Facing East from Indian Country: Native Voices in Colonial America
This paper examines pages 110–188 of Daniel Richter's Facing East from Indian Country, focusing on the chapter "Native Voices in a Colonial World." It explores the difficulties historians face when assessing colonial-era Native American and white relations, given the scarcity of authentic Indigenous accounts. The paper considers how conversion narratives and treaty protocols, though largely mediated by European scribes, nonetheless preserve elements of Native speech and self-expression. It also discusses Richter's argument that Indigenous peoples used diplomacy and ceremonial performance as strategies for cultural coexistence and survival in the face of European dominance.
- Introduction: The Challenge of Native American Sources: Scarcity and reliability of Indigenous colonial accounts
- Conversion Narratives and Puritan Influence: Puritan shaping of Native American conversion stories
- Treaty Protocols and Diplomatic Ceremony: Standardized rituals as windows into Native expression
- Native Strategies for Cultural Survival: Diplomacy and ceremony as tools of Indigenous survival
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its analysis in close reading of a primary scholarly source, using direct quotations from Richter to substantiate each claim rather than relying on generalization.
- It maintains a clear critical lens throughout, acknowledging the limitations of colonial-era documents while still extracting historical meaning from them.
- The paper draws a perceptive parallel between conversion narratives and treaty protocols, highlighting Richter's broader argument about Native agency within constrained literary and political forms.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective source-based argumentation: it introduces a historiographical problem (the scarcity of authentic Native voices), presents the author's solution (reading stylized documents for embedded Native expression), and evaluates that solution critically. This technique — using a scholar's framework to synthesize evidence — is central to undergraduate historical writing.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by establishing the evidentiary challenge facing historians of colonial Native-white relations. It then narrows to Richter's specific claims about conversion narratives and their Puritan context, before broadening to treaty protocols and diplomatic ceremony. It concludes by situating both document types within Richter's larger argument about Indigenous strategies of coexistence and survival.
Introduction: The Challenge of Native American Sources
In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel Richter identifies one of the central difficulties of studying Native American and white relations during the colonial period: the scarcity of surviving Indigenous accounts relative to the abundant documents and personal narratives produced by Europeans. Those Native accounts that do survive — such as those attributed to the so-called "Apostle to the Indians," a converted Native American — were written either by whites adopting a Native voice, or by Native authors writing in a language in which they were imperfectly fluent. By the time a substantial body of Native accounts was published, European cultural dominance had become so pervasive that many Indigenous people spoke English as their first language and were at least nominally Christian (Richter 173). This process of cultural erasure complicates historians' ability to trust the veracity of accounts of Native-white relations, particularly those concerning conversion, given the highly stylized and ideologically controlled literary conventions of the era.
Conversion Narratives and Puritan Influence
One notable distinction Richter draws between Native and European literary conventions concerns the emphasis, in Native American conversion narratives, on sins of action rather than sins of the heart. He attributes this difference largely to the fact that "seventeenth-century Puritans relentlessly hammered home the sinfulness of basic patterns of behavior in Native culture" (Richter 124). In the Puritan worldview, Native American religious beliefs and practices — as well as dress and social customs — were not simply different or primitive, but actively ungodly. Yet their detailed cataloguing of Native difference, however condescending in intent, does provide historians with some insight into Indigenous cultural practices that might otherwise be lost entirely. Conversion narratives thus represent one of the closest approximations available to records of otherwise undocumented aspects of Native American civilization.
Treaty Protocols and Diplomatic Ceremony
What is most illuminating about the chapter "Native Voices in a Colonial World" is the parallel Richter draws between two very different types of documents: conversion stories and treaty protocols. Even in texts solely authored by Europeans, Richter argues, these documents — despite their formulaic character — 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 surrounding treaty-making were, notably, almost as standardized as conversion narratives, extending even to ritualized weeping (Richter 134). Rather than reading this formalization as evidence of purely European imposition, Richter interprets these ritualized encounters as sites where Native speakers retained meaningful agency over the structure and substance of what was recorded.
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