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

Abstract

Well conceived, artfully crafted, and beautifully written, Daniel K. Richter's new book draws on a generation of pathbreaking scholarship to consider what colonization looked like from a Native American point of view. The result is a thought-provoking account that reorients the reader in powerful and often surprising ways. Richter begins with a series of vignettes that illuminate Indians' first reactions to rumors of, and encounters with, Europeans. Each vignette is speculative but rooted in known events. We glimpse parts of Native America on the eve of European contact and see the disruptions caused by such men as Hernando de Soto and Jacques Cartier. Yet Native America had a history of its own, in the course of which those intrusions were isolated events. As European influence spread, Richter argues, it was often felt first in material objects that came to Indian communities through trade networks long before the arrival of Europeans themselves.

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