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.
Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Living with Europeans”
Chapter 3 includes the stories of three famous Indigenous people whose lives illustrate how Indigenous groups incorporated Europeans into their world. Although Pocahontas, Kateri Tekakwitha, and “King Philip” Metacom are all celebrated in popular lore, historical information about them is scarce.
For Richter, Pocahontas is the symbol of “a road of intercultural cooperation that tragically was not taken” (78). Her rescue of Captain John Smith defined her as an “intermediary between […] two leaders and their communities” (71) and her later marriage to John Rolfe cemented a diplomatic alliance between the English and Indigenous communities through which the two became “fictive kin” (77). Pocahontas strove to create the conditions by which the English could live “in Indian country by Indian rules” (78).
Kateri Tekakwitha, a canonized Catholic saint, represents for Richter an Indigenous man who “welcome[d] a European visitor to her country, willingly embrace[d] Christianity,” and left behind “a legacy of interracial harmony” (80). The saint bridged the chasm between seemingly incompatible Indigenous and Christian belief systems. For people like Kateri, who joined Indigenous Christian religious communities, Christianity was “a way of making sense of their condition” and “mobilizing the spiritual power the missionaries […] described as ‘grace’” (90).
Metacom, known as “King Philip,” was a Wampanoag chief who became the protagonist of King Philip’s War (also known as Metacom’s Rebellion), an attempt to forcibly drive the colonists out of New England, ending in Metacom’s defeat and violent death. Metacom’s story was indicative of the increasing presence of Christianity among Indigenous Americans in the later 17th century. The Puritan minister John Eliot had established “praying towns” in which missionaries preached to Indigenous Christians. King Philip’s War was indirectly sparked by a rift between Metacom and his secretary, the bilingual Wampanoag Christian John Sassamon.
Around the same time, the Virginia colonist Nathaniel Bacon led an uprising against the colonial government that devolved into a campaign of ethnic cleansing and land theft against the Doeg, Susquehanna, and other Indigenous groups in and around the Jamestown colony. The uprising, known as Bacon’s Rebellion, came to an end when Bacon died of dysentery and Governor William Berkeley was removed from power.
Chapter 3 Analysis
Richter’s portraits of three legendary Indigenous people serve to give a more human face to the historical narrative while at the same time providing concrete examples of Indigenous leaders who tried to reach across the racial and cultural divide. By elevating these figures to a prominent place in his history of the United States, Richter offers an alternative to the typical historical narrative dominated by white leaders. For Richter, the stories of Pocahontas, Tekakwitha, and King Philip point toward an alternative direction that the developing country could have gone, as these leaders “sought cooperation rather than conflict, coexistence on shared regional patches of ground rather than arm’s length contact across distant frontiers” (109). Pocahontas is by far the most famous of the three, thanks to her enduring presence in movies and popular culture. In contrast to the common view of Pocahontas as an Indigenous person who broke with her culture, Richter sees her as a “dutiful child who fulfilled a very traditional function in Native politics and diplomacy” (77).
Kateri Tekakwitha claims a large following among Roman Catholic believers. Kateri’s story shows one form of Cultural Accommodation, as some Indigenous people embraced Christianity and formed religious communities set apart from regular Indigenous society. In adopting a foreign religion, they sometimes aroused suspicion from other Indigenous people. Kateri suffered from persecution, yet remained steadfast in her faith and was acclaimed as a saint after her death. Richter maintains an objective stance, looking beyond the language of piety in typical accounts of Kateri’s life to examine the motives of the missionaries. He concludes that they publicized Kateri’s life to show that Christian missions in Indian country were successful, to encourage and inspire other Indigenous Christians, and as time went on, to portray European occupation of the Americas as part of a mission to bring Christianity to the Indigenous people.
Richter sees Metacom as a person who “every bit as thoroughly bridged the cultural divide as did Pocahontas and Tekakwitha” (96). He fought to preserve an older system of cooperation between English and Indigenous people which, he felt, the English wanted to destroy. Richter views his story as a “countermyth” to the narratives of Pocahontas and Kateri Tekakwitha in that Metacom held fiercely to his Indigenous cultural identity, seeking to preserve equitable trade relations without acceding to European cultural influence.
King Philip Metacom is the most obscure of the three figures, although he was formerly much celebrated in poems and plays. Richter contrasts the various ways Philip was depicted—as a bloodthirsty savage who resisted European civilization, and as a noble tragic hero who possessed virtues that “civilized” men lacked (93). Richter asserts that both Kateri and Metacom inadvertently justified the white takeover of Indigenous lands, as white propagandists used their stories to argue that Indigenous decline and extinction were inevitable. This act of Racial Antagonism and Erasure was repeated in countless ways throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, as political leaders and land speculators sought to erase the possibility of coexistence between Indigenous people and settler colonialists.
Richter also examines the different challenges faced by Catholic and Protestant missionaries in teaching their respective brands of Christianity. The Catholics had strong institutional backing as well as the advantage that Catholic worship resembled Indigenous rituals in certain respects. The Catholic Church had a long-standing, unspoken strategy of tolerating a limited degree of syncretism, allowing colonized peoples to incorporate Catholic iconography and ritual into existing religious traditions. This form of Cultural Accommodation initially made the Catholic missionaries more successful in winning converts than the Puritans, whose “praying towns” often harshly repressed any sign of adherence to Indigenous beliefs. This theme is more fully developed in Chapter 4.
