James Fenimore Cooper:

According to the Norton, Cooper was the “first successful American novelist” (460). You have potentially been influenced by the long legacy of Cooper, in fact. Cooper was instrumental in constructing the nostalgic and exoticized version of Native people that has pervaded American literature and culture since his day.

Cooper’s famous novels include his Leatherstocking series (including the novels The Pioneers, The Pathfinder, and Last of the Mohicans), Notions of the Americans, and The Spy. The contents of his novels varied over his life, however he is best known today for his Leatherstocking series, novels which took place in upstate New York in the generation before Cooper’s own. He depicts Leatherstocking and his Native allies as belonging to a generation that has now passed. This nostalgia produces, in some ways, a safe image of the ideal Indian, one whose ways and tradfitionals have either fallen into obsolesence or have been eradicated all together my the push of American modenrity and growth.

In the passage included in the Norton, from 1823’s The Pioneers, we see Leatherstocking as an incarnation on the hybrid American, one in touch with the natural truths of nature –like an Indian – but, and importantly, white.

Consider the hybrid identity of Leatherstocking. What truths does he recognize that the white pigeon-shooters cannot see, or refuse to see? What is the consequence of their avarice?

What do you make of Cooper’s use of the phrase, on at least a couple of occasions, “feathered tribe,” to describe the pigeons?

D. H. Lawrence wrote of Cooper in his essays “Feminore Cooper’s White Novels” and “Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels.” These essays were published in Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature. Lawrence makes many compelling statements about Cooper, his Leatherstocking novels, and Natty Bumppo (referred to in your excerpt as Leatherstocking). Lawrence writes:

“The Leatherstocking novels create the myth of [a] new relation. And they go backwards, from old age to golden youth. That is the true myth of America. She starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing of of the old skin, towards a new youth. It is the myth of America” (SCAL 60).

How does the passage “The Slaughter of the Pigeons” reinforce this idea of an American ideal, a “true myth”? How does Cooper juxtapose a kind of ancient American idealism – subsistence, conservation, rugged individualism – with the “modern” reality of America?



William Apess:

Apess’s An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man is a powerfully worded indictment of white hypocrisy, specifically as this hypocrisy relates to white Americans’ avowal of Christian faith. As your Norton explains, Apess’s account is marked by “the oratory style of a practiced preacher” as well as by “a sense of power of the spoken word in native cultures” (477). What aspects of his text reveal his skill as a preacher? Which aspects appear demonstrative of the “power of the spoken word” in native cultures?

We discussed many of his biblical references in class. The most powerful among them are those in which he maligns white Americans for their persistent practice of using skin color as a “pretext to keep us,” Apess writes, “from our inalienable and lawful rights” (478). Apess dwells on skin colors; he references what he sees as a biblical precedent for the value of dark skinned people. He writes, “If black or red skins or any other skin of color is disgraceful to God, it appears that he has disgraced himself a great deal—for he has made fifteen colored people to one white and placed them here upon this earth” (478-9). He relies upon divine writ, as it were, to support his claim for equality among races and to strengthen his attack again white racism as it affects Native Americans and black Americans. What other examples, in addition to the above proclamation, does Apess include?

Consider the following statement of Apess’s: “What is all this ado about missionary societies, if it be not to Christianize those who are not Christians? And what is it for? To degrade them worse, to bring them into society where they must welter out their days in disgrace merely because their skin is of a different complexion” (480). This last sentence is a statement: the purpose of these society is to degrade Americans of color. How does Apess resolve his identity as both a Christian and a Native American, then? If the Christian faith brings the unconverted into fold only to degrade them, how can Apess avow such a faith? Or, if the faith itself is not the problem, how did the application of its principles become so perverted?

We discussed the following quote from Barry O’Connell’s On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot: “The very terminologies of an Americanist discourse, which value Euro-Americans precisely through implied contrast to their Indian opposites, are expropriated, inverted, or used as though they could characterize Indians as aptly as Euro-Americans. This ‘Rev. William Apess, an Indian,’ confounds savage and civilized, pagan and Christian, devil and saint, villain and hero, the polarities upon which Euro-American culture has built its sense of legitimacy, of its superiority to Native and African Americans. The binary logic of ‘us/them’ is riddled by Apess’s words” (xxii). There is plenty in An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man to support Barry O’Connell’s argument here. Please identify a few passages that demonstrate Apess’s “expropriation” of the binaries from which Euro-Americans have derived a sense of power and superiority.