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.
Symbols & Motifs
Gateway Arch
Richter opens Facing East from Indian Country with a description of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri. Built in the 1960s by Eero Saarinen, the modernist structure is meant to evoke the idea of St. Louis as a gateway to the Western United States, a position it held for 19th-century settlers. Richter uses this symbol to reorient the reader toward the Indigenous point of view on Euro-American settlers: Instead of standing, metaphorically speaking, on the eastern side looking at the West through the arch, Richter proposes standing on the Western (Indigenous) side and looking toward the East. From this perspective, westward expansion was not an inevitable fulfillment of destiny but the result of real human choices—choices that often resulted in destructive racial antagonism between whites and Indigenous peoples.
Wampum
Wampum are tube-shaped shell beads on strings or woven in belts or decorations. Before the arrival of the white settlers, Indigenous tribes used wampum for ceremonial purposes, but after Europeans developed ways to mass produce wampum, it became a medium of exchange and currency. Its value is derived from the skill involved in making it, its aesthetic appeal, and its sacred character. Richter emphasizes that this use of wampum as “Indian money” was entirely a result of the colonists. A New England official wrote that Indigenous people use wampum to “pay tribute, redeem captives, satisfy for murders and other wrongs, and purchase peace with their potent neighbors” (45).
In the mid-17th century, an influx of silver coinage into New England eventually caused wampum to depreciate. Indigenous communities continued to use it in trade until the middle of the 19th century. In diplomatic meetings between Indigenous groups and colonists, wampum was exchanged as a powerful token that “confirmed the validity of the speaker’s words” (137), assured his good faith, and functioned as an enduring record of the meeting.
Great Father
British and French colonial governors defined the relationship between themselves and the Indigenous people in their realm as that between a “father” and his “children,” replacing an earlier usage in which the colonial leader defined himself as “lord.” Though paternalistic, this “father/children” relationship was meant to be a protective and beneficial one. Indigenous leaders spoke of an “inviolable covenant” between them and the white leaders while acknowledging that white leaders controlled the resources and wielded power in their territory.
After the racial acrimony of the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, the American presidency revived the old vocabulary of fatherhood, defining the president as “Great Father” to the Indigenous “children” with whom he made treaties (226). In Eulogy on King Philip, William Apess turned the father analogy on its head to show that President Jackson’s actions were duplicitous and not fatherly at all:
You see, my red children [President Jackson says], that our fathers carried on this scheme of getting your lands for our use, and we have now become rich and powerful; and we have a right to do with you just as we please; we claim to be your fathers (250).
Separate Creations
Separate Creations, a religious doctrine embraced by many Indigenous Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries, declared that God created Indigenous, Black, and white people separately, placing them on separate continents for separate purposes. White people, therefore, had no right to consider themselves superior to or to impose their ways upon other races; in its extreme form, it called for declaring war on whites to drive them from North America, a continent that God intended for Indigenous people alone.
Separate Creation was articulated in a religious vision reported by Pontiac. In the vision, an Indigenous Delaware man went to a high mountain to visit God, the Master of Life, who expressed anger with his Indigenous children for adopting a sinful lifestyle and imitating white ways. The Master of Life explained that his favor would return to the Indigenous people only if they drove the Anglo-Americans from their midst, worshiped correctly, and returned to hunting with bows and arrows.
This nativist doctrine created a sense of camaraderie among separate tribes; their common interests transcended tribal rivalries (181). This new dynamic sparked a parallel reaction in the white community, where for the first time, various European ethnic groups discovered a common “white” identity as defined against Indigenous groups. Racial friction spilled into frontier violence, as seen in Pontiac’s and the Paxton Boys’ movements.
