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 | | Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America by Daniel K. Richter ISBN-10: 9780674011175 ISBN-10: 0-674-01117-1 ISBN-13: 9780674011175 ISBN-13: 978-0-674-01117-5 Paperback 2003-04-30 Harvard University Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description In the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers. Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States. Viewed from Indian country, the sixteenth century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make sense of a new world. Well into the seventeenth century, the most profound challenges to Indian life came less from the arrival of a relative handful of European colonists than from the biological, economic, and environmental forces the newcomers unleashed. Drawing upon their own traditions, Indian communities reinvented themselves and carved out a place in a world dominated by transatlantic European empires. In 1776, however, when some of Britain's colonists rebelled against that imperial world, they overturned the system that had made Euro-American and Native coexistence possible. Eastern North America only ceased to be an Indian country because the revolutionaries denied the continent's first peoples a place in the nation they were creating. In rediscovering early America as Indian country, Richter employs the historian's craft to challenge cherished assumptions about times and places we thought we knew well, revealing Native American experiences at the core of the nation's birth and identity. (20011015) | ||
Reviews | ||
Essential Excellent treatment of the real history of the USA, almost never covered in the standard texts. Well written, fascinating, this book tells the larger story using many more intimate ones. A must read for anyone with an interest in what really happened between 1492 and the early years of The Republic. If this book appeals to you I also recommend Angie Debo's excellent "The Road to Disappearance." | ||
Interesting but Problematic What happened in the New World before the Europeans? What did the Indians think of the Europeans from discovery to colonization to the American government of the early 19th century? Was the destruction of Indian race inevitable from the very first European explorations and colonizations? These are fascinating questions & Native American and Colonial Historian, Daniel K. Richter attempts to answer them and, thus, understand the Indian's role in the European conquest of their land. Richter, a white historian hundreds of years later, attempts to understand the Indian experience largely through documents written about them. For instance, he takes the De Soto Chronicles, written by participants in the Spanish explorer's exploration through the American Southeast from 1539 to 1542, and attempts to turn them inside out and tell them from the point of view of the Indians who the Conquistadores encountered. This sort of speculative history is akin to imagining other people's thoughts and feelings without asking them. This sort of 20/20 psychological hindsight is dubious at best and presumptive at worst. Throughout the narrative, Richter adopts a latter-day politically correct understanding sympathetic to the Indians and damning of the Europeans. This "moral hindsight" conveniently ignores the decidedly un-p.c time the participants lived in. Today, one can argue what the imperial colonizers did was wrong. One can conversely argue the colonizers acted and thought in the context of their own time. Richter does an excellent job delineating the clash of cultures between east (European) and west (Indian). Richter, like any historian, is on firmest ground when he deals with recorded facts. One can hardly imagine two cultures being more dissimilar. Differences in technology, agriculture, spirituality, & commerce rendered the Indians historically primordial compared to the European powers. One could argue that the fact they spoke different languages was the least of their worries. The Europeans colonized to The New World for two predominant reasons: to make money and, then, to spread Christianity. From the outset, it is abundantly clear the technologically inferior Indians were burdened with the task of assimilating and cooperating with the European powers for their own survival. For the Europeans, any cooperation was merely a matter of expediency. As long as these Indians are here, we might as well work with them on their terms so as to make a buck off them and "civilize" them as long as they aren't too much of a hassle to us. Thus is the history of imperial colonization. Power conveys the conceit of doing the weak a favor by allowing them to participate on any level. The Europeans, for the most part, paid little heed to the Indian communities, religions, culture, and agriculture they were displacing and destroying. Contact with the diseases brought by Europeans devastated the Indian population and was a crushing blow the Indians never recovered from. Entire tribes ceased to exist or were permanently displaced. Consequently, remnants of surviving tribes combined to make new tribes, or nations. Thus, not only did the Indians have to contend with the alien Europeans but were oblidged to mix and match cultures, religions, & traditions in their own communities. The Europeans wasted no effort in exploiting these internal conflicts and the constant warfaring that had always existed between the tribes. After a time, Europeans and Indians were able to achieve a sort of seperate but unequal status quo. As long as the Indians behaved, they were allowed trade with the Europeans. The trade was heavily weighted to favor the Europeans, of course. It is very telling that the Europeans were able to impose their faith on the Indians and not vice/versa. There is no convincing evidence that the Indians were any other than a weaker partner at the mercy of the Europeans. When the Americans won their revolution and established their own government, they discontinued the colonial model and began to treat the Indians as hostiles in a strange (American) country. The time of intercultural cooperation came to an end and the era of expansion and its accompanying extermination and forcible displacement began. In the end, I think Richter fails to support his assertions that 1) European settlers and Indians ever coexisted on any sort of equal bearing for any time and 2) the Indians were not doomed to either cultural extinction wrought by colonization or actual extinction at the hands of the Americans. Ironically, he provides the excellent historical research to defeat his own premise. | ||
Life of Indians The story depicts the struggles of early Indians on the American continent. The indian unwillingness to assimilate to the early colonists causes widespread turmoil for both races. Bloodshed occurs because the early Americans wanted to dominate this land without condition. Since the Indians resisted the effort, all kinds of killings occurred. One side avenging for the acts of the other and vice versa. This makes facing east a long road for environmental dominance by the Americans. | ||
Bad History The book has many problem sin my view as a history graduate student. Although many important arguments were included in this work, I found it to be a struggle to determine which was an "Eastern" view or an actual fact. Richter used his imagination a bit too much. Sometimes historians have to make the best possible interpretation but going on a limb and guessing what someone may have thought is not HISTORY. Furthermore, Richter is somewhat unclear throughout the work. He switches between imagination and reality, and sometimes it becomes a task in itself deciphering what is his idea or fact. Richter uses almost NO missionary documents when trying to argue his point. Very few examples of missionary texts were given, creating a situation of where did your idea come from. Furthermore, Richter generalizes far too much. A tribe in Delaware is not going to react similar to one in S. Carolina. While trying to put his point across he fails to discuss changing regimes in Europe (England, France, and Spain) and their effect on colonial policies against natives. He mentions that Louis XIV wants natives wiped out, but says nothing of the Stuarts or Hapsburg policies. Now I understand this was supposed to be a work facing east, not west, but Richter seemed to go too far outside the scope of the sources and use his imagination a little to often. What happen to American Natives was sad, but imagining history to glorify them does not do justice to them or the faculty of history. | ||
"Eastward" Approach of Studying Native Americans Traditional histories of Native Americans have focused on the point of view, or history, of European Americans. But in 2001, historian Daniel Ricther breaks this trend in his novel work - Facing East From Indian Country. The "eastward" approach incorporates the interpretations, or stories, of early Native Americans who observed the movements of Europeans from eastern America. His research is by no means exhaustive, but advances a fresh perspective of the scant pre-existing primary sources on early Native Americans. His sophisticated synthesis and analysis of the aforementioned sources, coupled with his incisive imagination shed light on a virtually untold Native American history. Richter chronologically organizes his work and concentrates heavily on early colonial times in his opening chapters, which appear to be his area of expertise. His passages of primary sources are often lengthy and precariously worded, but his strong narrative and eloquent articulation of Indian culture supersede these minor distractions. Revisiting the oft told stories of Pocahontas and Metacon, Ricther articulately portrays these individuals as being champions of peaceful co-existence, and cooperation, in the New World. In addition to the previously noted amenable traits, Native Americans also possessed sound diplomatic skills. For instance, Richter provides considerable detail about the sophisticated "treaty protocol" that early Americans utilized. Noting that this process "ideally consisted of nine stages," ( 135) Ricther explicitly detailed the expectations of Iroquois during these meetings in the mid-eighteenth century and illuminated the European's poor cultural understanding of these protocols. These examples, and others, highlighted the European's ignorance of Indian culture. The latter chapters chronicle the Indians transgression from peaceful co-existence with the Europeans in the eighteenth century to all out war with them in the early nineteenth century. In the mid-eighteenth century, for instance, Ricther convincingly argues that "diversity wrought an increasingly pervasive view that Indians and Whites were utterly different, and utterly incompatible." (180) These views became more solidified in the nineteenth century. And Indians gradually surrendered more rights, and property, in the New World. In the epilogue, which was more suited for the introduction or opening chapters, Ricther outlines the writings of Native American writer William Apess who sought to promote an eastward narrative of Indian history in the early eighteenth century. According to Richter, his work was silenced by European histories. This work, in closing, creates new opportunities for scholars to re-interpret Native American history. This paradigm shift will likely lead to more sophisticated studies of early Indian culture in the New World, and ultimately add to our rather meager understanding of Indian history. A must read for Native American scholars and graduate and undergraduate history students who wish to broaden their understanding of early American history. | ||