Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Preface to the twentieth anniversary edition
- Introduction
- 1 Refugees: a world made of fragments
- 2 The middle ground
- 3 The fur trade
- 4 The alliance
- 5 Republicans and rebels
- 6 The clash of empires
- 7 Pontiac and the restoration of the middle ground
- 8 The British alliance
- 9 The contest of villagers
- 10 Confederacies
- 11 The politics of benevolence
- Epilogue: Assimilation and otherness
- Index
2 - The middle ground
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Preface to the twentieth anniversary edition
- Introduction
- 1 Refugees: a world made of fragments
- 2 The middle ground
- 3 The fur trade
- 4 The alliance
- 5 Republicans and rebels
- 6 The clash of empires
- 7 Pontiac and the restoration of the middle ground
- 8 The British alliance
- 9 The contest of villagers
- 10 Confederacies
- 11 The politics of benevolence
- Epilogue: Assimilation and otherness
- Index
Summary
For every time we make others part of a “reality” that we alone invent, denying their creativity by usurping the right to create, we use those people and their way of life and make them subservient to ourselves.
Roy Wagner, The Invention of CultureIn action, people put their concepts and categories into ostensive relations to the world. Such referential uses bring into play other determinations of the signs, besides their received sense, namely the actual world and the people concerned.
Marshall Sahlins, Islands of HistoryBecause the French and Algonquians were trading partners and allies, the boundaries of the Algonquian and French worlds melted at the edges and merged. Although identifiable Frenchmen and identifiable Indians obviously continued to exist, whether a particular practice or way of doing things was French or Indian was, after a time, not so clear. This was not because individual Indians became “Frenchified” or because individual Frenchmen went native, although both might occur. Rather, it was because Algonquians who were perfecdy comfortable with their status and practices as Indians and Frenchmen, confident in the Tightness of French ways, nonetheless had to deal with people who shared neither their values nor their assumptions about the appropriate way of accomplishing tasks. They had to arrive at some common conception of suitable ways of acting; they had to create what I have already referred to as a middle ground.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Middle GroundIndians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, pp. 50 - 93Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010