Facing East, or Facing Inside? A Critique of Reconstructionist Historiography

Daniel K. Richter opens his book, Facing East from Indian Country, with the following quotation: “‘History,’ said Beard’s contemporary Carl Becker, ‘is an imaginative creation.’”[1] It is upon this premise that Richter launches the reader into a narrative that combines primary sources and historical fact with keenly fabricated intuitions of what first contact may have been like for the native denizens of the North American continent. In his effort Richter clearly follows Beard, but with a slightly more nuanced and possibly political historiographical telos: through constructing fictive Indian subjectivities, Richter aims to better approach, if asymptotically, a “real” understanding of the moment of discovery, and his creations imply that such a task is impossible without “looking east,” or creating a subjectively stylized understanding of Native American perspective that I call reconstructionist historiography.     

Via an analysis of “A Micmac Responds to the French, c. 1677,” one of several primary accounts from Colin G. Calloway’s text, The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices in Early America, and additional historiographical inferences provided by James Axtell’s After Columbus, this paper aims to critique Richter’s assertion that, absent the plethora of sources that articulate the European perspective, it is possible to deductively reconstruct Indian experience in the colonial period. Subsequently the implications of attempting to undertake such a process will also be assessed, with the specific argument that the project of “looking east” is politically and academically problematic due to its imposition of hierarchizing analytic and relational frameworks.

Perhaps the most affective account in relation to Richter’s project is that provided by Christian LeClerq in Calloway’s collection: “A Micmac Responds to the French, c. 1677.” This strong-worded account is ostensibly the direct dictation of a Micmac tribesperson, and contains several epithets that serve to delineate Micmac cultural attitudes as much as they do the behavior of the French. The informant notes, “As for us, we find ourselves secure from all these inconveniences [of finding private lodging], and we can always say, more truly than thou, that we are at home everywhere, because we set up our wigwams with ease wheresoever we go, and without asking permission of anybody.”[2] This excerpt shows a strong predilection towards freedom of movement and association on the part of the Micmac that they find particularly lacking among the French; it shows a sophisticated understanding of agency and positive freedom that the Micmac clearly regarded as superior to the social structures of private property and class hierarchy favored by the French.

As mentioned above, LeClerq’s notation relays a vibrant sense of the Micmacs’ unabashed cultural pride and feelings of superiority towards the French. At its most heated and rhetorical moment the account reads, “Whilst feeling compassion for you from the sweetness of our repose, we wonder at the anxieties and cares which you give yourselves night and day in order to load your ship…and [in doing so] you are obliged to give recourse to the Indians, whom you so despise.”[3] This excerpt clearly shows that, despite French technologies, the Micmac remained unimpressed by French colonial efforts. Indeed, as Axtell notes, “after eighty years of contact with the French, the Micmacs had not changed their opinion.”[4]

The Micmac account provokes many questions: what is the value of such a portrait? How does it help us conceptualize the European experience of first contact? What does the source itself say about Micmac life and values? And finally, what are the implications that this pathetic portrait of the French is drawn from a native source? There are many ways in which the Micmac response can be interpreted. In a Richterian reading, the value of this Micmac account is that it serves to paint the French as they “really” were: “incomparably poorer than we…and glory[ing] in our old rags”[5]—or, pathetic, grubby, and scrambling to survive. A political or social justice-oriented reading would focus on the ways in which the account valorizes the moral/ethical and rhetorical strengths of the Micmac as a community; “who carry their houses and their wigwams with them so they may lodge wheresoever they please, independently of any seignor whatsoever…[and] live the longest who despising your bread, your wine, and your brandy, are content with their natural food…?”[6] And a Eurocentric critique would doubtlessly highlight the defensive tone and alleged admissions of inferiority and subtle intimations of self-effacement—“we are content with the little that we have”[7]—on the part of the Micmac.

Due to the evocative and emotional detail of the source, the interpretive possibilities are extensive indeed. Thus, rather than speculating about “actually” happened in the context of this Micmac source, it is more interesting to analyze what scholars who participate in the project of “looking east” make of the Micmac account. In light of this decision, James Axtell’s analysis of “A Micmac Responds to the French” is necessary. The Micmac account clearly conveys a sense of cultural pride that is not only unshakeable, but also moralistically grounded—the Micmac believe themselves to be superior to the French because they understand French culture to be in contradiction with inviolable social mores. And yet, Axtell closes “Through a Glass Darkly: Early Indian Views of Europeans,” the eighth chapter of his book After Columbus, with the following assertion regarding his historiographical project:

The mystery we would like to solve is how, in the face of inexplicable and uncontrollable diseases, admitted technological inferiority, demographic inundation, loss of land and power, and aggressive religious and cultural proselytizing, the Indians managed to retain their magnificent, if disconcerting, self-regard. If we could solve that, we would possess the key to understanding the depth and range of their early feelings and attitudes towards the Europeans.[8]

The problem with Axtell’s analysis of the Micmac response to the French is that it paints the Micmac Indians’ valorization of their own culture as ‘disconcerting’—as not only different or in contrast to the obvious self-aggrandizement typical of European colonial projects, but somehow inferior. It is true that the Micmac eventually lost control of their culture and territory as the French gradually won it, but to attempt to reconstruct a Micmac subjectivity at first contact through the lens of the tribe’s “ultimate” defeat is neither academically rigorous nor socially responsible.

            It is for this reason that exactly the problem of lens that will occupy the closing section of this essay. It seems that in their haste to remove the historiographical lenses imposed by European colonial accounts, historians such as Axtell and Richter who tackle the project of reconstructive historiography forget that they sport lenses of their own, and that the eyes which read through those lenses directly shape the historical contexts they perceive. It is in acknowledgement of the historian’s own situatedness that I chose to juxtapose Axtell’s reading with the Micmac account itself, for when situated side-by-side Axtell’s selection of specific details to fit a specific historiographical telos becomes plainly obvious. Rather than letting the source speak for itself—i.e., “Learn now, my brother, once and for all, for I must open to thee my heart: there is no Indian who does not consider himself to be infinitely more happy and more powerful than the French”[9]—Axtell’s skepticism about the Micmac’s collective pride and cultural integrity throws an inherently hierarchizing and (albeit likely unintentionally) colonialist cast over his attempts to reconstruct native understandings of European identity.

I make the above accusation because, despite numerous cases of European deserters and “white Indians,” the monolith of European culture remains unchallenged—neither Axtell nor Richter ask why, after relying so heavily on the admittedly complex and bountiful societies of the Eastern Woodlands Indians for survival, most Europeans kept believing in their god and swearing allegiance to their crown. Rather, it’s a given that the “civilizers” would wish to maintain and propagate their “civility.” Though subtle, this element of Axtell and Richter’s critiques serves as a guiding lens for readers; though attempting reconstructive historiography is a revolutionary project, the genre’s heavy reliance on fabricated narratives—which are thus situated in and influenced by the contemporary geist—causes texts that “look east” to inevitably engage with the possibility of engendering a view of Indians that, if subtler, differs little from a popular narrative that still bears hints of racialized and colonialist influences.

While it is incredibly important to ask, as Axtell does, after the “depth and range of [Indians’] early feelings and attitudes towards the Europeans,” it is difficult to imagine a way in which such a project could be accurately or responsibly done. Aside from the problem of the historians’ subjective lens there must be considered the deeply ephemeral nature of cultural propagation and diffusion. Syncretism between idea systems is the cornerstone of this phenomenon; it is a subtle and pervasive sort of mixing that enables statements such as “Though reproachest us…that our country is a little hell in contrast with France”[10] on the part of a still-proud and self-identified Micmac. This excerpt is extraordinary in that it displays a member of one seemingly “bounded” culture utilizing the terms of another seemingly “bounded” culture. One would not argue that, because s/he referenced hell, a European construct, the informant was not “authentically” Micmac, and yet the Indian’s adoption of the European term and idea of “hell” breaks down the very Self/Other dichotomy that reconstructive historiographies mistakenly propagate through their juxtaposition of “western” looking Europeans and “eastern” looking American Indians.

Thus, what is most important to ask about is not why the Micmac “chose” to maintain their integrity and pride in the face of French conquest as Axtell does, but rather is the efforts taken to assure the persistence of that pride. Given the undeniable mixing that occurs from the first moment of contact between any two entities, I argue that it is detrimental to regard the Micmac—and all groups that made contact with European settlers—as “separate” entities with a unilateral, cardinally oriented perspective. Rather, it is most important to examine in what ways the Micmac and other groups adopted and integrated different elements of “French-ness,” “Dutch-ness,” “English-ness,” “Spanish-ness” et al as a part of each tribe’s unquestionable fight to survive holistically as a culture.

Bibliography

Axtell, James. After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America. New York:  Oxford University Press, 1988.

Calloway, Colin G. The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America. New York:        Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994.

Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.