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 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Native Peoples in an Imperial World”
In the 18th century, Indigenous and European colonial histories “moved in parallel, rather than opposing, directions” (151), with both groups becoming part of a single transatlantic imperial world. This perspective dispels the myth that the relationship between Indigenous and Euro-Americans solely consisted of “European advance and Indian retreat” (151).
In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, European powers contested their rights to the North American continent. A series of wars, including “King William’s War” and “Queen Anne’s War,” ended in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht that ushered in a 30-year “Long Peace.” During this period, British America achieved political stability and economic prosperity that contrasted with the harsh power politics of 17th-century New England and Virginia. Immigration from the British Isles and Germany enriched the American population, and the “Great Awakening” increased the diversity of religious expression. Although Indigenous communities benefited politically and economically from the Long Peace, the diversifying of the American population led to a “hardening definition of racial categories” (154). This period of peace ended only when, after the British victory in the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763), Britain’s newly expanded imperial power began to seem oppressive to many in North America, and an independence movement began.
The Seven Years’ War, and the elimination of the French and Spanish presence from North America, ended the “transatlantic structural framework” (154) that had allowed Indigenous and European Americans to coexist. That framework would disappear decisively when the American colonists went to war with Great Britain, which had always made room for Indigenous tribes in its empire. Until then, “British and Indian stories were parallel chapters in a single 18th-century eastern North American tale” (154).
Chapter 5 Analysis
Richter suggests that despite the many acts of violence carried out by British colonists against Indigenous peoples, Indigenous groups were often in a better situation in the colonial period than after the American Revolution because Britain carved out a space for Indigenous communities and often protected their lands from European encroachment. The transatlantic trade network also benefited Indigenous people by allowing them to acquire goods that they needed.
Wars between rival colonial powers involved Indigenous groups as allies, and those groups in turn depended upon European allies in their struggles with rival tribes; each side benefited from the strength, loyalty, and manpower of the other. The Iroquois had a great stake in the outcome of England’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 and subsequent war with France, for example, since they were allied with the English against the French in North America. At the same time, Indigenous groups often felt uncomfortably caught between the various European powers and had to develop a political strategy that would keep relationships in balance. They learned the danger of depending too closely on any one European empire (Britain, France, or Spain), as doing so caused pressure to join sides and risked conflicts with neighboring tribes, thus putting their very survival at stake.
In all, Chapter 5 presents a comparatively positive interlude in Euro-Indigenous relations. Richter presents the pre-Revolutionary 18th century as a period when Cultural Accommodation between whites and Indigenous groups was relatively widespread and might well have become a lasting norm, but he emphasizes that this hope was shattered decisively after the American Revolution. A growing feeling that Indigenous peoples were standing in the way of colonists’ designs and were unduly favored by the British crown helped to fuel the movement for American independence. Richter presents the moment of the nation’s founding as simultaneously the moment in which a possible future based on collaboration and coexistence between Euro-Americans and Indigenous people disappeared. As political leaders and thinkers theorized a new republic and built its system of government, they systematically excluded Indigenous peoples from the new American project. Richter foreshadows the coming era of Racial Antagonism and Erasure through the arrival of the Nativist Indigenous prophets Neolin and Pontiac and the doctrine of Separate Creation, which is explained further in the next chapter.
