Facing East From Indian Country

In the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers. Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States. Viewed from Indian country, the sixteenth century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make sense of a new world. Well into the seventeenth century, the most profound challenges to Indian life came less from the arrival of a relative handful of European colonists than from the biological, economic, and environmental forces the newcomers unleashed. Drawing upon their own traditions, Indian communities reinvented themselves and carved out a place in a world dominated by transatlantic European empires. In 1776, however, when some of Britain's colonists rebelled against that imperial world, they overturned the system that had made Euro-American and Native coexistence possible. Eastern North America only ceased to be an Indian country because the revolutionaries denied the continent's first peoples a place in the nation they were creating. In rediscovering early America as Indian country, Richter employs the historian's craft to challenge cherished assumptions about times and places we thought we knew well, revealing Native American experiences at the core of the nation's birth and identity.

Discusses the myth of European control over the Native Americans in the sixteenth century, and claims that Native Americans controlled the majority of eastern North America well after Columbus' arrival, having only to adjust to their presence.

At the center of this bold history are narratives of three Native Americans--Pocahontas, Blessed Catherine Tekakwitha and the Algonquin warrior Metacom, or King Philip. Telling each of these stories from the European and then the Native American perspective, Richter elucidates an alternative history of America from Columbus to just after the Revolution.

Richter examines a wide range of primary documents to survey the responses of the peoples of the Iroquois League--the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras--to the challenges of the European colonialization of North America. He demonstrates that by the early eighteenth century a series of creative adaptations in politics and diplomacy allowed the peoples of the Longhouse to preserve their cultural autonomy in a land now dominated by foreign powers.

America began, we are often told, with the Founding Fathers, the men who waged a revolution and created a unique place called the United States. We may acknowledge the early Jamestown and Puritan colonists and mourn the dispossession of Native Americans, but we rarely grapple with the complexity of the nation's pre-revolutionary past. In this pathbreaking revision, Daniel Richter shows that the United States has a much deeper history than is apparentÑthat far from beginning with a clean slate, it is a nation with multiple pasts that stretch back as far as the Middle Ages, pasts whose legacies continue to shape the present. Exploring a vast range of original sources, Before the Revolution spans more than seven centuries and ranges across North America, Europe, and Africa. Richter recovers the lives of a stunning array of peoplesÑIndians, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Africans, EnglishÑas they struggled with one another and with their own people for control of land and resources. Their struggles occurred in a global context and built upon the remains of what came before. Gradually and unpredictably, distinctive patterns of North American culture took shape on a continent where no one yet imagined there would be nations called the United States, Canada, or Mexico. By seeing these trajectories on their own dynamic terms, rather than merely as a prelude to independence, Richter's epic vision reveals the deepest origins of American history.

The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century, Second Edition is updated through the first decade of the twenty-first century and contains a new chapter challenging Americans--Indian and non-Indian--to begin healing the earth. This analysis of the struggle to protect not only natural resources but also a way of life serves as an indispensable tool for students or anyone interested in Native American history and current government policy with regard to Indian lands or the environment.

In this sweeping collection of essays, one of America's leading colonial historians reinterprets the struggle between Native peoples and Europeans in terms of how each understood the material basis of power. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in eastern North America, Natives and newcomers alike understood the close relationship between political power and control of trade and land, but they did so in very different ways. For Native Americans, trade was a collective act. The alliances that made a people powerful became visible through material exchanges that forged connections among kin groups, villages, and the spirit world. The land itself was often conceived as a participant in these transactions through the blessings it bestowed on those who gave in return. For colonizers, by contrast, power tended to grow from the individual accumulation of goods and landed property more than from collective exchange—from domination more than from alliance. For many decades, an uneasy balance between the two systems of power prevailed. Tracing the messy process by which global empires and their colonial populations could finally abandon compromise and impose their definitions on the continent, Daniel K. Richter casts penetrating light on the nature of European colonization, the character of Native resistance, and the formative roles that each played in the origins of the United States.

Between the early 17th century and the early 20th, nearly all U.S. land was transferred from American Indians to whites. Banner argues that neither simple coercion nor simple consent reflects the complicated legal history of land transfers--time, place, and the balance of power between Indians and settlers decided the outcome of land struggles.