Sample Solution

ncentives,” (Calloway, p.140). It was important to maintain this relationship with the Indians because “France’s North American empire…depended on the maintaining the goodwill of an array of Indian peoples,” (Calloway, p.140).

While this gift giving relationship between the Native Americans and the mainly French settlers helped the trading of goods between the two sides for a while, this all changed after the French and Indian War. In the Treaty of Paris, the French had to give all of their mainland North American land to the British. This put a strain on the interactions between the Europeans and the Native Americans because the British favored power over appeasement and the overall relationship soured because of this and the “Middle Ground” slowly dissipated.

4. What does it mean to study the history of North America “Facing East from Indian Country,” as the historian Daniel Richter suggests? How does doing so change traditional perspectives on North American history from a geographic, chronological, and methodological (what sources we use and how) perspective?

In historian Daniel Richter’s Facing East from Indian Country, Richter writes about the Eurocentric manner in which American history is taught and learned. He urges us to “face east from Indian country” and to consider the Native American point of view about American history. Richter wrote that the goal of the book was “to outline stories of North America during the period of European colonization rather than of the European colonization of North America,” (Richter, p. 9). It is important for a student and a historian to be able to consider both sides of every story and to account for the arguments and flaws with every viewpoint. As the old adage states, “history is written by the victors,” and, while this is not always true, it is still a solid