The Middle Ground

"Richard White’s The Middle Ground shifts the focus away from the East Coast to the upper Great Lakes. The first part of the book, and I think the most important part, focuses not on the relationship between the English and Indians but on the relationship between the French and Indians. It’s very important to remember that the English were only one of a number of European nations that tried to establish colonial footholds and, in so doing, had to establish relationships with native people. The French were early actors, particularly in Canada. They worked their way up the Saint Lawrence River and across the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi Valley toward New Orleans. But the Great Lakes area was the primary thrust of French colonialism – they were driven by the desire to harvest Indian furs and the missionary impulse to save Indian souls. Richard White complicates understandings of Indian and white relations by looking at how Indians and Europeans – in a world already thrown upside down because of the impacts of disease, escalating warfare involving the fur trade and an arms race, as Indian people scrambled to get the guns they needed to survive – constructed a complex world that was new to all the participants. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The middle ground was an area where Indian power was real, where Europeans who were ambitious about building empires, establishing trade or saving souls had to compromise and conciliate – not command. They had to adjust to doing business in Indian country in a world where kinship and fluctuating tribal alliances and multiple tribal agendas dictated life. It was an area of cautious coexistence, cultural convergence and alliances built on mutual need. The Middle Ground is important because it helps destroy the notion that American history began in the east with the arrival of the English and spread westward. It’s far more accurate to look at North America as a mosaic or even kaleidoscope of different Indian peoples. So, for 20 years now, the Middle Ground has been part of the lexicon of Native American history, and a whole generation of younger scholars coming through looked at different areas of the country, tested White’s hypothesis and considered how European colonists conciliated with Indian power. From my perspective, as a historian of early America, the most important thing to realise is that the English did not arrive on the edge of a continent that was essentially empty. We cannot fully understand what happens after that first Thanksgiving without better understanding what had happened in the thousands of years leading up to that moment. That first Thanksgiving shouldn’t be seen just as something that occurred on the western edge of European history but rather as something that happened at the northeastern edge of an American Indian world, which stretched throughout the continent."