French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630–1815 ed. by Robert Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale (review)

In his magisterial The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region (1991) Richard White argued that the “Algonquians” and “French” carved out an accommodative “middle ground”—a physical and metaphorical space in which both sides pursued their goals, not by force and intimidation, but by compromise and insinuation—in the Great Lakes Region. For the last quarter century, the “middle ground” has served as the master metaphor of Native—French relations, prompting scholars to explore the compromises and cultural mixing that White describes.

Both indebted to and critical of the “middle ground,” the essays in this collection offer a less sanguine and more complicated picture of Native—French relations in the interior of North America, defined broadly to include the Great Lakes region and the Mississippi Valley. Suggesting that the people of the region often remained divided and distinct, rather than blurred and mixed as White suggested, editors Guillaume Teasdale and Robert Englebert argue that the metaphor of “bridge-building” is more apt. Instead of forming a “middle ground” that is, French and Indian peoples formed “bridges” that sought, and often failed, to span the dramatic differences among peoples. In so doing, they seek to move “beyond the paradigms of the middle ground or métissage [cultural mixing]” and understand the “historical bridge-building process” which linked these groups together (xxi).

Such bridging took many practical forms. As Kathryn Labelle shows in her study of the 1636 Wendat Feast of Souls, French and native people sought to build bridges through religious and diplomatic rituals. Labelle argues that the Wendat of Georgian Bay sought to “solidify a Wendat—French alliance” by inviting Jesuit missionaries to participate in the Feast of the Souls, a ritual in which the Wendat interred the bones of their dead in a common pit (3). By literally mingling Wendat and French bones, the Wendats hoped, they could figuratively integrate the French into their diplomatic and social networks. The Jesuits’ refusal to participate precluded a potentially fruitful alliance. Later Jesuit attempts to build bridges to their Illinois charges, however, proved more successful. Robert Morrissey explains how the Jesuits and Illinois neophytes cooperatively created a distinctive Illinois Christianity “on the Indians’ own terms” and literally in the Illinois’ terms as the Jesuits translated Christian concepts into the Illinois language (63, emphasis in original). Such efforts allowed the Jesuits—initially at least—to bridge the religious divide with the Illinois, although it put them at odds with the Jesuits’ less accommodating Recollect competitors. If the Jesuits faltered in building bridges with their indigenous neighbors, the French people utterly failed to build lasting connections with the Natchez living in Louisiana. Summarizing French—Natchez relations from 1682 to 1736, Arnaud Balvay concludes that the French Company of the Indies “tyrannized” and “mistreat[ed]” their Natchez neighbors, provoking the devastating Natchez “Revolt” in 1726 (152). That the bridges with the Wendat, Illinois, and Natchez ultimately failed, even though both sides earnestly desired them, demonstrates the difficulty of the process and suggests that Franco—Native relations were more fraught and less cooperative than White suggests.

Other bridges were more abstract and intangible. Christopher Parsons, for example, describes the attempts of Native peoples and the French to define the “ontological dimensions” of tobacco (36). Seen by the French as utilitarian and secondary to the diplomatic symbolism of the act of smoking, tobacco held greater intrinsic meaning to many of the native peoples who smoked it. Parsons argues that native peoples saw smoking as a means of transmitting a valued substance—tobacco—to “other than human” beings that craved the substance. Although the French and natives could share in the act of smoking, ultimately, they did not share the interpretation of that act. Gilles Havard likewise explores such ontological bridging, albeit a bridging that only incidentally involved indigenous people. Havard describes how French jurists, scrambling to classify native peoples...