41 pages • 1 hour read
Daniel K. RichterFacing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Cultural Accommodation
A persistent theme of the book is how Indigenous people accommodated European newcomers by drawing on aspects of colonial life and society, which they then adapted to their own uses and rules. This accommodation stemmed from the community-oriented view of the world common among Indigenous cultures, and it included the incorporation of everything from European goods to European religion.
Richter notes that Indigenous people often adapted European pots and other metal objects by melting them down and remaking them into more familiar and useful objects—appropriating the imported technology of metalworking for their own purposes. Later, as European trade networks grew, they began to reshape the material lives of Indigenous peoples in ways that the colonists could not have anticipated. Mass-manufactured wampum became a form of currency exchanged between Indigenous groups, and woolen blankets became an indispensable part of many Indigenous cultures. These changes occurred as Indigenous groups took from the colonists what was useful to them and adapted it to their own needs.
In conflicts, Indigenous groups and Europeans relied on one another as allies, and early American settlers sometimes found themselves conscripted into existing wars among Indigenous peoples. The marriage of Pocahontas to John Rolfe is an example of an attempted diplomatic alliance, as the Powhatan people sought to bring Europeans into their Indigenous world according to Indigenous norms. Early Indigenous Christians like Kateri Tekakwitha used Christianity to make sense of their lives and to live in harmony with their new Euro-American neighbors, adapting European religious beliefs to fit an Indigenous worldview. Richter presents this early period of colonization—before the American Revolution—as a crossroads: If a few things had gone differently, the history of relations between Anglo-Americans and Indigenous peoples might have been one of cooperation and cultural exchange rather than of genocide and land theft.
In the racially contentious climate of the Seven Years’ War, however, advocates of cultural accommodation fell out of favor. As one Indigenous prophet proclaimed of the Europeans, “Drive them out, make war upon them” (196), a battle cry designed to save Indigenous culture and society from decline by purging Indigenous society of Euro-American influence. Richter sees this as a tragic consequence of both unfriendly Euro-American policies and a general increase in suspicion between the two groups after 1760.
Racial Antagonism and Erasure
Although some hostility between Indigenous people and Euro-Americans was present at the beginning of European settlement, the two groups got along relatively well until racial divisiveness set in during the Seven Years’ War. Land disputes led to growing antagonism on both sides—as shown by the Separate Creations doctrine, the Paxton Boys, and Pontiac—and this antagonism was exacerbated by bloodshed. From the 1760s onward, color terminology referring to “Whites” and “Reds” began to be extensively used, as both sides began to conceive of themselves as separate racial groups pitted against each other.
As the American Revolution approached, many of the American colonists’ grievances against the British crown involved disagreements about Indigenous land, and some colonists resented British alliances with Indigenous groups. After the Revolution, the US government under President George Washington attempted to revive friendly diplomatic relations with the Indigenous people of North America, but those relationships deteriorated during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. By the mid-19th century, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny had many white Americans convinced that God had ordained the whole continent for their exclusive use. A series of genocidal wars killed tens of thousands of Indigenous people and forced others off their ancestral lands and onto distant reservations. The possibility of equitable coexistence—so present in the 17th century—seemed to disappear forever.
For Richter, this legacy of racial animus was sealed when white Americans wrote the history of the country, erasing stories of Indigenous individuals and communities who tried to synthesize Indigenous and European ways. Richter deems this rejection of peaceful coexistence “the real American tragedy” (253).
The Influence of Resources and Materials on Historical Events
Chapter 2 details the richness of the material world Indigenous lived in; the goods they made and traded with the Europeans had a profound impact on everyday life. And European trade reshaped the trade networks that already existed between sometimes far-flung Indigenous groups. Richter states,
wherever Europeans settled, intercultural commerce flourished, and even in areas far from colonial centers, expanded trade not only reordered Native economies but dramatically reshaped Native cultures in ways beyond European control or comprehension (41).
Many European items, like weapons with metal cutting edges, were novel to the Indigenous people who first encountered them and had immediate usefulness and appeal. Even when European metal goods did not fit neatly into Indigenous life, Indigenous people learned to melt them down and repurpose the metal to make the things they needed. Europeans, meanwhile, developed methods for manufacturing wampum, the ornamental beads prized by many Indigenous groups, thus stimulating trade and contributing to unprecedented abundance (46).
Although trade with Europeans often had positive economic effects, Europeans also disrupted the natural environment in ways that devasted the Indigenous population: “The arrival of substantial numbers of colonists also sparked complex changes in the natural environment, with serious implications for Indian farmers and hunters everywhere” (41). With the Europeans came European livestock and farming methods that were often incompatible with the North American environment. European farmers practiced monoculture, planting vast fields with single crops in a resource-intensive practice that quickly depleted the soil of nutrients. This practice contrasts with the widespread Indigenous practice of planting corn, squash, and beans—the so-called “three sisters”—in tandem, fostering symbiotic relationships between the plants. Large numbers of pigs and sheep, imported by the colonists, had a similarly devastating effect on local ecosystems. The European taste for beaver furs also depleted the beaver population. These environmental changes harmed Indigenous communities, causing famine and forcing migration to other locales. Even more significantly, European diseases proved devastating to Indigenous communities that had never encountered these pathogens before and thus had no immunity. As early American hunting and agricultural practices depleted Indigenous resources, Indigenous communities were increasingly forced into conflict with settlers.
