SOURCE: A review of "On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot," in The New England Quarterly, Vol. LXV, No. 4, 1992, pp. 652-54.

Gura is an American educator and critic. In the following review, he lauds Apess as "a writer of great importance and power. "

As those who follow tempests in the academic teapot can testify, for a decade now, particularly after the publication of the much-discussed Heath Anthology of American Literature, the canon of nineteenth-century American literature has been radically altered. In college classrooms all over America Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catharine Maria Sedgwick jostle Hawthorne and Melville, and Frederick Douglass stands text to text with Thoreau. But as we eagerly fit women and African-Americans into our syllabi, it has been much more difficult to recover the voices of the Native Americans. If we have heard them at all, it has been through intermediaries...