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''This article was originally published on [http://videri.org/index.php?title=The_Middle_Ground| Videri.org] and is republished here with their permission.
Rich White's The Middle Ground examines the lives of Native Americans and their interactions with Europeans in the pays d'en haut (the upper country where the fur trade took place) from the Iroquois assaults of the 1650's 1650s through to the War of 1812. White's detailed book makes a compelling case for the invention, rise, fall, resurgence, and ultimate demise of a cultural "middle ground" between Indians and whites. This hybridization of European and Algonquian social conventions occurred as a result of — and thrived when — neither group had the ability to dominate the other by force. As a result, Europeans and Indians resorted to mediation instead and conducted both their formal and informal affairs using this amalgam of French and Indian ways.
White begins his tale with the chaos that followed the many strikes of the "Iroquois Hammer," and how the resulting displacement and disempowerment of ethnically diverse refugees first enabled the conditions that would make the Middle ground possible - When the French first arrived in the pays d'en haut, they encountered often desperate Indians who were quite often as unfamiliar to the area as they. White goes on to describe the formation of both the French-Algonquin alliance against the Iroquois and the Middle ground. In terms of Indians' cultural impressions, whites go from being manitous (otherworldly spirits) to voices for the "Great Manitou" (Christ) to benevolent fathers (represented mainly by "Onontio," the French Governor.)
White concludes his book by examining the decline of the middle ground in the post-revolutionary era - As the Americans amass more power in the East, they choose "imperial benevolence," a policy which aimed to make Indians "culturally indistinguishable" from Americans, as their basis of communication with the fledgling and increasingly dependent Indian confederacy in the pays d'en haut. And as the balance of power becomes more and more lopsided, particularly after the War of 1812, the middle ground disappears, and Native Americans are ultimately reconstructed as alien, exotic "others," as evidenced by the sad tale of the aged Tenskwatawa.
In sum, White's book is quite an impressive synthesis of cultural relations between whites and Indians along the Great Lakes region. I would have liked to hear more about the relationships between seventeenth -century English colonists and Native Americans, but since that's not the focus of his book I can't really fault him for it.
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