Illinois Issues Summer Book Section                     

Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. New York Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp 544 with illustrations, tables, maps, notes and index. $69.50 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

The recent controversies over the burial display at Dickson Mounds and the University of Illinois' mascot, Chief Illiniwek, reveal a lack of public knowledge about Illinois' Indians. Did the Mississippians leave descendants? Is the Chief authentic? Few of us know; for most of us our familiarity with Illinois' Indians and what became of them is limited to dimly remembered introductory chapters in history text books.

For those seeking more information about the history of Illinois' Indians, Richard White's superb book. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, should be priority reading. It is an account of the changes that occurred in native cultures from the time of first European contact through the expulsion of the Indians in the early 19th century. A professor of history at the University of Washington, White focuses on the interaction between the Indians, who were speakers of Algonquin languages, and the French who lived among them, and on the new way of life that evolved from their contact. With elegant clarity, White's introduction explains: "The book is about a search for accommodation and common meaning ... .It tells how Europeans and Indians met and regarded each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman. It tells how, over the next two centuries, they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world ... [in which] the older worlds of the Algonquins and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and exchange. But finally, the narrative tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and re-creation of the Indians as alien, as exotic, as other."

"The middle ground" of the title refers to both the geographic area from the Great Lakes to the upper Mississippi basin and the social terrain, "in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of the villages" of the Algonquin-European accommodation. White's theme is that this middle ground was not created by interaction between conquerors and conquered or by assimilation of a defeated people. Instead it was the result of adjustments and accommodations made as both the Algonquins and the Europeans sought benefits from each other and tried to survive new social realities.

Chapters 1 through 3 provide the background and develop the theme, describing the relentless Iroquois attacks, the epidemic diseases, the lucrative fur trade and the resulting multi-tribal refugee villages in which the middle ground evolved. These chapters contrast Algonquin and French values — for example, their religious practices and their problematic sexual relations (French men only understood Algonquin women's sexual freedom as licentiousness, while Algonquins found the Jesuits' celibacy strange and revolting). The Indian's intertribal and intervillage competitions and alliances are also described.

Chapters 4 through 7 deal with the French-Algonquin alliance against the British, the role of Indians in the French and British conflict, and Pontiac's rebellion. The final chapters, 8 through 11, cover the British alliance with the Algonquins, the eventual spread of American frontier settlements west of the Appalachians and the expulsion of the Indians.

White's writing is often memorable, and his insights will change the way readers think about Illinois and Great Lakes Indians and their history. However, The Middle Ground is a scholarly book written mainly for historians; it is not a quick or easy read. For an overview of Illinois' early history, reading chapters 1 through 3 and skimming thereafter may be enough for lay readers. The detail concerning such matters as shifting political machinations and French and British policy changes was less compelling to this non-historian than was the exposition of White's brilliant theme: "The history of Indian-white relations has not usually produced complex stories. Indians are the rock, European peoples the sea, and history seems a constant storm. There have been but two outcomes: The sea wears down and dissolves the rock; or the sea erodes the rock but cannot finally absorb its battered remnant, which endures. The first outcome produces stories of conquest and assimilation; the second produces stories of cultural persistence. The tellers of such stories do not lie. Some Indian groups did disappear; others did persist. But the tellers of such stories miss a larger process and a larger truth. The meeting of the sea and continent, like the meeting of whites and Indians, creates as well as destroys. Contact was not a battle of primal forces in which only one could survive. Something new could appear."

White's contribution, which accompanies the recent national reexamination of European and Indian relations during the Columbian era occasioned by the quincentennial, gives all students of American history — amateur and professional alike — a different lens for viewing this fateful contact and its consequences. �

James Stuart, associate professor of anthropology at Sangamon State University, has a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California. He teaches courses on American Indians, human evolution, anthropological theory and Mexican society, and has done research in several Native American communities in Mexico.

34/July 1993/Illinois Issues