The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650 - 1815

“Shattered people usually vanish from history, and many of the Iroquoian peoples—the Eries, the Neutrals—who fell before the epidemics and the warfare, disappeared as organized groups. But most Algonquians did not disappear. Instead, together with the Frenchmen, they pieced together a new world from shattered pieces. They used what amounted to an imported imperial glue to reconstruct a village world.”

White references the tendency for broken or conquered communities to vanish from the historical record. In doing so, he highlights that the very nature of surviving Algonquian communities was shaped by adaptation. As survivors of earlier crises, they adapted using elements from their interactions with the French: trade, alliances, and cultural exchange. This rebuilding process reflects the broader idea of the middle ground, where different cultures come together, negotiate, and create a shared space, through a combination of choice and necessity.

“The French equated leadership with political power, and power with coercion. Leaders commanded; followers obeyed. But what distinguished most Algonquian politics from European politics was the absence of coercion.”

White draws a crucial distinction between the French understanding of leadership and political power and the nature of Algonquian politics. In European political systems, leaders were expected to command, and their authority was maintained through coercion, force, or the threat of punishment. In the Algonquian system, however, chiefs ensured the people were cared for and could not command them. The absence of coercion in Algonquian politics became a key element throughout the centuries of European and Indigenous American interaction in the pays d’en haut. The system of coercion often gave European powers the ability to further their imperial and colonial aims.

“Any congruence, no matter how tenuous, can be put to work and can take on a life of its own if it is accepted by both sides. Cultural conventions do not have to be true to be effective any more than legal precedents do. They have only to be accepted.”

White draws an analogy between cultural conventions and legal precedents, emphasizing that their power is derived from acceptance rather than inherent reality. Within the pays d’en haut, accepting these conventions becomes crucial to navigating the interactions between Indigenous inhabitants and European settlers. It also highlights the adaptability and pragmatism of both individuals and communities in finding common ground and establishing meaningful connections.

“For the French it was murder that demanded blood revenge; for the Algonquians, it was killings by enemies, killings which the French saw as warfare. The French insistence on blood revenge in an inappropriate category, therefore, created great confusion. To the Ottawas the logic of such a response—that enemies should be spared but that allies should be killed—was incomprehensible.”

This passage highlights a longstanding difference between the European and Algonquian perspectives concerning justice. The French expectations contradicted the Algonquian understanding of warfare dynamics, where declared enemies were legitimate targets. The clash in perspectives on revenge and the categorization of violence illustrates how deeply foundational cultural assumptions and approaches can be, complicating communication and interaction. This may be especially true when one cultural group assumes superiority over another and seeks to impose or enforce imported cultural systems which are incompatible with existing ones.

“In the seventeenth- and eighteenth- century pays d'en haut, gifts were not merely bribes or wages; allies were not simply mercenaries; women were not merely prostitutes; missionaries did not just buy their converts; murderers did not kill simply for gain and then buy off those who would avenge their victims. Life was not a business, and such simplifications only distort the past.”

This passage encapsulates White’s efforts to present the complexity of interpersonal interactions in the pays d'en haut. White challenges simplistic interpretations of history and emphasizes the many facets of meaning in social, political, and economic transactions. Alliances in the pays d'en haut were built on complex webs of reciprocity. Gifts served as expressions of diplomacy and mutual respect. He also references the tendency to oversimplify and marginalize the roles of women in Indigenous societies.

“Increasingly in the eighteenth century, the political benefits of the trade outweighed its revenues. The trade of pays d’en haut supported Canada not through its profits, but because it was part of the glue holding the Algonquians to the alliance.”

This passage references the constant struggle between the Europeans’ desire for profit and the expense required for their alliance with the Algonquians. This alliance was crucial not only in itself but as a means to deal with other imperial factions, in this case, the British. If the Algonquians did ally with the British instead, the French would lose Canada.

“French withdrawal from the pays d’en haut had created a vacuum that the Algonquians lacked the resources to fill. Mediation, given the nature of Algonquian politics, was expensive and time-consuming. Only the French possessed the wealth, the contacts across the entire pays d’en haut, and the incentive to undertake mediation on a large scale.”

White here highlights the importance of the French to the Algonquians. As White notes, the latter was not a single, centralized group but operated in separate villages. The French, however, were centralized. The French withdrawal created a political vacuum and exposed the challenges the Algonquians’ faced in managing the colonial sociopolitical landscape, predicated on Eurocentric, centralized systems of power.

“The French were at their strongest when they appeared, at least to themselves, the most weak. When they offered goods freely, when they mediated quarrels, when they stayed Algonquian hatchets and covered the dead, then they achieved a status that no other group could rival. They were, conversely, at their weakest when they appeared the most dangerous and powerful.”

The European drive for coercive force and overt control is a recurring issue throughout White’s history of the pays d’en haut. White exposes the paradox that collaboration and a semblance of equality created more security and prosperity for the French than “strong” shows of force and conquest. Both the British and the Americans rejected this collaborative approach in favor of a “strong,” oppressive colonial style, leading to the erosion of the middle ground.

“Under the new governors, the formal ritual language of Onontio to his children remained, but the logic of his actions increasingly belied his words. The new governors expected obedience, and they mistook the Algonquians’ ritual demands for pity for admissions of dependence.”

White points out the cultural misunderstandings that arose every time new authority figures entered the pays d’en haut. The French, operating within a framework of dominance, expected obedience from the Algonquians. The Algonquians' ritualistic expressions of allegiance were misinterpreted as signs of dependence. This misunderstanding stemmed from a failure to grasp the subtleties of Algonquian political and cultural practices.

“Métis bâtards may have become Indian, and métis legitimes French, but both, nonetheless, represented significant ties between the two peoples.”

The Métis occupied a liminal space in the pays d’en haut. Generally, those born to Frenchmen married to Algonquian women were brought up in French society, while those born outside marriage stayed in their mothers’ culture. In both cases, these descendants were a physical embodiment of the middle ground between the two groups who shaped the ongoing relations between the French and the Algonquians.

“The republics were on the rise and the Iroquois were in decline, but in the early 1750s both stood in common fear of empires. They only disagreed on which empire they feared more.”

Here White encapsulates the shifting geopolitical landscape in the pays d'en haut during the 1750s. While the Algonquians and the Iroquois remained opposed to one another, both had a shared concern—the encroachment of European empires into the pays d’en haut. While they shared a general apprehension, their specific concerns varied. For the Algonquians, it was the French, while for the Iroquois, it was the British.

“He would treat the Indians according to the services they rendered, rewarding them when they were good, punishing them when they were bad. In the kinship terms of the alliance, the Indians had always been children, but now they were being infantilized.”

White shows that General Amherst's approach towards the Algonquians was explicitly transactional and assumed a right to superiority. This contrasts with the earlier alliances built on mutual respect and reciprocity. The mention of “good” and “bad” behavior shows that the British increasingly assumed the role of moral arbiters and decided what constituted “acceptable” behavior through the imposition of their own value judgements. White’s choice of language, particularly the use of “infantilized,” shows Amherst’s assumption of racial superiority. That Amherst treated Algonquians “according to the services they rendered” indicates his dehumanizing and self-interested attitude towards interaction.

“The inability to unite against the British was only one sign of the underlying divisions of the pays d’en haut. Without the French, groups of associated villages, such as the ones at Detroit or along the Ohio, became planets without a sun. There was nothing to keep them in their orbits, and they collided and clashed.”

White here discusses how French withdrawal deprived the Algonquians of a common ally against the British and disrupted communication and coherence between Indigenous villages. This underscores the complexity of relationships in the middle ground. As the French presence had prevented internal fragmentation, its absence exposed the underlying divisions of the tribes that made up the Algonquians. White’s imagery of celestial bodies visualizes the loss of an external force to mediate conflicts but is also suggestive of a white-centric perspective.

“The emphasis on Indians in these different contexts was important if, as yet, tentative. Manitous helped individuals or discrete social units: clans, villages, and, perhaps, tribes. But God seemed to deal with Indians in larger units.”

White here attempts to engage with the nuanced nature of Indigenous identity in the pays d’en haut and how it was perceived over time by European settlers and powers. He shows how the general term “Indians” increasingly emerged as a collective identifier in European discourse and was, in some contexts, adopted by Indigenous groups as a means to consider their distinct groups and cultures in a collective way.

“Johnson, Croghan, and Gage recognized that the only secure basis for Algonquian-British relations lay on the middle ground, but at the outset their middle ground remained almost exclusively diplomatic; it did not extend to day-to-day life. And as long as it was exclusively diplomatic—governed by paid officers with all the contingent expenses involved in maintaining an alliance amid the constant strife of British subjects and Algonquian villagers—it would remain expensive.”

This passage addresses the structural issues of the alliance between the Algonquians and the British. White shows that British emphasis on the exclusively diplomatic nature of the middle ground highlights a gap in effectiveness between formal agreements and the daily realities of coexistence. The British could not establish the same connection that the Algonquians had with the French because they were unwilling to foster a deeper lifestyle of integration.

“It was the resistance of adult British prisoners to complete assimilation, abandoning neither their culture nor their religion, that made them bridges to a new middle ground. They made an adjustment to village life that involved something less than taking it on its own terms. The critical part of this adjustment was not the simple exchange of skills by which prisoners, for example, learned to hunt or farm in the Indian manner but, rather, a search for mutually intelligible meanings by which a common life and sense of the world became possible.”

White’s discussion of the prisoners shows the complexity of the middle ground as the act of resisting becomes a pivotal factor in mutual influence. Resistance becomes a give-and-take, showing the nuance of cultural adaptation and exchange.

“Clark's dependence on the ‘French mode’ complicated his Indian hating. He tried to construe the French mode as making Indians fear him, but French methods inevitably made him act at times as if he were an Indian lover. As a result, Clark came to misunderstand both the nature and the conditions of his triumphs. He only vaguely knew the Indians with whom he was dealing and why they cooperated with him.”

The “French mode” here refers to the diplomatic and integration practices the French colonial presence used in the pays d’en haut. Clark's willful lack of knowledge about the Algonquian practices and the factors driving their cooperation is representative of larger problems with the American and British attempts at diplomacy, which were largely fueled by expediency and discrimination. These powers, like Clark, saw that the French methods worked and decided to borrow them without understanding their true nature or the reasons behind their effectiveness.

“Indian hating did not concentrate on enemies. Indian haters killed Indians who warned them of raids. They killed Indians who scouted for their military expeditions. They killed Indian women and children. They even killed Christian, pacifist Indians as they prayed. Murder gradually and inexorably became the dominant American Indian policy, supplanting the policies of Morgan, of the Congress, and of the military.”

White here shows how Americans in the pays d’en haut increasingly subjected Indigenous Americans to indiscrimination and unprovoked race-based hatred and violence. White considers that the increasingly racist policies and institutions which “supplanted” the earlier policies of the middle ground were driven by a grass-roots increase in race-based intolerance and hatred on the part of the white population of America at this time.

“For all their stress on unity, the members of the confederation never considered themselves a single people, nor were individual villages bound by decisions of council. The confederation council became in effect a village council writ large, but the confederation lacked the intimate ties that bound a village, and it lacked fathers to mediate disputes.”

Despite a concerted effort among its members to present a united front, White highlights that the Algonquian confederation was never a single, homogenous people. Diversity and distinct identities persisted among the individual villages that made it up. With these distinctions came the issues and rivalries that had always been present but had once been tempered by external forces. Attempts at internal mediation continued to fail.

“The defeats of St. Clair and Harmar demonstrated how formidable Algonquian warriors were in battle, but they also demonstrated the warriors’ weakness in a long campaign. The Indians lacked the logistical capability to keep large numbers of men in the field, and they lacked the artillery necessary to storm fortifications. And even if they had possessed such capabilities, warriors, like militia, sought to fight and then return home. After a battle, decisive or not, Indian forces melted away.”

This passage highlights the recurring issues experienced by the Europeans when relying on Algonquian forces as allies in warfare. While they were essentially the most effective combatants in the pays d’en haut, the Algonquians approached warfare in a way which was challenging to the European methods of conquest, methods which the European military structures were unwilling or unable to flex accordingly.

“Dependency is an economic, political, and social relationship, but it can also be an environmental relationship. Economic change can produce environmental changes that undermine people’s ability to feed and clothe themselves.”

In his presentation of what he sees as the growing dependency of the Algonquians on the Europeans, White breaks down the tangle of factors that resulted in this dependency. It was not immediate, and for much of the pays d’en haut’s history, the Algonquians could maintain their living with European goods tied to prestige rather than survival. However, the impact of the fur trade and the overhunting by the settlers in the area led to competition for the now-scarce resources. This environmental degradation due to European economic desires eroded the Algonquian way of life and power balance, forcing communities into an increasingly position.

“The imperial conquest over the pays d’en haut ended with the War of 1812, and politically the consequence of Indians faded. They could no longer pose a major threat or be a major asset to an empire or a republic, and even their economic consequence declined with the fur trade.”

White describes the turning point for Indigenous Americans in the pays d’en haut. Following the War of 1812, they lost the bargaining power which had previously maintained the middle ground to a greater or lesser extent. Their perceived position as an essential ally to power was already dwindling in the Americans’ perception; the war’s end marked a decisive political, military, and economic point of departure.

“The middle ground that explained Tecumseh disappeared; culturally cannibalizing him for the same reasons that Algonquians ate the hearts of their admired enemies, Americans absorbed Tecumseh. And once they had assimilated him, the world that produced him ceased to matter.”

White uses the imagery of cannibalism to convey the impact of Tecumseh's absorption into the white American narrative. He implies a disregard on white Americans’ part for the complex historical, cultural, and social context that gave rise to Tecumseh. This assimilation shows a broader pattern where figures from indigenous cultures, once considered adversaries or distinct, are absorbed into the dominant cultural framework. Tecumseh, a symbol of Indigenous resistance and leadership, became appropriated into the white American narrative in order to create a false sense of cultural birthright, and to uphold the growing ideology of “manifest destiny” (i.e., an expression of white American Imperialism which held that white settlers were destined to expand across North America).