That might also be the fate of the “Indian Preacher” – the figure who emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and who stretched their mind to the breaking point trying to find some conversation, if not commensurability, between Indigenous and European epistemologies.

Perhaps it is not only the “traditional” Indian who has suffered indignity and is thus in need of recuperation.

We can regard this pile as the wreckage of those who have been discarded by regimes of “civilization.” As Benjamin reminds us: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (vii). Is it something like Benjamin’s “theology” that Native people cite when we speak of “traditional knowledge” – an alternative epistemology emerging out of deep time relationalities?īut as we seek alternative visions of history-and futurity-Benjamin asks us to contemplate a “single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” (ix). It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to suggest that the hunchback is to Europe as the Indian is to North America: a figure whose image has been subjected to every kind of ridicule and distortion but whose mind is all the more perspicacious, in part, because of these indignities. The hunchback-as-theology is part of the motley crew of archaic but clairvoyant figures whom Benjamin sought to recuperate, because it is they who upend modern orientations to history and with that, the structures of political formation. The puppet in Benjamin’s parable is “historical materialism” and the little hunchback is “theology.” It is the hunchback who is clued into the illusory artifice of modernity to which most are oblivious, who continues to move influentially and astutely within contemporary society even if his stature has been diminished. Who has understood the course of history? Who can channel its world-making power? In the opening to his Theses on the Concept of History in 1940, Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish, Marxist mystic, imagined an expert chess-playing puppet whose hands are guided by a “little hunchback” who has “wisened, and keeps out of sight” (i). Taken together, their penetrating visions not only elucidate the violent currents moving through discourses of time but disrupt the spatial and temporal terrains within which the oppressive and redemptive work of political theology, very literally, “takes place.” William Apess, the surprising-to-many nineteenth-century Pequot performer/minister/activist, fiercely articulates the colonial and anti-colonial stakes of the political theological imaginary from an Indigenous New England vantage point. How do the past and future impinge upon the “now” of political theology? This two-part essay triangulates temporality from the vantage points of two thinkers: the well-known, if perplexing German Jewish political theologian, Walter Benjamin, offers a riveting twentieth-century, European Marxist perspective.

Apess son of the forest summary