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

White lays out the scope and method of his book. He challenges traditional narratives of European and Indigenous American relations as a one-sided conflict, proposing an approach that explores what he considers to be a more complex reality: the “middle ground.” His book applies this approach to the region known as the pays d’en haut, showing how Indigenous Americans and Europeans in the area learned to navigate their differences through conflict, exchange, and a give-and-take process.

To establish his approach, White critiques conventional methods of describing the region’s history and questions the utility of terms such as “imperialism” and “savagery” in describing the complexities of interactions. He also argues against the use of “tribe” as a meaningful unit to describe the political or social structures of the indigenous groups of the region. Instead, he emphasizes the significance of villages. White states that his purpose in The Middle Ground is to present the reader with a view of the reality of the pays d’en haut as a jointly Indigenous American and European creation. He believes that this relationship ultimately ended following American Independence, when white American discourse reinvented indigenous populations as “the other,” destroying the middle ground and shaping subsequent historical perspectives.