This is an oddly disturbing and somewhat distressing book. In its construction, Facing East from Indian Country has the potential to be original and exciting. As Daniel Richter clearly points out, most work on the interaction between European and Indian looks inland from the Atlantic and thus the view is looking west from the Atlantic. Instead, he is asking that we look at these same events as seen looking eastward from Indian country. This is a very important observation. Indeed, asking the reader to take a different perspective is becoming more widespread as is evident in David Northrup's Africa's Discovery of Europe 1450–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). The problem for Richter occurs in what lies between asking the reader to take this alternative perspective and the writing of a native history of early America. Unlike other situations, Richter has scant evidence on which to base his history.

My concerns are threefold. The first is that during the early years of contact between Indians and Europeans, there is no Indian documentary evidence about their perspective. This is a reality with which all in the field must work. Oral history for the period has been passed down though generations and thus must be treated with care. The documentary evidence that does exist was written down by Europeans. Even when Europeans intended to provide exact translations, we know now that the understanding of the words used could be quite different between Indian and European. Thus in his very first chapters, Richter has a problem. He solves the problem by providing a number of case studies of what he imagines particular Indians would have felt. In the book, these imaginings are not right-hand justified as is the remainder of the text. But they still pose a serious problem. These imaginings are not history. To be sure, the careful reader will recognize this. Yet on a methodological level we must be concerned about the bounds of historical speculation. Where does speculation based on other case studies or other time periods end and pure imaginings begin. Should such a line be drawn? Is there a responsibility to draw that line?

My second concern is that while trying to present a work that views the contact between Europe and America from an Indian perspective, the narrative is incredibly Eurocentric. Indeed, we end up with what I consider to be a very old fashioned view of Indian life after contact. Richter sets up for us a world of dependency. For instance, “[t]he inability to make a decent pot or airworthy flint arrowhead (even if one had wanted to make such things) meant that their replacements now had to be purchased…commercial hunting was likely to crowd out almost all other economic pursuits, and to make communities almost entirely dependent on European trading partners for nearly all their supplies” (p. 51, italics in original). This is a story of glass baubles (p. 48) and dependency. Yet while this might have been the historical reality for some very few communities, it was not the reality for the majority of native communities in North America for the first hundred or two hundred years of contact. Richter claims to be writing a Native History of Early America but this is a book about only those communities that actually had contact. It is not a history of all Native communities many of whom would still be making decent pots.

If we take only those communities which had contact as the relevant set, my third concern lies in the way that the early centuries of history are compressed. The arrival of new people, new goods and new diseases did change lives. But how were lives changed? The emphasis in the narrative is that all change is the result of colonial interaction. Colonial interaction becomes the focal point. Yet for much of the first two centuries, it is surely better to think of the arrival of the colonists as an exogenous shock to the system and Indian communities responded to this shock as to any other exogenous shock. It caused a change in the power balance which played out in particularly Indians ways. Indian communities could respond to changes in the relative power between groups with war. This is to argue that Indians reacted to the power change brought about by the arrival of Europeans as they would have to an epizootic. But by focusing on the fact that the shock is the arrival of Europeans, Richter is saying that the resulting changes were European induced rather than shock induced. Again this is a Eurocentric view. By the time we get to the new republic, relationships between Americans and Indian have changed. There are now specific Indian–American tensions and war. But are we justified in calling these wars ethnic cleansing? More than anything else, what is gained by labeling all interaction in this way? In summary, I found this an odd book: Interesting in conception but flawed in delivery.