Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America by Daniel K. Richter

Author:Daniel K. Richter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-08-03T16:11:00+00:00

Everywhere, then, the lessons Native people drew from the carnage of the period between Metacom's War and the Yamasee War were the same. Direct military confrontation with European powers was suicidal; some kind of diplomatic accommodation was the only route to survival. But an accommodation that relied solely on a single European power was an almost equally certain path to extinction. Whether in the form of the "greatest lord" Andros, the spiritual lord of the Christian God, the material lord of a briefly profitable intercultural trade, or the indigenous lords created by the Republic of Indians, accommodations that relied solely on Albany, or Quebec, or Charleston, or St. Augustine led to disaster. The Native peoples who survived and even prospered into the eighteenth century capitalized on their geographic position, their economic and military value to European governors, and their decentralized political systems to keep their options open, to maintain connections with more than one imperial power, and thus to maintain their cultural and political autonomy. As a frustrated New York Indian affairs secretary Peter Wraxall put it, "to preserve the balance between us and the French is the great ruling principle of the modern Indian politics.""

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