SOURCE: "Nineteenth-Century American Indian Autobiographers, " in Redefining American Literary History, edited by A. La Vonne Brown Rouff and Jerry Ward, Jr., The Modern Language Association of America, 1990, pp. 251-69.

Ruoff is an American educator and critic who specializes in Native American literature. In the following excerpt, she discusses the narrative style and techniques Apess employed in his autobiography, A Son of the Forest.

The first published, full-life history written by an Indian is William Apes's Son of the Forest: The Experience of William Apes, a Native of the Forest (1829). Published in the midst of the controversy over [the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the federal government to resettle Indians], Apes's autobiography, which appeared in a revised and expanded edition in 1831, is a testimony both to the essential humanity of Indian people and to their potential for adapting to white concepts of civilization. A Son of the Forest...