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.
Key Figures
Pocahontas
Although the historical record on Pocahontas is a bit uncertain, she is thought to have been born around 1595, in present-day Virginia, as the daughter of the powerful Algonquin chief Powhatan. Her birth names were Amonute and Matoaka; “Pocahontas” was a nickname meaning “playful” or “mischievous.” In 1607, the English captain John Smith’s exploration party was captured by Natives, and Pocahontas reportedly rescued him from death. From then on, she became an “intermediary between the two leaders and their communities” (71). In 1610, she married Kocoum, a warrior from the Patawomeck tribe.
In 1613, Pocahontas was captured by the English and became a hostage at Jamestown, where she was instructed in Christianity and adopted the Christian name Rebecca. She met John Rolfe, an English tobacco farmer and captain, who suggested a diplomatic marriage to seal an alliance between their people. Despite already being married, Pocahontas married Rolfe; they had a son and two years later traveled to England, where they were received ceremonially at the court of King James I. Pocahontas died of an unidentified illness two months later, as she was preparing to travel back home to Virginia.
Richter sees the Pocahontas-Rolfe story as tragic since the hopes for peaceful relations between English settlers and the Indigenous peoples of Jamestown died with her. Pocahontas ended her life as an exile in a foreign country, disappointed in the failure of the English to fulfill their reciprocal social obligations toward her and her people. Instead of a youthful rebel who broke with her culture, she was a “dutiful child who fulfilled a very traditional function in Native politics and diplomacy” (77). Pocahontas hoped, through her marriage, to incorporate the English into the Indigenous world according to Indigenous rules.
Kateri Tekakwitha
A popular and revered Roman Catholic saint, Kateri started her life as Tekakwitha, a Mohawk Iroquois girl in the mid-17th century. At an early age, she was orphaned and weakened by a smallpox epidemic in her village. As she grew, she developed habits of personal austerity, solitude, and hard work. After being visited by a Jesuit missionary during an illness, she was baptized with the name Kateri (Catherine) and joined the small group of Christians in her village. Her new faith was met with hostility on the part of her family and neighbors, who spread vicious rumors about her. She fled to a mission reserve on the St. Lawrence River near Montreal, where she practiced an austere religious way of life until her death in 1680 at age 24. Soon after her death, people began to believe that she was a saint based on miraculous healings reported to have occurred.
For Richter, Kateri’s legacy represents an attempt to “resolve the moral contradictions raised by the European colonization of North America” (81). From the European perspective, Kateri’s story helped to justify colonization by presenting it to spread the gospel to the Indigenous people of North America. Richter, however, looks at Kateri from an Indigenous perspective: The inclusiveness of Indigenous belief systems and certain similarities between the two worlds (e.g., between shamans and priests) allowed some Indigenous people to easily adopt elements of Christianity into their spiritual practices. Despite the gap between Indigenous and Christian spiritual views, Indigenous people like Kateri who embraced a Christian identity found in it a “lifeboat to weather the storm” and a means of making sense of their lives “in a world growing more and more unfriendly” (89).
King Philip Metacom
Metacom or Metacomet (c. 1638-1676), known to the English colonists as King Philip, was a sachem (intertribal leader) of the Wampanoag and Narraganset. For Richter, he is a representative of the many Indigenous people who resisted English attempts to infringe on their rights and lost their lives for it.
Metacom’s father, Massasoit, had successfully kept peace among the Wampanoag and the New England colonists since their landing at Plymouth in 1621. After succeeding his father and older brother as sachem, Metacom became increasingly disturbed by white encroachment on Indigenous sovereignty. These tensions escalated into King Philip’s War, in which Metacom led a coalition in a year of fighting that culimated in an estimated 3,000 Indigenous and 600 colonist fatalities. It was one of the bloodiest wars in US history and ended with Metacom being betrayed by an informer, beheaded, and having his head displayed on a pole for 25 years at Plymouth. Later historical figures, like orator William Apess, saw Metacom as a martyr and a heroic figure for Indigenous people.
Andrew Jackson
First as leader of a Tennessee militia fighting Indigenous American resistance and then as president, Andrew Jackson (nicknamed “Old Hickory”) is portrayed unsympathetically in Richter’s book. When responding to a false report that an Indigenous party had been killing white settlers, Jackson vowed “a final check to those hostile murdering Creeks” (228), displaying actions characterized by “disregard for higher authority” (233). He ignored the terms of the Treaty of Ghent restoring lands to Indigenous inhabitants, illegally invaded Spanish territory during the First Seminole War, illegally tried two British subjects for assisting the indigenous, and summarily executed Hillis Hadjo and another Indigenous leader. These actions were applauded by “a huge sector of the U.S. population” (233) who admired Jackson, saying he “makes law” rather than “quoting it.”
As president, Jackson’s record toward the Indigenous Americans remained consistent, as he enacted the Trail of Tears and continued to seize their lands. He justified his actions by arguing that “Indians are the subjects of the United States, inhabiting its territory and acknowledging its sovereignty” (234). In a speech to Congress, Jackson claimed to indulge a “friendly feeling” toward “the aborigines of the country” (235); his actions were anything but. He insisted that the extinction of North America’s Indigenous people was inevitable and that they should be allowed to die off for the sake of progress and civilization—to serve, from his perspective, “the general interests of the human race” (235).
William Apess
Apess was born in Massachusetts in 1798 of a mixed bloodline that included Pequot relatives. After his parents’ separation, he was raised by abusive grandparents. A period of servitude to a local white family led to a religious conversion, and he joined the Methodist Church. By 1818, Apess had become a Methodist “exhorter” (traveling preacher) speaking especially to Indigenous and mixed-race audiences. The mainstream Methodist Episcopal Church denied him ministerial ordination, probably on racial grounds, but a Methodist splinter group granted him a preaching license.
Apess helped the inhabitants of Mashpee, an Indigenous Christian community, to assert their independence over their white overseers in the Mashpee Revolt. He was arrested and jailed but continued to fight for the Mashpees after leaving prison. These efforts paid off when, in 1834, the Massachusetts legislature granted the Mashpees the right to partially govern themselves. Apess’s influence among the Mashpees later declined, and he died in 1839 of illness associated with the alcoholism he had battled for many years.
Apess’s story serves as a fitting capstone to Richter’s book. His famous oration, Eulogy on King Philip, inverts many of the myths that Americans had fostered about the history of the country and forces whites to consider the cruelty and oppression enacted upon Indigenous people. Thus, Richter uses this “extraordinary figure” to conclude and round out his book on Indigenous American history, as told from an Indigenous perspective.
