CHAPTER 2
William Apess's Theater
and a ʻNativeʻ
American History

when William Apess stood before a
crowd in 1836 at Boston's Odeon Theater, the Pequot essayist and Indian rebel-
lion leader knew that he had tough acts to follow. Down the street, one of the
most popular thespians of the nineteenth century, Edwin Forrest, had performed
Metamora: The Last of the Wampanoags off and on before packed houses for
nearly five years. The play starring Forrest, only one of dozens staged in the de-
cade about the ʻextinctʻ Indians of the Northeast, told the story of the seventeenth-
century King Philip's War between New England Indians and English settlers.
These plays allowed white viewers in the Northeast to romanticize Indians along
the Eastern Seaboard and to push them into a distant past, even as, farther south,
Andrew Jackson defied the U.S. Supreme Court and ousted the Cherokees from
Georgia.'
Apess, however, did not have to look far to refute a master narrative that
put whites at the center of American history and Native Americans on the mar-
gins. He and others like him were still alive-and kicking. This member of the
so-called extinct Indian tribe had only two years earlier led a revolt in Mashpee
that sought to stop whites from poaching timber from the Massachusetts tribe's 's
reservation. Apess massaged his identity as a ʻPequotʻ Indian and became an
honorary member of the Mashpees to lead the revolt. The rebellion landed him
in jail for a month.2 Now free, he rented the Odeon Theater to prove that Indi-
ans still had something to say. In those two January 1836 performances of the
ʻEulogy on King Philip,ʻ Apess offered a costumed performance as carefully
staged as the Indian melodramas so popular with Jacksonian audiences. But he
offered them in a completely different key. Instead of dishing up fair maidens
and noble but doomed ʻred men,ʻ he created a new story-a new national nar-
ration that rewrote a story of white domination-and told it in a new way. Apess
appeared not in feathers but in the garb of a Bostonian gentleman, and he be-

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