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, in a nutshell. Richter’s intention for his book: to tell the early history of American settlement from the perspective of Indians 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 the Indians as inevitable. 

“History is an imaginative creation.”

A quote from the American historian Carl Becker (1873-1945), which inspires Richter’s method of recreating historical scenes to delve into the psyches 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 Indian child from the Native 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 Native Americans could easily have gone differently. Early Indian efforts to make sense of such European symbols as flags and crucifixes, and to make alliances with the Europeans, showed that Natives were initially willing to accommodate European culture.