Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America [Paperback]

Dr. Daniel K. Richter (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674011171 | ISBN-13: 978-0674011175 | Publication Date: April 30, 2003 | Edition: First Edition

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)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At the center of this bold and thoroughly astonishing history of Native Americans are narratives of three Indians generally known to Euro-Americans: Pocahontas, Blessed Catherine Tekakwitha and the Algonquin warrior Metacom, also known as King Philip. Telling each of these stories a romance, the life of a saint, the destruction of a "noble savage" from the European and then the Native American perspective, Richter elucidates an alternative history of America from Columbus to just after the Revolution. Taking his cues from historian Carl Becker's famous assertion that history is "an imaginative creation," Richter, director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, recasts early American history from the Native American point of view and in doing so illuminates as much about the Europeans as about the original Americans. After explaining the vast scope of Native American culture probably more then two million native people lived east of the Mississippi in 1492 in villages that were "decentralized and diverse, but not disconnected" Richter reconstructs the Native American experience of the European. Using a variety of sources missionary tracts, official state art (the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company featured a native with the words "Come Over and Help Us"), military reports and religious writings by both Europeans and Native Americans he describes a world far more layered than that of accepted U.S. history. Exploring the varying complexities of different native peoples' relationships with England, France and Spain, he argues that the Native Americans were safer during the colonial era than after the Revolution, when the idea of a white, democratic country took hold. Gracefully written and argued, Richter's compelling research and provocative claims make this an important addition to the literature for general readers of both Native American and U.S. studies.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the acclaimed The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Univ. of North Carolina, 1992), Richter here offers a masterly work that eschews the long-standing perception that Native Americans were nothing more than marginalized bystanders as Europeans colonized North America. Focusing on the period between the 15th and 18th centuries, the author instead shows that Native American communities adapted to the many stresses introduced by the arrival of the Europeans and were active participants in creating a new way of life on the continent. This title, which should be read alongside Richard White's The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge Univ., 1991), provides a valuable perspective that is often overlooked in books about the same period. Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries. John Burch, Campbellsville Univ. Lib., KY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press; First Edition edition (April 30, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674011171
• ISBN-13: 978-0674011175
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #25,315 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #36 in Books > History > Americas > United States > Colonial Period

More About the Author

Dan Richter teaches early American History at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he also directs the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. His first book, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, won the 1993 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians and the 1993 Ray Allen Billington Prize, Organization of American Historians, and was selected a 1994 Choice Outstanding Academic Book. His Facing East from Indian Country won the 2001-02 Louis Gottschalk Prize in Eighteenth-Century History and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A different view, March 13, 2002

By 

"michaeleve" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Hardcover)

This book is by no means the first, nor the most comprehensive analysis of early American history with a Native American perspective. The writing style is straightforward and matter-of-fact and not as dramatic or emotional as the tale as told in BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE. Nevertheless this book is evocative of Dee Brown's book largely because of the same emphasis on Native Americans. Also because it too uses Native American history and traditions as the framework in which to look at North America, from discovery through to the 17th century.

One of the things that happens when FACING EAST FROM INDIAN COUNTRY is that you get a different picture of time and events. Traditionally the story of early America is a westward moving one, and one which quickly becomes a story about Europeans and an emerging people called American's.

One of the most profound impressions this book will leave with you is a view of the East Coast of North America as dominantly Indian country for more than a hundred years after initial settlement. Even more startling is Richter's well reasoned argument that Eastern North America only ceased to be Indian country when following 1776, the now fully emergent American's "denied the continent's first peoples a place in the nation they were creating."

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thinking Opposite and Otherwise, August 29, 2006

By 

Daniel A. Stone (Schenectady, New York United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Paperback)

Most historians have sufficient presence of mind to clear from their brains the Panglossian cant which insists we live in the best of all possible worlds. The best histories, of which Daniel K. Richter's Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America is most certainly one, are able to envision a historical narrative where paths not taken would lead to a counterfactual narrative to our own.

To this end, Richter musters the sources traditional to any historian--varied secondary sources, the journals of participants of historical interactions between Natives and Europeans, literary sources by Natives and sundry oral sources likely to be their own. Utilizing a vast knowledge of the period between the first arrival of Europeans in the Americas through the period of "Jacksonian Democracy," Richter paints a lucid picture of European interaction with the tribes of North America, and how it altered the behavior of all parties involved. This narrative is neither a record of triumphant civilization moving west, nor is it an account of genocide moving ferociously from East--though Richter makes clear both of these fit, respectively, into American myth and American realty--he is much more concerned with how the cultures interacted with each other in creating the circumstances that Natives lived under and how they viewed their changing world.

Richter's approach to understanding how the world did and would appear to Natives is grounded in the understanding that commerce, politics, environment, and ideologies will be discernibly altered by any new presence. Just as North America became a new market for European goods, so Europe allowed for the prospering of some tribes through a need for raw materials such as leather and beaver pelts. The same interaction could, and did, sometimes, lead to intertribal and international conflict (as well as a combination of both at once) or to the unforeseen environmental degradations associated with depopulating a large area of beavers. Richter's understanding of history acknowledges the law of unforeseen consequences--a law that is in fact central to his explanation of how so many Native communities were wiped out, radically altered, even created by European diseases--and how a good deal of the history between Europeans and Natives was the result reciprocal relations and not conflict, to say nothing of an irreconcilable conflict.

Perhaps the most interesting area Richter explores is in the realm of culture. The importation of European goods, African slaves, and Christianity led to profound changes in the ways that many natives lived. The foreseeable creations of Moravian, Catholic, or Anglican communities of Natives; changes in work wrought by iron made tools and warfare through the importation of muskets; expansion of world views due to contact with truly foreign cultures: all of these were the logical consequences of European arrival in North America. These facts were do as much to reciprocity and basic cultural interchanges as they are to the unequal relations that materialized between the two cultures as time passed. Richter is keen to point out that none of this was solely the result of the conqueror and subject role which so Natives were forced to accept.

Richter does not shy away from showing the disgraceful, murderous, and ultimately tragic side Euro-American and Native American relations. Throughout the whole of the book, Richter carefully records the injustices, massacres, broken promises and treaties, as well as the demagoguery that insured Natives even less than second class status. Richter quite convincingly argues that it is the proliferation of all of these factors which led to the creation of an ideology of irreconcilable conflict between Natives and Europeans--later Americans. By implication, Richter shows that this myth required those who believed it to repudiate, if not altogether forget, much past history.

To steal a phrase from Professor Ronald Takaki, Richter is able to look at history through a different mirror. Through his creative reading of the history of Native contact with their own New World, Richter does much illuminate what was one of the most central tragedies of American history.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars we need more voices like these, April 11, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Hardcover)

There are far too few books like this, that dare to make the imaginative leap to express the point of view of another culture. Mr. Richter's achievement is to give us a way to stand in the "shoes" of those who greeted us when we arrived on these shores, tried to understand us and live with us, and ultimately were decimated by the policies that we, as immigrant peoples, put in place. I would highly recommend that readers pair this with Kent Nerburn's Neither Wolf nor Dog, another work that takes us deep inside the hearts and minds of those who inhabited this land before us. We need more books like these. They show that it is not impossible to enter into the self consciousness and self understanding of people who see the American experience through very different eyes.