The Middle Ground

Richard White. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

This book is the history of a time and place that, while bounded geographically and temporally as indicated in the subtitle, was also defined by a complex web of social, cultural, political, and economic relationships between Indian and European societies which met in this "middle ground".

The author refers to it as a "circular story" (ix) in which Indians and whites began the period regarding each other as strange, alien "others" to be regarded from a distance; in the end, the triumphant Americans would re-impose this perception on the former middle ground, but in the intervening decades, there had been a complex world of ever-shifting negotiation and compromise. The Middle Ground could be--and often was--a dangerous and violent place, but it was also a place in which accommodation and compromise were possible.

White often refers to the region by the name given by early French explorers and colonists: the pays d'en haut. This is appropriate, as the relationship between French and Algonquian established much of the initial template for the middle ground; later generations of Indians would often look back to the era in which the "French Fathers" had been the primary Euro-American power with nostalgia and longing. The initial alliance that French and Indian individuals and groups painstakingly negotiated had a lasting effect on the history of subsequent Spanish, British, and American involvement in the region.

This book covers a long time period across a wide area, and while White's analysis pays a great deal of attention to the ambiguity and shifting realities of the topic, the book itself is largely structured in a straightforwardly chronological framework. This is welcome, as a more thematic approach would have lost any narrative connection, as White deliberately leaves the center of most commonly-studied events of the period (particularly the wars: French-Indian; American Revolution; and the War of 1812) off-stage. He locates the center of his story firmly within the pays d'en haut. 

This book is a valuable study of Indian'white relations and Indian history, but it also adds a new dimension to the study of colonial and Early American history. This is a view from what most standard American histories of the era consider the hinterlands or the "back country." As White explains, most students of American history know how this story ends--with the new nation committed to rigid racial hierarchies, and a complete dispossession of the western Indians. But that history was not inevitable, nor was it the logical consequence of what preceded it. White restores the history of a world that was lost when America "conquered" the West.