From Pawns to Players

From Pawns to Players

The middle ground is the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the non-state world of villages…It is the area between the historical foreground of European invasion and occupation and the background of Indian defeat and retreat.

Richard White, The Middle Ground

Courtesy of http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/ax 1

The American myth tells the tale of the European “discovery” of a new world, where brave explorers ventured into unknown lands, conquered the “savage natives”, and settled fertile lands for their countries. Where rugged individuals trail-blazed a path west, set the rules, and shaped the “new world” with European motivations and policy. The American myth was rife with violence, manifest destiny, and exceptionalism. The American myth is dead.

From the ashes rose a “new Indian history”, where Indians are no longer just an obstacle for European heroes to overcome, they are equal characters in a new paradigm that gives them a voice: as the myth died, a history was born. Richard White’s The Middle Ground has influenced a new surge in American history writing where the meetings of cultures are forced to create a unique, in between culture, based on kinship, economics, religion, and “mis-understandings.” The middle ground thesis can-not be used as an overarching paradigm to describe all contact points between Europeans and Indians, but it can serve as a starting point for discourse where all sides have a voice and actively participate in the direction of this “new” new world.

The old paradigms created and supported by authors like Frederick Jackson Turner, Max Farrand, and Christopher Columbus biographer, Samuel Eliot Morrison, [1] have gradually been replaced over the last five decades. When the Civil Rights Movement encapsulated America in the 1950’s and 1960’s, parallels began to develop between contemporary situations and Indian relations. R. David Edmund notes, “Historians who opposed the conflict [the Viet Nam War] drew similarities between interpretations of modern American imperialism in South East Asia and earlier American expansion onto Indian lands in the West.”[2] The problem was how to access a fair and balanced history when all records were biased and written by Europeans. The answer was in anthropology and new interpretive methodology, but since anthropologist and historians could not agree, the cause seemed lost. By 1969, however, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, by F.C. Wallace[3] gave new hope to a frustrated academy. This watershed bridged the gap between the social sciences, and ushered in a “new Indian History” based on “Ethno-History.” Wallace superbly blended history with cultural anthropology that humanized the Indians and gave them agency. He explained how the Five Nations of the Iroquois played the French against the British to keep them off balance.

“This successful system of aggressive neutrality had originated at the beginning of the Eighteenth century…They made two treaties at Albany and Montreal. These treaties inaugurated a new era of Iroquois policy; peace towards the ‘far Indians’, political manipulation of nearby tribes, and armed neutrality between contending Europeans…It was a policy that required of the Iroquois as much duplicity in diplomatic dealings with the Europeans as the Europeans practiced toward them.”[4]

While there was no “middle ground thesis” to refer to in 1969, the created relationship where the cultures “melted at the edges and merged”[5] as defined by White was there. Likewise the general public was drawn into the discussion in 1970 by a book from Author and Historian Dee Brown.[6] Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was told from an Indian perspective, highlighting the genocide, injustice, betrayal, and heartache of the American Indian. Though her history has been heavily criticized and no accommodation or “middle ground” exists in her book, she did contribute to the new Indian history by turning public support in favor of a new Indian perspective. Historians had little choice, with movies, novels, museum exhibits, and media coverage; they had to start asking different questions about early Indian-European history.

White’s treatment of the middle ground centers on the French-Canadian area of the Pays d’en haut (countries on top). He explains in a world where force alone could not dominate the region, new cultures were co-created to sustain an uneasy alliance in search of “accommodation and common meaning.”[7] White, through incredibly detailed research, shows that the “middle ground” had an unstable, but long existence (150+ years) in the Pays d’en haut. The middle ground was not a utopia, from whatever angle the story is told, violence will always be present. This shared world created specific kindred ties and alliances that were broken and reforged many times. Certain conceptions, or misconceptions, guided by ceremony and ritual brought both Algonquin and European peoples back to the middle ground. A unique system of “French Fathers” arose, later to be emulated by the Iroquois and English as a “covenant chain”, brought parties together for intercultural exchange. It was not until the Americans gained central power, White argues, that the middle ground was destroyed, the Americans claimed the land by right of conquest and that accommodation was replaced by assimilation.

In a body of growing scholarship that is exploring North American history, Juliana Barr’s book, Peace Came From a Woman,[8] adds a new dimension in the mix. Barr, also using an Indian centered point of view, claims that in the Texas Borderlands “Not even a ‘middle ground’ emerged, because this was not a world where a military and political standoff could lead to a ‘search for accommodation and common meaning’.”[9] In Texas, notes Barr, Indians gained absolute authority by dominant force. The old myth, still perpetuated in some circles, views contact and struggle in North America as a continuation of European history, Barr flips the story and claims it was an extension of Native American history, building on the White’s main theme beyond the middle ground, a theme of agency for a “people without history.”

Similar to Barr, Kathleen Du Val’s case study of the Arkansas Valley shows how groups established a “native ground” where the “Native Americans, not the Europeans, controlled the Arkansas Valley” before 1815.[10] Du Val, like Barr, breaks away from Whites “middle ground” thesis in theory, though in truth it appears to be a battle of semantics as there are multiple examples of “accommodation and search for common meaning” in both the Texas borderlands and in the Arkansas Valley. The second part of Barr’s book is all about the creation of bicultural communities, where the two groups (the Spanish and tribes of south-central Texas) came together to create new communities for intermarriage, trade, and alliances. Du Val notes similar circumstances, “In danger of becoming isolated, the Quapaws adapted to changing times. In order to retain their native ground, they cultivated three new allies- the Spanish, Spain’s British rivals, and their own erstwhile enemies the Chickasaws.”[11] Both Barr and Du Val show multiple examples of Indian dominance over their European “conquerors”, but also highlight examples of new relationships, where all parties involved had to adapt, regardless of military prowess.

Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness,[12] describes what White would call a middle ground, insofar as both Indians and Europeans came together for diplomatic negotiation, trade, and alliance for mutual interests, and “[sic] shared common bonds of first the intellectual equipment to construct knowledge, and a physical world where abstract systems of thought could be modeled.”[13] She, like White, also notes the volatile structure of the relationship but pins the blame on racial differences.[14] For Shoemaker the blending of cultures was easier than creating a stabilized relationship. Land was conceptualized on both sides as sovereign territory, though commerce and usufruct differed in their respective beliefs.[15] Both sides acknowledged leaders, but they had different roles for each; “Indians and Europeans used strategies that were alike in intent but different in form.”[16] Communication merged as hand signals, translators, and new ceremonies took place where both sides stipulated to misunderstandings to keep the peace, the kinship relationship in place. Where Shoemaker covers areas from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, the examples tie in common themes of all authors discussed here: contact, violence, accommodations, alliances, and eventually dissolution of relations, for any number of reasons.

While historians like Barr, Du Val, Shoemaker, and James Merrell[17] searched for case studies that would be different in nature to that of White’s “middle ground”, to secure their names in American Historiography; they found a middle ground of their own. In all examples here, the respective societies in contact did produce “something new”; new identities, new cultures, new interpretations of past events through new eyes (Indian perspective). They have each found agency in the Native American peoples. The actions, reactions, and effects may have been different in each case study, but the fact that each case study shows active participation on the part of Indians towards creating a “new” new world is important and should be further investigated, discussed, and embraced.

White’s middle ground thesis can-not be used as an overarching paradigm to describe all contact points between Europeans and Indians, but it can serve as a starting point for discourse where all sides have a voice and actively participate in the direction of this “new” new world. We, as historians, should explore and elaborate on this influential work, in hopes of discovering more unique patterns in North America. We should never again digress to a point where Indians are mere pawns in the making of nations; they were and are players on this ever-evolving continent. While White closed his middle ground with the rise of the American nation, perhaps more studies should involve contemporary Indian involvement; reservations, legal battles, fights for recognition, billion dollar casino incomes can be new case studies for some form of a middle ground.

The tale of Indian-European relations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should be dualistic. There should be balance between the players, total inclusion in the general history, and no longer just a footnote for the stoic Indian population. Native Americans, both pre-columbian and post-contact, should be set on a world stage, noting the similarities of the growth of European nations, as well as major American nations, like those of the Aztecs, the Maya, the Inca, the Mississippians at Cahokia, the Pueblo peoples, the Anasazi, etc… Indians as Columbus found them “stupid and made for slavery” is a myth of the past, the new Indian history is on the right path for discovering a new and inclusive history of native peoples. White has opened a flood-gate of possibilities surrounding the middle ground and should be explored by every serious Americanist.

Lee Davenport~

Bibliography

Barr, Juliana. Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1970.

Du Val, Kathleen. The Native Ground Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

Edmunds, David R. , “Native Americans New Voices: American Indian History, 1895-1995.”AHR, Vol.100, No.3 (June 1995).

Farrund, Max. “The Indian Boundary Line”, AHR, Vol. 10, No. 4 (July 1905).

Gutierrez, Ramon A. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846. Stanford, Ca.:Stanford University Press, 1991.

Merrell, James. Into the American Woods: Negotiations on the Pennsylvania Frontier. New York: Norton &co., 1999.

Merrell, James. The Indians New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal. New York: Norton &co.,1991.

Shoemaker, Nancy. A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Wallace, Anthony F.C. The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. Chicago: Vintage books, 1972.

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

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[1] Frederick Jackson Turner, The Fronteir Thesis, closed the west in 1890; Max Farrund, The Indian Boundary Line, AHR, Vol. 10, No. 4 (July 1905), p.782-791.; Samuel Eliot Morrison, The Oxford History of The American People, (New York: Penguin Books, 1965.), The old paradigm was Indians were just objects, not players, there to respond to European actions, with no self awareness or initiative to act on their own.

[2] R. David Edmunds, “Native Americans New Voices: American Indian History, 1895-1995.”AHR, Vol.100, No.3 (June 1995),p. 717-740.

[3] Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, (Chicago: Vintage books, 1972).

[4] Wallace, 243.

[5] Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.50.

[6] Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1970)

[7] White, xxv.

[8] Juliana Barr, Peace Came From a Woman:Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Charolette: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

[9] Barr, 7.

[10]Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground (Philidelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007),P. 11.

[11] Du Val,P. 85.

[12] Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

[13] Shoemaker, 4.

[14] Ibid, 141.

[15] Ibid, 15.

[16] Ibid, 39.

[17] James Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiations on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: Norton &co., 1999), and The Indians New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (New York: Norton &co.,1991) Merrell shows the close knit contact between Indians and Europeans, how they lived, worked, intermarried, traded, fought together, but also strived to remain separate peoples and keep their identities.