Richter opens Facing East from Indian Country with a description of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri. Built in the 1960s by Eero Saarinen, the modernist structure is meant to evoke the idea of St. Louis as a gateway to the Western United States, a position it held for 19th-century settlers. Richter uses this symbol to reorient the reader toward the Indigenous point of view on Euro-American settlers: Instead of standing, metaphorically speaking, on the eastern side looking at the West through the arch, Richter proposes standing on the Western (Indigenous) side and looking toward the East. From this perspective, westward expansion was not an inevitable fulfillment of destiny but the result of real human choices—choices that often resulted in destructive racial antagonism between whites and Indigenous peoples.

Wampum are tube-shaped shell beads on strings or woven in belts or decorations. Before the arrival of the white settlers, Indigenous tribes used wampum for ceremonial purposes, but after Europeans developed ways to mass produce wampum, it became a medium of exchange and currency. Its value is derived from the skill involved in making it, its aesthetic appeal, and its sacred character. Richter emphasizes that this use of wampum as “Indian money” was entirely a result of the colonists.