Define relationship with a field?
Per hook_views_data_alter, I came up with code along the lines of the following which seems to work for my example in the question:

$data['field_data_FIELDNAME']['dummy_name'] = array(
  'title' =&gt; t('Map field to other db column'),
  'group' =&gt; t('Custom mapping'),
  'relationship' =&gt; array(
    'base' =&gt; 'node_revision',
    'base field' =&gt; 'vid',
    'field' =&gt; 'FIELDNAME_value',
    'handler' =&gt; 'views_handler_relationship',
    'label' =&gt; t('Map field to db column'),
    'title' =&gt; t('Field to db map'),
  ),
);