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Forum
The Middle Ground Revisited Introduction
Susan Sleeper-Smith
| IN his first chapter of The Middle Ground, Richard White borrowed from Eric Wolf to remind readers that "human populations construct their cultures in interaction with one another, not in isolation."1 White examined interactions with Indians from a long-range perspective but focused on the French, with Britain and the United States playing secondary roles. White's work encouraged scholars to refocus on French colonialism, exposed a rich panoply of archival sources, and rescued Great Lakes scholars from being provincially labeled local historians. Even more important, though, The Middle Ground produced a complex model for understanding encounter both as an event and as a cultural process. White's linking of geographical space with historical process is an important analytic tool that allows scholars to examine how foreigners and indigenous peoples from different cultures consciously created a place where negotiation displaced confrontation. The middle ground of his book evolved as a product of two cultures possessing roughly equivalent power; it was limited by time (the French colonial era) and by space (the pays d'en haut, or Upper Country, in the Great Lakes region). White's innovative approach earned him the Albert J. Beveridge Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the James A. Rawley Award. As Philip J. Deloria contends in his contribution to this Forum, scholars have been awed "by the depth of the book's historical research, thrilled by its conceptual power, pulled in by its writing" (15). This Forum offers an opportunity to review the characteristics that define White's middle ground and to examine the explanatory power and interpretive pull that White's work continues to have on scholarship. |
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The Middle Ground destabilized many of the older narratives of early American history by developing a different behavioral model for understanding human interaction. Though some historians may criticize White's middle ground as "a kaleidoscopic array of people ... [a] welter of combination and recombination," this perspective on demographic change has had less influence on the scholarly literature than how White embedded cultural production within the framework of encounter.2 Instead of viewing colonial mandates as dooming indigenous people, White investigated how new cultural forms emerged out of the often creative miscommunication between Europeans and Native Americans. As Deloria indicates, the concept of the middle ground has the power to incorporate as well as to move beyond the familiar analytic categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality. |
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White determined the characteristics of this middle ground by showing, through specific examples, how that process worked. His research revealed Indians who behaved in rather surprising ways, working toward compromise. For example Marie Rouensa, or Aramepinchieue, epitomized the role that young women could play in creating this cultural space. Rouensa's father had chosen a rather grizzled veteran of the fur trade for his young daughter. Her refusal and the disturbances that followed would eventually be resolved through the mediation process in which she proposed that her marriage be consecrated in the Catholic Church and that her heathen parents convert to Christianity. Shortly after their conversion, many people in her village also chose to become Christian. Indians proved themselves cultural innovators who drew foreigners into their changing world. For Marie Rouensa, it was Catholicism that held her community together, whereas in many other parts of this region, it was trade or gift giving that cemented the alliances formed by the Indians and the French. |
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By describing a middle ground of adaptation and compromise in a region continually plagued by violence and warfare, White supplied an optimistic model of how cultures negotiated rather than collided. This model has become so appealing that many scholars are guilty of turning every time and place of cultural encounter into a middle ground, transforming the phrase into an elusive metaphor for various forms of compromise. This increasingly ambiguous notion of the middle ground has developed a life of its own, but such overuse and misapplication should not detract from the explanatory power of White's original formulation. |
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