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Following The Middle Ground
Catherine Desbarats
| THE great historian," writes Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative, "is the one who succeeds in rendering acceptable a new way of following history." These words, which seem at first to have the whiff of an odd translation, came to mind more than once as I contemplated writing the final contribution to this Forum on The Middle Ground. They came to mind particularly as I thought about what kind of dent, if any, or what manner of meander, had been dug into Richard White's way of following history by the new research featured here: Heidi Bohaker's work on kinship and identity in the eastern Great Lakes and Brett Rushforth's piece on slavery and the Fox Wars. Ricoeur's words invite scholars, I think, to ponder again some of the resilient force coiled within White's act of narrative configuration, as others have occasionally done, mainly in fruitful musing on the middle ground as metaphor. It has long tantalized me that Kerwin Lee Klein's Frontiers of Historical Imagination, the most sustained, philosophically grounded treatment of narrative configuration dealing specifically with native-European encounters in North America, covers works published during the course of a century ending in 1990. An earlier work of White's, The Roots of Dependency, appears briefly in Klein's study as an impressive, yet stark, piece of Wallersteinian frontier history, already out of step, however, with an ethnographic imagination that had transcended tragedy some time before.1 What a difference a year makes. |
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Inspired by the promise of Klein's analyses, I would like to pay some attention to The Middle Ground as a whole, heterogeneous, narrative text: something greater than a thesis, something more than a conceptual model ("optimistic" [4], as Susan Sleeper-Smith suggests, or otherwise), something other than a metaphor, a process and place, something more than a book that gets truncated in so many readings to a story about French-Indian relations (the alliance) ending with Pontiac. It might be helpful, in short, to be more precise about being "pulled in by its writing," which Philip J. Deloria evokes in passing here. What did it pull toward? How? Away from what did it pull? Whom did it pull? |
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Some initial thoughts come to mind, and might help set the stage for what is to come. The pull was partly, I think, toward very real people, places, and things that had simply not been intelligible to historians of early America before. It was partly away, also, from national and/or subaltern romances (Canadian, Quebecois, metropolitan French, American, Ojibwa, or Huron-Wyandot, to name a few of the possibilities), or from superficial forms of irony, including simplistic inversions of national plotlines. And as for the how, I would venture the following up front: partly by virtue of an imaginative, moral, and humane way of cutting some of the Gordian knots with which writers of encounters between empires and native peoples must always contend; how to balance accounts of colonialism's bite with native agency; how to articulate the links between practices and meanings on the one hand, with power on the other; how to write responsibly and truthfully about transformations of any sort given the current politics of land, law, and identity in Canada and the United States. "How do we make a history that is true to the tropes of our times, the ideals of our disciplines, the political realities of cross-cultural knowledge, and the creativity of our imagination?" asks Greg Dening.2 Embedded in the question, perhaps, are possible ingredients for a history modern readers might accept to follow, and that we might look for in White's historical practice before contemplating what kind of inspiration, positive or negative, others, including Bohaker and Rushforth, have drawn from this writing.
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