Title: The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815
Author: Richard White
Year of Publication: 1991
Thesis:
"mediation itself can be an instrument of power." (but not simply imposition) (xvi)
"A fundamental thrust of The Middle Ground is to assert that Indian peoples in the pays d’en haul were modern, a people of history whom events had forced to charter a new' and dangerous route into the future." (xviii)
"The middle ground did not involve the achievement of a widespread mutual understanding and appreciation between Europeans and Indian peoples. People did not come together to love one another. Xor does the concept of a middle ground envision the elimination of either native cultures or of European cultures and their replacement by some common hybrid. I pre sume the persistence ofmany aspects ofthe old alongside the creation ofthe new." (xxi)
"I don't claim the two groups did this by understanding and appreciating the other's cultural perspective, but rather I claim they did it by capitalizing on creative misunderstandings." (xi)
Time: 1650-1815
Geography: pays d'en haut/upper French Canada
Organization:
List of abbreviations
Preface to the twentieth anniversary edition
- Never wanted to be the arbiter of others' application of the Middle Ground
- It's a "process of mutual and creative misunderstanding" (xii)
- It is grounded in historical space (in this case, the pas d'en haut)
- Requirements: "a confronttion between imperial or state regimes and non-state forms of social organization, a rough balance of power, a mutual need or desire for what the other possesses, and an inability of one side to commandeer enough force toc ompel the other to do what it desired. Force and violence are hardly foreign to the process of creating and maintaining a middle ground, but the critical element is mediation." (xii)
- emphasizes its particularity
- Argues that Levi-Strauss in talking about hot and cold societies is similar to a continuum of modernity. (xviii)
Introduction
-"The middle ground is the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages. It is a place where many of the North American subjects and allies of empires lived. Il is the area between the historical fore ground ol European invasion and occupation and the background of Indian defeat and retreat." (xxvi)
- Algonquian speakers dominant in region, even though not all were part of that language group and it extended beyond that region (shows the limits of Western attempts to define Native American spaces)
1 - Refugees: a world made of fragments
2 - The middle ground
3 - The fur trade
4 - The alliance
5 - Republicans and rebels
6 - The clash of empires
7 - Pontiac and the restoration of the middle ground
8 - The British alliance
9 - The contest of villagers
10 - Confederacies
11 - The politics of benevolence
Epilogue: Assimilation and otherness
Index
Type:
Methods:
"New Indian" history (centers Indian peoples)
Sources:
Historiography:
Greg Dening Islands and Beaches
Keywords:
Middle Ground:
Is the creation, in part through creative misunderstanding, of a set of practices, rituals, offices, and believes that although comprised of elements of the group in contact is as a whole separate from the practices and beliefs of those groups." (xiii)
Bricolage (Levi-Strauss)
- "using materials at hand to overcome a new obstacle." (xiii)
accommodation
- upstreaming - mapping more current interpretations onto previous histories
creative misunderstandings
Themes:
gift exchange
patriarchy
Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:
Notes: