Behind the Scenes Minis: William Apess

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and I'm Holly Crying today or this week. We talked on the show for two episodes about William APIs. Sure did, Yeah, I didn't. I didn't expect that to become a two parter because, uh, there are a couple of biographies of him, one of which I read and the other I kind of skimmed through highlights of. Uh, they're both pretty short. Like I was surprised at the length of the Lucy Parsons book when I got it from the library. I had the opposite experience with the William APIs biography. The first one that I picked up from the library. It was like even smaller of a volume than I thought it was going to be. Um, partly because he did die at such a young age, and then partly because they're just parts of it where we don't know a lot of details. Uh. I really was like, yeah, it's gonna be one part. It's gonna be pretty easy and straightforward. And then every time I read anything he wrote, I was like, well, I want to put that quote in the episode. I want to put this quote in the episode two. What if we had a whole episode where we just read this entire piece that seemed maybe a little excessive, But I I had a lot more trouble figuring out things not to include in the episode from his writing than I often do when when working on the you know, a podcast on somebody who wrote lots of things that we have available to read. There is the law of inversion where pretty much every time I go into an episode going this is gonna be a breezy, quick one to put together. No, And often there the opposite happens, where I'm like, oh, I got really like a walk around the perimeter of this one and like really get the lay of the land. And then I'll be like, oh, I just dropped that off, Like I think, yeah, probably because I'm approaching it that way, I get a better holistic sense of the whole thing before I even start writing. And then it's like off to the races. But yes, the accidental two parter is a thing that happens so much. Um so many things about his life are things that are still so so relevant today. I mean, we talked specifically about the mash b Wompang's having the whole part of very recently having been informed that their reservation was going to be disestablished. You know that that was uh an example that we gave of like how this was still all of this is still ongoing, but a lot of stuff in a more general way is still a big issue. Like, Um, it's clear that the situation of William and his siblings with their grandmother was not a good situation. Also, removing Indigenous children from an Indigenous family and putting them with a white family has historically been used intentionally to try to like get Native kids out of their home environment um and to to like quote assimilate them with a white family. And it's something that's all going on today. There's a lot in the United States on the books called AQUA, that's the Indian Child Welfare Act that was passed in like specifically to address this, to to to try to cut down on the number of Native children who are taken from Native families and placed into foster care or adopted by white families. Um. After you know, generations of that having been done intentionally, UH. And there have been ongoing court cases in recent years arguing that this law is discriminatory against white families. Um. And that is way bigger of a topic than we can get to in this behind the scenes episode. But the podcast This Land has a whole season that is just about that, like following the court cases that have been evolving specifically about this, so that like as I was researching, it was like this just resonates with a lot of things that are still really happening today, and also just a lot of more general stuff about, uh, what sovereignty means, and what different indigenous people want sovereignty sovereignty to mean. How a lot of the laws that we have in place that are about indigenous people were passed by white legislatures and are like a really European view of looking at things. Um, like the idea of how much quote Indian blood somebody has ties into all of this. Also because mashp had had a lot of wampanaged people, but also people of other nations, there are people who tried to argue like, well, that's not really a tribe, that's just a bunch of different people that happened to live together. Uh. And for a lot of Indigenous nations, like inner marriages and people being adopted into a different nation than they had been born into. Is like just a part of how society works and the idea that it would not be that something that uh that you know, a majority white government put into place to try to control people and where they lived and what they had access to. So this whole episode continually like that's still happening right well, And I know this is an episode that UM is very tricky in regard to the way that APS was using some of the same arguments that people had used historically to oppress indigenous people's Like that's that's some tricky stuff to work through, yeah, Um, And he was doing all that with a mostly self taught education, UM, which I'd find to be extraordinary, Like he he found ways to use a Western set of rhetoric, a Western mindset to kind of turn that in on itself to argue for indigenous people's sovereignty, having um had six winters of formal education, UM, which uh, you know that he his library does not sound like that many books when we have talked about other people on the show who had volume like three thousand volume libraries. As an itinerant minister, he had assembled a library of something like forty one books some of them multi volume works without having the kind of resources that a lot of the people that we have talked about who have had gigantic libraries had. So it's like he he learned how to make his points in a way that was really effective in a society that had intentionally tried to make him not have the skills to do that, which is amazing. Um. Also, I was raised Methodist, uh, And having been raised Methodist, like, I know the basics, you know, I know the basic history of Methodism as a denomination, but I find it hilarious every time I find historical writing that's like and then the Methodist they were so radical. People thought it was weird how radical the Methodists were. And I'm like Methodists were not radical enough for the young Tracy V. Wilson as a teenager. So there are scans of a whole lot of William Abiss work. You can mind a lot of it at archive dot org, a lot of it at various university websites, UM, and stuff that you can read yourself if you're interested in that. I'm glad that there are a couple of biographies that have come out on him in the last few years. UM. And I I hope he'll become better known. Like I can't remember exactly where I first stumbled across his name, uh, but it was one of the people that I was like. I really like he has been compared to somebody like Frederick Douglas in terms of his life and his work that he was doing, but of course not nearly as as well known of a name as Frederick Douglas. So so again, Happy Friday. I hope everybody's weekend it's going to be as great as possible. We'll be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and then back on Monday with a brand new episode. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. 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