Senna777 says:

The book has many problem sin my view as a history graduate student. Although many important arguments were included in this work, I found it to be a struggle to determine which was an “Eastern” view or an actual fact. Richter used his imagination a bit too much. Sometimes historians have to make the best possible interpretation but going on a limb and guessing what someone may have thought is not HISTORY. Furthermore, Richter is somewhat unclear throughout the work. He switches between imagination and reality, and sometimes it becomes a task in itself deciphering what is his idea or fact. Richter uses almost NO missionary documents when trying to argue his point. Very few examples of missionary texts were given, creating a situation of where did your idea come from. Furthermore, Richter generalizes far too much. A tribe in Delaware is not going to react similar to one in S. Carolina. While trying to put his point across he fails to discuss changing regimes in Europe (England, France, and Spain) and their effect on colonial policies against natives. He mentions that Louis XIV wants natives wiped out, but says nothing of the Stuarts or Hapsburg policies.

Now I understand this was supposed to be a work facing east, not west, but Richter seemed to go too far outside the scope of the sources and use his imagination a little to often. What happen to American Natives was sad, but imagining history to glorify them does not do justice to them or the faculty of history.
Rating: 2 / 5

Roger Berlind says:

Daniel Richter offers a very different perspective on the early history of Eastern North America by attempting to reconstruct how the arrival of Europeans in North America and their subsequent colonization might have been viewed by Indians “facing east”. This is in contrast to the usual accounts from the European point of view that faces and moves west.

I found “Facing East from Indian Country” a valuable supplement to other books that I have read about early American history. I found Richter’s paradigm very insightful. For instance, the notion that Europe was the “New World” to the Indians while North America was their “Old World” really does lead one to think differently about the historical events of the period. I also think Richter does a great service by discussing the impact of the Europeans on the Indians which is usually ignored in standard books on American history. It’s actually a very interesting, although also very sad, story that involves much more than epidemics and warfare; but other books ignore it to a large degree since they provide histories of the “United States” viewed as a nation rather than histories of “North America” viewed as a region. These books ignore the story of the Indians because they are essentially viewed as being outsiders within the “United States” (and the previously existing British colonies).

While Richter is critical of European and later U.S. actions against the Indians, he has not written a politically correct book that casts the Indians as innocent victims of evil Europeans. Indeed, he describes how Indians often warred against each other and even enslaved their war captives for sale to South Carolina and West Indies plantations. He also points out that the British tried to prevent white settlers from encroaching on Indian lands west of the Appalachians with the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Unfortunately, U.S. policy after the American Revolution reversed that policy.
Rating: 5 / 5

Anonymous says:

Wow!! What a book. Focusing on the Eastern Colonization of America, Daniel Richter provides an extremely powerful and even handed view on Native American – European interaction between the years 1620 and 1812. I loved this book. You will to.
Rating: 5 / 5