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The two earliest indigenous North American writers from whom extensive bodies of writing in English survive -- Samson Occom (Mohegan, 1723-1792) and William Apess (Pequot, 1798-1839) -- both received an Anglo-American education, converted to Christianity in their youth, and became ordained clergymen. At the same time, they consistently write from an indigenous perspective, representing themselves as belonging to an ancient people who belong to North American soil, who have no collective memory of having been elsewhere, and who have suffered injustices in a colonial situation. Scholarship in Native American Studies has devoted increasing attention to Occom and Apess (e.g., O’Connell 1992, Konkle 2004, Warrior 2005, Brooks 2006, Brooks 2008, Chiles 2014, Weaver 2014, Lopenzina 2017), but a noticeable theme in their writings has yet to receive sustained discussion, either in reception studies or in indigenous studies: their uses of the prestigious Greco-Roman or “classical” antiquity of settler-colonial culture.

In this paper I focus on the following in particular: Occom’s self-presentation in his journals, marginalia, and correspondence as a multilingual Mohegan who has mastered English as a second language and puts on display his knowledge of Latin (Vance 2016, Williams forthcoming); Apess’ deployment, in his autobiographical A Son of the Forest and his Eulogy on King Philip, of moments from Greek and Roman history (such as the military successes of Philip of Macedon and the Gallic sack of Rome in 390 BC) in support of his antiracist and anticolonial agenda; and both writers’ strategies for talking back against views of American Indians as savage and barbarous, which include pointedly contrasting the Greeks and Romans widely respected by the Anglo-Americans of their day as cultural forebears with the ancient Britons whom those same people claimed as genealogical ancestors, and issuing fundamental challenges to the Anglo-American language of “civilization.” At the paper’s end I suggest that Occom and Apess are key figures in the history of Native North American receptions of Greco-Roman antiquity from the late seventeenth century to today and that they illustrate some of its characteristic features: by positioning Greece and Rome within a broad view of human history as seen from North America, they decenter Greco-Roman antiquity while contributing to ongoing processes of indigenous survivance. (See Vizenor 1994 for the concept of “survivance”; for the earliest surviving and one of the most recent examples in the history of Native North American receptions of Greco-Roman antiquity, see Williams 2021 and Freiert 2013 respectively; see Laird 2014 for sixteenth-century Latin texts by indigenous Mexicans.)