William Apess (1798-1839), a Pequot, was an itinerant Methodist minister who preached to communities of Native and African Americans and poor whites in New York and Connecticut. He may have been the first Native American to write and publish his autobiography, first issued in 1829, in which he articulates issues of Indian identity. He played an instrumental role the Mashpee Indians’ struggle to self-govern their Massachusetts town in 1834, publishing his account of this crisis in Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts (1835).
Source:
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.
