The Blue Ridge - Transformation of the Southern Frontier From 1500 Through 1800
Most previous studies of the history of the region are focused on a Eurocentric perspective and explore how Europeans transitioned to American Colonists to Americans as the pushed Westward from the coast through the piedmont and across the mountain barriers to the open lands beyond.
We will explore the transitions of both the Indigenous Peoples and the New Arrivals from Europe during the first 300 years of contact and clash as these two divergent cultures and two established civilizations met in the Blue Ridge and surrounding regions of North America.
Although many Americans consider the establishment of the colonies as the birth of this country, in fact Early America already existed long before the arrival of the Europeans. From coast to coast, Native Americans had created enduring cultures, and the subsequent European invasion remade much of the existing land and culture. In New Worlds for All, Colin Calloway explores the unique and vibrant new cultures that Indians and Europeans forged together in early America. The journey toward this hybrid society kept Europeans' and Indians' lives tightly entwined: living, working, worshiping, traveling, and trading together—as well as fearing, avoiding, despising, and killing one another.
Traditional histories of Native Americans have focused on the point of view, or history, of European Americans. But in 2001, historian Daniel Ricther breaks this trend in his novel work - Facing East From Indian Country. The "eastward" approach incorporates the interpretations, or stories, of early Native Americans who observed the movements of Europeans from eastern America. His research is by no means exhaustive, but advances a fresh perspective of the scant pre-existing primary sources on early Native Americans. His sophisticated synthesis and analysis of the aforementioned sources, coupled with his incisive imagination shed light on a virtually untold Native American history.
Richter chronologically organizes his work and concentrates heavily on early colonial times in his opening chapters, which appear to be his area of expertise. His passages of primary sources are often lengthy and precariously worded, but his strong narrative and eloquent articulation of Indian culture supersede these minor distractions.
One of the things that happens when FACING EAST FROM INDIAN COUNTRY is that you get a different picture of time and events. Traditionally the story of early America is a westward moving one, and one which quickly becomes a story about Europeans and an emerging people called American's.
One of the most profound impressions this book will leave with you is a view of the East Coast of North America as dominantly Indian country for more than a hundred years after initial settlement. Even more startling is Richter's well reasoned argument that Eastern North America only ceased to be Indian country when following 1776, the now fully emergent American's "denied the continent's first peoples a place in the nation they were creating."
Richter musters the sources traditional to any historian--varied secondary sources, the journals of participants of historical interactions between Natives and Europeans, literary sources by Natives and sundry oral sources likely to be their own. Utilizing a vast knowledge of the period between the first arrival of Europeans in the Americas through the period of "Jacksonian Democracy," Richter paints a lucid picture of European interaction with the tribes of North America, and how it altered the behavior of all parties involved. This narrative is neither a record of triumphant civilization moving west, nor is it an account of genocide moving ferociously from East--though Richter makes clear both of these fit, respectively, into American myth and American realty--he is much more concerned with how the cultures interacted with each other in creating the circumstances that Natives lived under and how they viewed their changing world.
Richter's approach to understanding how the world did and would appear to Natives is grounded in the understanding that commerce, politics, environment, and ideologies will be discernibly altered by any new presence. Just as North America became a new market for European goods, so Europe allowed for the prospering of some tribes through a need for raw materials such as leather and beaver pelts.
Revisiting the oft told stories of Pocahontas and Metacon, Ricther articulately portrays these individuals as being champions of peaceful co-existence, and cooperation, in the New World. In addition to the previously noted amenable traits, Native Americans also possessed sound diplomatic skills. For instance, Richter provides considerable detail about the sophisticated "treaty protocol" that early Americans utilized. Noting that this process "ideally consisted of nine stages," ( 135) Ricther explicitly detailed the expectations of Iroquois during these meetings in the mid-eighteenth century and illuminated the European's poor cultural understanding of these protocols. These examples, and others, highlighted the European's ignorance of Indian culture.
The latter chapters chronicle the Indians transgression from peaceful co-existence with the Europeans in the eighteenth century to all out war with them in the early nineteenth century. In the mid-eighteenth century, for instance, Ricther convincingly argues that "diversity wrought an increasingly pervasive view that Indians and Whites were utterly different, and utterly incompatible." (180) These views became more solidified in the nineteenth century. And Indians gradually surrendered more rights, and property, in the New World.
In the epilogue, which was more suited for the introduction or opening chapters, Ricther outlines the writings of Native American writer William Apess who sought to promote an eastward narrative of Indian history in the early eighteenth century. According to Richter, his work was silenced by European histories.
This work, in closing, creates new opportunities for scholars to re-interpret Native American history. This paradigm shift will likely lead to more sophisticated studies of early Indian culture in the New World, and ultimately add to our rather meager understanding of Indian history. A must read for Native American scholars and graduate and undergraduate history students who wish to broaden their understanding of early American history.
