Facing east from Indian country; a native history of early America

Kliatt, July, 2003 by Patricia A. Moore

RICHTER, Daniel K. Facing east from Indian country; a native history of early America. Harvard Univ. Press. 317p. illus. notes. index. c2002. 0-674-01117-1. $15.95.

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Daniel Richter, Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, invites his reader to imagine himself in the 17th century, at the location of modern-day St. Louis, facing eastward toward the Atlantic as the first Europeans arrive. He suggests that "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. North Americans appear in the foreground, and Europeans enter from distant shores." Richter maintains this eastward gaze as he traces three centuries of our continental history from the 16th-century explorers and the 17th-century colonizers to the 18th-century wars, culminating in the American Revolution.

This is history as we have seldom read it, a perspective we have rarely adopted. Richter's research is broad and detailed, his prose smooth and his storytelling often absorbing. His conclusion, that "native people... could find no place in the mythology of a nation marching triumphantly westward," cannot be avoided.

Patricia A. Moore, Brookline, MA