Facing east from Indian country

¶ … East from Indian Country, by Daniel Richter

"Native Voices in a Colonial World"

Richter, Donald. Facing East from Indian County. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 110-188.

According to Facing East from Indian County by Donald Richter, one of the difficulties of assessing white and Indian relationships during the colonial period is the fact that there are so few Native American accounts surviving, in comparison to the many documents and personal narrative by whites. Those that do remain, such as that of the 'Apostle to the Indians,' a converted Native American, are written either by whites in a Native voice, or by Natives in a language in which they were imperfectly fluent. By the time a large amount of Native accounts were published, European cultural dominance had become so strong many Indians spoke English as their first language and were at least nominally Christian (Richter 173). Given this evidence of cultural eradication, problems remain trusting the veracity of accounts of Native-white relations regarding such experiences as conversion, particularly given the highly stylized and controlled literary and ideological conventions of the time.

One notable difference, though, Richter notes between tales of Indian and white conventions is the emphasis on sins of actions, rather than sins of the heart in Native American conversion tales, probably because "seventeenth century Puritans relentlessly hammered home the sinfulness of basic patterns of behavior in Native culture" (Richter 124). To the Puritan eye, Native American religions and beliefs, as well as dress and manners were not merely different or primitive, but ungodly. But their cataloguing of Native difference does yield some insight about native cultural practices to the historian.

Conversion narratives are as close as what is available to offer some records of lost aspects of Native American civilization. What is most fascinating about the chapter "Native Voices in a Colonial World" are the similarities Richter draws between two very different narratives: conversion stories and 'Treaty Protocols'. Even when solely authored by Europeans, Richter suggests, and despite their stylization, Richter believes these documents do "preserve something of what Indian people said at important personal and political moments in their lives, and they originated as largely self-contained oral texts, whose structure was largely under the Native speaker's, not the European scribe's control" (Richter 110-111). The diplomatic ceremonies were, interestingly enough almost equally as standardized as the tales of formulaic conversion, down to ritualized weeping (Richter 134). Richter sees in these rituals not eternal conflict, but at least some attempts at cultural coexistence on the part of the native populace, despite the negative end result. "Direct military confrontation" with Europeans was deemed suicidal, but through skillful managing of different alliances and ceremonial performances of diplomacy and conversion, the tribes hoped to survive (Richter 164).