It seems to me that Indians had a terrible life, and the white men were horrible, horrible people. However, it seems to me that Apess and Occom have some different outlooks on the matter. Apess takes a strong defiant stand. Two quotes that really jumped out at me were "I'll venture to say, these very characters who hold the skin to be such a barrier in the way, would be the first to cry out, injustice! awful injustice!" and "And you know as well as I that you are not indebted to a principle beneath a white skin for your religious services, but to a colored one." The first of these I found significant because it is the most blatant, straightforward punch to the white man's dignity that I could find in this essay. I almost envision that little kid who always complains about the other kid cheating at a game when he clearly isn't, and then cheating himself to try to win, but still failing to the other non-cheating kid and pitching a temper tantrum. The second was interesting because it was basically a slap to the face of the white man. The idea that Jesus, who they claim that they are doing everything for, wasn't white either, but a colored man. The sheer hypocrisy of the whites makes you a bit queasy. Occum, however, was different. I see Occum as being that annoying little nerd in the school yard who always got pushed around, never caring to put up a fight, and then told people how much he was going to beat up his tormentors the next time he saw them, but of course not. His writing is not as angry as Apess's by any stretch of the imagination, but it still succeeds in proving the whites to be selfish, self-righteous jerks. They pushed him around for all of Occum's life, and never until the end did Occum complain about how whites doing the exact same job as he were getting paid ten times more, and how he had to spend his whoe life living off of all his own work, and how no one would give him a break. Boo hoo. He was such a pushover. Regardless, his writing still manages to very successfully prove the same flaws of the white men as outlined in Apess's work.
Your take on Occom illustrates one of the problems of a quick survey course; he had actually complained for some time, but he regarded the establishment of a school for Indians to be so important that he traveled to England with another minister to raise money for that purpose. Wheelock took that money and founded the college that is now known as Dartmouth. It was for white kids. In short, the man lied and stole the money -- 200 pounds of which was a donation from King George. Apess was a major leader in the fight for the rights of Indians, but remember that Occom was the first Indian to have serious work published in the new world.
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