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.
Prologue-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary: “Early America as Indian Country”
Richter opens by describing his visit to St. Louis, Missouri, where the Gateway Arch—a symbol of westward expansion in the 19th century—as well as the courthouse famous for the Dred Scott case brought to his mind “how freedom and unfreedom, expansion and dispossession, entwined to create the nation’s story” (2). He explains that his book will reverse the conventional “master narrative” of American history that sees European settlers as the protagonists and Indigenous people as passive victims.
The area of present-day Missouri was at one time the heartland of eastern Indian country, home to what scholars now call “Mississippian” societies. These societies flourished during a climatic warming trend during the late Middle Ages that resulted in a “burst of agricultural creativity” (5) centering on the key crops of squash, maize, and beans. After the warming period gave way to a Little Ice Age, Mississippian societies went into decline, breaking up into several linguistic groups.
Although Indian country was decentralized by the collapse of these societies, it remained, for a time, connected by trade and communication routes across the continent. Then, a biological challenge decimated the Indigenous population: contact with European settlers brought diseases to which Indigenous people lacked immunity. Despite these devastating events, Euro-Americans did not gain total control of the territory that Richter calls Indian country until the early decades of the 19th century. Seen from an Indigenous perspective, “the process by which […] European newcomers and their descendants […] came to dominate the others becomes a much more complicated, much more interesting, much more revealing, if no less tragic, tale” (8).
Chapter 1 Summary: “Imagining a Distant New World”
In this chapter, Richter reimagines several historical scenes from an Indigenous perspective: hunters off the coast of Newfoundland in 1497 finding their traps purloined by explorer John Cabot and his crew, with a crucifix and flag in their place; Giovanni da Verrazano’s sailors kidnapping an Indigenous child in 1524; and a Montagnais woman telling her granddaughter about her first contact with Europeans, emphasizing their unusual food and mode of transport. These stories highlight how Indigenous knowledge of Europeans was at first limited to rumors and physical objects that the Europeans left behind. Though there had been sporadic encounters between European explorers and Indigenous peoples since the late 15th century, it was not until around the 1530s that Europeans became a physical reality—rather than a mere rumor or legend—to large numbers of inland Indigenous peoples. Richter uses imagined Indigenous encounters with Hernando de Soto and Jacques Cartier to illustrate this transition.
The story follows de Soto’s disastrous, wealth-driven trek across what is now the southeastern United States, a trek that sparked violence with Indigenous people, included widespread enslavement, and ended in de Soto’s death. The author begins de Soto’s tale by reconstructing the scene of Spanish ships arriving on the Gulf Coast of Florida in May 1539 and telling the story of Juan Ortiz, a Spaniard who was captured by the Timucuan people and later became an interpreter for de Soto.
Just a few years before de Soto, French explorer Jacques Cartier arrived in present-day Canada. The author reimagines the scene of his arrival on the Gaspé Peninsula and how it must have looked to the Micmac and Iroquois. Cartier’s crew exchanged knives, beads, and other goods with the Micmac and the Iroquois, then took two village chiefs back to France to train as interpreters. Upon returning to Canada, Cartier’s men contracted scurvy, and relations with the Micmac and the Iroquois deteriorated. On his third trip to Canada, Cartier searched for a spot to settle French colonists; after losing some of his men both in skirmishes with the Indigenous people and to disease during a harsh winter, Cartier returned home to France. The French abandoned plans to settle Canada for 40 years after Cartier’s departure.
Although Richter emphasizes that “the great changes occurring in Indigenous American life during the 16th century were not all, or even primarily, set in motion by Europeans” (39), these changes set the stage for relations between Euro-American colonists and Indigenous people. In the southeast, the great Mississippian chiefdoms collapsed, and some tribes formed new configurations, while in the north, small groups coalesced into larger communities. Some population movements among Indigenous groups may have been motivated by a desire to be close to sources of European trade; as a result, vast areas of eastern North America were left uninhabited. During this period, many Indigenous leaders desired to form alliances with the Europeans and trade with them, which exacerbated tensions between tribes as they strove to acquire what the newcomers had to offer.
Meanwhile, a global cooling trend—the beginning of the Little Ice Age—wreaked havoc on Indigenous agricultural patterns and caused widespread food shortages. European diseases also decimated Indigenous populations by as much as 95 percent during the 16th century. The desire for trade, the collapse of farming, and the devastation of disease came together to put Indigenous populations at a disadvantage, although as Richter explains in Chapter 2, Indigenous community-oriented cultural patterns remained stable, in sharp contrast with the individual-oriented ways of European colonists.
Prologue-Chapter 1 Analysis
Richter’s goal in writing Facing East from Indian Country is to force people with Eurocentric views of history to look at the history of European settlement in North America from a new perspective. He thus begins at St. Louis’s Gateway Arch, a massive work of public art intended to signify St. Louis’s 19th-century role as the so-called “gateway to the West.” Because it is possible to look through the arch from either direction, it serves as a metaphor for the reorientation of history that Richter seeks to effect.
The story of American history has long been framed as one of westward progress across the continent. Richter calls this a “master narrative,” a term coined by the French post-structuralist Jean-Francois Lyotard to describe those deeply embedded theories of history that inform a culture’s understanding of itself. Richter seeks to challenge the master narrative of westward expansion by asking readers to look east rather than west. If standard histories of the US have identified with the settler colonialist looking west toward an unexplored land of infinite promise, Richter seeks to write a history that identifies with the Indigenous person looking east toward the advancing wave of change, and often of devastation, that the settlers bring with them. Although the paucity of original sources makes Richter’s task difficult, he develops “eastward-facing stories of the past” (9) that recast early American history in a new light.
If St. Louis in the 19th century was the supposed gateway to the West, in the 15th century it was the heart of “Indian country”—a term Richter uses to describe the contiguous network of Indigenous communities that was later fragmented by Euro-American settlement. In that precolonial era, the Mississippian society of the American Southeast was among the most complex and widespread civilizations in the world. Its most important city was Cahokia, located near present-day East St. Louis, which Richter describes as “probably the largest American city that existed north of Mexico” (3). Mississippian groups were among the first Indigenous peoples to encounter Spanish colonists in North America, and these colonists did establish lasting settlements in the area until much later, they brought pathogens that killed huge numbers of people, and they left behind horses that radically changed Indigenous ways of life—evidence of The Influence of Resources and Materials on Historical Events. Richter’s eastward-facing history thus plausibly begins in the same location as the standard westward-facing history, though with a much earlier starting point.
The Gateway Arch represents westward expansion and a point of view that equated settler expansion on the continent with rebellion against the British crown. The St. Louis Courthouse, site of the Dred Scott decision, connects Indigenous history to African American history, particularly in terms of how white people assumed dominance over the two cultures, and the consequences that ensued for each. Notably, racial color terms are not present in historical speech at this early stage. Indeed, Richter asserts that “Europeans most often used the term American to describe descendants of the original inhabitants” (3).
Chapter 1 presents Richter’s unique method of historical reconstruction through imaginative scenes retold from Indigenous perspectives; it is the Indigenous people who are “discovering” the Europeans and their world. De Soto and Cartier are seen in terms of the impact they had on the Indigenous population. Europeans are referred to by the names that population gave them—“woodworkers,” “clothmakers,” “metalworkers,” “axe makers”—highlighting a relationship that was initially built around Cultural Accommodation as both Indigenous groups and white colonists saw one another as trading partners rather than competitors for the land and its resources.
At the chapter’s end, Richter makes the point that not all the misfortunes faced by Indigenous peoples were caused by the European settlers:
Cahokia disappeared from the map sometime around 1400, long before even the first rumor of Europe arrived on Native shores, and it is quite possible that Stadacona and even Cofitachequi would also have disappeared even if Cartier or de Soto had never existed (39).
He further emphasizes that Euro-Indigenous relations were initially marked by alliances, curiosity, and a desire for trade, although these relations became more strained in the 18th century.
