History 3010

Week 3 Finding Middle Ground

We have come to acknowledge the rich diversity of Native American peoples and cultures out of which came great achievements in economics, politics, technology, and agriculture. Some of these achievements--particularly agricultural products--have enriched the non-Native world. Other achievements--in family and social structures, in political and spiritual values, in mathematics and science--were essentially lost as the people themselves were lost to disease, warfare, and policies of forced assimilation.

Europeans and Indians met and regarded each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman. Over two centuries of European colonization, they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in which the older worlds of the Natives and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and exchange. But finally, there was breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and re-creation of the Indians as alien, as exotic, as other."

Historian Richard White uses the phrase "middle ground" to refer 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 non-state world of the villages" of the Algonquin-European accommodation. Richard 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 Algonquians and the Europeans sought benefits from each other and tried to survive new social realities.

Readings:

• Alfred Crosbey, Columbian Exchange
• Lisa Heuvel, "Looking with Clearer Vision: The Significance of John White's Watercolors"
  • and the John White, Theodore De Bry images
• Episode 1 of PBS Series We Shall Remain. Consider these questions posted on the PBS site:
  • 1. Why did Europeans come to the New World? Why did they feel that land was there for the taking? How did they justify their expansion?
    2. How did generational differences between white settlers and Wampanoag affect the outcome of colonization? Examine the differences between Massasoit and his son, Philip, as well as Edward Winslow and his son, Josiah.
    3. How did the combination of disease, environmental imbalance, and new trading opportunities change Native communities? How did they adapt to survive?
    4. Why did Philip take a stand to fight a war even though he had been warned about its potential devastation? What caused such high casualties on both sides of King Philip’s War?
    5. Why do you think some Native people who converted to Christianity chose to fight with the English? Why didn’t tribes join together in fighting the English?
    6. Was conversion to Christianity the same thing among Native Americans as among Europeans? Were Native Americans converted in a European sense?
    7. Do you think the concept of religious damnation was alien to Native peoples? How do we know what tribes of this era believed?