This is an amazing book that I read back in 2016 and rediscovered on my Kindle. I read it again and was reminded of how good Richter's writing and perspective is. The point of Facing East is for the reader to see the colonization of North America (mainly the northeastern United States but also some of Canada and the southern colonies) through the eyes of the native people. Mostly, the book focuses on the mid-15th century to the mid-18th century, with a little more at the end until the mid-19th.
Richter writes that in 1492, there were about 2 million people living east of the Mississippi River. Those numbers would start to shrink rapidly, but by 1700, there were still just 250,000 Europeans living in the area, exclusively in coastal enclaves and along some rivers, so the natives still predominated. The shift occurred between 1700 and 1750, by which point there were only about 250,000 Native Americans east of Mississippi and 1.25 million Europeans and Africans. However, at that time the area between the Great Lakes, the Appalachians, and the Mississippi remained in Indian hands, and would stay that way until after American independence and the early 19th century. Only around the time of US independence would the area that is now the eastern United States recover to hold 2 million people, but of course they were very different people. Richter writes that in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America, places where the Spanish settled saw epidemics that slashed Native populations by 75 to 95 percent during the 16th century, but that the evidence in North America is far shakier.
The first major population collapses were happening by the middle of the 16th century, with disease being the likely cause of the breakup of nearly every chiefdom in the Mississippi Valley and the southeast at that time. Mounded cities were abandoned and political organization fractured into less hierarchical groups that would eventually form the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws. The opposite happened in the north, where Great Lakes peoples coalesced to form the Iroquois Confederation and the Huron (later the Wyandots), as refugees from tribes destroyed by disease gathered into larger towns along the Susquehanna and Potomac River watersheds. These consolidations left large swathes of territory in New York and Pennsylvania empty of permanent inhabitants. There were also major epidemics right after colonists arrived in Massachusetts and Virginia in the 1600s. There was a pandemic in New England from 1616-18 that Europeans estimated left just one in fifteen alive in nearby villages, with an overall estimated 75% fatality rate. There was simultaneously a "great mortality" in the villages around Jamestown. And down south, at least 15 separate nations in the early 1500s had declined into just four groupings in Spanish Florida by the late 1600s.
The book's best chapter's are its earliest ones. In chapter 1, Richter has us imagine three different perspectives, Stadacona (on the St. Lawrence River), Cofitachequi (South Carolina), and Cahokia (St. Louis). The imagined narratives are useful for getting the reader in the right frame of mind, although very limited by the lack of written records, and therefore largely fictional. In chapter 3, Richter tells three narratives through the eyes of real native peoples: Pocahontas, Kateri Tekakwitha, and King Philip (Metacom), who varied in how they dealt with Europeans. Pocahontas was used as a child-bride to forge a marriage alliance with the Europeans. Kateri Tekakwitha was a convert to Catholicism who fled from her native culture. And Metacom was a Wampanoag chief who made war against the colonists. The inclusion of their stories enhances the book a lot.
Richter also describes some of the ecological impacts of the arrival of Europeans, which would also have an effect on the native inhabitants. For example, massive demand for beaver pelts led to regional extinctions of beavers, which had large ripple effects due to the ways that beavers transform their environments. Moreover, European methods of farming damaged the environment. Native Americans in the eastern part of North America had adapted an ingenious method of farming using the Three Sisters (corn, beans, and squash) to sustainably harvest more crops in a smaller area than Europeans could as they exhausted the soil. All that was needed was a digging stick to make a hole to plant seeds and a hoe to build up a hill around the growing plants. No weeding or other tending was necessary once squash vines began to grow, and the process was much less labor-intensive than the plow-and-sickle agriculture Europeans used. the resulting diet of Native Americans, supplemented by fruit and wild game, was far healthier than European standards. However, Native American agriculture depended on a semi-nomadic lifestyle and use of the landscape that was incompatible with how the colonists farmed. It was even more affected by the Europeans not fencing in their livestock so that cows, chickens, and pigs wandered and ate everything they saw. The pigs were the worst, and essentially starved out everyone else by eating everything in their path.
There was a broader period of peace in the first half of the 18th century, in which Richter argues that Native Americans were able to coexist with the European powers by balancing them against each other. The French held the St. Laurence and the Mississippi and the Spanish held Florida. The English held the east coast, leaving the middle to the Indians. The tribes that had no European support failed, as did those that only counted on one European power, which always abused them. But tribes that could play their position well and keep the Europeans competing for alliances with them did well and earned trade goods. However, Indians quickly became dependent on those trade goods, and therefore could not risk fighting the Europeans. One colonial official wrote in 1761 that "A modern Indian cannot subsist without Europeans and would handle a flint ax or any other rude utensil used by his ancestors very awkwardly. What was only conveniency at first is now become necessity." Richter writes that apart from food and shelter, every aspect of Indian life depended on material goods from Europe at the dawn of the Seven Years' War (French and Indian War). Without open ties to at least one colonial power, a tribe was doomed. And so it was especially bad for the Indians when the French lost in the Seven Years' War, resulting in uncontested English power that would gradually push them completely off their lands. The era of diplomacy was over, and Indians faced colonists greedy for land and an English government with no reason to restrain them since there were no Europeans who would be upset by expansion.
The massacres by colonists of Indians sound like they could be right out of a book about the Holocaust. This is just one example:
In August British agent Matthew Elliot showed up with a party of Wyandot warriors to convince the Moravians that they should move, for their own protection, to the British-allied Indian population centers on the Sandusky River. When they refused, the Wyandots treated their missionaries, Heckewelder and David Zeisberger, as captives and forced everyone to relocate to the Sandusky. After a half-starved winter, the Moravian Indians received permission to return to the Muskingum and harvest the corn they had left standing in their fields the previous autumn. As they settled into their houses at Salem and Gnadenhütten, Washington County, Pennsylvania, militia under the command of David Williamson appeared and convinced some forty-two men, twenty women, and thirty-four children to gather at Gnadenhütten, from which he promised to escort them to Fort Pitt for their protection.
At least some members of Williamson’s militia were said to be former Paxton Boys; nearly all shared that group’s attitudes toward Indians who claimed to be the friends of Whites. Once the militiamen had collected the Moravian Indians at Gnadenhütten and convinced them to give up anything resembling a weapon, they announced that the Indians would all be killed. Surely, the Pennsylvanians claimed, the Gnadenhütten people had harbored—if they were not themselves—murderers of Whites. Moreover, the “clothes, children’s caps, tea-kettles, pots, cups and saucers, etc., saws, axes, chisels, pewter basins, porringers, etc.,” found in the homes of these hard working Indian disciples of their missionary teachers could not possibly have belonged to them. In the racially bifurcated vision of the militiamen, these “were only made use of by White people and not by Indians,” and so must have been plundered from frontier victims. Thus condemned, the Indians spent the night praying and singing hymns. In the morning, Williamson’s men marched over ninety people in pairs into two houses and methodically slaughtered them.
That could be a description of Babi Yar with the names changed.
Miscellaneous:
- A central feature of Iroquois life was "Mourning Wars," in which Iroquois bands would raid other tribes for captives, who would become Iroquois and replace the deceased.
- Something this book got me interested in is the Native Americans who travelled to Europe and what they thought about it. There were a lot of people who got to make the colonization voyage in reverse and it must have been so surreal.
- Something I thought was interesting about the decline of feudalism and the European "empires" is that they all used "governors" in the New World, and seemed to only rarely name lords. I would like to read more about how the colonization of the New World strengthened kings against their nobility.
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