their work rather than subordinate it to his own. He maintains ultimate authority over the text, however, by framing these tributes within a “department of his work.”
Even as writers such as Apess labored to produce works of truly collaborative and Native-centered authorship, the 19th century also saw a project of “memorialization of the noble savage undertaken by Euro-American culture.”[7] Many settler-authored ethnographic texts appropriated the communally-authored stories and traditions of Indigenous communities. The following page will examine one such text by Canadian settler writer John Reade.
[1] Phillip H. Round, “Proprietary Authorship,” 153.
[2] Ibid., 156.
[3] William Apess and Barry O'Connell, “A Son of the Forest (1831).” In On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 3.
[4] Phillip H. Round, “Proprietary Authorship,” 163.
[5] William Apess and Barry O'Connell, “A Son of the Forest (1831),” 3.
[6] Apess, William. A Son of the Forest. The Experience of William Apes, A Native of the Forest. Comprising a Notice of the Pequod Tribe of Indians. Written by Himself (New York, 1829), Introduction to the Appendix.
[7] Phillip H. Round, “Proprietary Authorship,” 158.