Title: Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America
Author: Daniel Richter
Year of Publication: 2001
Thesis:
Argues that more complex stories develop when centering Native American experiences and that a method of "looking over the shoulders" of Native American people is a framework by which this can happen without pretending to know their viewpoints due to lack of historical documents. Conceding the paucity of evidence, he embraces a historical imagination and adopts a multi-layered framework of "looking east" that includes material culture, reframing well-known stories, emphasizing parallel and overlapping histories of empire, and finally sees the development of an "Indian" identity from shared struggle as evidenced in his invocation of William Apess.
Time:
16th-19th century
Geography: Eastern North America
Organization:
Prologue: Early America as Indian Country
- Discussion of Cahokia
1. Imagining a Distant New World
- Initial Encounters & imagination
2. Confronting a Material New World
- Trade & Disease
3. Living with Europeans
- Pocahontas, Kateri Tekakwitha, Metacom/King Philip
4. Native Voices in a Colonial World
- Conversion narratives
5. Native Peoples in an Imperial World
- As active/not passive agents in the Atlantic world
- Emphasizes parallel histories
6. Separate Creations
- Separation & Genocide (uses "ethnic cleansing")
Epilogue: Eulogy from Indian Country
A Technical Note
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Type:
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
Keywords:
Themes:
Critiques:
- Questions about how far the historical imagination can go.
- Leaves out histories of Native Americans who did not have contact.
- Gender & sexuality then, would be an excellent way to see. Archeology. The role of African Americans. One way to think about this book is as a point of departure.
Questions:
- How are oral histories important to the work of Early Americanists trying to understand Native American histories? What role do they play in largely Eurocentric narratives?
- What can we take from works that revise perspective without uncovering new documentary evidence? (thinking of Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in this light)
Quotes:
- "Perhaps the strangest lesson of all was that in the new nation Whites were the ones entitled to be called "Americans." Indians bizarrely became something else." (2)
Notes:
See: [Facing East From Indian Country] | C-SPAN.org
Notes from presentation:
- BR effectively expel French after 7 Years War - playoff system no longer works
- Am Rev. - allows Americans to have "carte blanche" on expansion
- Jacksonian Era - genocide
- Starts with thinking about how to teach Early American history
- "standing on shoulders" metaphor vs. adopting actual viewpoint
Ex: De Soto / Cartier (imagines looking on as a reporter)
- See: The Unreedeemed Captive for historical imagination
Not *just* facing east, but multiple ways of facing east:
- Example: "material forces" (chapter 1), people (chapter 2), how to read texts to try & read native voices (chapter 3), Adapting to imperial system & "carving out" their own world (chapter 4), Am. Rev. - "Pontiac's Rebellion" & "Paxton Boys Affair" - where ideologies of Native American & Settlers solidify against assimilation & "frontier" takes on harder lines. Epilogue - William Apess
Treaties - "about a process of having a treaty." Ceremony, ritual, having many people present. Native Americans did treaties en masse vs. backroom deals. Treaties as a process, not a one-off event. This is also a process by which we may see how a shared identity is being created over treaty making.
British were thinking about incorporating Native Americans into the BR empire (vs. British Americans, who on the whole reject this idea)
White people becoming "the new Indians" -- I need to grab Berenstein Bears Go To Camp for an example of this.
Argues that on-Native folks need a less Eurocentric perspective.
Nominated for the Pulitzer