Facing West, South, and North, as Well As East, from Indian Country

In a recent forum issue of the William and Mary Quarterly, "The Middle Ground Revisited," various contributors bemoaned that Richard White's paradigmatic model of a middle ground has often been overextended and misapplied. White persuasively demonstrated that new cultural forms emerged out of creative misperception and miscommunication between Native Americans and Europeans in the Great Lakes region. But when cut from its original spatial anchors, the middle ground has tended to drift away from much of its explanatory power and value. Some teachers have treated it as a kind of grandma's nightshirt capable of covering all moments of cultural compromise. Some scholars have applied it as little more than a badge of ethnohistorigraphical kudos. Kathleen DuVal is manifestly not one of those scholars.

As evidenced in the title, DuVal's The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent is in many respects an attempt at a parallel study to White's The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (1992), with similar chronological parameters. As her spatial anchors, DuVal delineates the region along the central Mississippi River and its western tributaries—the Missouri, St. Francis, White, Ouachita, Red, and Arkansas Rivers—with most of the content focusing on the Arkansas River Valley. She repudiates the applicability of the Great Lakes model in this region according to a range of specific criteria. In spite of European intentions, the infrastructure that the French created in the mid-continent was simply not the same as the framework that White described "from missions, to posts, to a network of alliance chiefs, to a set of mutually comprehensible and oft-repeated rituals."¹ Whereas the middle ground model posited indigenous power as equivalent to French power in the Great Lakes (a prerequisite for the patient evolution of new cultural forms as opposed to rapid change brought about by violence and war), the Arkansas Valley Indians were more formidable than the Europeans who tried to settle in their midst or direct their affairs. More over, the Indian peoples of the mid-continent tended to be larger and more cohesive than their broken-up counterparts in the pays d'en haut, occupying a considerably different human as well as environmental landscape. At the heart of DuVal's argument, beneath the different European infrastructures and the different Amerindian societal landscapes, lies the notion that adapting Indian peoples, not imperialistic European colonizers, mediated power in the Arkansas Valley and manifested the greatest capacity to influence the course of events before the early nineteenth century. If White's middle ground is, as Susan Sleeper-Smith put it, "an optimistic model of how cultures negotiated rather than collided," then DuVal's native ground finds even more grist for a mill that has long been pounding the myth of white omnipotence in "early" North America: "Indians remained the primary agents; they called the shots" (p. 12).²

DuVal's early chapters uncover the fluid world of rising and falling peoples and economic systems in the region before it was penetrated by Europeans and their diseases in the sixteenth century. Synthesizing archaeological findings with written evidence from the Hernando de Soto and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado expeditions, DuVal evocatively describes the natural resources and patterns of human settlement and exchange along the riverine veins and arteries of the mid-continent. Hundreds of thousands of people were linked in systems of diplomacy and trade that disseminated goods (copper from the Great Lakes and seashells from the Gulf of Mexico) and encouraged specialization in mining and manufacturing. DuVal leans towards a peaceable history of exchange in the pre-Mississippian period, suggesting that stable trading and gifting relationships were used to maintain positive relations along borders and across language differences. This emphasis on the successful self-interested brokering of diplomatic goods exchange continues to act throughout the book, in a sense, as DuVal's litmus test of...