Facing East from Indian Country

Daniel K. Richter. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Any attempt, no matter how well-meaning, to "write Indians into" a standard narrative history of early British North America must confront the asymmetrical availability of sources.  The Indians did not produce their own written sources, and the early English colonists never betrayed much interest in understanding native peoples. Advances in archaeology and other fields have given once-silenced Indian peoples a voice, but in the standard teleological narrative that voice struggles to be heard above the much more robust and explicit record that English colonists left behind.

Richter has found a novel way to address that imbalance--by reversing the point of view. The "facing east" of the title is literal; this is a (sometimes speculative) re-imagining of the story from the perspective of Indians witnessing and coping with the arrival of Europeans. By reversing the point of view, the relative paucity of written sources no longer tilts the playing ground in favor of the literate Euro-Americans.

Another advantage of Richter's approach is that it emphasizes the historical nature of the Indian side of the story. Native peoples were part of history, not the victims of history as so many well-meaning histories have portrayed them. Their removal was neither the inevitable workings of demographic inevitability nor a morality tale for future generations.

By framing the traditional colonial story in a way in which the "west" is the center rather than the dimly-known frontier, Richter not only offers an Indian-centric version of early American history, he also sheds new light on well-known dynamics of colonial land acquisition, resource use, and more. T