In a 2018 address to the Israeli Knesset, Vice President Pence declared: “In the story of the Jews, we’ve always seen the story of America. It is the story of an exodus, a journey from persecution to freedom, a story that shows the power of faith and the promise of hope. My country’s very first settlers also saw themselves as pilgrims, sent by Providence, to build a new Promised Land.” The settler trope of the North American colonies as the New Zion, and the self-modeling of New England Puritans as the New Israelites, not only continues to characterize the public rhetoric of US national formation but historically has provided Indigenous writers with a powerful narrative of resistance and freedom.

In this presentation, I will explore William Apess's short text, “The Indians: The Ten Lost Tribes” (1831), as an instance of Indigenous appropriation of US national rhetoric. Apess's subversion of American exceptionalism and his promotion of Native rights is contextualized by contemporaneous accounts of Native Americans as the lost tribes of Israel. For instance, Mordecai Manuel Noah's 1837 Discourse on the Evidences of American Indians Being the Ten Tribes of Israel followed his efforts in the 1820s to establish the nation of Israel (which he proposed to call “Ararat”) in western New York, on traditional Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe lands. Apess positions Indigenous peoples within the Christian Zionist narrative that assimilates the Biblical Israel to the settler US, and thus he is able simultaneously to dismantle the providential importance attributed to settlers (as the New Israelites) and also to claim that the status of Indigenous communities as descendants of God's original “Chosen People” underlines the urgency of their political claims to sovereignty, rights, and freedoms. In this 250th anniversary year of the settler nation, William Apess's voice deserves to be heard as a powerful testament to Indigenous resistance and the struggle for freedom.