This is a biggie – easily the most influential work in American Indian history (term chosen deliberately) of the last quarter-century. As Paige said, we’d like to you read it, and the articles responding to it, as much for analysis of the particularities of historical events as for the broader conceptual and ethical questions we often speak about.
Here’s what we’d like you to read:
Everyone: Chapters 1-4, 7, and Epilogue.
Dane, Jakub, Elspeth, Nicole, and Henry: Chapters 5, 6, and 8.
Nick, Rosie, Vicki, and Michael: Chapters 9, 10, and 11.
We realize that’s a lot, especially in combination with the additional readings. Do your best.
As Deloria indicates, the middle ground is a temporal and place specific conceptual network that is too often reduced to a few simple concepts to be applied to any site of cultural contact. And, as White reflects, the middle ground also refers to, among other things, a literal space that is not replicable elsewhere: the pays d’en haut, or upper country of French Canada. With those caveats in mind, but perhaps suspending them too for a moment, I am curious about thinking through how a “middle ground” could be applied to contemporary state-led projects of reconciliation. To what extent could thinking through the kinds of mediation, creative misunderstanding, seeking of cultural and political congruence—“fictional or actual” (53)—described in the eighteenth century French/Algonquin middle ground map on to the kind of project that the Canadian state has become interested in for relating to Indigenous peoples?
I’m thinking here of David Garneau’s critique “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation” in which he diagnoses some of the structural problems endemic to rosy-eyed narrations of Indigenous/settler state relations in the past that get brought about in the project of reconciling: returning to a fictive, co-operative past. I haven’t quite fully worked through this relationship of middle ground to reconciliation, but (especially now following the outcome of the Fontaine and Boushie trials, which are symptomatic of the state’s failure to structurally and materially “reconcile” with Indigenous communities and nations), I think it might be a fruitful or even prescient line of inquiry, anachronisms aside.
Elspeth thank you for raising these points, I hadn’t thought of the idea of thinking about the middle ground alongside spaces for reconciliation, but that’s a really interesting idea to engage with!
My question is less temporal/specific. Regardless of how we want to critique the Middle Ground, it is still perhaps one of the most influential works of American Indian history and has had potentially the most resonance outside the field of Indigenous history, in America or otherwise. Although our priorities are obviously the peoples/communities we write about/with, and our peers in the field, in order to avoid simply operating in an echo chamber I think there are undeniably lessons to learn from Richard White – why had this book had so much influence in and outside the field?
Okay, lots of thoughts and thanks Elspeth for getting us going.
Richard White’s literary style is colourful and compelling and certainly keeps momentum for a reader but I wonder what his style choice may obscure or mislead while it simultaneously illuminates. White’s description of the Iroquois “shatter” and subsequent consistent invocation of “shattered” people certainly has impact and illustrates the ultra-violent realities of wartime and its impact of the pays d’en haut but I’m curious about when historians take liberties with characterization of people what is lost, whether intentional or not. Ultimately, how does this style serve to tell the story, who does it serve, and is it effective in re-creating the “middle ground?”
Another question I have is, as Deloria (or her friend, rather) points out, how do we avoid everything becoming the “middle ground” and losing the nuance of what White is trying to argue and it becoming another generic term loosely applied to any and all situations of Aboriginal-settler relations? Despite my first question above, I do definitely see White’s work as one full of nuance. For White, the middle ground shows a navigation and capitulation (and confusion) between peoples, thrown together and trying to serve their own interests. As he illustrates with Clark’s accounts: “It shows how the concerns of villages could, as in earlier wars, complicate imperial concerns. And it demonstrates, too, how the war itself forced a continuing accommodation with Algonquian custom among both British fathers and revolutionary Indian haters.” (White 368) How then do we use an understanding of the middle ground effectively to re-examine other sources, without applying it where it may not fit?
Thanks for your interesting, and insightful questions, Elspeth and Rosie. In a way my question(s) relate to the questions you have posed as well. My question is a bit more broad (and maybe everyone is also asking it), but I want to bring it up anyway. Essentially, I’m trying to wrap my head around how we should go about working through ‘the middle ground’ as a concept or an ‘analytic platform’ (as Deloria discusses). In his reflection on the book, White writes that “I do not contend that middle grounds occur everywhere, but I do demonstrate that such worlds arose. Biased and incomplete information and creative misunderstanding may be the most common basis of human actions” (13). If this is so, how do we identify these worlds, and once we have, how can/should the ‘middle ground’ be applied to them, keeping in mind Deloria’s caution to not oversimplify for the ease of utility?
The biased and incomplete information and creative misunderstandings White describes are comprised of a myriad of interesting and overlapping ideas of cultural process and change, power relations, ideologies, interpretations of space and place as well as concepts of representation and agency (to only name a few) that counter accepted historical narratives of the pays d’en haut during that time. It’s all rather complex and nuanced (as Deloria highlights). So, how relatable are the specificities of White’s discussion to other contexts? Should we try to relate them? What are arguments for or against this?
Hi Nick, I only saw your post after I posted and refreshed the page. Thank you for your questions – it’s helpful to see a question similar to mine posed from another angle!
To my mind, the most interesting issue raised by White’s book is the potential for a scholar to misunderstand the past when the subject of their study is itself produced by misunderstanding. White puts it well in his 2006 piece on the book’s legacy: “If scholars assert that colonizers didn’t get it, is it the assumption that modern historians know the it that their own sources got wrong?” (13) How can White hope to assert the existence of a mutually-constructed historical process that depends on such specific criteria as mediation, the inability to use effectively use force, and a kind of “in-betweenness,” according to Deloria (17), when the majority of his sources were produced from a European/settler perspective?
I agree with White’s assertion that the authors of his sources were “not necessarily stupid, simple, or parochial,” and that some likely had “sophisticated understandings of Indian cultures” (13). But is this faith in his sources enough to legitimize his characterization of the construction of the middle ground as a mutual process of misunderstanding? Is it truly “mutual” when one view is vastly over-represented?
Moreover, his suggestion that contemporary oral knowledge is too problematic to be useful is itself quite problematic. From Bohaker’s work on the importance of nindoodemag kinship networks, we know that a critical aspect of White’s narrative did not occur exactly as it is presented in his book. Is it possible that the inclusion of more oral knowledge held by descendants of The Middle Ground’s protagonists will further complicate White’s concept?
If anybody is curious, because the idea of exporting the concept of “the middle ground” has come up a few times already, here is an attempt to apply the process to frontiers in Qing-dynasty China:
“A Motley Throng:” Social Change on Southwest China’s Early Modern Frontier, 1700-1880
http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/stable/2659505?origin=crossref&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
There seems to be a consistent assumption in these texts that Indigenous and European peoples couldn’t understand each other’s cultures/intentions. Sometimes, this seems to have definitely been true, and solid evidence is given. Other times, it just seems to be taken for granted–especially in terms of Indigenous peoples not understanding actual imperial intentions. I wonder how flipping this assumption would complicate these histories. What would the middle ground look like if we assumed that Indigenous peoples did understand the intentions of imperial agents?
My second question has to do with Witgen and White’s decision to not discuss Indigenous groups in the present. Obviously, many Native peoples have present-day stakes in these broad histories. Besides the problems of choosing a methodological approach that refuses any non-textual sources, Witgen and White’s methodologies also seem to avoid engaging the present. What would these histories look like if they engaged the contemporary struggles of communities from the pays d’en haut? Could it help spell out the strengths, weaknesses, and consequences of the methodologies Witgen and White utilize?
The overall goal of Richard White’s (Pulitzer Prize nominated) book is to bring Indigenous peoples into history as historical actors with agency. “The Middle Ground” thus becomes a reality created by the interactions of Indigenous peoples (mostly a broadly defined Algonquin collective) and Europeans (mostly a motley assortment of French), and critically the inability of either group to dominate the other. As Michael and Jakub have pointed out White builds his work from within the European documentary record. This is problematic especially considering Heidi Bohaker’s argument that White ignores the importance of Anishnaabe kinship practices. Bohaker goes further to say that the peoples that White lumps together under the term Algonquin did not define themselves as a collective in response to the French (or other Europeans), and that they continued to define themselves in their own terms despite what is written in trader journals, explorer memoirs or other documents of colonial knowledge production. Following this, is it even possible to say that a “Middle Ground” ever actually existed? Or, is this another creation of European colonial project to know the other?
Also, anybody count how many famous American car brands come out of this history? ha ha ha…
Hi all – great questions! I hope to add a couple..
On power and mutuality: as a number of folks have mentioned, White argues that the middle ground is built on processes of mutual accommodation (not acculturation) and creative misunderstandings. This mutuality is centered in this text, and as Jakub has pointed out, is particularly questionable with regards to his use of sources. I wanted to add to this question, in hopes of discussing what to me seems like a central contradiction in this work/argument—though it could very well be an intentioned one.
White suggests that mediation is a “source of power” (33). The power of mediation falls in French hands many times, particularly in the forming of the alliance: “the alliance that the French and Algonquians created in the last two decades of the seventeenth century rested on the willingness of the French to undertake such mediation and their ability to perform it effectively” (33). How do we reconcile the ostensible mutuality of the middle ground with the understanding of mediation as a form of power? I wonder too, if this contributes to some of the misreadings of White’s text. How might we see the “middle” or the in-betweenness of the middle ground, not as a site of equality, but as a site of power in itself? How does this complicate readings of the middle ground as a space of “power equivalences” as Deloria calls them?
I think this consideration of mediation and power also speaks to Bohaker’s argument. On page 50, she asserts: “It is clear that Algonquians did not have a relationship with the French. Instead, local leaders constructed alliances between themselves and French individuals, either as cross-cultural alliances at the band level and as marriage alliances between their daughters and French men” (50). This was the work of a “number of key chiefs.” This reminded me of our conversation about Josh Reid’s book—this was a history of chiefs, not all Makah people. Can we follow a similar line of questioning with White’s book? How does this framing (of specifying the people making these alliances) change our understanding of the Great Lakes history? Or, does it at all?
I did not manage to get to chapters 5, 6 and 8 as I didn’t see this post before now. Unfortunately I don’t have the time now to get to them, so apologies for that.
My question relates to academic humility. What I take from The Middle Ground’s historiographical trajectory is that no matter how ground-breaking, well researched and well written work might be, it will always be open to both intense criticism and well-meaning-but-consequential misunderstanding. How do you feel about the fact that any of the works you produce (even your MA theses) take on a life of their own once you have released them to the world? How would you suggest academics maintain some attachment (and hence responsibility) for their work, and yet accept the discursive and intellectual fluidity that is inherent in publicly released ideas?
My second question relates to fluidity, particularly of culture and identity. Is it possible to have more than one culture? Or more than one identity? How do the authors we have read (I am particularly thinking of Bohaker and Whitgen here, but also obviously White) take different approaches to the boundaries between different cultures and the potential fluidity and multiplicity of collective identity?