Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America

“Yet if we shift our perspective to try to view the past in a way that faces east from Indian country, history takes on a very different appearance.”

This quote expresses Richter’s intention for his book: telling the early history of US settlement from the perspective of Indigenous people encountering Europeans for the first time. This turnabout reverses the usual way of understanding the subject, which assumes a European perspective and treats the conquest of Indigenous people as inevitable.

“History is an imaginative creation.”

This quote from US historian Carl Becker (1873-1945) inspires Richter’s method of recreating historical scenes to delve into the psyche of a population. Richter follows this method starting in Chapter 1 when he recasts such scenes as the landing of John Cabot’s crew and the abduction of an Indigenous child from an Indigenous perspective.

“These efforts to reach out to people of alien and dangerous ways are more striking than the fact that, in the end, enmity won out over friendship.”

One of Richter’s main points in his book is that the tragic history of relations between Euro-Americans and Indigenous people could easily have gone differently. Early Indigenous efforts to make sense of such European symbols as flags and crucifixes, and to make alliances with the Europeans, showed that Indigenous people were initially willing to accommodate European culture.